Russell T. Warne, PhD - Psychologist, author, and educator

10/31/2025

Today is the 5th anniversary of the release of my book, "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence." Yes, Cambridge University Press really released it on Halloween!

The book has held up well over the past 5 years. There are pieces that I would revise in light of new research, but none of my fundamental claims have been overturned. I'm proud of the book and how well it serves the curious public today.

Get your copy:
https://amzn.to/2C8Ktuu
https://bit.ly/32LTCo9
https://bit.ly/32LDHoS

10/30/2025

No matter how bad you think the problem of scientific fraud is . . . it's actually worse. A new paper published in the journal "Plos Biology" finds that they found evidence of fraud in 40% of papers on studies of stroke in laboratory animals. The scariest part: that's probably an underestimate.

Read more in The Scientist:

Red flags during a literature review led to the discovery of over 200 papers on animal models of stroke with duplicated images, which is likely an underestimate.

10/28/2025

Elon Musk's xAI company has released Grokipedia, a new online encyclopedia built with A.I. that is designed to compete with Wikipedia. Musk has argued that Wikipedia has a pro-left wing bias, seen most prominently in its decision to ban sourcing of media outlets that do not have a pro-leftist editorial bent. (Wikipedia, for example, bans the New York Post and the Daily Mail as factual sources, but not similar left-wing newspapers like the Guardian.)

Because my area of expertise often touches on controversial topics, I compared Grokipedia and Wikipedia on a few articles. Here's what I found:

1️⃣On scientific topics, Grokipedia cites a broader range of scholarly opinions. Whereas Wikipedia will sometimes ban legitimate scholarly journals (or even entire disciplines) in discussions about controversies, Grokipedia gives all sides a fair hearing.
2️⃣This does not mean that Grok treats truly crank ideas (like flat earth theories or the supposed Shakespeare "authorship question") with the same credence as mainstream theories. From my browsing, Grokipedia seems to separate genuinely nutjob ideas from controversial but empirically supported hypotheses.
3️⃣On controversial topics, Grokipedia's tone is much more neutral than Wikipedia's. In Wikipedia's articles on the Covid lab leak hypothesis or race and intelligence, Wikipedia is more concerned about smearing one side of the debate as "pseudoscience," or a "conspiracy theory." Grokipedia describes differing views more neutrally and then discusses the evidence on both sides.
4️⃣Grokipedia's sources are a mixed bag. It cites some sources, such as scholars' blogs and tweets by scientists, that probably don't belong in an encyclopedia. On the other hand, it doesn't systematically ban sources just because an anonymous cabal of humans doesn't like it. Grokipedia's coverage of scholarly books and non-English sources seems to be lacking. I don't think it's good for an encyclopedia to cite my professional blog, but not my scholarly book published by Cambridge University Press.
5️⃣By reducing the role of human judgment, Grokipedia seems to evaluate sources more fairly than Wikipedia does. It favors primary sources, government reports, and scholarly articles over journalistic sources. It also evaluates sources automatically and downgrades those that have "emotional language, missing perspectives, or a lack of diversity of sources." Humans aren't removed completely from decision making, but I don't see how a Wikipedia-style grip that self-appointed "experts" on content could survive on Grokipedia.

Less than 24 hours after Grokipedia's release, I'm not ready to declare a winner in the Online Encyclopedia Wars. For most topics, it probably doesn't matter whether you read an article on Grokipedia or Wikipedia. No one complains about the Wikipedia article on Augustine of Hippo or "The Empire Strikes Back." Wikipedia also covers more topics than Grokipedia: 7 million articles vs. 885,000 articles.

For controversial topics, though, I find Grokipedia to be an improvement over Wikipedia. But I have some reservations about both web sites. For now, I think it's best to read both encyclopedias' articles in order to get a full view of controversial topics.

In the long-term, I see Grokipedia as having more potential than Wikipedia. Wikipedia has about 114,000 active English editors (defined as making at least one edit in the past month). That's a powerful hive mind. But it's still limited in what it can read, assimilate, and add to the encyclopedia. It takes time for a human to learn the rules of editing Wikipedia, and its users waste a lot of time and effort arguing about the application of those rules. Grokipedia's bots never sleep, don't have such overt biases, can read far more sources, and can edit instantly.

Fundamentally, I also don't see Wikipedia as having the infrastructure or governance to implement A.I. in an effective way. Wikipedia's bots do low-level tasks like fixing broken links, removing vandalism, and categorizing pages. Wikipedia policy forbids bots from writing or creating articles, and any new bot has to be approved by a committee. Wikipedia's lack of central vision was a huge asset when it launched over 20 years ago, but over the years it has resulted in a byzantine bureaucracy that can create policies and do routine tasks well... but not engage in important reforms or handle fundamental challenges. Grokipedia is the first serious challenge to Wikipedia, and I think that Wikipedia does not have the culture or technological vision to beat this new competitor in the long term.

