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:

Also, given how prodigiously Hanno Sauer applies insights from Social Paradox Theory in his great new book Klasse, small surprise that its chapter on art anticipates a hypothesis (about effortful & rarefied forms of cinema, lit & art I tend to dig) Pinsof floats in the episode.

"intimate kissing is now more unsafe than it used to be during our evolutionary history, and humans are left without innate avoidance mechanisms that would be more consistent with the present costs of intimate kissing"

I've seen several attempts to dismiss this paper's (imho, accurate) critique of feminist studies' (lack of, or poor) engagement w/ Evo Psych by (imho, accurately) pointing out its deficient engagement w/ feminist studies lit. Look forward to his response to Cordelia Fine.

"'There was a distinct effort to silence me'... while undergoing a recent post-tenure review, managed to secure his administration’s written approval to address questions pertaining to evolutionary psychology more publicly"

Another superb episode -- and, as usual, great for generating Google NotebookLM reports -- stuff on victim compensation and justice resonates closely with work of the great honor culture scholar William Ian Miller (e.g. Eye for an Eye) and the second essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy.

This week, we talk to Léo Fetuchi about the moralization of self-control and the lack thereof. youtu.be/duLUU9e0i0k podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... www.podbean.com/eas/pb-99f5i...

"But eventually the Left came to de-emphasise class, for better or worse, and substitute questions of culture for those of production."

"Is it rational for Democrats (Republicans) to dislike rank-and-file Republicans (Democrats) whom they have never met and likely will never meet?" scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e...

"We argue that it is important for scholars to consider and apply retrodiction consciously and thoughtfully, by explicitly stating what they would expect to see in as-yet-unexamined or unavailable sources."

"It's morality all the way down"

"it is worth noting that we, along with most of the other authors, are liberals... those of us on the left side of the political spectrum need to pay special attention"