"To be fair, when it comes to indirect aggression – spreading rumours about people, excluding them from the group – we find either no sex difference or that women engage in slightly more. For everything else, though, men are in pole position."

🎯"As Donald Symons wrote in The Evolution of Human Sexuality, evolutionary theories of sex differences may be especially problematic for people who have difficulty distinguishing between a description vs. a prescription, as do these authors."

Honestly, I think a whole generation of experimental psychologists fell for this mistake. Toddlers give the wrong answer in the false belief task because the answer is bloody obvious and they don't know why the adult is asking such a silly question

I'm not opposed to journalists using AI, but this case — a faux emotional paean to Messi in the New York Times, clearly written by an LLM — pissed me off. @nytimes.com, meet @pangram.com. open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...

🎯🔪"What we need to do is to restore a conception of the justification of scholarly claims that is as unabashedly about following the evidence wherever it may lead as it is possible to get."

🔪"It is only unfamiliarity with the empirical literature, or perhaps some motivated reasoning, that can explain Cosker-Rowland's astonishing claim that 'it does not seem that it is riskier to prescribe GAHRT [i.e., cross-sex hormones] than to provide religious exemptions to laws.'"

I never mentioned this, most of my followers are academics: Technopanic was not written for you! I wrote it so that people outside academia could engage with the evidence, rather than having it filtered through news headlines. Pass it on to your friends! mybook.to/technopanic

"To understand humans, anthropologists must be able to understand the humans with whom they disagree."

The greatest corrupting force inside elite institutions right now is the idea that making changes or reforms that outside critics would agree with or support is ipso facto bad. Pure binary thinking. On the side of the bad people, etc. Why 1/2 prevent us from addressing 3 👇

New episode (1280), with Rafael Ruiz. We discuss his Substack post, “Being "Woke" is good, actually”. #Philosophy #ethics YouTube: youtu.be/J7BLA71lI7c Podcast: tinyurl.com/yfrf8d4n

Yeah, THIS is the most damning part of the interview for me, even above the silly blather about sexes. How could Henrich be unknown to AAA prez?! "You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t. He’s not obscure, either."

🔪"'Jay,' [David Buss] said, 'all hypotheses are just so stories' -- which made perfect sense, and thus disarmed for me Gould's insightful-sounding criticism of work he was not disposed to embrace."

🔪"When such questions are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent. This is a serious injustice to scholars on the 'wrong' side of these issues."

😺"Starting with the gendering of anxiety, Kierkegaard is clear that men and women have distinctive psychological profiles that are rooted in nature."

My take on global workspaces and J-spaces, and the possibility of consciousness in Claude www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🔪"If we want to change undesirable behaviors and/or promote more desirable behaviors, we need to understand why & under what circumstances those behaviors occur. Far from just investigating human universals, this level of understanding is exactly what evolutionary-minded scientists seek to achieve."

👶🔪"Infant studies constrain theoretical accounts of aesthetics by showing what attracts visual attention before mature aesthetic concepts, expertise, and culturally elaborated knowledge are available."

"Looking at things from an evolutionary lens, I have often wondered if maltreated children's tendency to become antisocial and hypervigilant to threat actually reflects the evolutionary logic underlying the maltreatment itself."

Ok: the summer is upon us, so we will be on hiatus and return on August 18th!! Have a great summer!! And please post episode and guest recommendations!!!! youtu.be/M97y0wuPPL4 www.podbean.com/ew/pb-9a53k-... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...

"the proposal that leaders can shift followers’ goals or evaluations in ways that would diverge from what we would predict based on the instrumental pursuit of core biological goals... seems an open question of how and to what extent"

"If AI begins to fulfill some of those loneliness-related needs, will people still feel compelled to reach out to others? And if not, what are the broader implications for social life and society at large?"

