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Wyclif's Dust

wyclif.substack.com

Serious and frivolous ideas about politics, culture, social science and the world. Click to read Wyclif's Dust, by David Hugh-Jones, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Society / politics / economyScienceEssays / personal

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
182 from 14 Oct 2020 to 8 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://wyclif.substack.com/feed

2026 7

  1. AI, the peacock’s tail and bullshit jobs
  2. Let’s find out why* social liberals have fewer children
  3. Big families are more conservative, but that doesn't affect public opinion much
  4. I went to the Heterodox Social Science Conference 2026
  5. Hanging a cat on the Sabbath
  6. A quick note on liberal family values
  7. Fertility and social liberalism in Europe

2025 33

  1. Training AI will take longer than you think
  2. What we talk about when we talk about "ancestry"
  3. The Palestine plan
  4. Immigration and anti-semitism in Britain
  5. 🍾🍾 Thought bubbles: cancelling people is fine 🍾 there are too many researchers 🍾 Plato's wheel of fortune 🍾 AWOL political science 🍾🍾
  6. The hidden world our parents give us
  7. Adam Smith’s second big idea
  8. If you want to increase fertility, look at how religions do it
  9. We should measure effect sizes on substantively important scales
  10. What are behavioural polygenic scores for?
  11. Why I am not a polygenic score nihilist
  12. A way to think about scientism
  13. Cultural surrender: a comment from a reader
  14. The cultural surrender of the European middle class: part 4
  15. The cultural surrender of the European middle class: nerd bonus, cohort data
  16. The cultural surrender of the European middle class: part 3
  17. The cultural surrender of the European middle class: part 2
  18. The cultural surrender of the European middle class: part 1
  19. Trade wars, what else?
  20. London in the 2000s
  21. This is what's wrong with mental-healthism
  22. ChatGPT always lies in exchange for a donation to charity, or itself
  23. God as a programmer
  24. Things I don't know
  25. Book: Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Penitent
  26. American desperation
  27. Reacting to a very bad weekend
  28. Two authoritarian cults
  29. Thought bubble: I am pleased to report that AI is now a better poet than William McGonagall
  30. Cultural endosymbionts
  31. The authoritarian political agenda: beyond populism
  32. Barangay stories: the Aswang and the jealous auntie
  33. Du Fu and Li Bai critique modern media as art

2024 27

  1. The Philippines
  2. Temple monkeys
  3. Makers and takers
  4. Mainstream media also has audience capture
  5. The vast deserts of bad science
  6. Going paid: subscribe and get a freebie
  7. Immigration won't get you a libertarian utopia
  8. Removing antisemitism won't change the Middle East debate much
  9. A quick reaction to "Foundations"
  10. Repost: Parochialism in time and space
  11. Woke is a religion, and that's totally normal
  12. Values, interests and populism
  13. A theory of cynicism and conspiracy
  14. Wyclif's Pod pilot episode 1 - The Unjournal
  15. Five toy worlds to think about heritability
  16. Your society is lying to you about ethics
  17. Thought bubble: maybe refugees are bad for your mental health, but this paper doesn't prove it
  18. The UK election reflects our flawed political institutions
  19. The academic literature on smacking children is not load-bearing
  20. The end of the boarding school?
  21. Decline?
  22. Ten quotations from my scrapbook
  23. 2x2 games will change your life
  24. The manlet Dorian
  25. The global defeat of democracy: geopolitics, and what to do about it
  26. The global defeat of democracy: ideological weaknesses
  27. The global defeat of democracy: financial weaknesses

2023 27

  1. 🍾🥂 Thought bubbles: a Christmas list 🍾🥂
  2. The global defeat of democracy: political weaknesses
  3. The global defeat of democracy: a scenario
  4. Does birth order matter?
  5. How to write a good comment
  6. What has value?
  7. Social media is an adversarial system, the MSM is inquisitorial
  8. Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
  9. Academia is worth fighting for
  10. A quick note on the genes-SES gradient
  11. 🍾 Thought bubbles: Germany, effect sizes, shared political issues
  12. Schizophrenia: a coda
  13. Work in progress on natural selection in the US
  14. The global competition between exit- and voice-based legitimacy
  15. Sexuality is as wide as the sea
  16. Thought bubble: why DEI is bad, even if you like diversity, equity and inclusion
  17. The age of extremely horizontal norms
  18. Is "Wrestling" Fixed?
  19. Natural selection: I still have no clue about the effect size
  20. Natural selection: what's the effect size?
  21. A pattern in world history
  22. 🍾 Bubbles: SVB, GPT4, books and links 🍾
  23. The Italian city-states as a distant mirror
  24. Square pegs and round holes in cultural change
  25. Is the gender equity theory of fertility a cope?
  26. How to think about democracy and autocracy in 2023
  27. Social norms: the downside

