A smart approach?
Feedback’s ears always perk up when we see a post with a self-aggrandizing title. So we latched on to a social media post with great interest Rebecca SearA demographer at Brunel University in London, Elsevier said “He has chosen new editors the mind“.
the mindyou see, it’s a scientific journal that publishes the research they do.outstanding contribution to understand the nature and function of the mind”. The opinion cannot verify that the editors have changed, the magazine’s “About” page has not been updated, but it is advertise January 2024 for a new editor-in-chief. Most of the editorial boards are said to have resigned following the appointment of the new editor, but since that report appeared on a far-right website, Feedback disagrees without further evidence.
Wait, readers are thinking. How did we go from a scientific journal representing its editors to a far-right website? The thing is, intelligence research has sometimes been misused to justify claims of racial superiority, especially in the 20th century. in the eugenics movement of the beginning of the century. And the mind has published research that your racist uncle can cite approvingly.
Someone at Elsevier seems to have noticed. The Guardian reported the publishing house He was reviewing the papers of the late Richard Lynn, who claimed to have discovered variations in intelligence between countries. including papers the mind.
This is all getting a little dark, so let’s move on quickly to another problem the mind: the absence of its supposed defining characteristics. Sear pointed to a paper with an innocuous title.Temperament and evolutionary novelty as forces behind the evolution of general intelligence“.
This is his motivation, sometimes Wise man As populations migrated out of Africa for the first time, they encountered all kinds of new conditions, like different climates. This pushed them to evolve a higher level of intelligence. What this means for African populations is left to the reader.
If this all sounds like something from the bad old days of Victorian science, Feedback regrets that this post was first published online in 2007. However, if you swallow the nausea and take a closer look, real delight emerges.
The first issue is that the author calculates the distances “crows have flown” by the populations. You can’t use straight-line distances as a first approximation to the history of human migration, which traveled as far northeast as Asia, across North America, and as far south as South America.
But it gets better. In the same sentence, the author of the paper states that he calculated the distance “using the Pythagorean theorem.” Readers will recall that the Pythagorean theorem applies only to flat planes and does not hold for curved surfaces. Yes, this research on the racial origins of intelligence assumes the Earth is flat.
With severe academic restriction, a 2009 rejection suggested that this research may be “dubious”. Other psychologists brought the issue to the attention of the journal, which they said had been criticized.completely negative and honest“. The paper lives on.
Accordingly, Feedback wants to name the magazine the mind For the 2025 Nominative Inverse Determinism Award.
Forty shakes
The New Scientist Journalist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan highlighted a paper about why eyelashes are curly, which they describe as “silly enough to be feedback material.” Rude: This is a very serious column about serious things.
The research is mainly about the physics of eyelashes, explaining how they transfer water from our eyes so we can see when it’s raining. This process depends on the “micro-ratcheting and macro-curvature of the surface of a hydrophobic curved flexible fiber”. There are many things about the importance of adhesion forces and the curvature of the lashes for water drainage.
And then we get to the discussion section, where, as Karmela dryly states, “the authors go into aesthetic advice”. You see, “modern beauty standards” encourage women to use mascara to “lengthen and repair eyelashes,” which “compromises protective functions.” But fear not, the solution is at hand: “as a tip, for people with sparse eyelashes, hydrophobic curved false eyelashes can offer a practical solution to enhance the look while maintaining eye protection.” Maybe a patent pending?
Feedback asks if the authors have any advice for middle-aged writers whose eyebrows grow too long, making them look like a macaroni penguin unless they’re trimmed regularly. for a friend
Worst stack to read ever
Reviews have somehow made their way onto Spines’ mailing list, a publishing industry that aims to disrupt the publishing industry through the power of artificial intelligence.
Who using AI for editing and other works done before skilled and salaried people, The spines It aims to publish 8000 books in 2025. As feedback says, yes please. When one looks at the structural problems in the publishing industry, such as lax fact-checking standards in the production of non-fiction, one can simply conclude that what we really need is a flood of even more books of even lower quality.
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