The rise of a Christian elite
The above plot from a Peter Turchin blog post, Easter, Early Christians, and Cliodynamics, illustrates a sigmoid curve in the rise of Christianity among Roman elites (elites are relevant since […]
White conservatives are falling behind white liberals on intelligence
While working on my previous post I decided to poke around the General Social Survey. I’ve been using this resource since 2007 or so. The data goes up to 2018. The chart above illustrates something that is somewhat important, though not surprising. White conservatives are getting less intelligent in relation to white liberals over time […]
Ritual purity as evoked culture
Jonathan Fast’s novel Golden Fire is set during the height of the Gupta Empire at the end of the 4th century A.D. The novel revolves around the origins and rise of Chandragupta II. But what remains with me after all these years is the depiction of social relations in an India where elite Hinduism as […]
The Limits of My Language are the Limits of My Stupidity
I think about this quote from1984 literally every day: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed […]
The limits of the mean and the moderate
Red States vs. Blue States: Going Beyond the Mean:
In recent years, many scholars have explored the degree of polarization between red and blue states (red states are those carried by Republicans at the presidential level; blue states are those carried…
The academy is liberal, deal!
A new article in The New York Times, Social Scientist Sees Bias Within, profiles Jonathan Haidt’s quest to get some political diversity within social psychology. This means my post Is the Academy liberal?, is getting some links again. The data wi…
How much more racist are white conservatives than white liberals?
A few weeks ago there were a bunch of stories on how white the audience was at Glenn Beck’s rally. That’s empirically true, and the Tea Party movement as a whole is overwhelmingly white. So is the American conservative movement. This in a nation which is ~65% white in a colloquial sense (i.e., white Hispanics […]