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

12/31/2025

My colleagues Jennifer Jolly and Joni Lakin (University of Alabama) have just published an article in which they examined teacher rating scales for selecting kids for gifted programs. Their conclusion is that these scales are mostly just poorly constructed personality scales that favor kids with high conscientiousness and openness to experience. In other words, they systematically favor compliant kids and "good students," even if students with other personality traits are just as smart.

Another finding is how little agreement there is among the scales, which is apparent in the second image. Whether a teacher rates a child as "gifted" probably depends a lot on the scale that teacher uses and not the child's actual traits.

Read more:
https://doi.org/10.1177/00169862251397381

12/29/2025

A team of scientists from the Allen Institute has fully mapped one cubic millimeter of neural tissue. Even though it's just a portion of a mouse's visual cortex, the result shows how incredibly complex and beautiful the mammalian brain is. Some factoids:
➡The map is 1.6 petabytes of data large. That's the equivalent of 22 YEARS of HD video.
➡The tissue contains 200,000 cells
➡The neurons are connected by 4 kilometers of axons and 523 MILLION synapses
➡The project took over a decade to complete.

Learn more:

The MICrONS Project is considered the most complicated neuroscience experiment ever attempted

12/24/2025

The latest book I've read is "The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left," by Garett Jones (George Mason University). As an economist, Jones focuses mostly on productivity and economic attitudes/behaviors. But there are definitely other implications. I think this is the most important book I've read for understanding the current political and cultural moment in Western countries.

Check it out:
https://a.co/d/8kgXf4X

12/22/2025

A.I. slop is a real danger to science. Below is a figure from a paper that is being retracted from a journal. The figure is obviously nonsensical (unless "Factor Fexcectron" is something real), and it's a little funny. But beneath the absurdity is the real threat of A.I. to scientific publishing: for every ridiculous paper like this, how many A.I.-generated papers with less obvious errors are getting published? 😬

Read more about this example:
https://nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the-autism-bicycle-to-retraction

12/19/2025

New podcast episode, and it's another doozy!

"My genes made me do it!" Is that an excuse? Does genetic causation rob you of your free will? Should society reward people for their genetically influenced traits? Is that fair when we didn't pick our genes?

Dr. Damien Morris (King's College London) and I discuss these issues in this podcast episode. Check it out!

If you want to explore your own ability profile, you can take a free sample of the RIOT IQ test at https://www.riotiq.com.In this episode, Russell talks with...

12/14/2025

In Aporia, Noah Carl analyzes petitions to punish academics for their opinions. Among his findings:
➡️Petitions were rare before 2017, but exploded during the Great Awokening.
➡️Race and transgender issues were the most common reasons academics were targeted by a petition.
➡️Bruce Gilley (author of "The Case for Colonialism") was the target of the most petitions.

Read more:

An analysis going back to the seventies.

12/13/2025

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote the hit books "Awakenings" (also made into a film) and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," is the subject of a long article in The New Yorker. The bombshell: he made up many of the details and conversations that made his books so compelling.

Those lies made Sacks the world's most famous neurologist and landed him cushy jobs at Columbia and NYU. Too bad he's dead and can't face accountability.

The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

12/10/2025

Hamm v. Smith reaction and analysis (December 10, 2025)

12/09/2025

Join me on Wednesay, December 10, for analysis of the Supreme Court case Hamm v. Smith. This is a case about how IQ scores will be applied to the death penalty.

I hope you'll join me for my livestream ever!

12/08/2025

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court will hear a case about IQ scores & the death penalty. In my new essay in The American Spectator, I explain why the Court is hearing an IQ case for the 3rd time in

The ambiguity in IQ testing has pushed the Supreme Court to revisit the death penalty for the third time.

12/05/2025

RIOT IQ just released my favorite episode yet of the "IQ and Human Intelligence Podcast." In it, I speak with Dr. Jonathan Anomaly from Herasight, which is a company that uses genetic data to help expectant parents to influence the genetic makeup of their baby. We discuss how:
➡️Embryo selection works
➡️Predicting traits from DNA works
➡️Herasight ensures that the predictions are as accurate as possible
➡️Gene editing in humans still has some barriers
➡️The past can teach us about responsible use of reproductive technology.

In this episode, Dr. Russell Warne talks with Dr. Jonathan Anomaly about embryo selection, polygenic scores, and how modern biotechnology can predict differe...

12/04/2025

Will climate change cost $38 trillion/year in economic losses? That's what one major study published in the top-tier journal "Nature" said. However, it's been retracted after problems with some of the data and analysis methods were identified.

Read more from The New York Times:

While growing evidence shows that carbon emissions are harming the economy, the journal Nature found that an outlier paper had deep flaws.