A new New Zealand online outlet dedicated to open inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge, and edited by a consortium of leading Kiwi scientists and scholars.
Joined August 2022
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Pinned Tweet
14 Aug 2023
OpenInquiry was founded in the wake of the mobbing of the Listener 7. We seek to defend rationalism, science, and academic freedom in a politically-disinterested way, in the tradition of Mike Corballis. Profiles of some of our editors are on our website, openinquiry.nz/
And who are the leading scholars behind this so called open inquiry?
What are you?
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OpenInquiry retweeted
18 Sep 2025
“If you want to have freedom for the speech you love, you have to defend it for speech you loathe.” – Nadine Strossen
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OpenInquiry retweeted
9 Sep 2025
This is most clear in actual job-candidate appraisal, for which conservatives showed much less bias.
"Although negative job recommendations may seem tepid... politically motivated indirect aggression might lead not only to retarding career opportunities and advancement but could also lead to losing one’s livelihood. This study focused on the hiring stage of employment"
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OpenInquiry retweeted
20 Sep 2025
It looks like the dean there is using the term for PC reasons, which is obviously dumb, but grade compression is a real phenomenon, caused by the natural upper ceiling that grading systems have. From my report:
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21 Sep 2025
RT @sapinker: Maher:
Have college students changed in recent years? Do they have trouble keeping up with the amount of reading that used t…
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1 Oct 2023
This is interesting by Russell on Western civilization: users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-eur…
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
Say "Hi!" to a new (well: old, but you get the idea) human sculpture at #GobekliTepe.
Well fitting to another, apparently quite related find and type:
dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegra…
Kültür ve Turizm Bakanı Ersoy’dan Göbeklitepe’de yeni keşif açıklaması:
"Göbeklitepe’nin B ile D yapıları arasındaki mekânda, bir oda duvarının içerisinde yatay vaziyette duvara monte edilmiş ve adak olarak yerleştirildiği düşünülen insan heykeli bulundu."
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
Has anyone currently teaching at a NZ university set the same, or a very similar, assessment for many years now? Ideally it would be something that lends itself to objective marking, like a factual test
5 Sep 2025
It would be good to find examples of this in NZ - assessments that have remained the same for many years. Then we could see whether students were getting worse or better at those assessments independently of the grades they are awarded.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
I agree 99.2% - the only thing I'd change is to put "kind" in quotation marks. It's not actually that kind to lower standards and give students a lower-quality educational experience
5 Sep 2025
Academics are formally evaluated by their students, so it pays to be kind.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
5 Sep 2025
We can apply for extensions with no need to provide a reason because *life can be complicated*. That definitely wasn't the case when I was an undergrad 20years ago!
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
If we had a more accurate grading system, good students would feel less pressure to do this kind of thing to stand out. Instead they would be able to just focus on their studies, safe in the knowledge that a high grade actually meant something.
5 Sep 2025
I'm a post-grad and have taken on a paid research assistant role as that seems more beneficial than my qual alone. The paid role takes up a lot more time and mental space than my studies but is related so feels like it's worth the drama. Only took it on to put on my CV.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
Folding Aspergers Syndrome into the "autism spectrum" has been a disaster.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
19 Sep 2025
Again, none of this is new, and the colleges and Universities do abdolutely nothing to discourage it.
Here's a video of a University of Missuori professor asking for "some muscle" to stop a journalist from filming a protest
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OpenInquiry retweeted
17 Sep 2025
Really intrigued by this carving on a doorway on a 16th century farmhouse. Any ideas what it depicts? 🧐
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OpenInquiry retweeted
5 Aug 2025
AI models, driven by market incentives, might be increasingly designed to flatter users. The human desire for positive validation could create reinforcement loops that shape AI behavior, often prioritizing feel-good responses over robust debate and honest critique.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
13 Aug 2021
On this literal question - defunding the police is a highly SES-loaded question that is, relative to partisanship, most unpopular with Hispanics and working class-white people. This is pretty consistent with what actually happened (though Defund was a symptom of a broader thing).
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OpenInquiry retweeted
16 Sep 2025
New Zealanders rank fifth globally for Claude usage per capita.
This contrasts with surveys suggesting we lag on AI adoption...
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OpenInquiry retweeted
11 Sep 2025
The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life.
A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation.
No more political violence.
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OpenInquiry retweeted
14 Sep 2025
Ok, hear me out. In Hawaiian, Mahalo means thanks. In Taiwan’s indigenous Saisiyat (賽夏), ma'alo' means thanks & it comes from the root word 'alo' meaning blessing. In Hawaiian, it’s Aloha (good wishes)
📷 Austronesian Languages (Cognation & Comparison) FB
ALT Photo credit: Austronesian Languages (Cognation & Comparison) https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A9fKJVNtp/?mibextid=wwXIfr
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OpenInquiry retweeted
7 Sep 2025
22. then we should look at whether colder countries in general have more words for snow, ice and so on. So I hope future research presses on more along the lines of that 2016 paper - and beyond the likes of Whorf and Pullum
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OpenInquiry retweeted
14 Sep 2025
This is a side of archaeology people don’t normally see. When you find any type of artefact, it needs to be cleaned and sorted. Lithics, bones, ceramics, everything. On most projects this happens every afternoon and depending on the scale, everyone takes part.
14 Sep 2025
Sorting lithics from #Göbeklitepe is part of our daily routine when we get back to the excavation house. Flint artefacts make up the majority of the find assemblage. In fact, there are tremendous amounts, an indication of domestic activity spanning over 1.500 yrs of settlement
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