10/26/2025

Have you ever heard of "citation justice"? It's an idea that says that scientists should take active efforts to try to cite more publications by scholars from underrepresented groups. Heterodox Academy has a new article about this trend and why it threatens science.

"Much like DEI statements in faculty hiring, citation diversity statements function as another ideological filter that forces academics to contort themselves and their professional pursuits into ideologically palatable shapes. . . . these journals jeopardize the scholarly rigor of scholars and of the journals themselves . . ."

Read more:

'Nature Reviews Psychology' is urging authors to measure the demographics of their citations.

10/21/2025

Every intelligence researcher acknowledges that IQ is influenced by genes and environment. But what if the environment can completely change how people's mental abilities are demonstrated? That's the intriguing possibility that I discuss with Dr. Michael Woodley of Menie in RIOT IQ's latest episode of "The IQ and Human Intelligence Podcast"

Watch the episode here:

What happens when IQ tests stop working the way we expect?In this episode we talk with Dr. Michael Woodley of Menie about his study “The Reversal of Spearman...

10/19/2025

This article in Palladium Magazine describes how identity politics and a supine scientific community have led to the near-total destruction of anthropological specimens of pre-colonial Australian populations. These fossils and other human remains are irreplaceable, but to appease the desires of racial activists, they are destroyed or allowed to disintegrate.

But appeasing the activists doesn't stop them. Now the activists demand that drawings and photographs also be destroyed and to have control over research questions and the conclusions that can be drawn by scientists.

Read more:

Jack Mungo October 17, 2025 Articles The Birth and Burial of Evolutionary Science in Australia This article will feature in our Fall 2025 print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History. Subscribe now to receive your copy of our latest edition. In March 2025, the Australian government quietly buried its la...

10/17/2025

A higher murder victimization rate among criminals is an example of the "offender-victim overlap," and it's one of the strongest, most consistent findings in criminology.

(This is why your parents didn't want you hanging out with "the wrong crowd.")

Read more: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.09.003

10/14/2025

The newest episode of RIOT IQ's podcast was just released. My guest for this episode is Dr. Karen Rambo-Hernandez (Texas A&M University). We talked about her recent study showing that millions of children in the United States are above or below their grade level in math and reading. How does this happen? What are the consequences? Find out by watching below!

What does "grade level" really mean, and does it still make sense in today’s classrooms?In this episode of The Human Intelligence Podcast, we sit down with D...

10/12/2025

Columbus Day is tomorrow. So, let's look at what the scientific research has to say about the people he found in the New World. A 2020 article by a team led by Harvard geneticist David Reich investigated the genomes of individuals from ancient and modern times and found:
➡ That there were a lot fewer people living in the Caribbean than historians believed. There were approximately 10,000 people living in Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, and Hispaniola when Columbus arrived.*
➡The people who lived in those islands (and most of the rest of the Caribbean) were not the original inhabitants. An earlier group of people had been almost completely replaced; they lingered mostly in Western Cuba and today seem to have left few or no descendants.
➡The people Columbus found were the descendants of people who had migrated to the Caribbean from South America. There was no evidence found of migration from North America.

Read the full article (with no paywall) here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03053-2

*The range of the estimated population was 4,590 to 81,500, but the most realistic estimates are about 10,000 people across islands.

10/10/2025

Are left-handers or right-handers smarter? A study of >10,000 children in the UK has the provocative answer. Lefties were more likely to be male, white, and the children of mothers with higher levels of stress. Right- and left-handers were similar in all other background characteristics.

On the cognitive scores, there were no statistically significant differences at age 3, but differences (favoring right-handers) started to emerge at age 5 and generally got larger at older ages. The largest differences were in spatial abilities, where right-handers outscored other children by about d = .11 to .15. (Note that in the table in the 3rd image, lower scores on the spatial working memory task indicate better performance.)

The differences are too small to notice in daily life, though. Most of the distributions for the cognitive variables look like this the last image. This study provides information that would be useful to theorists in neuroscience and experts in handedness. But has few (if any) practical implications.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2025.101952

10/07/2025

Sometimes the title of an article says it all:

"There are only two sexes and there can never be more."

In this new article from the scholarly journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, F. Sid Dougan (University of Texas) explains why the male-female system is the only possible outcome once sexual reproduction evolves in a species.

Link to the full article: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-025-03311-2

10/06/2025

When school gets out, ChatGPT usage drops by over 50%.

Teachers and professors: Your students are already using A.I. That horse has already left the barn. Your new job is to figure out how to adapt to the new reality.

Data released by OpenAI shows a major drop-off in overall usage during weekends and the summer — when students aren't in class.