Crime is a multi-faceted problem with many influences. Poverty has a significant effect on crime even after controlling for other factors. Neighborhood structure issues lead to conditions of crime — the idea that culture is in the driver's seat is a myth. High rates of crime in black communities can be explained by black poverty and segregation, creating an ecological niche of self-perpetuating violence.

Education can help fight crime: data from compulsory schooling laws shows that more years in school are associated with less crime, even when controlling for family background. A controlled experiment from Sweden shows that more education can reduce crime. Whereas incarceration causes more crime than it prevents.

Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition before it, has been a major cause of gang violence. The focus on drug arrests has distracted police from fighting real crime and destroyed police community relationships.

Man maintains a capacity for criminal violence because violence is a behavioral strategy that has often lead to reproductive success. Twin studies agree with common sense in showing that some people have more propensity toward violence than others, and this a matter of nature, not just nurture.

Crime flourishes not because of poverty or inequality but when social and governmental structures fail to punish anti-social behavior and allow predatory strategies to be successful. Social scientist Raymond Fosdick was correct back in 1920 when he wrote that America's crime problem was due to a heterogeneous population and an ineffective justice system. His findings have held up, but since then academic criminology has become more and more detached from reality. Segregation does not cause crime, rather crime causes segregation. Policies to coerce integration do not reduce crime, they just make middle class people miserable. What has reduced crime is more active policing.

Crime rates vary dramatically and consistently by race, both in the United States and internationally, with blacks having the highest rates and Asians the lowest rates. These racial differences are powerful even when controlling for other factors. In primitive societies, natural selection can select for men who are good at violence. But long periods of rule-of-law can plausibly cause genetic pacification of the population, as may have happened in Roman times, early Western European history, and later European history.

Police kill upwards of 1,000 people every single year yet few get charged, fewer convicted. In a never ending stream of cases police assault or kill unarmed or innocent citizens, especially black men — Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Orlando Castille, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray. Yet in almost none of these cases did the offending cop go to jail. Overly protective law, sympathetic jurors, and colluding prosecutors allow the police to get away with murder.

There are deep, systemic problems with bad behavior among police. Cases abound, such as lying under oath or covering up criminal behavior within departments. Police operate under different rules than afford the public. They get extensive protections when arrested, but when you are arrested be on guard for them twisting your words against you. Police have become so risk adverse they have adopted a shoot quickly mentality, resulting in deaths such as Tamir Rice. Their "take control" mentality leads to deaths like Sandra Bland. Oh, and don't believe the myth of the 'War on Police'

Even with well-meaning police, people do not realize how often the wrong person ends up in jail. Read this piece about an ex-cop's remorse.

What could help with policing is an increase in body cameras, which make citizens safer. What does not help is the increasing militarization of the police.

And this is not to even start with problems of racism or the war on drugs, which we will talk about elsewhere on this page.

Police have been unfairly demonized by the media. If you read through the summary of every police shooting in a single month, in nearly every single instance the police were not at fault. The vast majority of shootings happen to armed offenders or offenders who are committing a crime and resisting arrest. The idea that the cops are wantonly murdering black men is simply slanderous. Remember, even unarmed offenders are often dangerous. When a cop shoots an unarmed man it makes headlines, when a man steals a cops gun and shoots the cop, we never hear of it. Can you really make a better decision than the cops?

In many of these headline cases, it is simply false that the police were blameworthy for the death. Now that the dust has settled and the facts are in, read the full story about Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray. The reason why only a tiny number of police end up in jail for shootings is because only a tiny number of police shootings are actually murder. Even in cases where the officer was blameworthy, his actions usually are a bad decision made in a split-second or a result of a cascade of mistakes. That is bad policing, but not murder.

The demonization of police has had real negative consequences. When the Baltimore DA went after police officers who were doing their job, crime doubled over night. If police think they are going to be prosecuted for mistakes on the job, then they will be less likely to be proactive in police work. Fewer good people will want to go into police work. We have had riots which destroy the property innocents — and these riots have happened even in cases where the deceased was clearly armed and dangerous, such as in Charlotte or Milwaukee

The United States has too many laws, and too many prisoners: Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little. The drug war has created a new racial caste system just as bad as the old Jim Crow. The drug war was motivated by racial animus and hysteria. Mass incarceration has been unbelievably expensive, destructive to families, and shown costs far in excess of benefits.

America has a crime problem, not a prison problem. The standard narrative of the drug war leading to mass incarceration is all wrong. The high prison population of the United States is not due to ticky-tacky drug offenses but due to violent crimes, if anything drug offenses are not enforced enough. When Obama commuted sentences for drug dealers, he couldn't even find 61 prisoners who were clean of violent offenses or gun offenses. Nor were the harsh laws against crack cocaine motivated by racial animus, they were passed by black and white politicians concerned about incredible levels of violence. That alleged quote from a Nixon official is unsubstantiated hear-say that is most likely bogus, and should not be repeated by sources that wish to maintain credibility. Nor did incarceration break up the family, family breakdown came first, crime rose, and incarceration rates rose as a response to rising crime. Opponents of the so-called "drug war" consistently underestimate just how destructive availability of drugs can be to communities.

Police racism against black Americans has been a consistent theme of history, most famously described by James Baldwin's A Report from Occupied Territory. Nothing much has changed — as one ex-officer says, "Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are". Another police officer describes how departmental pressure to "do something" leads to police going after "suspicious" people — which ends up being black men. A quarter of black men report being harassed by the police. The news is filled with stories of cops planting drugs on black men, or punching innocent black men. In city after city — Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, etc. — there are Justice Department lawsuits documenting systematic racism and abuse by the police.

The statistics about police racism always fail to take into account the fact that there are much higher rates of black crime and thus higher rates of police encounters. Controlling for this, there seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings, prosecutions, or convictions. Even claims of traffic stop profiling are suspect. Back in James Baldwin's New York, only 12% of blacks claimed police brutality was a major problem, and many believed that their neighborhoods needed more police to deal with the crime problem. Police have to deal with perps who lie and play the race card, and have to deal with the trade-off between avoiding profiling and actually catching criminals.

