Eric Turkheimer

The Rindermann Reply Identifying pseudoscience

By the way, that conversation continues at....

Competent Referees for Controversial Ideas - Daily Nous "I think Jeff McMahan is in for the surprise of his life when the submissions to his new journal start coming in." I recently thought of that message, which a friend (like me, an admirer of McMahan's)...

Nice writeup of my discussion with Rindermann at @dailynous.com. Thanks to Justin Weinberg.

tool dammit

Slightly different domain but I have recently been using Gemini's notebookLM as a research too. Super useful.

The Rindermann Reply Identifying pseudoscience

On the day it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein was a proponent of "race science," I finally get around to replying to some of Rindermann's rebuttals to my piece with @kph3k.bsky.social about Rindermann et al. "Identifying Pseudoscience." ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/the-rinder...

The standard thing, but I have to say it. re: El Paso, it is amazing how normalized it has become that when anything happens, the administration gets to lie about it for a few days before the truth slowly emerges. The Times reports it calmly: "The admin said X, but what really happened is Y."

The OpenAI ad just had bayes theorem

Currently 15 degrees and pouring rain. Not good.

Approach temperament, anger, and evaluation: resolving a paradox - PubMed Factor analytic investigations into the structure of naturalistically observed self-reported mood suggest that anger loads together with avoidance temperament markers, such as fear and anxiety. However, when anger is examined following experimental manipulation, it appears to relate more to approach …

For what it’s worth, @ent3c.bsky.social and I worked on related problems some years ago. We argued that there is a theoretical reason for measuring overall valence separately pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23773039/

Nonlinear decline in the association between birth weight and cognitive ability from infancy to midlife in a community sample of twins AbstractObjectives. Birth weight is a widely used indicator of prenatal experiences in models of the developmental origins of cognitive ability across the

(1/4) Thrilled to share our new paper out now in @geronsociety.bsky.social Journals of Gerontology. The association between birthweight and cognitive ability declined exponentially across the lifespan. A longitudinal twin study helped us unpack why...
academic.oup.com/psychsocgero...

You can imagine an AI agent that could learn to tell time by watching the position of the gears. re: HD. It's the same thing. We think of the clinical signs of the disease as the consequent, and they gene as the cause, but why? They are two parts, at different scales, of the same entity. /end

Thanks for the comment. re: clocks. If you turn the hands on a clock, the gears move inside. They are linked across scales by a mechanism (see Craver and Bechtel). One doesn't cause the other: they are two parts of the same thing. The correlation of the hands to time of day is a human convenience /1

New, brief theoretical piece out in World Psychiatry: The Causal Structure of Mental Illness and Why It Matters. Not about genetics, I pursue one of my longest standing concerns, about relations between classification and reduction. Link is to whole issue; my piece starts on Page 3.

The awful mess at UVa continues.... Only bright spot is the incoming governor, so there is hope things will improve.

Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. Understanding Life. By Eric Turkheimer. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. $19.99 (paper). xxii + 188 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 9781108958165. 20...

Nice review of my book, Understanding the Nature-Nurture debate, by Ingo Brigandt in the Quarterly Review of Biology. (Firewalled).

Yes, it worked out for me, and afaik the investigators whose work I was criticizing are doing fine. Without opening the can of worms all the way, it wasn't just the premises....

Agreed, though I think it is important to acknowledge how difficult it is. It isn't something you can do without naming names. People are hurt and friendships ended. Though I stand by every word of it, I am not over my ambivalence about publishing this paper.

Rode in an elevator in NYC with Spiro Agnew. When he got off, someone said, "Everyone check your wallet."

I can’t believe we’re still get one of these.

Eric Turkheimer (@ericturkheimer2) Not sure if this is intended as a comment on my piece with @Daniel Willingham: https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2025-2026/turkheimer_willingham But I will go ahead and respond to it as if it is. Speaking ...

I posted a long reply to Freddie deBoer's comment on my piece about intelligence with Dan Willingham @dtwuva.bsky.social. substack.com/profile/1707...

Ask the Cognitive Scientist: What Do IQ Scores Mean?

So happy to have co-authored this piece about IQ and education with my great colleague, the cognitive scientist and education expert Daniel Willingham @dtwuva.bsky.social. Our goal is to take intelligence seriously without lapsing into essentialism.

The Pettersson paper is much more circumspect, though they too reach fairly strong conclusions about population associations holding up within families. I am generally skeptical we can learn much about these issues when we start with such tiny population effect sizes. Time will tell.

Associations between psychiatric polygenic risk scores and general and specific psychopathology symptoms in childhood and adolescence between and within dizygotic twin pairs - PubMed This implies that PRS-psychiatric symptom associations did not appear attributable to indirect pathways such as population stratification, assortative mating, or mediation via parental environments. Rather, genetics appeared to directly influence symptomatology.

I'm embarrassed to report that I was incorrect when I stated that this paper was first on the scene of within-family psychopathology. In fact this paper by my former student @erikpett123.bsky.social did it three years ago, finding much the same thing.

Blog post: Within family prediction of psychopathology:
Bad prediction is bad prediction. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/within-fam...

Here is a meme from @hfsunde.bsky.social while I think about getting back to work... /end.

Everyone from the guy at the registration desk to the nurses to the residents to the attending surgeon were kind and respectful. Now on to the super-competent physical therapists. I think a lot about 70 year olds not very long ago who were consigned to living out their lives in pain. Grateful. /3

I am privileged to live next to a major university medical center with reasonably good insurance, for the US. Under those conditions, even though our overall health system is a political and economic mess, once you make it to the clinic (I waited in pain for three months) the people are so nice. /2

I had my right hip replaced Wednesday. Very successful. On Day one I felt great, I was announcing I'd be back at work on Monday. Then the nerve block wore off swelling and stiffness set in... oh well, it's par for the course. A quick reflection: 1/

Pick your fucking baby?!? JFC! They’re not fucking puppies.

Missing Heritability Revisited Following up on Sasha

Blog post: A Missing Heritability Update. Three legs and other problems. I follow up on the recent excellent post on the subject by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/missing-he...