I have a new pre-print, in response to the below BBS Article. "Myth as Model: Group-Level Interpretive Frameworks"
I argue that the primary function of myth is to serve as transmitters of tacit knowledge and to provide substance for in-group analogies.
“Our Roots Run Deep”: Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment by Amine Sijilmassi, Lou Safra, Nicolas Baumard is available at
Proposals are due Thursday, February 8, 2024
More info:
I am not going to believe that science is democratized, opened up, decentralized, disincentivized, decolonized, uncorrupted, or anything like that until this lady gets a Nobel prize.
Just got yelled at in a coffee shop for plugging my laptop into the wall. Lady was seriously pissed off with a "you should've known this" tone.
Is that a thing here in the UK? Like I can't just go into a place and plug my laptop in?
This blew up outside my usual circle and a few people are asking who this is. It's Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of a website called Sci-Hub where you can access and download most of the world's gatekept academic papers for free.
Seriously? The Consumer Product Safety Commission is seriously going to consider banning gas stoves because a single meta-analysis, published without code, published without an available dataset, with a single month of peer review, that came out in a journal 19 days ago?
One in eight cases of childhood asthma attributable to gas stoves used in the home
Exposure to gas stoves is dangerous, the stats for restaurant workers will be off the charts when they get around to measuring them
She has done more for diversity in science than everyone else on the globe combined. We went from students in developing countries blowing up forums and message boards asking if anyone could get them access to a paper to being able to write a paper or thesis fully independently.
Following the Challenger disaster, the Rogers Commission took four months to find a culprit btwn four contractors.
13 minutes after the disaster, Morton-Thiokol's price on the market sank while the other three stabilized.
Morton-Thiokol was later implicated as the culprit.
I just finished Incomplete Nature. My second attempt in five years.
All I can say is I'm left utterly dumbfounded and speechless, nearly on the verge of tears at the completeness of this book and its explanatory arc. I have never read anything like it and wonder if I will again.
Someone, my guess is the DoD or CIA, is selling a 6,000 acre "ranch" in Tennessee that includes:
- an airstrip w/ control tower and two hangars
- four guard towers
- fiber optic wiring
- paved system of roads
- numerous wells and springs for fresh water
@BDSixsmith
@ellegist
Looking at this graph thinking, "hey I'm in my 20s and none of these describe me!" Then realizing, indeed, women aren't dating you.
Michel Foucault on pandemics:
"But there was also a political dream of the plague.. the penetration of regulation into the smallest details of everyday life...masks put on and taken off.. to see perfect discipline functioning, rulers dreamt of the plague."
I can't believe this. A student just showed me an assignment their professor posted requiring them to upload proof of voter participation detailing who and what they voted for.
Please don't ever do this. It's fucking illegal.
Color differentiation is controlled by three cone cells in the retina. Genes encoding these are on the sex differentiated X chromosome.
Up to 15% of the world's womem have functional genes for tetrachromacy, four cone cells, potentially extending their range of color perception.
I'm generally of the opinion that Amazon is not listening to your real-world conversations to sell you stuff, but the other day I spoke with a bartender about a very particular object, which I had not looked up: an L-shaped table.
Guess what's been recommended to me.
Every time I hear about neo-Marxists coming to take over the biological sciences, I try to remind myself of the time actual Marxists took over the biological sciences.
John Maynard Smith on WD Hamilton's breakthroughs
What does altruism look like? Virtue? I think we confused ourselves when we thought it looked like Academy Award winners talking about climate change on stage.
Dr. Giampiero Giron, ends retirement at age 85 to treat COVID-19 patients in Italy.
"They asked for my availability, and I said yes. When you decide to be a doctor in life, you get involved. I swore an oath. Afraid of getting sick? Then it is better not to be a doctor.”
I have a long list of colleagues, people I work with, gloating over violence and death, who I will not be able to look at the same way after all this is said and done. I just can't believe this.
The laziest take alive today is that our ancestors had "no problem" killing animals for food. On the contrary, in more cases I've read than not, animistic beliefs demand a unique empathy with animals that is otherwise absent in the "developed" psyche.
Entered a Lego competition on campus where I spent like two weeks constructing the Konstantinbasilika in Trier, Germany.
Went in to submit today and realized with horror I am likely competing against literal children. I just basically Gears of War'd someone's Teletubby fun time.
One of the better papers on rat kings and their formation. The idea is that they are formed at nesting sites, often during winter when tails become frozen together.
Every time someone says, "Haha can't function without my caffeine," I immediately think of that time NASA gave spiders a bunch of drugs to see what kinds of webs they'd make.
I definitely have COVID. I didn't get the test results, but have woken up with a complete lack of a sense of smell to the point of not being able to smell anything directly below my nose. The full loss of a sensory mode is somewhat incredible, I thought people were exaggerating.
Halfway into The Count of Monte Cristo seriously asking myself why people considered this piece of garbage a "classic" when I realized I was reading an abridged version of the book intended for middle schoolers.
I'm gonna try and start this one over.
Among Australian Aborigines, in Papua New Guinea, and Melanesia, men hunt sharks aboard miniscule outriggers, luring them in with rattles or dummy rats made of coconuts and catching them by hand.