America Leads the world in guns per capita by far, and compared to other developed nations we lead the list for gun deaths. Possessing a gun in the home raises the risk of dying in homicide (controlling for other variables). The best studies of strict gun laws with gun buybacks in Australias show the gun buyback led to a large decline in suicides, and weaker but real evidence that it reduced homicides as well. There are feasible, effective policies America can and should implement such as: a national permit-to-purchase, repeal of legislation that protects gun manufacturers from liability suits, and denying sales to those with violent misdemeanors. We need enforcement against straw purchasing nationwide, since guns get ported in from states with weaker rules — one store in Virginia was linked to 2,500 crimes in D.C. and Maryland.

Any relationship between gun ownership and homicide is statistical noise compared to other factors. Within the United States, there is basically no correlation between severity of state laws and gun crime. Internationally, more gun ownership is actually correlated with slightly less crime (although we doubt this relationship is meaningful or causal). Some of the places with the most lax gun laws — Utah, Idaho, Switzerland, Israel — have very low rates of homicide. While some of the places with very strict laws — South Africa, Brazil, Baltimore — have extremely high rates of homicide. Vermont and Washington DC have the same population. DC has the strictest gun control in the nation. Vermont the least. In 2002, DC had 250-something killings, Vermont had six. Literally - just six. After tougher gun laws were passed in Britain, Ireland, Chicago, and Jamaica homicide went up. Harsh anti-guns laws passed in South Africa and Brazil have failed and failed. Criminals are still able to find unlawful guns, including homemade guns, while guns lawfully owned are extremely unlikely to be used in crime.

The gun control debate is further confused by misunderstandings about why people own certain types of rifles or specious arguments about magazine size.

The entire gun control debate is broken because Democrats cannot admit that it is a subgroup of their own voting coalition (black men) that is causing the biggest crime problems. The Democrats unfairly demonize gun ownership by white Republicans making any negotiation and compromise based on the reality of crime impossible.

The problems of black ghettos were created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, compounded by racist housing policies that shunted black people into the worst neighborhoods while saddling them with predatory mortgages, stripping them of money needed to invest in housing. This racist housing policy affected every city across the country. Even after housing policies have changed, blacks were victimized by the war on drugs which has destroyed education and the black family. De facto segregation continues, despite it being illegal, and blacks are left living in neighborhoods devoid of job opportunities.

Black communities since the Civil War have long been plagued by high crime, low achievement, and poor government, for the most compelling explanation for this see the section on race realism. These problems were made worse in the 1960s by a "War on Poverty" that created a culture of dependency, court rulings that tied the hands of police, and a black power ideology that treated whites as the enemy. As the higher crime black population moved into northern cities, the crime drove away the white people — see stories from Baltimore, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and many others. It was not white people leaving that caused crime, but crime that caused white people to leave. The theory that concentrated poverty causes crime and underachievement has lead to government programs that move lower-class people into middle-class neighborhoods — but this has only spread around the crime and disorder, failed to substantially improve outcomes, and made life hell for good people in the suburbs.

Scientific racism is a modern invention and poisonous idea that has lead to oppression and discrimination that is still with us today. Race has long been used as a way to divide people between the in group and out group in order to justify violence. At one point the pseudoscience of racial social darwinism nearly destroyed humanity. The Bell Curve is reckless in the way that it pretends to be about science while spurring readers to prejudge based on race. Most biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists have discarded the concept of race yet people still remain uninformed.

The case for genetic determinism of IQ and g are based on misconceptions, the confusion of heritability with malleability, and statistical myths. Criticisms of these tests are nothing new — here is an article from 1922 pointing out all the flaws of the IQist world view. The discredited science of brain skull studies resurrected by Rushton is still nonsense.

For a comprehensive refutation of a genetically based race-and-IQ connection read this paper by Professor Richard E. Nisbett or this long anti-racialist Q&A. You can also read the original Scientific American article debunking the Bell Curve , another good scientific paper, or read a more recent article noting that we still have no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes.

Race is real, it is based on relatedness, which has been important throughout all human history. Race can be seen modern genetic studies.

Many on-average differences between the races are most plausibly explained by on-average genetic differences. That sprinters from a dozen different countries from four continents, but all of West African descent have dominated the 100 meter dash, is most plausibly explained by genes. A more controversial claim is that there are on-average differences in IQ or cognitive problem solving, due to genes. For an introduction to this theory, read Will Saletan's "Liberal Creationism" series in Slate (part two and three), this Race and IQ FAQ, or this article on on race and standardized tests. For a longer treatment, read the original Charles Murray Bell Curve excerpt or Rushton and Jensen's Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Intelligence. It's also important to note that these gaps on aptitude tests show up within every country and between countries.

The idea of racial intelligence differences was never refuted, rather people holding the idea were simply demonized, bullied, fired, and ostracized. While the "Bell Curve" thesis has been argued against, these counter-arguments are weak. Read Rushton's response to Nisbett or Sailer's response to Nisbett, this response to Gould and Shalizi about G and its follow-up, an explanation of why heritability does imply genetic causation, a response to the book Scientists Respond to the Bell Curve, Dalliard's response to James Heckman, and this exposure of Gould as making false claims about historical 'scientific racists'.

All statistics are flawed, and IQ is no different. However, racial differences have also been noticed by the smartest observers, from David Hume to Thomas Jeferson to Charles Francis Adams to James Watson. For narrative accounts, read this man's journey or read about how this man watched the struggles of black iron workers to pass the tests and reach the same level of skill as the white workers. Around the world we see race and IQ correlate with our own observations about technological capabilities and ability to create a sophisticated economy.

Racial inequality in schooling has long been a problem. In the 1960's Kozol wrote Death at an Early Age about how the Boston schools maltreated black children. Today huge inequalities persist in suspensions, lack of AP classes, teacher preparation and a dozen other metrics. Disparities also exist in exposure to advanced classes, college quality, and racial mismatch. In states such as Pennsylvania minority schools are chronically underfunded due to the local property tax system. Integration worked when it was tried, but schools have re-segregated due to the choices of white people. Some districts even send the police to follow kids home to make sure they are not enrolling in a better school than their address allows.Policies to reduce suspensions through initiatives such as "restorative justice" can actually make disparities worse.

