Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Bethany Mandel, September 24, 2019, National Review

Activists left and right are protesting an effort to close loopholes in a state law mandating vaccination for schoolchildren. Here’s why they’re wrong.

There aren’t many policy proposals or causes that unite Left and Right these days, but in California, one has emerged: opposition to Senate Bill 276, which aims to close loopholes in a state law mandating vaccination for schoolchildren. Liberal and conservative activists alike have protested the bill at the state capitol and demanded that state legislators scrap it.

Unfortunately, this particular bipartisan movement isn’t just wrong — it’s dangerously wrong.

California has been the epicenter for anti-vaccine sentiment, and measles outbreaks, for the last several years. That’s not a coincidence; the former fuels the latter. When “herd immunity” dips too low, the entire “herd” is placed at risk. Anti-vaccine activists often ask, “If vaccines work and you’re vaccinated, why…

James Flynn is a well known researcher on human intelligence at University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and the man after whom the “Flynn Effect” is named. If you don’t remember that term, it refers to the continuing increase in intelligence, as measured by IQ, throughout the world. We don’t fully understand the trend, but it seems to be a real phenomenon.

At any rate, in this new article in Quillette(click on screenshot), Flynn recounts how a book he just wrote defending free speech (called, of course, In Defense of Free Speech) was rejected by Emerald Publishing, but not on very substantial grounds.

In fact, the book appears to be largely about colleges and universities and their attempts to deplatform speakers or otherwise enforce ideological purity through speech codes, trigger warnings, and the kind of “party line” that pervades much of the humanities. Why did the…

Welcome to issue #5 of my occasional newsletter on climate and energy issues. The above image comes from an essay I have in press titled “Climate Change as Symbolic politics in the United States,” which I’ll share in due course. The image shows a “word cloud” for President Obama’s Rose Garden comments on the Paris Agreement and those of President Trump in the Rose Garden. They were speaking in the exact same location about the exact same policy, but they clearly live in different symbolic realities.

As a reminder, my day-to-day research or writing is focused on sports governance and various issues of science policy. But I’ve written a fair bit on the topics of climate and energy over the past 25 years, including two recent books and a boatload of academic papers, and I’m paying attention. So caveat lector!

A few things to say up front:

• If you don’t…

Whilst on holiday I decided to read a book telling the life story of one of the world’s most influential evolutionary theorists. Despite it not being about the application of evolutionary psychology to the workplace, I thought this post would be of value regardless.

The scientist in question is Robert Trivers.

Robert Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist, who has managed to revolutionise both the natural and social sciences.

Steven Pinker described Trivers as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought”, and Time magazine has named him one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. In 2007, Trivers was awarded the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for “his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation”, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for evolutionary theory.

Robert Trivers’ key contributions to science are papers he published in the 1970s whilst at Harvard, formulating theories such as Reciprocal Altruism (1971)…

Interesting article by Tabitha Stanmore of Univ of Bristol.

Magic is a universal phenomenon. Every society in every age has carried some system of belief and in every society there have been those who claim the ability to harness or manipulate the supernatural powers behind it. Even today, magic subtly pervades our lives – some of us have charms we wear to exams or interviews and others nod at lone magpies to ward off bad luck. Iceland has a government-recognised elf-whisperer, who claims the ability to see, speak to, and negotiate with the supernatural creatures still believed to live in Iceland’s landscape.

While today we might write this off as an overactive imagination or the stuff of fantasy, in the medieval period magic was widely accepted to be very real. A spell or charm could change a person’s life: sometimes for the worse, as with curses – but…