Video excerpt from
@Slicedocs
I've come to the conclusion that the best way of marketing yourself as a scholar, whether in academis or otherwise, is to make sure people can trivialize your research in exactly one or two words.
For example:
This is all clearly military junk. What was it going to be used for? Military drills? A People's Republic of Pineland in Tennessee? Venezuelan rebel training? Your guess is as good as mine.
An anthropologist's greatest trick is his ability to use ethnography to "debunk" an entire cross-cultural pattern or human universal by providing a single exception to the rule. This is why no one argued with Levi-Strauss, he had a memory with infinite ethnographic examples.
Disappoints me that most people can't name the birds in their own backyard. You spent years of your life memorizing the names of 150 Pokemon and now don't even know who your neighbors are?
Perhaps of note:
The Nobel Peace Prize accepts nominations from, among others, University professors, members of national governments, etc
I would support a grassroots effort to have Alexandra Elbakyan nominated by as many people as possible
New pre-print w/ us,
@FinchesofDarwin
&
@Dyep76
Humans worldwide mimic their prey's signals to deceive them. We believe this is important for the evolution of deception, theory of mind, and language.
To show you, here's a thread of our favorite examples:
They say there's between 5,000-15,000 blue whales in the current global population when approximately 29,000 were killed in a single year 100 years ago.
The pre-whaling population was something like 250k.
Serious question, because I haven't seen much discussions about the alternatives.
If not Jordan Peterson, who should dejected single young men be listening to for advice?
Kind of crappy how many screwed up stereotypes about the South that we've allowed to just propagate and take over peoples' perceptions of an entire region of the US.
There's no honor in academia. Don't like your ideas but can't disprove them? Instead of publishing in a peer-reviewed setting, they'll full-roundabout the entire process and just deplatform you. This whole episode has been nothing but disgraceful.
I have just learned that the mob has been successful in getting social scientist Noah Carl fired from his position at Cambridge. The statement from St. Edmund's apologises for the "hurt" caused by his appointment. Read the back-story here
The highly r-selected mites of the genus Adactylidium are born pregnant without any males. How is this possible?
The mother actually produces several offspring within her body, one of which is a male. Prior to emergence, the male impregnates all his sisters. He dies thereafter.
#Evolution
Thought Exercise:
You have just one tweet to tell (introduce) your favorite Evolution example/story to a 10-12 year old student.
What do you choose?
Please share it as a reply to this tweet. I’m eager to see what you think!
#RTs
are welcomed as well
#scicomm
The CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon were just asked if they believe China steals technology from U.S. firms.
Cook: We haven't experienced it.
Pichai: Neither have we.
Zuckerberg: Yes, absolutely.
Bezos: I've read that.
If I ever come across a foreign food I've never had before, I only hope I have nearly the amount of joy the people in these
@ReacTistan
videos have when trying Mexican food.
Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first year Rationalist. You finished Yud and believe computational theory of mind and Bayesian learning are equivalent. That’s what you’ll believe until next month when you get into Gigerenzer and then eventually into Rumelhart and PDP.
Known as drive lanes, people in North America have been laying out lines of stones in the tundra to drive caribou to hunting blinds during migrations for thousands of years. Similar structures have been found in Norway dating to about the same time.
@scottjshapiro
I had an ecology professor whose class was running over and someone tried to tell him there were anxious students outside.
"Ask them what class they're waiting for."
"They're waiting for rocket science."
"Well this is the one subject harder than that, so they get to wait."
The nuanced view of great man theory is that great men are everywhere in a continual string of greatness waiting to seize upon times which have come.
The tragedy is that to get to Martin Luther, you have to burn through many Jan Hus', all of which had thought that time had come.
This video about Vikings, cod, and Vitamin D has one of the best short explanations of cultural evolution I've seen in a Youtube documentary (or a documentary of any sorts for that matter).
I keep hearing about how biological men don't have any physical strength advantage over women in 2019...
So watch me DESTROY the British Women's deadlift record without trying.
P.S. I identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight. Don't be a bigot. 😂
86 billion neurons. Not million. Billion. In every human.
The brain is complex on a level that is incomprehensible to human beings. I mean that literally.
We are easily some of the most complex things to ever exist, and we don't even realize it.
If you know of anyone who does this, contact your Supervisor of Elections with proof. Even offering extra credit very clearly falls under vote buying and should be kept away from the classroom.
For several hundred years, important and actionable forces of the world like "energy", "temperature", and "heat" were entirely nebulous in their causation, but predictive in terms of measurement.
Genetics was understood well before we knew about DNA. Even before that, breeding.
Twitter is weird....there's literally nowhere else I can think of where you can ask the giants of your field what are otherwise irrelevant questions and they'll tweet you back.
Been lurking Substack... there are people doing better ethnographies and thicker descriptions of genuine online communities in their free-time that put ethnography to shame.
Cultural Anthropology will end up just becoming the imperialist meme it complains about.
Wasn't Elon's big thing when taking over this website "muh bots"? Why are there so many more now? Just a constant onslaught of bot messages and crypto tags.