First, read the article compilations elsewhere on this page about race realism and about education. The black-white school achievement gap is due to differences in IQ which is just an artifact of gene distribution. Reformers in denial of this reality have continually failed to close the gap.

Liberal explanations for racial academic disparities do not fit the facts. School funding is not on average lower in black schools. Nor can the achievement gap be explained by segregation, socioeconomic status, teacher quality, or any other measurable input. The conventional wisdom about education is filled with easily debunked myths, such as the idea that spending more can close the achievement gap. Interventions such as day-care and preschool fail to produce long-term changes in intelligence. Nor are white kids magic pixie dust that can fix black schools through integration.

Meanwhile hypersensitivity to charges of racism has lead to terrible problems of disorder in predominantly black schools, with teachers trying to maintain discipline at risk of being punished for their own attempts to break up fights. Lack of discipline is the biggest problem in predominantly black inner-city schools.

Integrating lower class black kids into white schools — without first addressing discipline problems — has over and over again resulted in chaos and bullying and whites fleeing to more orderly school districts. This has played out in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other schools.

There is a widening gap in income between blacks and whites, and that gap can only be explained by discrimination. In an experiment in responding to newspapers ads, resumes that were identical but had a black sounding name received 50% fewer callbacks. People can make decisions that suffer from implicit bias even when they are not conscious of it, test it yourself here.Blacks who have a name that "sounds black" earn 10 percent less even when controlling for factors such as IQ and experience. Another study showed black job applicants receiving lower compensation offers and then accepting those lower offers. One woman tells her own story of how she changed her name on her resume to a more white sounding name and suddenly got job offers. Another computer science student at Stanford describes the overt and subtle racism she experiences, such as always being asked if she is lost.

Increased diversity is not just the right thing to do, it also makes everyone in the organization smarter. But as one black engineer who worked at Twitter notes, a lack of diversity can lead to groupthink and mindlessly reinforcing the status quo.

First, read the compilations on this page about race realism, education, and race and education. Average black IQ is lower, which results in lower levels of education and lower level of occupational achievement. The Armed Forces Qualifying Test is a highly predictive test of cognitive skills relevant for job performance: when controlling for AFQT results the black-white wage gap disappears. While you can cite statistics such as "among law school graduates, minorities are about 10 percent less likely than whites to practice law", this is more than explained by differences in cognitive test outcomes. In one study of bar exam pass rates, 97 percent of whites passed the test after repeated tries while only 78% of black graduates passed. For the medical board test to become a physician, 87.7 of whites passed the test compared to 48.9 percent of black students. The demographics of top tech firms generally maps to the demographics of who is scoring above 750 on the SAT Math section —heavily white and asian and only 2% black. Blacks on average perform worse in the workplace, and the gap is just as big on objective tests as subjective tests.

Implicit bias studies are bad science, the tests are unreliable, non-predictive and unvalidated. Stereotype threat also has not been demonstrated in real world situations, and may be a result of researchers hinting to their study subjects the results they want. Studies of discrimination towards African-American sounding names shows it is relatively small effect limited to customer facing positions. Furthermore, the names parents choose about kids reflect whether they wish to put racial identity ahead of assimilation, which sends a signal to employers about something they might care about.

Overt employment discrimination against black people has been illegal nationally for 50 years, and positive overt preference toward black applicants has been the policy at most Fortune 500 companies for many decades. Affirmative-action is also the policy in higher education where at the most selective universities being black is worth an additional 230 SAT points on a 1600 point score.

The effect of lowering the bar in the name of diversity can be devastating, as shown in the cases of the Washington DC metro or this story from the construction industry. Because of average IQ differences, any meritocratic higher practice will produce racial imbalances, which can then be challenged in court under the "disparate impact" clause of Civil Rights law — thus all meritocratic hiring practices are effectively legally suspect.

America's insanely high medical bills and porous insurance system is killing people. It's expensive because profit-seeking entities maximize their charges. Even fiscal conservatives should recognize that universal healthcare would be more economical. That free markets cannot cure healthcare is a result known to economists since Kenneth Arrow's work in the 1960s.

American healthcare is not expensive because of a free market, rather the free market we had was destroyed as a way to drive up costs. Singapore has a much more free market system and much lower costs. Our obsession with the sanctity of healthcare has lead us to dramatically overspend. In America government intervention is used to restrict supply and drive up costs through "Certificate of Need" laws. The problem is not profit seeking insurance companies, but the hospitals. Medical licensing is used, not to protect patients, but to drive up prices. The problem in the United States is there are no prices for healthcare services, thus no free market, meanwhile there is too much treatment for non-problems.

Private school successes are due to better students, not better schools. We have gone insane with testing — the average US student takes more than 113 standardized tests before graduation. While expensive for schools, this testing has been a bonanza to test prep companies. Opting out of those tests will invoke the ire of the education administration. Yet constant testing also makes teachers hate their jobs.

The conservative/neoliberal education reform agenda has been a disaster. The Nation At Risk report which launched the educational reform crusade was based on bad math. The Value-Added Model for teachers, currently in use all over the country, is a terrible scoring system — it is approximately a random number generator. Online charter schools are frauds, ‘It is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.’ Homework for elementary school kids has no impact on achievement but makes kids more negative about school. In the Michigan experiment with charter schools has been the children who have lost. Even the charter school success stories are less than meets the eye, the New Orleans makeover is a myth and the "No Excuses" Charter Schools juiced their average test scores by selecting the better students, kicking out the underachievers, and subjecting the rest to soul killing drilling to pass the tests.

What does work? New reviews of studies about class sizes shows that class size does matter after all. Evidence from school funding reform shows that increasing funding does improve student outcomes. A dollar spent on education pays back $6 later.

Teachers are unfairly blamed when the real culprit is poverty. We underpay teachers — the weekly wages of public school teachers in the United States were 17 percent lower than comparable college-educated professional. A new global study finds that elementary and pre-school teachers across 34 developed countries make about 22% less, on average, than their full-time counterparts with similar education levels who have chosen to do pretty much anything else with their lives

Schools have had success. A San Francisco school extended the day for meditation time, which resulted in better academic performance and a 75 percent decrease in suspensions

About 62% of the individual differences in academic achievement—at least when it came to GCSE scores—could be attributed to genetic factors. Nothing but genes can explain the results of twin studies about IQ. Educational interventions have failed to produce long term gains in general intelligence. It is simply impossible to teach certain skills to students with too low IQ. Universal Pre-K is not the solution many think it is. Educationalists willfully ignore the understanding of human nature that the modern human sciences are gradually attaining, and cling doggedly to long-exploded theories about how human beings develop from infancy to adulthood. Summaries of books on education reform show an unending history of folly. Much of the achievement gap is just an IQ gap rooted in genes, beyond the ability of any known intervention to fix. Arnold Kling notes that the 'null hypoththesis' that interventions do not improve outcomes continually ends up the best predictor. What if education, as you understand it – public or private or charter schooling from age four or five all the way to university as young adults – is, on net, a waste of your time and money?. Justifications for public schooling are rife with "goal kiting". Education reforms that appear to work are almost always a result of selection bias. World-wide an explosion of public schooling has lead to little better outcomes. Education has not driven economic growth.

While liberals complain because some Podunk school is teaching evolution as "one possible theory", our nation's most popular AP history textbook has taken out the Wright Brothers while doubling down on racial grievience and adding "heroic" figures such as Juan Chanax whose "accomplishment" was in bringing in 1,000 illegal aliens into the United States.

Over and over again, spending does not correlate with success — a result shown between states and within states. Attempts to spend more money such as in Newark or Kansas City produced negligible results. Trying to hold schools accountable with high-stakes testing only leads to optimizing for the wrong things and gaming the system.

Beyond wasting time and money, the school system evolved as a Lord of the Flies situation that crushes many kids' souls. Children in school are not physically active enough, then we diagnose them with ADHD. It is a feminized system that treats boyhood boredom with school as a psychiatric disorder. A teacher who tries being a student for a day understands all the ways students are mistreated. School was designed as training for a permanent underclass and is actively harmful to creativity and well-being. Now school exists to train a bureaucratic population. However it often fails to do even that, due to catostrophic failures in student discipline.

Fancy dorms aren't why tuition is up, lower state funding is the reason. And in California starving the system of funding is bringing great hardship. The government and college complex has preyed on our country's youth and saddled them with a crushing load of debt. Our obsession with meritocracy and selectivity for universities results in students sacrificing individuality, health, happiness, ethical principles, and behavior.

The university despite its legal status as a public charity, is today driven by motives indistinguishable from the profit-maximizing entities traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

If students have adopted a litigious approach to regulating campus life, they are only working within the culture that colleges have built for them. When school environments casually yet consistently deemphasize the intellectual benefits of higher education, students become less imaginative about their futures — we need to proactively teach our most marginalized students that honing an intellectually curious frame of mind is as essential to leading an invigorating working life as ambition and work ethic.

We are taught that college is increasingly important to life success, but many of the professions now requiring college used to function fine by requiring self-study and apprenticeship. Furthermore, the number of professional jobs has been exaggerated, we are actually already sending far too many people to college. From surveying, to house building to driving taxis, more and more careers need inflated creditials to perform. Education is a zero-sum status race. As we send more people to college wages for those with a BA haven't budged. As more people get Bachelor's, the Master's degree becomes the new Bachelor's degree. College does not make more productive workers, rather it is just very expensive signaling which can be shown the sheepskin effect, more comments on the signaling effect here). Forcing everyone onto a college track is cruel to students of less ability. Because of lawsuits that resulted in banning IQ tests for use in hiring, college diplomas have become expensive ways of laundering IQ scores. The college system has created a bubble where youth are cut off from older people. Over the past century or so, we have, through a growing set of restrictions, artificially extended childhood by perhaps a decade or more, and we have also completely isolated young people from adults, severing the “child-adult continuum” that has existed throughout history.

Nor are colleges providing an intellectual environment — elite English departments now focus on nit-picking the great texts of the past rather than learning from them.

Government funding for college is at an all-time high. Government funding for college is vastly higher than it was in the 1960s — the funding has just gotten eaten up by higher enrollment and more administration. While once there nearly twice as many professors as administrators, now administrators outnumber instructors. Only 10% of university costs actually go directly to education.

Academia-as-business has created constant reorganizations, a permanent revolution, and an erosion of academic freedom.

Conservatives don't enter academia because 1) actually studying human past and present challenges conservative beliefs and makes people more liberal and 2) conservatives prefer higher paying professions. Conservatives hate academia because it teaches students to think for themselves — which might create more liberals. While revenues for the university system are up, faculty salaries have actually decreased.

Forget what the right says: Academia isn’t so bad for conservative professors. The campus liberal "echo chamber" is a myth. While academia leans left, professors are not out to indoctrinate, conservatives are wrong about why it happens and its effects. Conservatives lamenting discrimination based on numerical disparities are doing the same thing they always complain liberals do, there is no actual evidence of this discrimination.

Recent hand-wringing over failed replications in social psychology is largely pointless, because unsuccessful experiments have no meaningful scientific value — the likeliest explanation for any failed replication will always be that the replicator bungled something along the way. The original article about the replication crisis itself had statistical errors that created the wrong result.

While higher education’s state funding problems over the past decades have bipartisan causes, the targeting of these institutions’ budgets lately is much more common in states with GOP leadership—and may worsen yet. Some of the most wealthy and powerful are pressuring politicians — who, in turn, are pressuring college administrators and ultimately professors — to ensure that only the wealthy have access to a liberal education.

Conservatives have been increasing efforts to alter the campus climate, with the Koch brothers funneling millions into promoting laissez-faire capitalism. A single well funded conservative group has been behind 111 speakers who have brought a more mean-spirited, in-your-face politics to the campus.

The two most abused words in the English language might be "studies show". All articles mentioning a correlational study should include a warning: "These data are based on multiple regression analysis. This would be a sign that you probably shouldn’t read the article because you’re quite likely to get non-information or misinformation." Using a bag of tricks, academics can routinely get results at 5% level of confidence even when there is no correlation. Most studies are wrong, most supposed breakthroughs never happen, and you can find a study showing that pretty much anything causes or cures X. Commenters on a top tech site agree. Bits of conventional wisdom are often wrong a result of misreporting. It is easy to make up results and get the press to publish them. We use studies to replace logic, but in many cases the best arguments are better than the best studies. In running a business, simply talking to people is the most important way to understand what is going on, but for academics, that is not good enough. And if you still believe in "studies", studies show that most studies are wrong while most stereotypes are true.

Replication is the magic that makes science work — not peer review. Adversarial journal referees can reject articles for arbitrary reasons that do nothing but slow progress down. In general reviewers do not actually check the math or data, and passing peer review is often an insider's racket.

The process of becoming a professor selects for for mediocrity and obsequiousness.

Many academic fields have overcomplicated their methodology with pseudoscientific B.S. as a form of barriers to entry. Rather than being too corporatized, academics would be much more relevant if they actually talked to businesses to understand what problems in the field need to be solved. Entire fields are often divorced from anything useful.

Modern civilization is being overrun by parasitic bureaucracies that are like the Borg in Star Trek — they assimilate and feed upon the competition. Academia is now full of bandwagon research with marginal results, and is no longer a driver of human knowledge.

Colleges are not cathedrals of free thought, rather teachers are now afraid of their students as social justice demands have gotten out of control. Colleges have been overrun by activists who, rather than trying to win arguments, bully other students, usually without facing any punishment.

And the demands of the students look suspiciously like a full-employment program for the faculty that are egging them on.

The peer review process is actively hostile to ideas that are politically incorrect, not based on the quality of the work, but because of the results. There is even bias against research that shows a bias. In some schools the screening based on ideology is overt. Political donations from the faculty of Harvard and elsewhere go overwhelmingly to Democrats. The liberal slant can be seen in commencement speakers. The latest trend is that speech is violence, conservative students now must go underground.

From the time of George Washington, being welcoming to immigrants has been a policy that has made America great. America no longer has a wave of undocumented immigrants — that ended a decade ago. The economic benefits of immigration may be the most settled fact in economics. A remarkable 83% (33 of 40) of the finalists of the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search were the children of immigrants. Our immigration policy means that America's top achievers live with the threat of deportation. If America does not let in the most exceptional technical talent, other countries will and will out compete us. Trump built his campaign on a pile of myths about immigration. Explode more myths here. People who oppose immigration are ignorant of the facts. But the people who live with immigrants don't buy into these fears — read how the people of Erie have found welcoming refugees has made their community better.

And don't even get us started on a border wall — it is an impractical, expensive, and ineffective border plan.

The idea that Hispanic immigrants commit more crime on average is a myth that sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for. And overall, study after study shows that immigrants do not commit more crime. Even illegal immigrants do not commit more crime.

While people complain about the problems of assimilation, America has previously faced immigration surges vastly larger and those surges made America stronger. There are many similarities between today's Mexicans and yesterday's Italians, between today's Asian-American's and yesterday's Jews. Our fears today are just as irrational over fears about the Irish a hundred years ago.

Fifteen years ago, writers were warning of how California was being transformed for the worse by overwhelming amounts of illegal immigration. The same writer now describes a California where "the state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between." Today Hispanic immigrants in California are lagging badly in cognitive performance and taking more in welfare than they are paying in taxes. We have been failing to enforce the law and creating a new underclass. Generations of Latino immigration has shown that Latino immigrants are not assimilating upwards. The data shows the same for California. While Hispanics commit less crime than blacks, they are in jail nearly three times the rate as whites. And in California ethnic school children are increasingly no longer identifying as Americans.

People who think Mexicans will integrate the same way Irish and Italians did, ignore that they haven't, ignore race realism (see section elsewhere on this page) and ignore that Mexico itself has never achieved racial assimilation and instead has its own racial caste system which we are now importing, read: part one, part two and part three. Our immigration policy is turning white people into a market-dominant minority, and around the world such market-dominant minorities have a history of facing pogroms and genocide.

America's border with Mexico remains porous, while in Israel a border fence has cut immigration by 99%.

Obama was not the deporter in chief he deported less than 1% of visa overstays. And don't buy into the PR spin about the "DREAMERS"

Studies that show immigration do not harm wages are based on models that assume things about the world that are probably not true. In Trump's America a shortage of immigrants means that "farmers are paying well above minimum wage, offering 401K plans, paid time off, and other incentives to try to lure workers back to the fields." Turns out you can solve the labor shortage just by paying workers more.

Immigration is good for the growth of the host country and the home countries. There is no evidence that immigration significantly holds down wages.

Angela Merkel's much-criticized bet proved correct: Germany, and other countries, can integrate Muslim migrants. Negative views of Muslim immigrants is driven biased media coverage, such as the different ways the media covered two cases of men grooming children for sex. We discuss threats to free speech from Muslims, but not the threats from Islamaphobes. The story about refugees assaulting Germans on New Year's in Frankfurt was a hoax. Statistics about increased rape in Sweden are due to changes changes in the definition of rape, not due to immigration. It's not Islam that causes terrorism, but a “process of deculturation” that leaves them ignorant of and detached from both the European society and the one of their origins.

Sweden has taken in more refugees per-capita than any other developed nation — and the result has been rising gang warfare, riots, and epidemics of pick-pocketing. One Swede writes his goodbye to Sweden where immigration has overwhelmed the traditional welfare state — "there is no plausible scenario where these social tensions and future financial commitments will not lead to a downward spiral of hardship and strife".

