Not all people retain everything from their courses, but everyone retains a small amount, probably in their specialization. That explains your trends.

Every AP teacher I had in high school noted that the tests have gotten dramatically easier, and based on the practice tests they provided, I agree that the questions at least are easier. I do not know if the scoring has gotten correspondingly harder, but if it hasn't there's another factor accentuating your argument.

I don't believe you can talk about the lack of emphasis on traditional Chinese culture without talking about the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era generally. The violent Communist upheaval uprooted a great deal of traditional culture. That is the reason that the diaspora is so interested in preserving some traiditional elements even as they become more developed; they are preserving a way of life that thanks to government intervention no longer exists in mainland China.

Fixed prices are easier to sell, and also as long as the number of "fat" people is relatively small, the majority of people will be for the policy as it soothes their egos. Just like Obama plans to tax only the top x%, it's easier to bash small groups.

I think the liberal line right now is more "Sure, people have different abilities, but there are no differences between groups." 
 
Which is good; the more we can push them towards accepting determined differences between people the easier the HBD argument is to make down the road. On the other hand there's significant cognitive dissonance in the liberal mind; while they can accept that Alice is smarter than Bob, and use IQ as a metric to measure that intelligence difference, as soon as you pull out differential IQ scores by race they'll shoot the messenger and attempt to discredit IQ. And so it goes.

it's well known that the more traffic you get on a blog the more retarded your commenters become on average 
 
Well I would say that that's because there is less and less feedback for each individual poster. If nobody is likely to read your comment, you might as well get your kicks by flaming, or simply register an opinion without fleshing out your argument. It's the number of "casual users" (as in users who only take a casual interest in your site) that is a problem, not the number of users per se. 
 
As a site matures, it probably becomes more important to adjust your incentives so posting is harder and feedback is easier. Hence the difference between YouTube comments and Wikipedia articles.

I'm skeptical of the argument, though. Sure there may be lots of crap, but the crap is more or less proportional to the number of users, and these same users help to comb through the crap. There are also synergies with other social networking sites (the good stuff will get hotlinked from blogs and Facebook). Also, the author fails to note that hosting and bandwidth costs will continue to fall throughout this period.

Great find, with the usual caveats of using data from people looking for only one conclusion. The size of the affirmative action subsidy is huge, and if it were more publicly acknowledged would probably swing public opinion. The fact that these scores come late in the professional pathway makes the gaps even more egregious.

The purchase of abducted boys to serve as sons is of course is not likely to be a evolutionary-psychology phenomenon

The allegedly correct prognosticators. Someone's always predicting riches, and someone's always predicting doom and gloom. A crisis simply gives their lucky claims emotional heft. This is not to say that mathematical modeling is necessarily a bad idea, but simply being right in one (albeit emotionally charged) case shouldn't give their case extra weight.

Broken clocks are right twice a day.

It probably comes down to tribalism. We view "the rich" (implicitly rich businessmen and so on, never doctors or academics) as a particular class. When times are going well, everyone likes a winner, and people read business books and seek to emulate them. When times are bad, we see the mighty fallen, and like to poke sticks in their eye. Similarly capitalism is popular when times go well, but when recession hits, people love to kick an ideology when it's down. 
 
Note that at all points it's the change in status of the person or ideology that matters, not its absolute performance. The fact that capitalism has delivered unprecedented economic growth is irrelevant; it's the point in the business cycle that determines people's animal spirits towards free markets.

The education trend isn't that surprising, really. If you're educated, the the opportunity cost of the time spent bearing and raising children increases. Likewise religious groups tend to place more emphasis on raising children, raising the psychic benefit of parenting. 
 
It *does* surprise me that libertarians are the most fecund political group, but that may well be because a certain subset buys into the evolutionary psychology-libertarian package deal, which is more common online.

The education trend isn't that surprising, really. If you're educated, the the opportunity cost of the time spent bearing and raising children increases. Likewise religious groups tend to place more emphasis on raising children, raising the psychic benefit of parenting. 
 
It *does* surprise me that libertarians are the most fecund political group, but that may well be because a certain subset buys into the evolutionary psychology-libertarian package deal, which is more common online.

Greatly increased population sizes at more recent stages of human evolution.

Greatly increased popoulation sizes at more recent stages of human evolution.