2022 42

  1. Thought bubble: Christmas links
  2. New subscriber chat
  3. Ordinary human life
  4. Thought bubble: William McGonagall or ChatGPT?
  5. Thought bubble: C.S. Lewis and Adorno on academia
  6. "... and that will be England gone..."
  7. Thought bubble: is China in the Danger Zone because it's peaking?
  8. Utilitarianism corrupts liberal institutions
  9. Resurrection of the centre
  10. How (not) to approach controversial genetics research
  11. Updates
  12. Let biological metaphors back into social science
  13. Thought bubble: let's uncancel people!
  14. Self-Control Secrets of the Puritan Masters
  15. A market is a neural network
  16. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a review
  17. History as mind furniture
  18. Genes and ethnicity: can we?
  19. We are entering a new age of collective action
  20. Research into genes and ethnic differences: should we?
  21. Wyclif's Dust: the missing chapter
  22. I wrote a book
  23. A review of Nate Hilger's The Parent Trap
  24. On a fallacious argument about ethnicity and genetics
  25. Our new working paper: trading social status for genetics in marriage markets
  26. No wait stop it matters how you raise your kids
  27. On effective altruism, utilitarianism and localness
  28. A journal is just a Twitter feed
  29. On Nazis who read genetics
  30. Doubts about viewpoint diversity
  31. Thought bubble: the normal, ordinary politics of Donald Trump
  32. What did the printing press do in early modern Europe?
  33. The internet makes it easier to cooperate, that’s the problem
  34. The Traveller returns
  35. We are still paying for the spin in Iraq
  36. Albert Hirschman on liberalism and nationalism
  37. The Dawn of Everything: a review
  38. Hopescrolling
  39. No, human life was not a misery until the 1950s
  40. Some simple game theory of discursive conflict
  41. The diversity of modern family forms is a myth
  42. Public goods problems are everywhere in software

2021 35

  1. The end of Victorian culture, part II: people and history
  2. The end of Victorian culture, part I: structural forces
  3. Is the big tech era ending?
  4. The emperor's new clothes
  5. The soft side of Paul Celan
  6. Rich-poor genetic differences are not just about IQ
  7. Is genetics “dark”?
  8. Li Bai and the Doorways of Night
  9. How's it going with the Universal Cultural Takeover? Part II
  10. Thought bubble: Haberdasher's school has improved its motto
  11. How's it going with the Universal Cultural Takeover? Part I
  12. Li Bai and the very demanding task
  13. Social science versus common sense
  14. Thought bubble: fake history, global edition
  15. On the boringness of the word Woke
  16. Decolonize the lifeworld
  17. Incentives in economics are wrong, but how?
  18. On the idea that group loyalty is a primitive holdover
  19. Cephalus: an underrated figure in Western philosophy?
  20. Yeah, we're imperialist!
  21. Don't second-guess yourself!
  22. Asleep in Azeroth
  23. Parochialism in time and space
  24. The story is about you
  25. Victorian values: conclusions
  26. A practical guide to Victorian values, part two: teaching
  27. Victorian values, a practical guide: enforcement
  28. Feminism: my beef
  29. bioRxiv wouldn't host our paper on natural selection, why not?
  30. Thought bubble: defending Bitcoin
  31. Social science: activists versus experts
  32. Valentine's Day theology
  33. The natural selection paper, part 3: reflections
  34. The natural selection paper, part 2: theory
  35. The natural selection paper, part 1: our findings

2020 11

  1. Malaria
  2. On the demand for social science
  3. Open and shut
  4. Coaservatism
  5. On social science about complex stuff
  6. Revenge of the Edwardians
  7. Li Bai: a beast or a god?
  8. Li Bai and the Abominable Prague Machine
  9. Democracy: fire or slow decay?
  10. Li Bai and the unicorns led by donkeys
  11. Frivolous and serious arguments about politics, society, social science and the world.