Reading The Enigma of Reason. Pretty good so far. Not incredibly surprising to me so far. To be clear, their argument is somewhat orthogonal to the whole ‘rationality’ debate you may be familiar with from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work (e.g., see Heuristics and Biases).
One of the major problems in analysis is that rationality, reflection and ratiocination, are slow and error prone. To get a sense of that, just read ancient Greek science. Eratosthenes may have calculated to within 1% of the true circumference of the world, but Aristotle’s speculations on the nature of reproduction were rather off.
You may be as clever as Eratosthenes, but most people are not. But you probably accept that the world is round and 24,901 miles around. If you are not American you probably are vague on miles anyway. But you know what the social consensus is, and you accept it because it seems reasonable.
One of the points in cultural evolution work is that a lot of the time rather than relying on your own intuition and or reason, it is far more effective and cognitively cheaper to follow social norms of your ingroup. I only bring this up because unfortunately many pathologies of our political and intellectual world today are not really pathologies. That is, they’re not bugs, but features.
But I do suspect that the human bias toward trusting social wisdom is less useful in a world as fast changing and protean as ours. The math is pretty clear that in a stable environment there is no gain to reinventing wheels, as opposed to learning and believing what always works. Where individual learning and cognition are useful is in a situation where parameters are changing constantly, and folk wisdom leads you astray.
The Languages of Political Islam in India c.1200–1800 is only $5.99 on Kindle. I have no idea how Amazon figures out which academic books to discount highly, and which not to, but it’s always something I keep an eye out for.
RV dwellers in Palo Alto neighborhood forced to motor on and a reflection by a Stanford post-doc how difficult it is to make ends meet. One response is “we need affordable housing.” The reality is that you don’t need anything targeted, and special-built housing for the poor inevitably is subject to shortages. What is needed is more housing. But for various reasons incumbents between San Francisco and San Jose don’t want development.
Viral NRA ad sparks controversy. People are very freaked out on my Twitter timeline (I mostly follow liberals since I mostly follow scientists). Some people are saying that this is white supremacy in action. At this point it is useful to step outside of your socio-political bubble. For the past few years the dominant Left discourse has suffused all injustice with the term “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” At some point you desensitize people who aren’t already fully on board with you
If 2011’s Rise Of The Planet of the Apes was filmed today I wonder if CRISPR/Cas9 would play a role?
I will be filling up the #SMBE17 hashtag tomorrow.
Bringing Neanderthals to Life: The Sculptures of Elisabeth Daynès. Neanderthals are depicted as having straight hair and African hominins with wooly hair. Is this justified? Is wooly hair the ancestral state?
Since wooly hair is found in many disparate human populations it probably is ancestral. But it would be nice to have more than a hunch or phylogenetic inference based on extant distributions of the trait.