CSPI Center

This org is as full of shit as the study is. Number two on their areas of interest >---------------------------------------- 2. The Great Awokening In the last decade, white liberals in America have shifted far to the left on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Ideas once seen as radical, like defunding the police and gender being on a spectrum, are embraced by more people than ever before. Social scientists know little about the social and psychological factors underlying this “Great Awokening.” Is wokeness a status competition among elites? An extension of WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) morality? Or something new altogether? CSPI is interested in funding scholars studying woke attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. We are also interested in work examining the impact of woke policies and practices on organizational culture and performance. >------------------------------------------------------------- It seems trivially true that supporting parents especially at the low end of the spectrum provides them with less stress, less home insecurity, less food insecurity, more likelihood that one or both parents can spend less time at work and ergo more time with the child. If the actual question is does giving money to parents improve childhood trajectories the answer appears to be much more likely to be yes. Attacking a study that tries to go about proving this in a probably wrongheaded and silly way appears to be attacking sidelong a strong…

Vaccinate all people greater than 40 years old, preferably anyone and resume a normal life. Even though the vaccine doesn't prevent to catch covid to high degree, it still prevent deaths and hospitalizations to more than 90% (whether Delta or not, and whether Aztrazaneca or Pfizer or Moderna) Long Covid seems to exists, but it is about 2-3% of cases so nothing to really worry about more than any other disease. Maybe at some point the vaccine won't protect from a new variant and things will change. But so far so good. And even at this point, Lockdowns and masks mania doesn't seem to be give a better output than asking citizen to be careful and try to limit meeting too many people (Sweden) Here for more details https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-…

While I don't think this necessarily affects the conclusions, this source is kind of brazenly ideologically-driven. From their home page https://cspicenter.org/ : > 3. Safetyism > The sacralization of physical and emotional safety is a worrying trend. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the inability of public health officials to consider the tradeoffs between physical safety and personal freedom. > Progress in science and technology is impossible without physical risk. Progress in ethics and politics is impossible without emotional risk. Yet, society and government seem to be becoming more risk-averse. > CSPI welcomes work investigating the origins, nature, and effects of safetyism. We are also interested in policies and practices that reduce risk aversion or encourage better cost-benefit analysis. That is - they are taking as a given that people are being too risk-averse, especially in regards to COVID-19, and that public health officials are unable to consider tradeoffs (as opposed to having considered them and reached a different conclusion), and they want "better," by which they mean riskier, cost-benefit analyses. (It also makes me think that the point about it being difficult to vaccinate everyone is a bit disingenuous - it's true that it's difficult, but it would be easier if there weren't political organizations arguing for political reasons that we shouldn't vaccinate everyone!)

It means they can rant about all the other academics, whilst cherry picking their own conclusions in the opposite direction. This[1] is an example of it which borders on Swiftian satire... [1] https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-im…

> brain as a predictive engine that constantly refine its internal model And a pretty effective one at that. Stereotype accuracy is one of the most solid and replicable findings in psychology. There are very strong correlations between what people think is true about statistical discrepancies between groups and what the truth actually is. The relationships consistently replicate and are much stronger than most effects found in social psychology [0]. We must thus understand wokeism as a war on pattern recognition. [0] https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-im…

This informed post is optimistic about covid after it's endemic: https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-…

> Many important discoveries are found by chance. And a lot of extremely important basic research is not obviously important until some flashy result is achieved, if ever. Funding this is almost a lottery... I do not find this persuasive. Is the argument really "we have no idea how to fund science, so we might as well use it as a social justice tool?" While many salient discoveries are found by chance, most science is done deliberately, not at random. We did not get to the moon, split the atom, or develop electric cars by chance. Even chance results are often found by very good scientists, because fortune favours the prepared mind. I'm also unconvinced by "Forcing diversity in funding may be a way to disrupt endogamous tendencies". Frankly, from my POV, this is about as credible as "joining the Jonestown cult may be a way to cure suicidal ideation". See also https://cspicenter.org/reports/increasing-politicization-and-homogenei…