But your example was incomplete. Your example of a "massive flagrant barefaced lie" was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR's
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they're talking about.)
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today - but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn't mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960.
What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It's very likely that some American academic after 1960 "retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960&q...
"In this study, we use a large-scale incentivized experiment with nearly 1,300 participants to show that the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society."
It is presently a commonplace of Western culture that women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, and this is commonly attributed to intrinsic biological differences.
It turns out this may be highly questionable. A study in PNAS studied two nearby tribes in northeast India, one with a strongly patriarchal organisation, one with a strongly matriarchal organisation. Both share the same agrarian diet and lifestyle and DNA tests indicate they are closely related.
In the patriarchal society, women did noticeably worse on spatial reasoning. In the matriarchal society, women and men did about the same.
The authors carefully do not overstate their results, claiming only that they demonstrated that culture influences spatial performance "in the task that we study." However, this promisingly suggests quite a bit of room for improvement of measurable aspects of intelligence may be feasible with proper attention to culture and nurture.
What measurable aspects of intelligence do you attribute to genetic causes? Can you test it this well? How would you fix it and help people be all they can be?
News coverage: ArsTechnica.