"usually it's better to start from the principle that most people are by and large rational"

"I defend an account of demarcation grounded in the Argumentative or Interactionist Theory of Reason... Scientists strive to persuade the community with the strongest possible arguments while being equally motivated to rigorously evaluate those of their peers"

🔪Milgram's experiments seem to have more intriguing, if not darker, implications than hitherto appreciated: the 'good' participants were more procedurally obedient than the participants who went all the way.

In an attempt to demonstrate that philosophy is a "fact-based" discipline that makes progress, a philosopher offers up “200 straightforward facts directly about philosophical matters that virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know.”

New episode (1218), with Dr. Edward Hagen. We discuss whether sex is binary, the distinction between sex and gender, and more. #Anthropology #Biology #Science YouTube: youtu.be/DjIqDREBOqI Podcast: bit.ly/4avxMHW

Great interview: Szegofi adds some nuanced qualifications to the epistemic vigilance approach...

🎯"The wrong model of epistemic vigilance: absence of epistemic vigilance makes people gullible... The right model of epistemic vigilance: absence of epistemic vigilance makes people unable to update their beliefs in view of what is communicated."

🔪"If campus censorship is justified, campus censors should also censor arguments in favor of campus censorship. That will include — and conclude — the argument offered here."

"women and men feel similarly threatened by feminism... women’s perceptions of feminism as a threat are better explained by their generally higher threat perceptions regarding all investigated threat sources and higher levels of anxiety, and are not associated with a particular party affiliation"

"The systemizing-empathizing theory for autism is strongly supported by the meta-analytic results reported here... shifts in empathizing and systemizing were much greater in females than males, which can help to explain the male-biased sex ratio in autism"

If you were to create a philosophy of LLM course, what kinds of things would you cover? My thoughts in thread, but eager to hear what others would do

"more than half of Harris voters, known for their higher trust in scientific authority, are unwilling to 'trust the experts' when it comes to gender medicine for kids"

"Evidence-based guidelines addressing the needs of transidentified children and adolescents are urgently needed, but the uncritical adoption or endorsement of WPATH’s guidelines may result in a disservice or even harm to this vulnerable population."

"Moral philosophy, as Marx and Nietzsche both demonstrated in very different ways, is irrelevant noise in the history of the world, merely symptomatic."

I wrote a new essay responding to Eric Schwitzgebel: Is Diversity Intrinsically Valuable? If you can provide me with better arguments for the existence of intrinsic values I'd be happy to be convinced. walterveit.substack.com/p/is-diversi...

"Anyone who is familiar with my career knows I was accused of being politically incorrect, experienced being cancelled, and so much more – even before such woke terminology was coined –as a result of the same scientific commitment that led to my evolutionary awakening"

"High-status professionals may sincerely believe that their activities serve the common good and are worthy of trust and support. But ordinary citizens get a vote, too."

🔪"When science has spent 20 years positioning itself as an opponent of the Republican Party and paints their leader as Public Enemy No. 1, it seems obvious what would happen when the guy is in power. Will scientists learn their lesson? Or can we expect another Nature editorial come October 2028?"

"chimpanzees respond to higher-order evidence"

…not by truth vs falsehood or “disinformation.” So claims like “this shows the effects of repeated exposure to disinformation on X changes beliefs” go beyond what they actually measured in this paper.

🔪"Is academic dishonesty connected to political power in China? [...] What lessons might this hold for politics, meritocracy, and institutional performance elsewhere?"

🎯"[T]here are so many who are ideologically motivated to dismiss evolutionary psychology... There are those who think that we should not bother defensively correcting misconceptions and instead just focus on improving our field. I think we can and should do both."