"critical voices have not been received into this burgeoning area of research with similar opportunities of expression and many academic philosophers have faced significant obstacles to being heard or published"

🔪"if the distribution of persuasive information—facts, findings, expert consensus, etc.—is disproportionately shaped by people who don’t seem to share your values or interests, what amount of scepticism towards that information is warranted?"

🔪"A realist approach of the Nietzschean kind appears to me committed not only to identifying the causal determinants of legal decision-making, but also to exposing forms of reasoning that are epistemically defective, self-deceptive, or ideologically compromised."

"Once private thoughts have been forced through the tubes of language they take on an unmissable scent of the outside world."

✨"the whole enterprise of evolutionary psychology started from rejecting the assumption that organisms behave in ways that directly maximize fitness... the explanatory frame is [natural selection → cognitive adaptations → behaviors]"

✨"infra-individualism adds tools from cognitive psychology to the social scientist’s toolkit"

✨"Much of our cognitive life is but poorly integrated within the set of conscious beliefs and desires that form our subjective sense of self; for that reason, Sperber made a plea to replace methodological individualism with an *infra-individualism*"

✨"In the end, cultural products are best understood as emergent phenotypes: cultural forms generated by evolved motivational systems and modulated by ecological conditions and historical legacies"

🔪"one critical mechanism by which we compete is by not having conscious awareness all the time that that's exactly what we're doing"

"It turns out that amidst increasingly vicious and all-encompassing partisanship, the need to preserve a sphere in which scholars carry out their distinctive, nonpartisan function becomes more important, not less."

"it is a problem even for those academics who agree with the prevailing orthodoxies"

New episode (1279), my third interview with Dr. Patrick Hassan. We have an open conversation about suicide from the perspective of #Philosophy. YouTube: youtu.be/TOWfQFnve-k Podcast: bit.ly/4w6fN3a

Why do human societies adopt rigid moral rules? Our new paper, led by @jliep.bsky.social, proposes a new model in PNAS @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"There is no reason to assume, he points out, that the psychology of 'well-behaved' people is normal while that of 'antisocial' adults is aberrant"

🔪"Conflating human gender identities and expressions with the binary nature of biological sex is therefore not a scientific inference, but amounts to two fallacies"

🔪"After all, the last few decades of scholarship in service to progressive causes has left the US with conservatives in charge of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of gov in many states and at the federal level. Thinking does not make it so."

"All of this is very Darwinian. Men tend to compete for access to the opposite sex through displays of strength and direct confrontation. Among women, the preferred forms of aggression are more 'indirect' and, one might say, more Machiavellian." www.lepoint.fr/debats/une-e...

😼"Since Appiah is gay, he ought to recognize that the AAA’s claims about sex and biology are accurate. So why is he giving them trouble?"

🔪"We have found little evidence that the scholar-activists doubt their claims. Far from it. The problem is not that they are insincere. What’s going on is that, for whatever reason, they’re sometimes refusing to consider possibilities that they have no sufficient reasons to rule out."

President of @americananthro.bsky.social: "All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually... the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect"

"When facts do not align with their moral sensibilities, people deploy a host of cognitive strategies... the writing is incomprehensible; the researchers are foolish or morally suspect; the research question is beyond the limits of science; or even that the institution of science cannot be trusted"

👻"Even the most terrible events may possess features that make them funny when viewed from certain perspectives. The fact that we do not, or will not, take up those perspectives does not show that those features are not there."

🔪"we should regularly psychologize those in positions of formal authority because the costs of failing to do so are too high" philarchive.org/rec/SHIPAA-15

"consistent with research showing cognitive origins for a range of health-related beliefs and practices, including bloodletting, vaccine hesitancy, some medicinal plant uses, and the persistence of ineffective medical treatments" doi.org/10.1016/j.ev...

"proximate goals that are arbitrarily complex (even the human brain ultimately evolved to fulfill the seemingly simple objective of producing offspring)... a specific cognitive trap: the transparency of the goal is mistaken for the transparency of the mechanism"