A parrot plays peekaboo with a neighbor's cat.

'There’s no harm in adding a trigger warning.”

Yes, there is, because: 1) there is little if any good scientific evidence that trigger warnings help students, and 2) it abets a kind of frailty in the students.

Who takes a class in this subject but cannot see bones? Who studies

Interesting paper. Would a Paris School perspective (tinyurl.com/58h6kwpt) on cultural learning & transmission result in a significantly different social epistemology?

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Recently there has been a reckoning about whether scientists, like evolutionary psychologist and population geneticists, are responsible for the 'bad' beliefs and violence of people who read and cite their work.
I don't think they are 🧵

Scientific racism is a blight on science & isn’t going to go away if scientists ignore it. So I’ve teamed up with Magdalena Hurtado, Dr Sarah Myers & Abbey Page to highlight & counter this problem by editing a special collection of Evolutionary Human Sciences. Please share CfP👇

Great discussion. Check out some of his stuff:

'Beware climate populism'
aeon.co/users/akos-sze…

'Institutions of epistemic vigilance: The case of the newspaper press'
tinyurl.com/3a4r7pbc

'When it comes to our partiality to our intimates, we are faced with an important difficulty in that what counts as an appropriately loving response is often judged relative to the extent to which those around us lavish their resources on their intimates.' books.google.com/books?id=QI8DE…

'after weighting each URL’s persuasive effect by its number of views, the impact of unflagged vaccine-skeptical content dwarfed that of flagged misinformation.'
Same logic we explain here
misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/resear…

Fresh out (OA and cover story)!
doi.org/10.1007/s12110…

Why are gambling odds the way they are?

I present a cultural evolutionary framework to explain why the odds in games of chance in premodern China appeared “designed” to ensure a moderate yet favorable house advantage.

Nice people over at The Monkey Dance podcast sat down with me to talk about lying and deception in the media and beyond - their channel is really cool!
youtube.com/watch?v=gkPmey…

'Popularity should be resisted over the need for evidence and caution. This requires strong leadership. Shutting down, or trying to shut down debate about serious clinical uncertainties—as has happened—is unacceptable.' bmj.com/content/385/bm…

classic Hopper

Inspired by my new paper on dating and morbid curiosity with Mitch Brown.

Why do some women write love letters to serial killers?

morbidlycuriousthoughts.com/p/why-some-wom…

How will this affect the election? I don't know (and neither do you). I do know, though, that after the election the effects will have been obvious all along.

'This trait has gone unnoticed by scholars working in vice epistemology... can help account for cases of epistemic apathy in everyday life, academia, politics, etc.' tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

What kind of university that warrants its name takes seriously claims that ideas and words can make a person legitimately 'unsafe.' It's preposterous. And typically this claim is used to silence people whose ideas one cannot refute with actual facts and logic.

'the most persuasive forms of misinformation are likely misleading claims published by mainstream sources subsequently pushed by well-networked supersharers' science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

'Countless conservative religious and political tracts have attempted to undermine Darwinian evolutionary theory... The myth of Darwin’s complicity in the crimes of Hitler, has, I believe, been thoroughly dispatched.' cambridge.org/core/books/dar…

It's striking how many supposed intellectuals still evaluate moral propositions in terms of their coalitional value instead of their truth value. (Like, 'it's good to earn lots of money and donate it to effective charities' is controversial bc earning money is coded right-wing.)

All The Right Movies 'The people we killed, there's nothing to be done about it. They have to accept it. Maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better, but it works: I've never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares.'
youtube.com/watch?v=AtCgMP…