The wife of an American diplomat working with refugees in Europe writes that with the incoming numbers of refugees there has been a large and growing incidence of sexual assault — not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but a rise in vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs of young men. While the German government tries to hide statistics about immigrants and crime, when statistics do become available it shows that immigrants have much higher crime rates. The circumstances behind terrorist attacks in Europe show that the terrorists must have had support within the community. On one News Year there was mass sexual assaults in Cologne (while the Frankfurt assault stories were fake news, the assaults in Cologne were real).

The majority of the "refugees" are really adult men migrating for economic reasons.

In Britain thousands have marched in support of an Islamic Caliphate and British natives now feel like strangers in the place where they grew up. German police are now raiding the homes of people who post anti-migrant hate messages on social media.

Africa is on pace for an astounding 4 billion people by the end of the century — the idea that Europe — a continent one-third the size of Africa — can be an outlet for African overpopulation will only result in Europe's destruction. The government's are hiding statistics about ethnicity, but if you look at what numbers exist, there are indications that non-European ethnicities in many countries are on pace to make the natives ethnic minorities in a remarkably short time see this on Sweden and this on France.

Democracy is good not just for freedom and equality, but also for economic growth. Conversely, dictatorships result in leaders forgoing the common good in order to reward supporters. The United States promoting democracy abroad benefits the citizens of new democracies, promotes international peace, and serves U.S. interests. If democracy is to remain as successful in the 21st century as it was in the 20th, it must be both assiduously nurtured when it is young—and carefully maintained when it is mature.

Defenders of "democracy" are incoherent in that they have no clear definition of democracy, and every time "democracy" goes awry it is not actually democracy. The democracy versus autocracy framing is a false dichotomy that inhibits our ability to think about practical reforms for better government. That democracies do better is survivorship bias — attempts to promote a transition to democracy frequently result in disaster such as in Afghanistan, the Congo, Europe, Libya, Zimbabwe, and many others. The writings of classic opponents of popular government still hold up today, while the writings of the pro-democracy intellectuals is filled with nonsense and failed predictions.

The real media bias is pro-business, pro-corporate, and pro-CEO. The media is part of the military-industrial complex, there are many links based on funding and sources resulting in a pro-war bias. While Chomsky wrote his critiques of top-down media control before the internet, his arguments still hold in a world dominated by Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Chomsky diagnosed how the elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents occur so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news "objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. This remains true today when a handful of companies control most of the media. Conservative complaints about media bias are an example of "working the ref" to get better treatment — conservatives admit "the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures." Journalists care more about the story than about pushing one side. Conservatives need to come to grips with the fact that it is their ideas that are the problem, not the media. The facts really do have a liberal bias. Trump received far more coverage than other candidates and the coverage against Hillary was very negative.

The vast majority of “conservative” media is simply just a business cynically disguised as a cause. To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-­October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. Here is a list of ten of the worst lies Fox News has spread. Youtube is dominated by right-wing politics because it is driven largely by the unexamined prejudices and anxieties of (primarily) white men.

Journalists have long been more liberal and more likely to vote Democrat, and that is even more true now when a mere 7% of journalists are Republican. Of journalists who donated in the last campaign, 96% donated to Hillary Clinton.

On issues concerning Democratic voting identity groups (blacks, Hispanics, gays, careerist women, etc.) the prestige press routinely slants its coverage to cast them as victims, see these examples of covering a police shooting, blatantly misreporting rape statistics, whitewashing the Black Panthers, lying about the views of conservative writers, misreporting economist views about vouchers, claiming 'women write better code' based on a study that did not show that at all. And lately the New York Times has gone completely off the deep end with opinion pieces calling all white people racist and arguing black people and white people cannot be friends.

The media is also Orwellian in how it changes language — witness how every outlet has shifted from illegal alien to illegal immigrant to undocumented immigrant (the last implying the problem is that people are supposed to be here but simply had a paperwork problem which is not an accurate description).

Every time you watch a movie out of Hollywood you should Google to find what liberties they took with the truth, because over and over they fictionalize the story in ways that support a liberal narrative, see for example the flaws of the movie Trumbo, Ghandi, Remember the Titans,

Far from being anti-communist, both the New York Times and the Economist whitewashed Mao upon his death. Today NPR and the New York Times underplay the role of socialism in the economic disaster in Venezuela.

The prestige liberal media is susceptible to its own fake news of the form of extreme credulity to claims of victimhood by liberal identity groups — whether that be the Rolling Stone rape hoax, the Muslim student "suspended for a science project" hoax, or the "Hands up, Don't shoot" narrative about the Michael Brown shooting.

The press engages in extremely dishonest reporting about Republicans and Donald Trump. Examples about: bogus claims about drop in foreign college applicants, a hit piece about Gorsuch's first Supreme Court Vote, claiming Palin incited the attack on Congresswoman Giffords, falsely ridiculing Trump's feeding of fish, falsely claiming he mocked a reporter's disability, twisting his words about illegal Mexican immigrants to make it seem like he claimed that Mexicans were generally were rapists, claiming the GOP rolled back an Obama rule restricting gun sales to the mentally ill, a slew of reporting errors in the first months of Trump administration, or slandering Trump's treasury nominee. Politifact rates the same statements differently when a Republican says them versus when a Democrat says the same thing. This comparison of New York Time headlines about Obama versus Trump show how the dislike of Trump colors the coverage even in the non-opinion pages.

Journalists have gone completely insane about the Russian menace. The Economist literally demonized Putin. Meanwhile the net sum of Russia social media ad buying appears to be $100k, in election that spent $2,000,000k. This coverage was driven by the Clinton team's need to find a scapegoat for the election loss.

The prestige press frequently writes unfair hit pieces against people on the right, such as this Washington Post piece calling conservative a intellect who disagree with liberal consensus "fiercely anti-intellectual". They edit interviews in mendacious ways to make conservatives look bad. Scott Adams breaks down how a Bloomberg article about him twisted his words and used loaded language to make him look bad. Scott Alexander shows how when writing about a right-wing group a writer fills the page with word associations that color the target as being odious.

Meanwhile the press actively cooperates with the Democrats to mold stories, such as this example from The Atlantic. And the Clinton campaign treated the press as a tool to be used, planting stories with the AP, and pushed puff pieces to people like Colbert.

The prestige media (New York Times, etc) should actually be considered an arm of the permanent government, for it virtually never criticizes the permanent government. The the Washington Post and New York Times have long worked closely with the CIA. The problem is much worse than the media being to the left of the American center — the problem is the media constantly redefining what the American center is.

Through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to hold on to power while more and more Americans reject their candidates and their ideas. Republicans are much better at Gerrymandering. Heading into the 2018 midterms, data and conventional wisdom agree: Gerrymandering is a big reason the G.O.P. has a real chance to retain control of the House, even if the Democrats score a clear win. The latest Congressional map has a record setting bias against Democrats. Now Republicans are looking at an attempt at a third "redemption" — using violent tactics and voter suppression to ensure their rule.

Republicans rewrite election laws to reduce participation, such as in North Carolina. There has been a nation wide effort to purge black voters from the rolls.

When Republicans don't like the results of science, they try to rewrite the rules to put industry members in judgement of what science is. Republican presidents tamper with reports and suppress science they do not like.

The Republicans began to go insane in the 1990s when Newt Gringrich created a movement conservatism that accused anyone who stood against him of elitism, socialism, or corruption. By 2012 the GOP become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. The Republicans continued to be the "Party of No" through Obama's term. While Obama was president the Republicans reflexively opposed everything Obama did, for purely the reason of hurting his presidency. The Tea Party took out Republicans who were willing to work with Obama, ending prospects of compromise.

Democrats and their auxiliaries in the media routinely boast of their dream of turning America into a one-party state through changing who gets to vote in American elections and converting America into a democracy where ethnic groups vote Democrat based on getting racial preferences. The claims of "no proof of voter fraud" ring hollow when the registration is so broken and no one has actual audits the rolls to see if fraud is happening. Non-citizens can vote with a utility bill and no one checks for citizenship. The studies showing no voter fraud are all bogus because it is illegal for these studies to actually verify citizenship. Meanwhile Obama in an interview rather than emphasizing that it is felonious for undocumented people to vote, implied the opposite.

While Republicans win their share of elections, the real power in America resides in the permanent government — the courts, the universities, the school system, and all the agencies ranging from the State Department to the EPA. The permanent government is overwhelmingly liberal Democrat, and uses its power to push the country leftward. The rules that govern our lives are overwhelmingly created by the administrative agencies, not by Congress. Laws are usually written by unelected people, and the even more important regulatory rulings are implemented by unelected people who cannot be fired. Even worse, the government avoids the normal rule-making process by using corrupt and undemocratic a "sue and settle" strategy — the government gets someone to sue them and then throws the case. Court ordered "Consent decrees" now mean that vast areas of municipal policy, from special education to the placement of foster children to housing for the homeless, are determined by unelected judges. Judges in the past have invented novel interpretations of the Constitution, that would have been shocking to the Americans who original wrote and passed the laws. The courts have struck down local regulations on matters ranging from vice laws to illegal-immigration while at the same time using the law to the suppress of free speech disliked by liberals in corporate environments. Rather than ruling based on the law, the courts started making policy on bogus social science. They massively meddled in local affairs by forcefully bus children across towns and to ban local schools from grouping students by ability. Democratic regimes sue corporations on various trumped up civil rights charges, and then funnel settlement money to liberal activist groups.

Rule by elected officials is a myth. The political appointees nominally in charge of agencies are in fact "managed upward" by the agency itself. The power of the permanent government becomes obvious in cases like Belgium where the government continued as normal even when the elected government was absent for 535 days. Government "shut downs" provoked by hard-ball Congressional tactics do not actually shut the government down.

In the recent past the American left has engaged in unbelievable amounts of terrorism — and those former terrorists often ended up with presidential pardons and jobs in academia.

Our academic and educational institutions that are government subsidized and legally privileged with credentialing the next generation are overwhelmingly liberal. The left used violence in the past to establish left-wing departments. Our current generation of text books are being rewritten to omit entrepreneurial heroes like the Wright Brothers and instead celebrate people who helped smuggle in illegal immigrants.

Democrats have used the tax system to go after conservatives, using the IRS to help destroy the so-called "radical right" back in the 1960s, and more recently targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny.

Liberals use their commanding cultural power to bully and purge rightwing thought out of society — there is a long list of people bullied and purged. Our most important companies, such as Google, will fire a conservative without warning for writing a memo in a civil tone about supporting conservative ideas that are likely true, while liberals saying truly racially hostile things go completely undisciplined.

People on the left arguing the left is winning: America has moved left, the despite short-term gains by Republicans, both Republicans and Democrats are more liberal than ever. Despite Trump's victory, America on the whole has gotten more liberal on issue after issue. Conservatism, racism, and white nationalism are not increasing — it's social liberalism that is taking over.

People on the left arguing the right is winning: free market conservatives have successfully executed the proposals of the Powell Memo and enshrined pro-corporate, free market ideology as the default.

The GOP has a growing monopoly on state government. And as of 2017 it has taken over Washington too. These maps show how dominant the Republicans have been. The left is losing because it cannot connect its economic message to the personal and family issues that people care about more. The left is losing the debate over the nature of politics itself. The left keeps defeating itself with excessive factionalism. Some states have gone so far to the right, Texas has gone so conservative crazy the George W would be considered a communist. The Reagan Revolution legacy still stands, but this legacy is our government’s weakened ability to do its job protecting families, consumers, workers and the environment.

People on the right arguing the right is winning: During the 1980's the Reagan ascendency represented the triumph of a new conservative movement, that while not winning complete victory on every policy issue, did achieve a subtler and more enduring transformation of American politics and society.

People on the right arguing the left is winning: On a review of the 13 of the most important issues to Americans, three are neutral, eight have been moving left and only two have been moving right. Conservatives don't want to admit that what they are fighting is, in fact, a very old religious war, in which their side holds and has always held the losing hand. The job of the establishment conservative is the job of the Washington Generals — to show up, lose, and get paid.

