Thinking about Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. It’s a good book. I’d recommend it. But a lot of the research highlighted pre-dates the era of the “reproducibility crisis.” That is, some of the positive results just didn’t end up being replicated after this book was written (more ethical behavior if you show people false eyes is mentioned, as are priming studies).
I think this is a general issue for anything written before 2015 that deals with psychology (unless it’s a book that to some extent tries to refute the ubiquity of overly sexy ideas, like The Invisible Gorilla).
Patrick Wyman has a podcast, The Fall of Rome Podcast. He comments on this weblog now and then. Recommended.
Over at Anatoly Karlin’s some confusion because his comments, from a Russian IP, were labeled “spam.” He thought I had banned him. Unfortunately, I don’t understand the logic of some comments labeled as spam, and I have to retrieve them many weeks later, as I check the spam folder only once a week or so. The ones with lots of links make sense, but sometimes there must be some semantic similarity with comment spam (and a lot of the spambots for a while had .ru addresses, so that explains why they don’t like Russian IP addresses).
Also, since for a while they thought I banned him some of his commenters who I had probably legitimately banned at some point decided to rant about how I don’t know anything about genetics or history and I’m a poo-poo head. There are lots of things you could criticize me for…but not knowing genetics or history are weird ones to fix upon. But hey, perhaps I’m the stupid one here with the blog that they were reading, while they, the anonymous commenters, are really so genius I can’t even Grokk their incandescent brilliance (there is a strange similarity in criticisms from both frog-Nazis and SJWs directed toward me as to my ignorance of all the facts they know).
Emails Show How An Ivy League Prof Tried To Do Damage Control For His Bogus Food Science. And Why We Find And Expose Bad Science. The researcher at the center of this scientific scandal actually seems like a decent human being from what I can tell. Unfortunately, he also seems to have likely been committing very basic statistical errors in his research and enabled a culture of sloppiness. The problem with not coming down with a hammer on a prominent professor at Cornell is that lenience will give the green light to more researchers that sloppiness and statistical shoddiness will “pay.”
If you don’t follow my RSS you might know, but I’m posting more at Brown Pundits and Secular Right.
I do have one opinion on Catalonia: seems like the government in Madrid took a low flame and sprayed gasoline all over it.
People regularly confuse that Africa has the most genetic diversity with the idea that African populations have the most genetic diversity among them in terms of ‘genetic distance.’ I realized an easy way to explain why this does not follow: Bantu populations diverged over the past 3,000 years, Eurasians over the past 40,000 years. The Eurasians went through a massive bottleneck, and so are less genetically diverse than all Sub-Saharan Africans. But the genetic distance between two Eurasian populations can be greater than between two Bantu populations because there is ten times as much time to accumulate between-group differences in the case of Eurasians than Bantus (in contrast, the high between-group difference among San Bushmen indicates really deep divergences).