John Cheese is a very good columnist. Cracked has been linked here before; for a dick-joke peddling comedy sight, I find it's usually very insightful and often pretty rational.

Regina Spektor, I've been discovering her stuff over the last few months and I've reached the point where I know roughly all of it. As I think is expected in this thread, all I can really offer here is possibility that blog-reading choices vaguely correlate with musical preferences. Her lyrics are pretty non-inane, especially upon repeated listening. Her variance of musical style is pleasing to me, makes it fun to play and listen to. Nothing especially Less Wrong-y, but I might be forgetting something. Though I don't think I know any composer at all who's (consistently) Less Wrong-y. She has a wild imagination and has written songs about being robots. She's one of those artists whose discography is a tapestry of varied and wonderful worlds that I can never really appreciate unless I'm in the process of listening to it, always a process of both rediscovery and familiarity. (She often writes in the first-person as non-Regina people, from fiction, the bible, or anonymous people; more than half of her songs are probably from the perspective of a different person). There are also lots of moments in her various songs that strike me in the right way, that capture some complex emotion I had never put into words, which gives her songs a sense of salience and intelligence. Some especially enjoyable songs: Us very uplifting, makes you think; Call Them Brothers the man singing is her husband, I like the eeriness; The Party, uplifting, pretty; All the Rowboats, she makes cute noises, quite fast. Back of a Truck, from her unusually jazzy first album.

Disclosure: I play and especially like piano so appear to be skewed towards liking such artists.

There's a lot of ways to act on data about group differences in intelligence.

For example, if it turns out that group A has a higher average IQ than group B, and that A and B can be distinguished reliably by genetic testing (including but not limited to visual inspection for associated phenotypes), I might decide to devote more effort to educating group B than group A, to make up for the difference. Or I might decide to devote more effort to educating group A than group B, to get the best bang for my education buck. Or I might decide to research the differences, to learn more about the physiological mechanisms of intelligence. Or I might change my ways of evaluating claims so that I give more weight to group A's ideas relative to group B's than I used to (assuming I used to believe they were equally intelligent). Or I might decide to structure my society in such a way that group A has access to certain privileges that group B is denied, on the grounds of their superiority, or such that B gets privileges A is denied, on the grounds of their greater need. Etc.

Which of those I do, if any, depends a lot on what I think follows from greater potential intelligence within a group. People disagree about this. People often change their minds about this depending on whether they consider themselves in group A or B.

Incidentally, just for the record: I find it pretty likely that there do exist such group differences, though I expect that the portion of variation in real-world expressed intelligence accounted for by group differences in innate intelligence is <10%. I find it fairly unlikely that "race" is the best detectable correlate of membership in such groups available to us, though it might be more reliable than, say, the shape of an individual's head (also a popular theory once). I expect its popularity in that role is more of a reflection of historical social relations than a conclusion drawn from current data.

To answer your general method query, this essay by Karl Popper deals with the issue of distinguishing science v pseudoscience. However, from my reading of, you need to know a bit about the topic, or at least observe it in action, to make a judgement.

autism/language troubles in particular, are fields in which there is a lot of pseudo-science... There are a lot of mysticism and sect-like gurus related to autism, too.

What gives you this impression? I'm not saying you're wrong - just that it's something I haven't picked up on myself.

Regarding Freud, I get the impression that his therapies have some merit (placebos work; all talk therapies seem to have some benefit iirc) but his theories are utter horseshit. I know a lot of people that work in special needs education, particularly dealing with autism, and there seems to be no real professional consensus as to what the best approach is. I will ask some questions for you though. I'd hazard a guess that it's important to reinforce whatever methods the kid's parents or educators are using, as long as those methods aren't counter-productive.

I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own,

Very possibly. The Christian who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family, friends, and church group that they're now an atheist; similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they're now a race realist.

I haven't read any of his other books -- is there any you could recommend? Maybe one of the recent ones, like Embassy Town and Railsee?

Not really new, but I found China Miéville's Perdido Street Station really good. It's a mix of steampunk, fantasy and horror, and Miéville is a magician with words. He also looks at the motivations of all the actors, good and bad (and human, non-human).

Could you explain why you did that?

Because he doesn't want to create Azkaban.

Also, possibly because there's not a happy ending.

"Given the nature of the multiverse, everything that can possibly happen will happen. This includes works of fiction: anything that can be imagined and written about, will be imagined and written about. If every story is being written, then someone, somewhere in the multiverse is writing your story. To them, you are a fictional character. What that means is that the barrier which separates the dimensions from each other is in fact the Fourth Wall."

-- In Flight Gaiden: Playing with Tropes

(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)

I used to have a fear when I was a kid that when you were asleep you were actually wide awake but unable to move, and just forgot your panicked attempts to move each morning.

I don't sleep well.