The issues keeping women out of fire-fighting today are the same that have keeping them out for thirty years — sexual harassment, lack of locker rooms, and general disrespect born of sexism. In some departments, sexual harassment seems to happen to every single woman. Only 7% of fire fighters are women, but programs such as "Girls Fire Camp" can help change that.

Opposition to women in combat is based on myths — standards are not being lowered, PMS and pregnancy are no more disruptive than male problems with drugs and alcohol, and while integration changes the unit dynamic it doesn't make things worse.

Men are overwhelmingly stronger and more durable than women — on a test of grip strength the very strongest trained female athlete is lower than that of the 75th percentile of typical males. 99.9% of females have less upper body muscle mass than the average male. In a Marine Corp study of trainees, females had substantially less aerobic and anaerobic capacity and injury rates that were six times higher than males.

Despite millions spent by the L.A. Fire Department on recruiting women and outfitting female locker rooms, almost no women could make it through the physical tests (and then the response to was to dangerously lower standards). All over the nation fire departments are passing through women who fail the physical tests.

The common arguments for women in the military are false — size and strength still matters even with high-tech warfare, standards are being lowered for the women, and sexual attraction interferes with creating a loyal band of brothers. A British study found what countless other studies have shown — mixed-gender combat units have “lower survivability,” a “reduced lethality rate” and reduced deployability. Beyond passing the physical fitness tests, there is the issue of smaller women being able to survive IED attacks and drag wounded comrades out of danger zones. Even if a few women can pass the physical requirements, the negative impacts on espirit d’corps far outweighs the benefits of those few extra recruits.

Tech has long been hostile to women. Women make up only 25% of employees in computing professions compared to 58% of the professional workforce overall. There are innumerable stories of sexism. For a small sample, read the stories of: a Stanford computer science graduate, an employee at a top company, another engineer, an entrepreneur seeking funding, a women who saw her experiences change after she tranistioned to female from being male, from a Venture Capitalist, a tech event, and another tech event. Sexism is driving women out of tech. Women are tired of being told to 'lighten up'. On Internet Relay Chat, women are twenty-five times more likely to recieve harassment. Women quit technology because 63% of women in tech have received sexual harassment. Add on top of that poor environment, isolation due to lack of other women, lack of identifiable mentors, and the rewarding of risky behavior.

Girls are just as interested in math and science as boys. Girls get better grades — even in math and science — in countries around the world. Differences between men and women are vastly exaggerated. Women were once more prominent in computing but were driven out for a number of reasons, such as how computer game marketing in the 1980's exclusively targeted boys.

A study of data from Angelist shows that women in tech earn significantly less for similar years of experience and job role. Another study shows a 13-14% wage gap. Articles denying the gender wage gap are guilty of playing games with control variables. A study of job applications in academia showed a bias toward an identical resume but with a male name. In other professions, such as orchestra musicians, saw much more gender balance once hiring moved to blind auditions that hid gender.

The idea that women are worse in math is a myth. Nor are they any worse at computer programming. Results showing that on some exams women do worse are likely due to stereotype threat. University computer science programs putting in the effort have been able to close their gender gap. Internationally, math variance ratios and gender gaps are largely associated with educational differences and sociocultural differences.

Women overwhelmingly choose career paths that involve working with living things. That women are innately, on average, more interested in such jobs is more plausible than any other explanation. When researchers did a study simply asking women about their preferences, they found the computer programming gap explained purely by preference. While women were once somewhat more common in computer jobs, programming was a very different job than it was now, it was more corporate and repetitive as opposed to being risky and adventurous — read this post and all the comments. For anecdotal evidence of difference in preferences, read this women's testimonial and this man's testimonial or this thread of dueling anecdotes.

Twin studies show what is obvious to any parent, or anyone with pets — all psychological traits have a large genetic component. Given that males and females have operated different social roles for their entire course of their evolution — and behavioral differences between the sexes are seen in Chimpanzees — then it follows that the sexes would have different selective pressures. We should not expect any given psychological trait to be equally distributed between the sexes, and studies in fact show substantial differences. Traits that measure the same in studies — such as IQ — are only that way because the test is designed that way, the aggregate results are show no gender difference but all the subtests do show gender differences.

The articles circulated on the left claiming that women are just as good at math or computer science, therefore women are just as apt to be Google engineers are misleading. The meta-studies work by averaging scores of boys versus girls with scores of men-versus-women — but sexual dimorphism increases dramatically in adolescence. Furthermore, people going into tech are usually in the top percentiles of quantitative skill. If you read the study, adult men outscore women in math, and the more selected the group the more men score better. Overall, there is around a 2 to 1 ratio of men scoring 800 on the SAT Math, at least 1.6 to 1 ratio of men scoring in the 99th percentile on the PISA test, a 10 to 1 ratio of men to women on the highest scores of the American Mathematical Competitions, and a 20 to 1 male to female ratio at International Math Olympiad. And no, this is not due to stereotype threat. Stereotype threat studies have a huge publication bias problem, and has not been shown to exist on real world tests with actual stakes.

The media consistently makes exaggerated claims of gender bias which are not founded by actual data. While you can cherry pick studies showing gender bias in some jobs, a big study trying to confirm this bias in STEM academic hiring found the opposite -- a 2-to-1 bias against men. A review of the evidence does not suggest bias in STEM academia. A survey of 16,000 tech professionals shows no bias in pay. Another study by the American Association of University Women shows that the gap has almost entirely disappeared, when comparing like-jobs-to-like-jobs. An experiment done by one tech recruiting company found that women were slightly less likely to get passed the interview if their gender was masked. The headline cases of sexual harassment in technology often have another side to the story or don't hold up in court. Some examples of sexism that make the front pages seem to be people seeing sexism where none exists, and some examples actually work in the women's favor. And even the really bad, real cases of harassment don't prove that tech has a systemic problem that is worse than any field. Nor do offensive attitudes in general explain any sort of gender imbalance.