New blog post (link in bio): How Intention Matters
(even for consequentialists)

My latest, for COMPACT, says all I have to say about the encampment protests.

Before going into that, I think it's important to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in #Gaza that the protests are 'about.' The Biden Administration has belatedly joined most of the rest…

Either Cofnas merits academic freedom like so many other academics, or his work is beyond the pale. But its unprincipled to view his work as beyond the pale and defend his freedom only for instrumental reasons.

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/…

manvir singh I studied meta ethics and became a nihilist, but it has never affected my behaviour. I always try to be nice

Loved this - fantastico⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Anyone experienced an existential or ethical destabilization after studying/learning about the psychological or evolutionary foundations of moral intuitions? I'm interested in that feeling and how people reconcile evolutionary debunking with the desire to be moral.

This is an incredible piece of writing

This afternoon the Accelerate team took our AI Café to Christ's College where we met with graduate students and answered their queries about using AI in their research. Many thanks to Marcella Montagnese for hosting! Interested in holding an AI café at your college? Get in touch!

Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson (preprint 2024) 'Rethinking ostensive communication in an evolutionary, comparative, and developmental perspective'
osf.io/preprints/psya… via Center for Open Science

I suspect simple failures in estimating representativeness - e.g. the representativeness of one's experiences and beliefs, and the representativeness of truths, images, and videos encountered in media - are more important drivers of popular misperceptions than 'misinformation'.

“They wanted to know if I was a communist or a capitalist. I said “Well, I’m very young and I’d just like to find out the truth about both and choose when I’m older.”” ♥️

Dan Williams manvir singh I write a bit about this (and review some of the evidence for nomadic egalitarian bands as a modal social org) in a critique of The Dawn of Everything, which makes some similar points

theconversation.com/the-origins-of…

How gullible are people? If you’ve been following Twitter recently (or um…The New Yorker?) you might have seen that lots of people think: not so much!

In a forthcoming paper (philarchive.org/rec/PORBDC), Eric Mandelbaum and I argue for the opposite view:

Does anyone know of good recent developments or critiques of this (excellent) article by manvir singh and Luke Glowacki, which argues 👇 that there was much greater social and political diversity among Late Pleistocene humans than orthodoxy assumes?
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Why is trust in US institutions—esp colleges—collapsing?

Here’s a theory. The 21st c has became the age of the unfocused institution—the age of mission inflation, goal ambiguity, and complex orgs losing any clear sense of priority, or identity.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Dan Williams 😸'it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis'
archive.ph/ATyH2#selectio…

'The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.'

Happy birthday to one of the GOATs.

In this excellent essay and review, Erik Hoel makes the provocative and interesting point that the informal gossip-based social power admired by anarchists looks a lot like the oppressive world of Mean Girls.
astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-re…

Here is what he actually said 👇 - which is completely reasonable and refreshing.

Re-reading Appiah's review of 'The Dawn of Everything'. It really is one of the most devastating and beautifully written book reviews in recent years. nybooks.com/articles/2021/…