David Pinsof

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David Pinsof

David Pinsof

@DavidPinsof

Evolutionary social scientist, co-creator of @cah, co-host of Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast), blogs about bullshit at https://t.co/FODwrznZRX

Los Angeles, CA Katılım Kasım 2012
534 Takip Edilen4.4K Takipçiler
David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@robsica I do feel sad to see my beloved French squad fall short on this topic. If they have a weakness, imo, it’s an overemphasis on cooperative game theory relative to other kinds of game theory (e.g., coordination, alliances, zero-sum competition).
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Rob Sica
Rob Sica@robsica·
"[T]he French squad who have been doing some of the smartest and most ambitious evolutionary social science of the past decade. Their ecological approach to culture is brilliant... Their views on sexual morals, on the other hand, are weirdly strained..." chartyarps.substack.com/p/what-are-the…
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Maarten Boudry
Maarten Boudry@mboudry·
I maintain that @slatestarcodex is a better philosopher than most academics publishing in philosophy journals. This essay is a treasure trove of carefully chosen thought experiments and hypotheticals — genuine “intuition pumps” that will clarify your and my intuitions about art and aesthetic experience. astralcodexten.com/p/contra-every…
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Maarten Boudry
Maarten Boudry@mboudry·
Humans are not simply “good” or “evil.” Some of the worst atrocities in history are driven by moral conviction: empathy, solidarity, and a perceived duty to protect one’s own group. A fascinating new study on armed groups in Congo shows that many people who participate in genocidal violence are not psychopaths, but ordinary individuals motivated by loyalty, empathy, and the belief that they are doing good for their community.
Nicholas Decker@captgouda24

Violent people, soldiers, who are responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths, are not psychopaths. They are driven by empathy toward their own. To kill is a duty, justified by past actions. This paper is an extraordinary look into *why* genocide happens. 1/

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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@StefanFSchubert Okay, I see. But you haven’t given an argument for that view, which is why I was confused. So consider me, an evolutionary psychologist, unpersuaded.
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Stefan Schubert
Stefan Schubert@StefanFSchubert·
@DavidPinsof The article argues for that but I think general cognitive limitations play a central role
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Stefan Schubert
Stefan Schubert@StefanFSchubert·
I think evolutionary psychologists overrate specialised cognitive adaptations and underrate general cognitive limitations in their explanations. It's simply cognitively demanding to understand how people react to incentives, and what aggregate outcomes that leads to.
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@mboudry I mostly agree, but 1) most citizens have little incentive to learn counterintuitive economic truths (compared to economists + intellectuals), 2) it's hard to coordinate a coalition around a counterintuitive truth, and 3) markets are zero-sum insofar as status/power are zero-sum.
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Maarten Boudry
Maarten Boudry@mboudry·
Humans evolved intuitions about every domain of reality that affected our survival and reproduction. Those intuitions served us well in ancestral environments—but they often misfire in modern contexts evolution hasn’t had time to catch up with. That’s why science so often contradicts common sense. This is widely recognized in physics, and to some extent in biology, but largely overlooked in economics. Many of our “folk” intuitions simply aren’t equipped to grasp how modern markets function. See @PascalBoyerUSA's seminal paper in Behavioral & Brain Sciences. pascalboyer.net/articles/2018B… We misjudge trade, distrust profit, view markets in zero-sum terms, and apply small-group fairness instincts to vast, impersonal systems. newsletter.humanprogress.org/p/why-our-econ…
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Public Opinion Quarterly
Public Opinion Quarterly@poqjournal·
Does partisanship affect justifications of political violence? Berntzen et al. find that both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to justify identical acts of political violence when the victims are from the opposing party. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/nf…
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@robinhanson Also, the thing they want must be bad, and you’re bad for wanting it.
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Zachary Elwood
Zachary Elwood@apokerplayer·
Cards Against Humanity co-creator and evolutionary psychologist David Pinsof has some deep theories on status-seeking, humor, and more. I think you'll like this one.
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof

Had a great time chatting with Zachary Elwood on People who Read People. Youtube: @zacharyelwood/note/c-245864308" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@zacharyelwood… Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/car…

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Oliver Scott Curry
Oliver Scott Curry@Oliver_S_Curry·
Do you need God to be good? A meta-analysis of 701 effects across 237 samples (N = 811,663) finds a correlation of r = 0.13 between religiosity and prosociality, more with self-reported prosociality (r = 0.15) than with prosocial behavior (r = 0.06) doi.org/10.1037/bul000…
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@NTFabiano Another plausible interpretation: delusionally optimistic people are also delusionally optimistic about their mental health.
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@DrGipps Why couldn't an "animal appetitive world-exploring essentially-sensorimotor etc system" be a computer?
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Richard Gipps
Richard Gipps@DrGipps·
@DavidPinsof Perhaps the idea is it won’t wash to ascribe non-derivative intentional states to a system that isn’t itself an animal appetitive world-exploring essentially-sensorimotor etc system.
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@koenfucius I suspect this is why people in politics are motivated to paint their opponents' views as not merely different but wrong: to mobilize others against them.
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Koenfucius 🔍
Koenfucius 🔍@koenfucius·
Research by Molnar & Loewenstein suggests it’s not so much divergence of beliefs that segregates people, but the conviction others’ beliefs are *false*—negative feelings are much stronger when we think someone’s view is wrong rather than just different: buff.ly/qJfp92r
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mechanism
mechanism@ilinxing·
@DavidPinsof how objective can a 'tradeoff ratio' be? as an idealized theory, it involves never-obtaining 'potential states of affairs', which definitionally aren't objective features of the environment, but sophisticated ape speculation.
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Rob Sica
Rob Sica@robsica·
Guess it Indicates how cynical I am that the most devastating revision to my worldview Pinsof's Substack has forced upon me so far is abandonment of full-blown moral error theory (because incompatible with adaptationism) for (albeit still pretty folk-unfriendly) moral naturalism.
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Robin McKenna
Robin McKenna@rbnmckenna86·
planning on writing a new paper, which I don't think will be controversial at all
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David Pinsof
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof·
@danwilliamsphil @robsica The best evo accounts of moral emotions are implicitly realist, in that there are objective features of the environment (e.g., welfare trade-off ratios, social contracts) that moral emotions are attuned to. Evo explanations of illusory realism are much more handwavey & bad imo.
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Dan Williams
Dan Williams@danwilliamsphil·
@robsica Interesting. I don't get why adaptationism would be incompatible with moral error theory.
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Joe Szaka
Joe Szaka@joeszaka·
"If you watch lots of great movies, your desire for great movies will not diminish. No, you will become a film snob and watch 7-hour black-and-white films about the collapse of a farming collective in post-communist Hungary." 😂😂😂
David Pinsof@DavidPinsof

I wrote about enduring satisfaction, how it is impossible to obtain (sorry), how its impossibility was likely built into us by natural selection, and how self-help gurus can trick us into thinking they can provide it. (Link below).

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Keşfet

@robsica @mboudry @slatestarcodex @StefanFSchubert @lucsteels @WillRinehart @hendrycks @sebkrier