Unsafe Science Retrospective
Top 5 Posts of the Year AND Top 10 of All Time
I launched Unsafe Science in early 2022 as an experiment. I had been blogging at Psychology Today for about 10 years1 and was first just curious about Substack. Then two things happened: 1. I realized Substack could pay WAY MORE than did Psych Today for the same content; 2. Psych Today started getting obnoxiously bureaucratic and censorious. So I quit Psych Today and moved entirely to Substack. For this retrospective, I cannot resist excerpting this section of that essay:
By May 2022, this was my only blog site. And lord above, coming here was one of the best decisions in my career. Substack (in contrast to Psych Today) does not interfere with my posts. Its subscription model is vastly superior. It allows comments, which Psych Today banned, and I love the discussions on the posts here (even though I strongly disagree with some of the comments — but that is one of the things that makes the world of ideas interesting). And it permits guest posters (Psych Today required they be “approved”) and I LOVE the guest posts here, some of which are among the top 5 most viewed posts (more on this soon).
About Unsafe Science
This is from the about page, which I repeat only because I have periodically updated it and, maybe except for when first signing up, few of you have seen it in a while.
What I plan to post:
Debunking of scientific and social scientific claims and papers
Reinterpretation of results presented in scientific and social scientific papers
Perspectives on controversial social and political issues informed by social science findings, regardless of whose ox they gore
Occasional personal essays and slices of life.
General issues, controversies, dysfunctions (and well-functioning) aspects of academia, social science, and science.
Occasional essays on broader and more general topics beyond academia.
I will be experimenting with what I post here, so this is subject to change.
I also *love* collaborating with people from across the political spectrum on politicized topics. This includes people who are not academics. Unsafe Science includes many such guest posts and it might include YOU. As this project develops, I hope to use it to foster a community of people, including but not restricted to academic researchers, who are similarly committed to free and open inquiry and discourse.
I do feel pretty good at having implemented all of that.
Paid Subscriptions
I have two posts about the benefits of paid subscriptions:
In those posts, among the things I committed2 to was applying at least 2/3 of the income to support either student (including grad student) research, and the activities of The Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS),3 for at least the first year. However, this has worked out so well that I have kept this up the entire time and plan to keep doing so (just transferred about 80% of the subscription income to a Rutgers research account). It mostly backstops projects — if funding is unclear, but I have enough in my subscription/research fund, I can commit to some project going forward while still looking for other sources of funding. Those have usually come through, so I have, so far, spent only a small portion of this fund on such projects — but those projects would not have gone forward without this backstop. Just one of those “backstop” things is in process right now (see end of footnote 3).
A secondary benefit, not mentioned in those posts is this: Paid subscribers also get early access to some posts (i.e., they eventually become free but are paid-only when posted).
The Attack of the Racist Mule: Substack to the Rescue
During the Attack of the Racist Mule episode, aka Fiedler on the Roof, I (and 3 other psychologists, and editor Klaus Fiedler) were denounced as racists by almost 1400 academics in a public online petition that also called for our papers (accepted by Fiedler) to be retracted. At the time, it was horrible.
How do you defend yourself against a mob of 1400? “You don’t” comes to mind. I did. Starting (but not ending) here at Unsafe Science.
My first line of defense and counterattack was almost entirely by writing about the nature of the entire episode and exposing the attack as not mere nonsense, but as authoritarian nonsense here at Unsafe Science (some of which is linked below). On the bullshit side, I was accused of invoking a racist trope by using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof. No, really, that is exactly what happened. I am not exaggerating or making some sort of straw argument.
The quote in question, “There was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule” is from the song, Tradition. I used it as a metaphor for progressive disingenuousness around “diversity” — which once sounded good to many Americans who think it means diversity in a broad sense. But what they delivered was the “progressive” version of diversity — i.e., providing extra benefits to members of groups they deemed oppressed. I was accused of invoking a racist trope “paralleling Black people with mules.” As the event unfolded, I discovered there was no racist mule trope to be invoked. There is no trope treating Black people as mules. It was entirely made up propaganda deployed to denounce me, Fiedler and the other authors (all of whom wrote articles critical of how “diversity” was being implemented in psychology):
At the time it felt horrible, but, ultimately, it was a blast. I posted and posted and posted about it here, eventually posts numbering somewhere in double digits. Documenting the full set of events was invaluable (even though I realize most subscribers did not religiously read every entry) for all sorts of reasons. One was that, when contacted by outsiders or journalists, I could direct them to my posts for lots of details and links to stuff, including the denunciations (which were so ridiculous I had no fear or reluctance to provide the original sources to outsiders). Upshot of that? Everything written about this event that appeared outside of academia saw the ridiculousness of the denunciations. Stuff by academics was more evenly split, but, hey, starting from 1400 denouncing us as racists to an even split? If you combine the win among essays from outside academia and the tie among those within, I ended up 1-0-1. If you treat it as football, given the first game started with the equivalent of me being down 31-0 at the end of the first 10 minutes, I’ll totally take 1-0-1. Literally undefeated…4
Then? The first sense I got that my Substack was actually turning the tide was this. People hate this censorious shit and both free and paid subscriptions to Unsafe Science skyrocketed.
