AZ native, son of immigrants, ex-Navy PhD Social Psychology – dissertation on envy and antisemitism Data science, media reliability, bias in academic research
Arizona
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Political Diversity Will Improve Psychological Science
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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Joe Duarte retweeted
Hamas really said “we’ll document this ourselves” and the internet still said “citation needed.”
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I just checked my local theater:
Avengers Endgame: Encore
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Moonlight 10th Anniversary Remaster
Resident Evil (I think this is a remake, not a remaster)
But, I discovered one promising actual new movie: Heart of the Beast, which sounds great.
Here’s the thing about “Keep theaters alive!” and “Go watch this film in the movie theater!”
It’s a two-way agreement.
The audience agrees to pay to see films in a theater only if:
- The filmmakers are shooting scripts that have a thesis statement/intention/point.
- The actors and director are giving it their all, and not phoning it in.
- The edit has trimmed off all the fat.
- The film isn’t some didactic exercise, intent on jamming a “lesson” into us.
- The studio executives have paid close attention to the film from start to finish and have given the filmmakers useful notes to keep it all on-track.
- The film is entertaining.
- (And the theater managers are maintaining some order and decorum in the theaters themselves.)
Otherwise, the audiences will continue to stay home and wait for the films to come online, so they can maybe watch five minutes of it or scrub through, and then turn it off.
The film has to be excellent. Or at least try in that direction.
Much of what is released is just not good enough.
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"Using light, researchers are now able to switch individual neural circuits on or off in the brain. They can bring memories to life, create feelings, drive behaviours and study the types of neurons that are involved in various psychiatric and neurological disorders. Optogenetics is fundamentally transforming our understanding of the brain. It has also provided important insights into how the nervous system interacts with various cells in other areas of the body, such as in the heart and gut."
I'd never heard of "optogenetics" and I'm still wrapping my head around it.
They deliver the algal channelrhodopsin gene into neurons and use light to trigger action potentials. This is a lot more precise than using electrodes, which stimulate all cells types in the area.
I hope we'll see clinical applications soon. Congratulations to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel!
Congratulations to our first #NobelPrize laureate of 2026 🎉
Early this morning Karl Deisseroth found out he was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
He seems very happy with the news!
ALT Karl Deisseroth on the phone looking happy
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The announcement and source of my quote: nobelprize.org/prizes/medici…
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This is such a bizarre video from a Mexican perspective. To do all that work and make a great dish... only to eat it by yourself with a tiny collector's dog in your lap...
Food is supposed to be social. This video reminds me of Paranormal Activity – a deeply lonely, isolated subculture.
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Paranormal Activity was jarring because this couple, who were "engaged to be engaged", lived in this big house all by themselves, and when things start to jump off with the paranormal activity, they remain alone...
Mexicans have families, and those families would be summoned. There would be old ladies with rosaries all up in there. It would be a team effort. It wouldn't occur to a Mexican couple to just remain alone throughout such an ordeal. And they definitely wouldn't stay in the house once Proof of Demon was established. I mean, I bailed on the movie at that point – there's no way I could finish it.
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Ridiculous. The Weinstein brothers have collapsed into dollar store conspiracism.
A few people telling New Mexico alien stories is nothing. It's not evidence – it's repetition of tropes.
The guy on Rogan was obviously a charlatan. Alien stuff is a waste of time without evidence.
What David Grusch said on @joerogan represents an entire strata of fairly consistent, highly specific overlapping stories told by many people over many years. If you are just hearing it now for the first time and are skeptical, you should know that there are generals, scientists, commandos, politicians', versions as well. It just goes on and on.
You can't make it go away by saying "That particular guy has a mental problem." There are dozens of such sober sounding people with a breathtakingly enormous overlap. It would be the world's largest flash theater troupe of master actors. Or an emergent mass delusion.
I find it all but impossible to explain. At some point you do have to ask: "What if I just take it literally?"
That's not a huge improvement mind you (e.g. All aliens have tetrapod body plans??? Really????). But it's a kind of weird you have likely never experienced if you stare it in the face. No matter how you slice it.
