Scholar and Heroic Striver
Joined August 2009
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Kudos
Hot take: “The great feminization” and the cattiness of wokeness/call-out culture stem from women not learning how to argue.
I’m trying to learn how to argue my points, listen openly to opposition, allow for possible shifting—rather than retreat, apologize, get emotional or feel offended.
Basic skills we all should learn, but women are less likely to.
Michael Bailey retweeted
I'm in academia where the modus operandi is, Speak your lies, whisper your truths.
Thank you! It isn't best because it's less offensive (though it is), but because it is an original and persuasive intellectual contribution. The implications (against anti-Jewish evolutionary conspiracy theories) is a bonus.
You're all obsessed with @nathancofnas's work on race and IQ and totally sleeping on his most important paper. (We are not the same.)
link.springer.com/article/10…
Today we published one of the best things I've read on the trans debate. Free of the usual acrimony that surrounds these issues, it's compassionate, clear-eyed, and a partisan only of evidence and reason. By @Edokwin. Check it out:
freeblackthought.substack.co…
Michael Bailey retweeted
It is truly an amazing time to build something new.
I sort of realized this when I left AV to start my own thing in June. But because I’d used AI so little at that point I completely underestimated how much it approximates having a full team. What a time to be alive.
I asked Claude how much it would have taken to develop Econvitals pre-coding agents. It's answer: a team of about 50 people working for three years with a budget of $20 million.
Is this correct or too high? I'm not sure.
econvitals.org/about/before-…
“Every revolution changes the nature of a calling, and whom it calls.” Beautifully stated truth.
Btw, the DEI revolution calls completely different people than traditional scholars. We’ll have to see if that revolution can be reversed.
I disagree with many parts of this response, but I will focus on one in particular.
The anonymous PhD student wrote:
"seeing mathematicians greet this release of papers with excitement and joy is beyond confusing. Many celebrate the possibility that AI will relieve them of the burden of difficult calculations, technical lemmas, and other supposedly tedious aspects of mathematical research...I love technical work...I can tell you that I entered graduate school fully intending to pursue a career as a research mathematician. The actions of October 6th have reversed this, and I’m probably not the only one."
Lozeno-Robledo responds: "We need to make sure students do not abandon mathematics because they think it has become unrecognizable."
I disagree.
We are going through a revolution in mathematics. It will change many aspects of what it means to be a mathematician. I believe mathematicians will continue to have a key role in mathematical discovery, at least in the near term, and the profession will continue to be one that attracts many people of the highest calibre. And yes, training these people will include us finding ways of making them struggle, perhaps in line with Niall Ferguson's "the cloister and the starship" suggestion.
But there is no reason to expect that the people for whom the new mathematics will be the right profession are necessarily the same people for whom mathematics as we have known it was the right one.
If a student finds that the profession is becoming unrecognisable, and that what it is becoming no longer appeals to them, then it may well be that the best course for them is to leave mathematics and pursue something else. That is not necessarily something we should seek to prevent.
Every revolution changes the nature of a calling, and whom it calls.
Michael Bailey retweeted
Finding neurological differences in transgender people does NOT establish that there is some innate “gender identity” that we all possess.
Look at depression. We could hypothetically identify specific changes in neural circuitry associated with depression, but this doesn’t mean we’ve identified some dedicated “depression circuit” that everyone possesses. Instead, these differences may reflect alterations in systems involved in a wide range of other functions.
Why should we interpret neurological differences in transgender populations any differently?
Even if we identified consistent neurological differences, these could reflect variation in neural systems involved in numerous other functions, rather than evidence of a dedicated “gender identity” mechanism that everyone possesses.
Finding neural correlates of a phenomenon does not establish that it represents a distinct, universal psychological characteristic.
Michael Bailey retweeted
I keep coming back to this: who would I be had I been born in Gaza? This doesn't mean I blame Israel. I blame Iran and I blame the wider world and the whole antizionist ideology that so many are keen to promote—so long as it's the Palestinians dying for the cause, not them.
Michael Bailey retweeted
New unpopular opinion:
AI prose is perfectly fine in most contexts. Get over yourselves.
Michael Bailey retweeted
No, the best you can do is buy a dozen copies.
Definitive analysis of free will and responsibility in a deterministic world by @DamienMorris in @Quillette . Link follows. You are responsible if you are conscious and feel that you controlled your actions (if I didn’t force your arm). No more books arguing otherwise.
Unless they are engaging directly (and I’ll wager, unsuccessfully) with this argument:
quillette.com/2026/10/10/the…
I seriously can't believe what a pleasure it is to co-work with Claude. The idea that Claude is doing it all is silly, at least my case. But Claude is accelerating my productivity by a lot, not a little.
My experience too. To be sure, even some colleagues I like and respect went crazy in 2020, but most have somewhat recovered their senses.
Those outside university departments may not realize that very few psychology academics are fully into the critical social justice thing (woke).
Some are to a degree, some conform which is sad, some like DEI because they think it will protect or promote them, but psychological scientists are generally good critical thinkers.
Especially since DEI no longer wins grants in the USA.
In no way are they like the school of education department at Cambridge.
I don't want to give the untrue impression that wokeness dominates faculty meetings in universities in 2026. It doesn't quite like it wasted time in 2019 or 2020.
Woke-affected policies do continue to do harm, years after, though. Eg the defacto removal of in person exams.
It's complicated, and not what you would imagine from what one sees on social media.