Then, I started incorporating this experience into my scholarship on academic tribalism and censorship, starting with something first posted here, a table that has now made it into one of my published papers and included in another currently under review:
I had begun publishing on issues of free speech and academic freedom prior to this, but this experience sorta gave my interest in such efforts hyperspeed booster rockets, eventually leading to two edited books and too many articles to be worth counting, as I documented here:
Among other things, in the aftermath of this event, Rutgers administrators invited me to take on a difficult position (in part, precisely because they knew I had a thick skin) but amply rewarded me for it, giving me a massive raise (60-100%, depending on how you count, also explained in My Vita of Denunciation).
I retold this story on Jordan Peterson’s podcast and it led to this exchange (starting about 1:28:40, story retold before that) was something like this:
Jordan: Every treasure has a dragon … mythologically speaking … there is opportunity where there is peril. You might end up as dragon toast, that’s one possibility. But the other outcome is that you find the treasure… When things become shaky around you, one of the things you can validly ask yourself is this: There is something positive lurking here if I have the wisdom to see it and the capacity for transformation necessary to allow the challenge to change me.
Me: At the time that it was happening, it was horrible. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. But in hindsight, it has made me a better person and I wouldn’t undo it now if I could.
And it all — the defense against, counterattack, and booster to my career — started here, on Substack. And I will be grateful till the day I die for all the support I received here at the time and in the aftermath.
Top Five Posts of 2025
Top here just means “most read” — whether they are the “best” is a subjective decision.
#5:
On Trump’s plan to cut indirect costs on grants to 15%. It has, so far, not gone into effect, because it has been relentlessly blocked by courts for being illegally capricious and retroactive.
#4:
Guest post by philosopher Matt Lutz. The core theme was this, quoted directly:
ACADEMIA CANNOT CONTINUE TO FUNCTION WITH ANYTHING LIKE ITS CURRENT FUNDING MODEL AS LONG AS IT REMAINS A PARTISAN POLITICAL INSTITUTION. And a corollary: ACADEMIA WILL NOT RECEIVE THE KIND OF SUPPORT THAT IT HAS ENJOYED SINCE THE GI BILL UNLESS IT REFORMS TO BECOME THE KIND OF INSTITUTION THAT REPUBLICANS CAN HAPPILY SUPPORT.
#3:
Not exactly “a” conspiracy. It was more like a large conglomeration of small conspiracies, some of which almost definitely involved violations of law.
#2:
A compendium of empirical articles finding that diversity is not necessarily a positive and/or that DEI initiatives are either useless or net negative; and also narrative pieces, both peer reviewed and general essays, critical of DEI. It is partially annotated (I summarize some of the key points of some but not all articles).
And now, the #1 post of 2025:
Preliminary List of Articles [by academics!] that Attempted to Warn Academics and Other Scientists that their Politicization of Scholarship, Teaching, Funding, Hiring and Promotions Was a Slow-Moving Train Wreck
Before going to the top 5 All Time, some 2025 honorable mentions:
This was the top Paid Subscriber only post. From that post:
Academics have mostly done three things to “fight” Trump. Yell and screech on social media; yell and screech in blogs, op-eds, and essays; publish studies on how evil and stupid Trump supporters are.
In politics, it is very easy to tell winners and losers. No deep analysis, fancy modeling, or complex logical arguments with excessive polysyllabic jargon needed. Who won the election? If your side lost, what you did failed. If you won, it succeeded.
So, academia, how’s that workin’ out for ya?