As I have been saying: something HUGE is up.
And keep your eyes on New Mexico: Nukes-Trafficking-UAP-Physics-Espionage-"Drones". All the stories converge there.
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Was Scott Alexander vastly overrated? This is incredibly low quality.
I don't think the "rationalists" or whatever can help us much. People who go to nude parties and base their ethics on fretting over strangers and invertebrates should be marginalized.
Oh, you're worried about a Jewish guy's apocalyptic cult? You're scandalized that they consort with prostitutes? You think their message of compassion for everyone threatens normal bonds of family, community, and nation? Should we throw you a party? Should we invite Pontius Pilate?
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This can all be traced to the 2007 film "Dan in Real Life", when Michael Scott's teen daughter screams that he's a "murderer of love".
It’s interesting how certain histrionic tendencies have permeated our politics and shaped our use of language.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s ‘rape’ or ‘genocide’ or some other WORST THING.
The distortion of language is coercive and Orwellian and is rarely effective in getting anyone outside the in-group who already agrees to accede to new ideological demands.
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New site is up!
MASSIVE improvement over the WordPress version I ran for two months, which was an improvement over the Weebly site I had for 12+ years.
1. This is a static site – every man's dream – built with the Astro static site generator. No more WordPress cruft – no database, PHP, the incredibly bloated page weight WP forces, etc.
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2. The design was adapted from the Strongly Typed HTML template at HTML5 Up. That site and their templates have been inert for 10+ years, but I like the visual design and Gemini adapted it by stripping all the JavaScript and modernizing the HTML and CSS (flexbox, variables, etc.) It's so much prettier than the WP site.
3. Claude checked the spelling and grammar on all posts and pages. All those fixes are in.
4. The metadata is massively improved. I've got rich schema-dot-org, OpenGraph, and Twitter Card metadata now, including the key sameAs properties on schema, with my ORCID and X pages linked. This helps search engines know who I am and link these posts to my academic publications and other platforms.
I've also got good descriptions and Knowledge Graph links on all the posts, written by Grok. For example, if one of the schema "about" fields is "climate science" or "scientific validity", the schema metadata links those fields to the Wikipedia pages for those topics. Should help with search.
5. Much smaller page weight, about 20-25% of the WordPress site's, ≈300 KB. There's no JS at all except for the search component (pagefind). Fonts are locally hosted now, so no more Google Fonts dependency (cross-site caching doesn't work for those anyway).
6. Search works *great*.
7. My Valid Science Substack is now prominently featured, and is the "publisher" in the metadata.
8. I fixed all the broken links to the fraud evidence on the Cook et al. 97% climate consensus study. It was links to their forum, where their raters broke blindness and revealed the authors of journal articles to each other.
Back in 2014/2015, I made sure those pages were archived at Archive-dot-org, and I've now swapped in the archive links. (This was Brandon Shollenberger's old site. I also backed up the entire forum locally.)
There's still significant room for improvement in the minification (Astro is keeping some comments in the production HTML, among other things) and I need to purge unused CSS. I also need to find some featured images for posts.
The site is basically an archive of my classic posts on the 97% climate consensus fraud, Lewandowsky's moon-landing fraud, the correction I forced with his ridiculous 32,757-year-old paleo-participant, etc. I want those posts curated forever, though I might substantially rewrite them if I find the time.
It was fun exercise to build a static site and try out the AIs. Weebly has been untenable for years and I was paying too much just to host an archive. At some point, I might merge it with Substack, move the domain over, etc.
All my current work is at my Substack.
joseduarte.com/
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I just noticed that while height and weight are given for NBA players, no weights are given for WNBA players...
(On Roster pages at ESPN, etc.)
There's a lot of subtle, funny sexism in both/all directions.
Recall that this app does not let men set a weight preference for women, because that would be - real past quotes - "offensive" and "shallow."
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7 seconds left. Game tied 31-31.
First-and-10 at their own 35.
Lamar Jackson drops back and hits Flowers for 27 yards. Flowers hits the turf at the 1-second mark.
