CSPI Podcast

Alec Stapp is co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a new think tank that focuses on accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress. He joins Richard to talk about why he started his think tank and what policymaking looks like in DC behind the scenes. They also discuss the idea of Secret Congress, the backgrounds of DC staffers, meta-science, biosecurity and immigration as policy issues, and the pros and cons of state capacity.
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Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney, “Progress Is a Policy Choice.”
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Freddie deBoer joins the podcast to talk about his book “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that many problems in the education system and American society are due to the failure to grapple with the fixed nature of individual differences in intelligence. He and Richard discuss the effectiveness of charter schools vs. public schools, how the economic value of traits changes over time, if American despair is a spiritual or economic issue, and whether college degrees have peaked in value. They also explore their differences over economic philosophy, which includes a discussion of why Freddie calls himself a Marxist, different kinds of Marxism, and how his philosophical outlook relates to his views on genetics and intelligence. Despite Richard being a capitalist, they find much common ground on policy specifics, including the need for less education and the acceptance of billionaires, markets and inequality. They also debate what Freddie's ideas about individual differences in intelligence imply – and don't imply – about differences between groups.
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Freddie deBoer, “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice."
Seth Ackerman’s Substack.
Peter Frase, "Four Futures: Life After Capitalism."
Robert Brenner, "The Economics of Global Turbulence."
Freddie deBoer’s Substack.
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Jonah Davids is CSPI’s director of communications. He joins Richard to talk about his essay on leaving academia, how social science is mostly storytelling, and what CSPI accomplished in 2021. They also discuss why reaching out to people is underrated, the recent study on racial discrimination in emailing, reasons to stay in or leave academia, the effectiveness of advertising, why CSPI has been successful so far, and wokeness as stupid vs. evil in the aftermath of the IDW.
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Jonah Davids, “The Overwhelming Underwhelmingness of Academia: Three Reasons to Leave.”
Ray Block Jr., Charles Crabtree, John B. Holbein, J. Quin Monson, “Are Americans less likely to reply to emails from Black people relative to White people?”
Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe.”
CSPI, “CSPI 2021: The Year in Review.”
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. Gabriel Rossman is a sociologist at UCLA. They join Richard to debate the relationship between woke institutions, civil rights law, and corporate culture. Each has written a recent article on this topic: Richard’s “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Charles’ “The Geneology of Woke Capital,” and Gabriel’s “Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same.” They also discuss the history of affirmative action, successes and failures of the conservative legal movement, the connection between the civil rights policies of the Reagan administration and pop culture, status quo bias and negative polarization, and whether Americans still believe in meritocracy.
Click here to watch the video version of the podcast on YouTube.
Richard Hanania, “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.”
Charles Fain Lehman, “The Geneology of Woke Capital.”
Gabriel Rossman, “Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same.”
John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.”
Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton, "The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions.”
Wikipedia, “Grutter v. Bolinger.”
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Philippe Lemoine is a Research Fellow at CSPI and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. He returns to the podcast to discuss his new paper, “Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission.” He and Richard discuss the role of networks in COVID transmission, the politics and sociology of the pandemic, the enforcement of mask mandates in LA County and French gyms, why we might want less genomic surveillance of new variants, and why the Omicron variant is no reason to worry. Click for the report on population structure, a thread explaining the results, and his latest piece on the Omicron variant.
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This week’s guest is Leif Rasmussen, a PhD candidate in computer science at Northwestern University, and the author of the new CSPI report, “Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020.” He discusses the report and critiques of it, along with his experiences in academia, and the growing bias against non-conformists in intellectual life. A tweet thread summarizing the report can be found here.
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Robert Plomin is a Professor of Behavioural Genetics at King’s College London and author of Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are. The conversation includes sections on the history of the field of behavioral genetics, and why we should not undersell what it tells us about why people turn out the way they do. Research involving twins, adoptees, and now looking directly at the genome, use a variety of methods to arrive at the same conclusion and all reveal that differences between individuals are rooted in our DNA, and the role of the home environment is very limited. Richard and Robert touch on parenting, what is happening in China and elsewhere across the world, consumer genomics, the existence of the p factor, and whether behavioral genetics can find more acceptance outside of the academic literature. They also discuss the potential political implications of the field.
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Michael Shellenberger is an activist and author. He joins the podcast to talk about his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He discusses debates around homelessness in San Francisco, the ideology driving the homelessness advocacy community, how the West coast differs from the rest of the world in its treatment of mental illness and addiction, and whether there is hope of political change.
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Razib Khan is a geneticist and Substacker. He joins the podcast to talk about what genetics can tell us about the human past and the progress made in his field over the last few decades. The conversation touches on population structures in Europe, India, China, and the Western Hemisphere, along with Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture among different races and how different fields define what it means to be human. Richard and Razib discuss questions including how Indian castes were able to remain genetically distinct for such a long time, the original "great replacement" in Europe, and the connection between state capacity and genetic heterogeneity, as can be seen in India and China. The conversation then shifts towards a discussion about their experiences in academia, recent radicalization on college campuses, and growing up as minorities in the United States.
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Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. The author of several books, his latest is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. He joins the podcast to talk about this work, and the discussion includes topics such as why voters make bad decisions, the appeal of conspiracy theories and the sense in which believing in them is rational, how to get more rational elites, and which statistical methods are better than others for establishing causation. In the second half of the discussion, Hanania and Pinker talk about how the conversation surrounding the influence of genetics on human behavior has changed since the publication of The Blank Slate, freedom of speech in academia, and advice for young scholars.
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