In some ways, using “most read” is unfair to more recent posts, which have had less time to accumulate page views. Two posts in the last three months just missed making the top 5:
In which sociologist Arthur Sakamoto describes the ridiculous treatment his paper received at two peer reviewed journals. The paper found that there is far more socioeconomic variability among White ethnic groups than between White and Black people and is currently under review at JOIBS (see footnote 3 for more on JOIBS).
In which Kevin McCaffree & I harangue the academic pussyfooters for not getting their collective asses in gear.
Top 10 All Time
#11:
Ok, I know I wrote Top 10, and here I am, starting with 11. That is for two reasons: 1. Several of the top 10 of all time have already appeared so will only be briefly mentioned here, and 2. This one just missed and is really good.
Actually, they don’t. But a peer reviewed paper said they did. And it was wrong. In this post, Free Black Thought cofounders Jake Mackey and Dave Gilbert explain why.
#10:
This is the “Was DEI a Conspiracy” post described in 2025’s Top 5.
#9:
In which SPSP, one of the major social psychology professional societies, mandates DEI statements for applications to present research at its annual conference. An email exchange between Jon Haidt, Laura King (then president of SPSP, also one of the signatories to the open letter that was part of The Attack of the Racist Mule described above), and me is presented and annotated. I have a later entry about SPSP ending its mandatory DEI statement, which it did, but, subsequently, they reinstituted it and it is still in place. I know because I am part of a panel presenting at the 2026 SPSP convention titled Is SPSP a Healthy Society (my presentation is titled “SPSP is Not a Healthy Society”).
#8:
The Downsides of DEI, already described above in the top 5 of 2025.
#7:
In this essay, I explain why, if the only thing you know is that something is published in a psychology peer reviewed journal, or book or book chapter, or presented at a conference, you should simply disbelieve it, pending confirmation by multiple independent researchers in the future.
#6:
In which Colin Wright describes: 1. a series of experiments conducted by my lab in collaboration with NCRI finding that DEI rhetoric leads people to “see” discrimination where none exists and 2. the chilly reception given this research by the mainstream media.
#’s 5, 4, & 3:
These have all be described or linked previously (section in which it is described is in parentheses):
#5: Notes from a Witch Hunt (Attack of the Racist Mule)
#4: 1400 Academics Denounced me as a Racist for Using a Quote from Fiddler on the Roof (Attack of the Racist Mule)
#3: We Tried to Warn You (Top 5 of 2025)
#2:
Apparently, many liberals, at least if you replace “Jews” (when quoting Hitler) with “White people.” This is a guest post by Michael Bernstein, a professor at Brown University and April Bleske-Rechek, a professor at University of Wisconsin — Eau Claire, who conducted the studies. As far as I know, Unsafe Science is the only place this research has appeared. I discovered it when Bernstein presented it at the first SOIBS conference (see footnote 3). We have taken to using this method of identifying Hitler quotes about Jews, and then flipping in other groups as a way to measure demonization (which we did in the studies reported in #6: Why was this Groundbreaking Study of DEI Silenced?
#1, And Now, the Most Viewed Unsafe Science Post of All Time
“More weight” is what Giles Corey, in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, said to his inquisitors, who informed him that, unless he confessed to witchcraft and identified other witches in Salem, they would add more stones that were slowly crushing him.
A guest post by Jake Mackey, professor of classics and co-founder of Free Black Thought, written in late 2024, the post opens up this way:
I am 53 years old. The last four years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I’ve ever lived through.
He then quotes Noam Dworman:
“the general atmosphere of fear that we lived through as people who want to speak and live our lives freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints on it of a particular leader, that leader would be a fascist. If any leader had brought that change into our lives, that would be the most fascist experience with a leader we have ever seen in this country.”
Interim Epilogue
Epilogue to Unsafe Science so far; merely “interim” because I have no plans to stop anytime soon (indeed, several new posts are in various stages of ready-to-post, drafted, and partially drafted). Such posts will address the growing evidence that academia does, in fact, indoctrinate students into leftist ideologies and morals; the ridiculous argument that calls for political diversity in academia is a MAGA plot; the overstandardization of teaching; and some very very interesting recent studies vindicating implicit bias skeptics and debunking “White privilege” narratives.
But for now, it has been a nice run so far. I have long welcomed and encouraged guest posts and am glad to see that has really worked: Guest posts can be found in 1 of the top 5 of 2025, 1.5 of the 3 listed as honorable mentions (.5 because one is a joint between a guest poster and me), and four of the top 11 of all time, including the most read of all time!
