History is full of cautionary tales involving crimes and atrocities committed in the name of the greater good that did not result in the greater good but sure did result in the crimes and atrocities."

Bluesky obsessives are far too credulous and in many cases have helped to elevate liars www.nytco.com/press/fact-c...

"As beliefs acquire social functions, it can become more important to believe what others believe than to believe what is true. Very costly belief systems can become entrenched in a community, given the great costs of losing the trust of one’s peers."

"romantic rejection not only affects incels, but increases the extremist tendencies of men and women in general... such as women becoming more Left-Wing Authoritarian and men more Socially Dominant" osf.io/preprints/ps...

"any structural explanation of the success of science must imply that there is a critical mass of epistemically virtuous scientists in the scientific community"

🔪"We conclude that talk of the epistemic environment amounts to little more than a rhetorical flourish... Speaking of flourishes, philosophy’s river of knowledge is clogged with cognitive kayaks paddling hard for attention."

"For better or worse, the shift to bipedalism meant that our peers' anogenital regions are no longer right under our nose."

"Although few philosophers identify normative nihilism as their preferred meta-normative view, there are grounds on which to take normative nihilism to be at least minimally plausible, and hence, to harbor at least some degree of nihilistic uncertainty."

Why you’re wise on Tuesday and foolish on Sunday: Practising #wisdom in uncertain times - a brief sunday read & a mild rant against "one trick" gurus & substakers. theconversation.com/why-youre-wi... @theconversation.com

Delicious episode of epistemic hubris and trespassing: x.com/andre_quenti...

"The slogan should not be, 'Trust, but verify,' but rather, 'Rely on, and verify.'"

"Why do woke progressives find so many things dismissible?"

"As adaptations that confer advantages in certain contexts, they are ecologically rational and shot through with strategic calculation."

"the null hypothesis of no consistent relationship between the degree of indiscriminate killing and aspects of social complexity is best supported" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"polygyny may not necessarily harm women if practiced in otherwise egalitarian societies that already guarantee political freedom and civil liberties to all their citizens"

"saying that someone is making claims 'without evidence' is just a sort of absurd editorializing that convinces no one"

"Maybe we have psychopathy all wrong... less about exploitation and coldheartedness globally, and more about a threat-activated shift in cognition... explains how otherwise normal people can be capable of extreme acts of evil, yet maintain empathy for their friends and loved ones"

"Our results are more in line with the one ornament hypothesis for faces and bodies, and more with the multiple messages hypothesis for voices"

"Christians ought to be anti-natalists... Christians cannot dismiss anti-natalism quickly out of hand as being inconsistent with their religious convictions"

Can't wait for the evo psych textbook Lieberman is working on that (she indicated on the Evo Psych podcast) will emphasizes the cognitive dimension.

My pick for best philosophical account of epistemic injustice -- because it's informed by Paris School adaptationist reasoning. (Many other domains of theorizing and moralizing into the blue within philosophy desperately await similar interventions, imho.)

🎯🔪"material and structural rather than interpersonal and ethical"

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"...how psychological science is laundered to support grander narratives of human failing and irrationality. Normally this happens via popularisation in the mass media, but you can also catch it happening in the scholarly literature."

"The gamete definition of sex is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of our species."

Max Brod met Franz Kafka at a lecture that he (Brod) gave on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

“Do you know what they’ve done to me, even though I’m a leading figure in my field? You’re in France and you want to study sociobiology or behavioural biology? You haven’t even been born yet and you’re already dead. Get out of academic life as fast as you can.”

"This more distal psychological factor strikes at the heart of the evolutionary dilemma of coming out."

"If you think the lesson of Nietzsche is that he agrees with your politics, it is more likely that you are a member of the rabble than a champion of individualism standing apart from it."

Note that this is a good heuristic if you use your own understanding of reality to predict the behavior of other agents (a strategy called 'factive' mindreading). When reality changes outside of the agent's awareness, then the real state of the world is not longer a reliable guide to their behavior.

"The raw truth of our evolution is that of a theater where romantic passions, desires, and encounters are often merely surface effects of an underground and relentless war: intrasexual competition." editions-observatoire.com/livre/Sexe%2...

"One way to make a sacred value plausible, therefore, is to make it resemble -- or mimic -- the actual values people hold... because sacred values have real-life counterparts, they appear more plausible to communities of status-seekers" osf.io/preprints/ps...

"It is my belief that the intimate bonds forged by enduring affairs have had a long-overlooked impact on our species' evolutionary history."

"challenges the idea that economic inequality is, on average, detrimental to population well-being & mental health... we recommend that, when resources are limited, public policies would do better to prioritize alleviating poverty & material hardship to improve well-being and mental health"

A sympathetic response to Ryan Briggs on trust in social science. My argument: the deepest problem isn’t error, but epistemic incommensurability-when fields lose shared standards for weighing evidence, experience, and interpretation. Trust depends on commensuration. open.substack.com/pub/kylesaun...

My first Substack post. It’s a tale of murder and intrigue! Please share.

"Awareness of the political difficulties inherent in philosophy should not blind us to the intellectual difficulties inherent in philosophy. It is just very hard to get things right."

"the problem is that the pretense of full control over one's epistemic situation can appear reasonable precisely because of a genuine ideal of reason"

"What appears as deontological rigidity may instead reflect an adaptive response to the problem of sustaining cooperation under uncertainty."

🔪"the tendency to describe political attacks in vivid detail while taking almost no responsibility for the internal failures that made universities such an easy political target"

"There was quite a widespread belief that although women were intellectually inferior to men they were morally superior to men. And so women would make use of this."

"most people doing evil deeds in the name of the good, they always justify their criminal deeds in the name of justice"

Given a predilection for psychological adaptationism and philosophical pessimism, in terms of highest ratio of profundity to words, this is my winner for 2025: