Kevin Bird

@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social

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NSF post doc at UC Davis | genomes & evolution | science & society | opinions mine

https://kevinabird.github.io/

Posts Replies Media

sir that's my emotional support inefficient for-loop

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Kevin Bird

Huge mistake not to have put this guy in cuffs after he participated in Jan 6.

Sen. Josh @HawleyMO: "Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do." Christian nationalism is fascism and Nazism as politics-and hawley is a proud fascist.

While not the most pressing aspect, this ideological assumption underlies all the research about biological/genetic underpinnings of crime as well and that work unfortunately hasn’t stopped since the likes of Lombroso. The white supremacist Charles Johnson has a consumer genetics start-up doing this

This is the entire view of the right and one they’re pushing out tons of propaganda about. It’s why we get 10,000 stories of people shoplifting from Walgreens and nothing about tax cheats even though it involves multitudes more money. They want to define crime as existing entirely within the poor

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Kevin Bird

Holy. Shit. They're literally saying Trump's felonies aren't that bad compared to the "real felonies". Bear in mind, they're ignoring J6 and "gimme 12000 votes" call and the stolen docs. We joke, but this is literally Newsmax copy.

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Kevin Bird

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

Of course it's being coordinated. That's what the Federalist Society *is*. It's a conspiracy against Americans' freedom, self governance and the rule of law and it's winning bsky.app/profile/debt...

It beggars belief that this is not all being coordinated in some way.

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Kevin Bird

There are two elements to the immunity decision that are particularly extreme in a way that many will miss: (1) motive is irrelevant and (2) immune acts are not just excluded from prosecution, they’re excluded from evidence. /1

Everyone who says this is better than Michigan winters is a liar or unwell

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Kevin Bird

Four years ago, Psychological Science published a paper which used a ludicrously poor quality dataset. That paper was retracted, partly in order to avoid “prolonging the use” of the data but the dataset still thrives in the academic literature. Read our article & 🧵 for examples

Journals that published Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles should retract themwww.statnews.com Richard Lynn's work has been repeatedly condemned for using flawed methodology and deceptively collated data to support racism. It's past time to retract the studies.

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Kevin Bird

Corruption Guys rule corruption good.

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Kevin Bird

Far be it from me to compliment the Times' political section, but this is a good baseline to send to friends who are lovable morons, vaingloriously checked out, recently awoke from a snakebite-induced coma, or have spent the last half-decade on a well-deserved bender.

Where Joe Biden and Donald Trump Stand on the Issueswww.nytimes.com Here’s what President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump have done and want to do on abortion, democracy, the economy, immigration, Israel and Gaza, and Social Security and Medicare.

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Kevin Bird

There’s a common story that, loosely speaking, the replication crisis occurs when publication bias and questionable research practices fill the literature with false positives. That story motivates a lot of science reform efforts — and it’s wrong. A thread on our new preprint:

The replication crisis is often described as a crisis of false positives, but is it? In our (re)new(ed) preprint, we show that false positives do not explain the replication crisis, and that varying rep. rates are often explained by replication sample size. #metascience osf.io/preprints/so...

We had An Occurrence

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Kevin Bird

two guys enjoying the window

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Kevin Bird

Huge story on Israeli campaign to punish BDS protesters in America, distort campus politics. “None of the groups identified in this story’s reporting have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara).” www.theguardian.com/world/articl...

Exclusive: Israeli documents show expansive government effort to shape US discourse around Gaza warwww.theguardian.com As the Gaza war rages, Israeli funds target US college campuses and push to redefine antisemitism in US law

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Kevin Bird

If you’re a college administrator, your only response to these kinds of bad faith complaints should be to tell them to go pound sand.

Hardly the first evidence of this but Columbia has gone completely ‘round the bend. They put three deans on suspension because some creep from the Free Beacon looked over their shoulders and saw them writing snarky texts?!? You do not take orders from these people!

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Kevin Bird

Richard Lynn was a pillar of 20th-century scientific racism. His magnum opus was a database of "national IQs", a menagerie of unrepresentative IQ studies with no explicit criteria for inclusion except that the results show a low IQ for Africans. This should be an open-and-shut case for retraction.

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Kevin Bird

Hi! The Onion is bringing back our Writing Fellowship. The fellowship has produced some of the biggest names in comedy, at The Onion and elsewhere. It was a casualty private equity. We are reviving it. The program is six months long and includes health insurance. jobs.gusto.com/postings/the...

The Onion Fellowship at The Onion jobs.gusto.com

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Kevin Bird

my view on these things is fairly dismal to start but the real story of the datasets behind the Bell Curve managed to slither under my considerably low expectations. very good article here detailing all the specifics

Richard Lynn’s racist national IQ data sets and papers that use them should be retracted. New piece in Stat News from @dsamorod.bsky.social, @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social, @jedidiahcarlson.com, James Lingford, @rebeccasear.bsky.social, Cathryn Townsend, and me

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Kevin Bird

honestly really moved by the dedication of these scientists to protect the academic record from fraudulent data that was produced to justify racism. there are so many ways to be anti fascist and this is a good one! www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/r...

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Kevin Bird

Lynn's "national IQ" dataset is egregiously flawed; he never described methods for its construction & there is evidence the dataset is systematically biased. Journals should retract papers which have used the data, yet are reluctant to do so, as our @statnews.bsky.social piece describes👇

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Threw together a quick post from the book here: open.substack.com/pub/kevinmkr...

Thou Shalt Notopen.substack.com When I saw today’s news that Louisiana has become the first state to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, I thought it sounded a lot like the 1950s campaign to ...

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Kevin Bird

Reply to

ApocalypticaNow

White Americans support integrated schools in the abstract but many oppose every method of actually achieving that outcome

The new Jim Crow swears he's not racist. It's just that Black people have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to get their kids into better schools

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Kevin Bird

Reply to

kilgore trout

deeply troubled by stuff keeping people alive, that is my brand now

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Kevin Bird

New lab preprint connecting structural variants and TEs to phenotypic variation in 🌽. Led by Nate Catlin & I think @manishamuna.bsky.social is the only author on bluesky :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Structural variants contribute to phenotypic variation in maizewww.biorxiv.org bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Apparently people have strong feelings about Stonehenge

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Kevin Bird

"free speech"

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Kevin Bird

I am once again asking you to consider that an entire information ecosystem established as the primary form of communication over a hundred years and allegedly regulated by the federal government was destroyed by scammers virtually overnight and we just don’t, like, ever talk about it

The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones. Curious? Bored? Worried it’s an emergency? Wait the extra minute it takes for the call to go to voice mail, then decide if it’s legitimate.

Sick of scams? Stop answering your phone.www.washingtonpost.com Phone scams are still hugely popular — and they depend entirely on people curious enough to answer.