If you think you have an essay, or even an idea for an essay that fits the pretty broad scope of Unsafe Science, feel free to contact me to pitch the idea. My goal has always been to produce a running average of 2-3 posts/month. With 43 posts in 2025, we (this is not the royal “we,” this includes the guest posters and me) have exceeded the upper end of that goal.
Its been a good run so far. Thanks for your support, happy holidays to all, and best for the upcoming new year.
Commenting
Before commenting, please review my commenting guidelines. They will prevent your comments from being deleted. Here are the core ideas:
Don’t attack or insult the author or other commenters.
Stay relevant to the post.
Keep it short.
Do not dominate a comment thread.
Do not mindread, its a loser’s game.
Don’t tell me how to run Unsafe Science or what to post. (Guest essays are welcome and inquiries about doing one should be submitted by email).
Footnotes
Blogging at Psych Today. I cut my teeth there, so the blogs are a mixed bag quality-wise. Two high points, though, were:
Claire Lehmann of Quillette fame got her start there and, I’d like to believe, got a taste for the whole “we need an alternative to academia for deeply thoughtful evidence-based analysis of … all sorts of stuff…” with this guest post of hers: The Sexism in Science Controversies.
My fav post of all time there, and also the most highly read, with, last I could check, over 120,000 views: Why Brilliant Girls Tend to Favor Non-Stem Careers.
I periodically think, “I should move at least the top blogs from there over here” and maybe I will. But then I get back to work and never do it. Maybe I will pay someone to do it… (sometimes, and this happens to me all the time, writing about something helps clarify my thinking about it).
Benefits to paid subscribers. I also realize that I stated that I would host some live discussion or q&a sessions for paid subscribers. I never did this, partially because I never figured out whether there was much of a demand or even what such a discussion would be like. I’ve listened to a few things like this hosted by others, and I never found them particularly compelling. HOWEVER, if you would like me to do this, leave a comment saying so. I still might. One of the issues, though, would be how to do this. Open questions? Thematic focus? On what? If you have ideas, fling em in the comments.
SOIBS has accomplished exactly what we (I was one of 10 founders) had hoped. We launched a journal (The Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, aka JOIBS) to be an outlet for any empirical work in the behavioral sciences, but especially to be an option for stuff people have trouble publishing elsewhere. You can find an overview of JOIBS here:
You can find the articles here, among them, two that were retracted at other journals, at the instigation of mobs, for reasons that had nothing to do with fraud or making up data, the main justified reasons for retractions (you can find those articles here and here). Both violated mob “social justice” sensibilities, though, of course, both journals came up with “other reasons” for retracting them. I wrote about one here:
SOIBS has also held two conferences. Several Unsafe Science entires described some of the goings on at those conferences:
As far as I know, SOIBS remains the only academic society to host an open debate about DEI.
As far as I know, SOIBS remains the only academic society to host an open debate about DEI.
This one is Wilfred Reilly’s keynote address at the second conference.
We are currently planning the third conference. I obtained two small grants to fund it, but it is unclear whether they will cover the full costs. And yet, we are committed to that conference. How is that possible? Because it is backstopped by the research funds provided by paid subscriptions.
1-0-1. Overall, my record with cancellation attacks is more like 5-0-1, as described in My Vita of Denunciation. Probably not good enough to get me into the Still Standing Strong after Repeat Cancellation Attack Hall of Academic Fame (I’d put Peterson, Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and Paglia in that Hall of Fame), though the Babe Ruth of Cancellation attacks is not an academic — its probably Bari Weiss who left the NYTimes when the younger staffers there created a hostile environment at the height of the Social Justice Summer of Floyd (July, 2020). She then started The Free Press, and recently sold it for $150 million and was made some sort of editorial honcho at Newsweek. Still, 5-0-1 feels pretty good.
I used to blog for Psychology Today as well, and I stopped for the same reason you did. I was tired of their politics and censorship.
I love your stuff and I always look forward to your next post. Happy 2026, my friend!
Thanks for sharing and all these wonderful articles. I do have to say this...I love Fiddler on the Roof and the song containing the debate over whether it was a horse or a mule is one of my favorites. The fact that this created a massive controversy did, in its own way answer the question. Clearly if academia were the party in question...it would have to be a horse....as only in academia could a discussion of innocent hard working mules reveal so many horses a..ses!