"the greatest risk posed by automation in higher education is not simply the replacement of particular tasks by machines, but the erosion of the broader ecosystem of practice that has long sustained teaching, research and learning"

Humans exhibit an astonishing variety of marriage systems. Sometimes monogamous, other times polygamous, occasionally we even marry ghosts. The diversity can seem to defy any general explanation. In my new piece for Works in Progress, I write about the Darwinian logic behind it. 1/

🔥🔪"This very paper, by shining a light on what we continually strive to cover up, is predicted to be discomfiting to many of its readers." psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

"Violence was endemic across many non-state societies. Celebratory narratives of ‘kick-ass’ women often obscure head-hunting, slave-raiding and intimidation."

🔪"While not many scholars might want to explore both these paths, preferring one or the other for ideological reasons, the most Nietzschean approach to gender in the present may well be to do just that."

Pourquoi les militants se fédèrent-ils autour de croyances sans lien entre elles et parfois même contradictoires ? Et pourquoi défendent-ils ces croyances comme si leur vie en dépendait, allant jusqu'à tuer pour elles ? L'anthropologue Pascal Boyer répond, et c'est passionnant.👇

"cultural theorists cannot propose hypotheses that are incompatible with what we know about the mind, just as the psychological theorist cannot sustain hypotheses that are evolutionarily implausible"

🍿"both opposing beliefs of sex & gender were related 2 rigid & restrictive authoritarianism... inclination to absolutize conservative or progressive moral values... absolutely reject & discredit other views, & impose the conventional or anti-conventional ideological concepts on everyone in society"

"We are not opposed to thoughtful and evidence-based reminders about nonhuman status... However, we caution that mandating constant reminders is not a panacea to the issues seen to date, nor is it necessarily harmless."

Mort de Quentin D. à Lyon : mon nouvel article dans The Conversation sur la radicalisation politique, co-écrit avec Peter Barrett. En accès libre ci-dessous. L'un des concepts clés est celui de "l'escalier de la radicalisation" : progressif et insensible, mais pouvant aboutir à l'irréparable.

"It’s hard to dodge the conclusion that psychology often describes the world the way psychologists would like it to be, rather than the way it is."

Evolution is often framed as a cosmic struggle of all against all. Yet everything we observe about life is the product of cooperation. Understanding how cooperation is sustained is a key insight for thinking about how to organise society. www.optimallyirrational.com/p/cooperatio...

"A censorious impulse has sometimes been evident on both the left and the right."

Henry Shevlin and I chat with @anilseth.bsky.social about his scientific and philosophical case against conscious AI: youtu.be/wVYg8u5xjno?...

"Concepts have no lives outside the social labour that animates them. And philosophers do not engage with them from a place of methodological safety. We intervene from within... philosophers must take a sober view of their position within this economy"

I wrote an essay responding to Philip Goff's recent anti-science meme. Hopefully successful in clarifying the relationship between science and philosophy, and perhaps even changing the minds of some philosophers. walterveit.substack.com/p/to-hell-wi...

"perhaps there is a way to persuade people that is neither hopelessly misguided nor morally suspect"

My rough, brief take on activist scholarship. TLDR: It’s an epistemological mistake, but it can come from a genuine search for the truth, so it must be included. But it can’t be allowed to take over. Ditto for other epistemologies. Academia needs pluralism, not forced activism or neutrality.

"[E]ven a purely negative orientation—like domination as an evil to keep to a minimum—is still a normative orientation in a wide, ecumenical sense. It can serve for critical purposes and for providing practical orientation."

This week, we talk to @katrinewhiteson.bsky.social about the microbiome: what it is, how to feed it, and why we need it. youtu.be/-gthtVjIOYs podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qam9b...

Ho scritto un editoriale per il magazine dell'Università di Trento sul nostro recente articolo: Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...

"Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist even in the light of shared evidence, and to improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them."

"The mind conceived as an assemblage of evolved information-processing modules offers a powerful organizing principle for understanding many phenomena of psychiatric interest" www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

"Without evolutionary framing, each generation can label any novel technological transition as 'unnatural,' using their own experiences as a baseline while ignoring other preexisting societal conditions that are plausible evolutionary mismatches." psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...