Timothy Bates
@timothycbates
Researching intelligence, conscientiousness, moral foundations & human attainment. Lots of individual differences & genetics
I think this is the first report of the heritability of Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is surprisingly heritable! Second, it reflects two underlying biological systems: 1) A flat moral circle, treating self, family and strangers as substitutable. 2) Treating people as means,…
Most comments on LLMs are either awe or cope ("I expensively studied X, and Gemini is all wrong") . The truth lies far from cope. By 2026, with 100x training time and synthetic data, IQ's value will plunge, in my opinion, while creativity's value will rise (until it, too, is…
Is this going to require ID to access X? That to me is the goal of the government here. It’s wrapped in child protection but they want a real world ID attached to every opinion they don’t like so they can send the cops round.
The new UK Online Safety Act is INSANE. As of next week you need to prove you’re over 18 to be able to view “content that incites hatred against people of a particular race [or] religion” or content which “encourages a person to ingest … a physically harmful substance”.
Just learned of an interesting, and potentially major, source of missing heritability: Structural variants are often not in LD with SNPs. That includes SVs underlying major phenotypes. The kinship matrices you get from SNPs and SVs can be markedly different.
Excellent thread about the importance of giving students a solid foundation in basic skills. When those skills are automatic, it frees up attention and working memory for more advanced thinking.
Expertise isn't about having more working memory, it's about needing less of it. Experts automate many components in long-term memory and can recognise meaningful patterns instantly, bypassing the need to process individual elements. ⬇️ 🧵
Add "check this" to the Grok-assist post editing options (currently generate image, enhance) Q |-Generate image |-Enhance your post |-Check your post
"But, when a literature is contaminated by questionable research practices, publication bias, and theory-encumbered observations, no statistical wizardry can resurrect it. . . . Terror management theory has become the academic equivalent of Weekend at Bernie's: its defenders…
open.substack.com/pub/michaelinz…
When a post contains a highlighted stock ticker like $TSLA, make hovering over it act like hovering over a user does: Bring up a mini card which summarizes the stock
Creative achievement is under-researched. For instance, only a couple of studies on heritability. Creative achievement overlaps with g, but has a goodly-chunk of non-g genetic variance. We also extended creative achievement into entrepreneurial/military creative domains which…
Nice mutualist enterprise you have; be a shame to be dispossessed of all of it, wouldn’t it? Perhaps you’d should pay some “insurance” to protect it?
Universal Basic Income is a firewall against fascism. Fascism feeds on desperation, scapegoats, and collapse. #UBI offers dignity, stability, and shared belonging before fear drives people to strongmen. It’s not charity. It’s democracy insurance.
Five ways that people downplay or dismiss scientific claims they find unpleasant. [Link below.]
In February 2024, I wrote Scientific Reports about a published meta-analysis claiming that mindfulness interventions affect neural plasticity, 'cementing the neuropsychological basis of mindfulness-based interventions'. Paper was retracted yesterday—here a process summary.🧵
Even super advanced models like grok 4 and Gemini 2.5 pro get citations reliably confabulated. Feels like it’s a tokenization problem: they should be double entered as both a test string, but also as a unique blob tokenized as the doi to keep the author, date, title, doi…
"You can go sleep at home tonight If you can get up and walk away"
.
I missed this news, but it's really exciting: Parents in Florida will now be able to get a free whole-genome sequence for their newborns.
