Two possible images of the future | Continue reading
People today are fighting the temptations of a new economy. With Twitter and TikTok a click away, we need self-control to get anything done. There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato … | Continue reading
Modern politicians need to be Tiger Kings | Continue reading
(Deep breath) OK, new working paper is out. If I seem excited, I’ve been planning this since 2007…. | Continue reading
It's been so long since you called her | Continue reading
It is uncomfortable to think that your work might be on a Nazi reading list. What should geneticists do about this? | Continue reading
To reinvent scientific publishing, the technical problems are already solved | Continue reading
News from the original steampunk | Continue reading
I and Mich Tvede have a new working paper out called Technology of Cultural Transmission I: the Printing Press. This is one of a series of papers growing out of my work on Wyclif’s Dust the book. Hence the “I” in the title: there are sequels to come. | Continue reading
In part one of this series I talked about how Victorian society enforced its values and sanctioned violators. Part two described how it transmitted those values. In this (I promise) last part, we’ll look at the outcomes. Who, whom? Lenin said we should always ask “who, whom?” Who … | Continue reading
A tale of two European cities | Continue reading
A mind-expanding book | Continue reading
There is an extant meme about early human history, that the invention of agriculture was a huge mistake. Noah Yuval Hariri popularized the idea in Sapiens. He pointed out that ancient foragers were “taller and healthier than their peasant descendants”. Foragers also suffered less … | Continue reading
There’s a really widespread belief in the social sciences that discourse matters, that language and narrative isn’t just a transparent medium through which we view the world, but also something that creates winners and losers, and is therefore fought over. Michel Foucault is the … | Continue reading
The last post was about deep structural reasons for the end of the Victorian cultural system. Here, I’ll discuss the unpredictable role of people and events. In every society, some people get listened to and copied. We listen to the rich and powerful, because we want to be like t … | Continue reading
HOW DID SATAN TAKE OVER | Continue reading
I put on my wizard hat 🧙♂️ | Continue reading
One day, the all-wise Emperor decided to test the perspicacity of his advisers, and he announced that he was having a new set of clothes made. When the Imperial Clothing Advisory Group was brought in to see the finished product, there was an awkward silence. The Group’s Secretary … | Continue reading
At the excellent Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences conference on Thursday and Friday, a late discussion raised an awkward issue: when you say you study the genetics of behaviour, eyebrows get raised. People don’t always like what we do. Now, academics are a quite confo … | Continue reading
Two friends spend an ordinary evening at the pub. But who is their companion? | Continue reading
Warning: this is a long post, split over two parts. Part II is coming soon. David Reinstein points me at a 2016 exchange between Bryan Caplan and Scott Alexander over a fine point of nomenclature: is the culture that is taking over the world “Western” or “universal”? Here’s Scott … | Continue reading
The former Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, gave the Reith lectures 2020, with the title How We Get What We Value. His thesis is that society has lost its way, putting financial values above human ones: “the drift from moral to market sentiments” risks “the undercutting of … | Continue reading
We aren’t starving for quantity, we’re drowning in garbage | Continue reading
Here’s Scott Alexander grading his Trump predictions, and then assessing his grading performance: According to my own judgment, I usually did better on predictions about race, and worse on other things. An optimistic take on this is that race has become so emotionally charged tha … | Continue reading
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat... | Continue reading
My previous post looked at how the Victorians enforced their values. Equally important are the institutions which taught those values in the first place, including the family, the school and the wider society. Families In early modern Europe, the family was basically an economic … | Continue reading
I wrote slightly satirically about the risks of doing controversial research. My working paper with Abdel Abdellaoui probably fits this category. It gives evidence for natural selection in modern societies, and it shows that it is concentrated among low-income people, people with … | Continue reading
Thought bubbles expose you to random, passing contents of my brain. Oh, did I say "bubble"? | Continue reading
Once upon a time, the inhabitants of the island began to suffer from malaria. Nobody knew exactly what malaria was caused by. Was it the newly introduced habit of wearing tricorn hats? The craze for bagpipes? Or was it the recent fashion for swamp parties? Whatever it was, the de … | Continue reading
Two Tang dynasty poets are getting drunk again | Continue reading
Forerunners of modern social science include (checks notes) Rudyard Kipling and Robert Baden-Powell? | Continue reading