Simian Seminar

@alba_superbus_ @EPoe187 @bronzeagemantis I’m not so sure. Class is a good example.

While for the sake of truth I think facts about racial disparities should be discussed, it’s not good at all politically. In fact it’s impossible in the present circumstances. Only a myth of race blindness is workable. You won’t convince some populations that they are inferior by birth and deserve their station in life. You won’t even convince “decent people” from high achieving populations of this. On the other hand discrimination to offset perceived past discrimination or natural inequalities is also felt to be wrong (although I think it would be relatively easy to convince modern populations to accept affirmative action to offset natural inequalities, which is another reason pushing this with a political intention is a big mistake). The only solution in short run is race blindness, stopping and reversing all racialization of politics and society. This isn’t my own preference by the way but a statement on fact. The “HBD position” is an impossibility politically and culturally today. Public hypocrisy is the only way out that will be accepted unless you are ready to go the Nietzsche and Gobineau route (and you are not).

@EPoe187 @alba_superbus_ @bronzeagemantis Highlighting cross-cutting alliances/causes (also permanent, and in many cases capture diffs better than race) is the type of move that can reduce racial categoriz’n even when race is a stable feature of the social env. Agree that race will always be an attractive explanation.

Sentence #1 of Adaptation and Natural Selection by G. C. Williams, a foundational text for the adaptationist program.

@kohn_gregory With you. I’d also argue that what’s important is the subset of relationships which have promoted replicative order - that highly functionally constrained sets of relationships have persisted across generations.

@kohn_gregory I’m not entirely clear what position you are arguing against (a lay view?). Seems like a truism that the genome can’t ‘independently’ cause the phenotype w/o a highly functionally structured env (from the gene’s pov) (including other antecedent products of the gxe causal interxn)

@kohn_gregory Sorry. I read your post as denying a priori the role of the genome in jointly causing the phenotype along with env inheritances. But you’re taking issue with the pure genetic determinism implied in the last line of the quoted post.

@robsica What’s a concrete example of that tradeoff?

"ingroup signaling sometimes frustrates the production of effective alliance-serving propaganda when the two goals come into conflict" tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

@kohn_gregory Though, provided a certain set of environmental regularities, the beaver genome will produce beaver-typical control systems whereas the portobello genome will not.

@gmiller In your view, what are the primary functions of a university president?

A little rant about American universities, in the light on the recent Congressional testimony debacle: Today I learned that Harvard President Claudine Gay seems to have published only 11 peer-reviewed journal papers in her entire academic career. 'So what?', you might ask. Well, that's about the number you'd normally need to get hired as a first-year tenure-track assistant professor at a decent state university. It's the number I published in the 12 months before I got tenure. It's about the number that my more workaholic colleagues publish every year, decade after decade, throughout their careers. And it's less than 1% as many papers as get published by outstanding researchers like behavior geneticist Nick Martin (with over 1,500 journal papers). The situation at Harvard is not unusual. The leaders of academia are not typically leading academics, in the sense of highly productive researchers or widely respected teachers. One might say they are career bureaucrats - but that would misunderstand their crucial ideological function. The American people need to understand that in modern universities, both public and private, administrators function more like party political officers in communist Russian or Chinese universities. They are selected, throughour their careers, largely for their political commitments, and their willingness to enforce them. Like Cold War commissars, their allegiance is to the party, not to academia where they happen to work. I mean 'party' quite literally: the Democratic party. Most American university administrators are loyal Democrats, and can't really imagine why anyone wouldn't be. Very few are Republicans or Libertarians. And an increasing proportion of them are fully woke identitarian Leftists: they often launched their careers with a short series of papers on woke topics, using woke ideological frameworks, published in woke journals - before turning to the administrative track that offers much more political power to propagandize, indoctrinate, and control. 'So what?', you're might ask. I've seen many calls for university administrators to enforce the rules of classical liberalism and free speech more fairly. This is like asking a Soviet-era commissar to abandon their Communist party allegiance, and to develop an entirely new identity and ethos grounded in an ideology that they have spent their entire career fighting. It will not happen. Political animals do not change their spots. University presidents who have prioritized amassing ideological power over producing academic research will not suddenly rediscover the merits of open inquiry. They need to be fired, and replaced with academic leaders who are actually leading academics - rather than party political officers. mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the…

@Oliver_S_Curry Basin of attraction for a motivational system geared toward accumulating influence. Nearly everyone can imagine himself benefiting from the util-maximizing sacrifice of the most well-off, and the intuitive grammar is to entrust the utilitarian with control of the purse strings.

Why do utilitarians think we ought to maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number?

@DavidPinsof What types of charisma come to mind?

@SimianSeminar Yea there are certainly different types of charisma, but they seem (at least to me) to share an underlying essence, which probably explains why we use the same word for them.

Anybody have a good theory of what “charisma” is and why it’s so powerful? Seems really puzzling to me—almost like a Jedi mind trick.

@DavidPinsof Which of those is the not bs one

If you want to understand why almost everything is bullshit, and why some stuff is occasionally not bullshit, this is the place to start:

3 celebrations in 3 days! Congratulations to the brave & brilliant Leda Cosmides on her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

@alephlove Both trained in Santa Barbara

@SimianSeminar Interesting. What EP school are they from? And what do other EP think about this paper?

I’m curious, has any evolutionary psychologist comment on this paper? journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

@JaimieKrems Is male loneliness unusually high atm?

I’m glad more people are paying attention, but this👇why we need REAL DATA on (men’s) friendships—how they form, how they sustain, etc. Otherwise we remain in the “ANECDATAL” realm of people being like, so, yeah pickleball helped my dad be social… nytimes.com/2023/07/19/opi…