Talked to Trevor Phillips @news.sky.com this morning about the dictators' network (not sure why they chose this headline)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qut...

Wonderful essay via @draliceevans.bsky.social

"Reaching educated homes across the country, women novelists helped make equal partnerships deeply appealing."

Social norms matter, and storytelling plays a powerful role in them.

www.ggd.world/p/reader-i-m...

Perplexity AI: The stability of liberal democracy compared to the fragility of authoritarian dictatorship.

www.perplexity.ai/search/the-s...

"I’ve spent the last, say, 20–30 years trying to encourage sociologists to be more open to incorporating understandings from biology and from the other life sciences... It’s completely compatible with our concerns about inequality and social justice"

"When I hear young scholars in conferences preface a remark by saying that everyone knows that the value-free ideal is dead, I scratch my head... this approach gives up on one of the central features of science that makes it worthy of our trust, namely, its striving toward the value-free ideal"

What can architecture teach us about cultural evolution?

www.ggd.world/p/can-archit...

Adam Kirsch on the double standards over settler colonialism vis-à-vis the West and the rest (starts at 1:19:34):

youtu.be/4q3tzyND9R4?...

@hooverinstitution.bsky.social

During most of the vast history of humanity, technologies have evolved gradually, not through leaps of genius, but slow cultural adaption.

Before the scientific method, easy communication & printed books, innovation happened at the level of societies, not people. www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdf...

“TWENTY-FIVE years ago, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics.”

“i’ll put it on my list”

@neilabrams.bsky.social on leftists' inner imperialist:

www.readthedetox.com/p/when-progr...

Hi all 👋

I’m a cultural & evolutionary scientist obsessed with 2 ideas:

1) humans are the only species with religion
2) within our religious species, atheism comes naturally

I wrote a book on that, here’s a short 🧵 with some fun book tidbits. Enjoy & share!

💙📚
🧪

www.amazon.com/Disbelief-Or...

I'm teaching BICYCLE THIEVES tomorrow. Here are V. F. Perkins' on-point comments on neorealism:

'To condemn [reality] does not demand falsification. [...] Facts are facts; our imagination makes use of them, but they are not designed a priori to serve it.’

God knows what he'd have made of 2024 😬

A bunch of sex offenders, a quack doctor, a fake wrestling executive, a crackpot anti-vaccine conspiracist who beheaded a whale, and some cable TV hosts serving a narcissistic authoritarian felon sexual abuser who loves dictators and routinely incites violence. What could go wrong?

What interests me is the world and humanity. Not who is better or worse, Israel or the Palestinians. Not who is more antisemitic, or anything like that. But what can make the world better.

PNAS special feature: Half a Century of Cultural Evolution
www.pnas.org/topic/565

“When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty.”

— Confucius

the trend towards monopoly and corruption also explains the hostility to liberalism. the thing about liberal neutrality is that it is an obstacle to the kind of patronage relationships that are facilitated by corruption.

LIberalism only works in high-trust societies.

High trust-societies only exist where crime is properly mitigated.