ActRight

“As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” the president-elect said in a news conference, though he avoided questions about whether his team had contact with Russia during the campaign.

Former New York City Mayor …

An Arizona state trooper is alive today because a gun-toting stranger came to his rescue as an assailant smashed the trooper’s head into the pavement Thursday. A 27-year Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper came upon the scene of a rollover crash on Interstate 10 in Tonopah, Arizona, early Thursday at about 4:20 a.m. A […]

On Tuesday I wrote a relatively short piece noting that new research is debunking the widely-held belief that there is a link between discriminatory behavior and so-called “implicit bias.” Yesterday, New York magazine published a long, detailed, and thorough essay that demolishes the idea that “implicit bias” — as measured by the extraordinarily popular Implicit Association Test (IAT) — can measure either real bias or meaningfully predict human behavior (hat tip, Roger Clegg). Some highlights: A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such. The history of the test suggests it was released to the public and excitedly publicized long before it had been fully validated in the rigorous, careful way normally demanded by the field of psychology. In fact, there’s a case to be made that Harvard shouldn’t be administering the test in its current form, in light of its shortcomings and its potential to mislead people about their own biases. There’s also a case to be made that the IAT went viral not for solid scientific reasons, but simply because it tells us such a simple, pat story about how racism works and can be fixed: that deep down, we’re all a little — or a lot — racist, and that if we measure and study this individual-level racism enough, progress toward equality will ensue. The test is so unreliable that people can take it at different times and different days and get wildly different results — meaning that there’s a chance that the IAT is measuring nothing more than a person’s particular skill at the test: What all these numbers mean is that there doesn’t appear to be any published evidence that the race IAT has test-retest reliability that is close to acceptable for real-world evaluation. If you take the test today, and then take it again tomorrow — or even in just a few hours — there’s a solid chance you’ll get a very different result. That’s extremely problematic given that in the wild, whether on Project Implicit or in diversity-training sessions, test-takers are administered the test once, given their results, and then told what those results say about them and their propensity to commit biased acts. (It should be said that there are still certain consistent patterns: Most white people, for example, score positively on black-white IAT, supposedly signaling the presence of anti-black implicit bias.) More: In examining the history of the IAT, it’s clear that early on, the test’s architects and most enthusiastic proponents got ahead of themselves in their claims that the IAT accurately measured implicit bias, never fully grappling with the possibility that the test captures, or also captures, other stuff as well. But again: All the test itself measures is differences in reaction times, and if those reaction-times differences haven’t been proven to predict real-world behavior, it doesn’t make sense to tag someone with a high IAT score as “implicitly biased,” except in a very trivial sense of the term. Why — with all its problems — is the test so popular? It’s a great way for progressives to virtue-signal: For one thing, the test offers a lot to members of the public who are concerned about racism, whether they are white and concerned about their out-group biases, or nonwhite and concerned about the possibility that they have internalized bias against their own group. Taking the IAT is a way for them to feel like they are part of the solution. Now I get it — now I understand that my implicit bias is contributing to America’s race problem. This can explain the strange but common phenomenon of test-takers loudly broadcasting results which imply they are implicitly racist: It’s a way of signaling they’re serious about investigating their own complicity in a big, complicated system of oppression. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that, of course, if the IAT were in fact providing test-takers useful information about their level of implicit bias. The broader story told by the IAT is, at the moment, quite politically palatable and intuitively satisfying. Not only is implicit bias driving all sorts of racially unfair outcomes, that story tells us, but it’s something that we can detect and measure in ourselves, helping to raise our consciousness. “I think the reason behind adoption of implicit-bias training is simple: It is now the thing to do to demonstrate commitment to diversity and redressing inequality,” said Mitchell. I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s long, but the author says, “It would take thousands and thousands more words to fully lay out all the problems with the IAT and how it has been applied.” Once again junk science is leading the public astray.

Cuban migrants who arrive in the United States without a visa will be returned to Cuba, the White House says.

Thursday's New York Times has a report on how the highly suspicious dossier alleging that Donald Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence agents came into existence. Among the other interesting revelations was that the dubious opposition research report was put together by the research firm Fusion GPS: The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate's past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear.

Donald Trump discussed his relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin in a 2013 interview that resurfaced after the president-elect denied any links to the nation — watch

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) reacted to the leak of an intelligence dossier that has been criticized as unfairly vetted and considered false by President-elect Donald Trump.

The Republican Senate just passed a budget in the dead of night that increases the debt by 50 percent. While many are hailing the budget as an important step to repealing Obamacare, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) is one of the few people acting as the canary in a coal mine about the budget: Early this morning, Senate voted on a budget that grows debt by nearly 50%. Thank you, @RandPaul, only R who voted no. It now goes to House.

Fearing immigration enforcement, approximately half of the nationals who traveled through this city claim they will not return to the US.

In a Wednesday tweet, a writer for the British edition of GQ wondered aloud whether President Barack Obama could murder president-elect Donald Trump and vice

At his first press conference since being elected president, Donald Trump introduced an attorney to explain the steps he is taking to avoid conflicts of interest related to his various businesses.

Austin Petersen might run in 2018 for Senate. But which party should he run as and will he run at all? Here's a breakdown of both sides.

A 42-year-old Dutch woman recently had her Swiss citizenship application rejected because of her “annoying” lifestyle, veganism.

President Barack Obama took the stage yesterday for the last time, in a farewell speech that summed up his Presidency, to a crowd of die-hard liberals. Here's some highlights from Obama's speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqliIoYo58 However, one marine known only as "J

A passage from the Koran that denies one of the central tenets of the Christian faith was sung aloud at a cathedral service in Scotland.

The king of election meddling is the United States of America.

Glenn Beck, his television network and a conservative think tank have been dismissed from a defamation lawsuit filed by the father of Ahmed...

One of the oldest trees in Birmingham is to be cut down so council bosses can replace it with concrete barriers to protect the city from a Berlin-style terror attack.

Donald Trump calls CNN fake news! At Tump’s press conference today, he slammed CNN ‘reporter’ Jim Acosta and his network as “Fake News.” The ‘reporter’ didn’...

Actor George Takei shares how his internment camp experience led him to stand with Muslims Americans.

Richard Benedetto writes that after leaving office, President Obama plans to stay in Washington. The capital city’s namesake took a different approach.

Bill Nye the Science Propaganda Guy just can?t seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. We?ve chronicled many of his blunders here, including his involvement in Al Gore?s ?Hi…

During Donald Trump's press conference, British GQ political correspondent Rupert Myers issued the following tweet: Could Obama murder Trump & Pence, then pardon himself? Asking for humanity.

Israeli intelligence officials fear that top-secret information that has been exposed to the United States will be leaked to Russia—and from Russia to its close ally, Iran.