Somehow, magically, the refs count an immediate timeout at that 1-second mark (the display clock actually ran down to zero).
I've never seen a team complete a 20+ yard pass with the ball carrier down inbounds and get a timeout registered with ≤7 seconds left in regulation.
In other words, I've never seen a team get two plays off with ≤7 seconds remaining, where the first play is a 20+ yard pass where the receiver stays inbounds.
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This is reminiscent of what @AaronRodgers12 did to the Cowboys in the 2016 Divisional Playoff game with 12 seconds left. 31-31. Game was supposed to go to overtime. Rodgers threw a ridiculous 35-yard pass to Jared Cook, which enabled a Crosby field goal. Ruined 2017 for me.
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Last week, I updated my report on Arday's data fraud with an addendum on his suicide:
"Suicide to escape responsibility for one’s actions is a massive moral failure.
It's smart, smart, smart to make suicide a sin, as Christian and other faiths have done, or to make honorable suicide require ripping through your guts with a blade and convincing a friend to chop your head off immediately after (seppuku).
Suicide should not be valorized. It should not generally make the person more sympathetic, certainly not if they’re villains. That’s a disastrous cultural trend, and it will have devastating results if it grows. Don’t encourage suicide. Don’t make it redemptive or a way to secure victim status.
Leftists are converging on a suicide threat culture. It started with their threats that trans-indoctrinated children would kill themselves if they were denied the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation they were brainwashed into demanding.
Now, they’re trying to bar public criticism of academic frauds and villains because they might kill themselves. This is outrageous. Arday was a bad person who tried to harm the innocent and who shattered sacred norms of truthfulness in scholarship and science.
The knave called the police on a journalist who politely emailed him about the plagiarism and scientific fraud allegations last year. Being in Britain, this actually worked! The police investigated the journalist for four months before giving up.
Arday also called the police on an academic who emailed him about his plagiarism and fraud."
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The NYT soft-pedaled Arday's corruption:
"accusations that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative"
No, he massively plagiarized his dissertation. He also stole data – quotes from purported participants – for at least one published journal article, an article that was supposed to report his own pointless study.
And of course siccing the police on people who emailed him about it.
And he didn't "embellish" his personal narrative – he fabricated it, from pig's heads to knife-wielding stalkers, to his ridiculous 300/600 mile run stories and daily marathons, brain tumors, assault-induced epilepsy, illiteracy until age 18, severe autism, and on and on.
He was an impostor unlike anything we've seen. His "work" was entirely focused on this new leftist ideology of racial navel-gazing, chronic racial rumination and victim-synthesis, and vicious hatred of white people. His public speeches and media appearances revealed him to be a moron with nothing to say, and yet...
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Link to my report on his data fraud: validscience.substack.com/p/…
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Similarly, the Tucson Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writers meetup wants attendees to be vaxxed and boosted. For COVID.
For a meeting on October 1 in the year of our Lord 2026.
"We prefer that attendees by fully vaccinated unless the individual’s health conditions make this problematic. Booster shots are strongly encouraged."
These are deeply confused, disturbed people. I left the group about 90 seconds after joining – a record.
A Massachusetts lesbian bar is dropping its mask mandate for one night a week and is now facing a wave of backlash for the move.
Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield made Saturdays mask-optional while struggling to stay afloat financially. Critics of the move are accusing the venue of "ableism," complicity in a "mass disabling event," and putting immunocompromised patrons at risk.
One of the owners broke down in tears at a community meeting, saying she's behind on rent and struggling to keep the business alive.
The two other owners stepped back from daily operations months ago, including one who had enrolled in clown school and another who is a drag performer using it/its pronouns.
Read how the dispute spiraled into chaos: foxnews.com/us/massachusetts…
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They're deranged.
Point of order: It's not HRT. They're not *replacing* hormones. They're injecting cross-sex hormones because they're mentally ill or a new thing we have no words for.
Trans activists inject themselves with HRT in defiance outside NYU Langone Health after the hospital stopped providing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children following pressure from the Trump Administration:
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