Rob Sica
Knowledge would have little allure if we did not have to overcome so much shame on the way to acquiring it. -Nietzsche
- "Only by treating violence as a form of strategic behavior, rather thanas a moral aberration, can scholarship avoid the selective blindness that has charac-terized much post–Cold War analysis."
- 🐍"That the ideal critical thinker might lie, equivocate, or otherwise mislead does not undercut their standing as ideal, as long as the relevant mental dispositions remain intact."
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- Reposted by Rob SicaThe belief that evolutionary psychology makes unfalsifiable hypotheses is old, but deeply misconceived: New paper by @costellowilliam @ProfDavidBuss et al. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
- "For ages, we've pictured our ancestors as living in small, equal societies, sharing everything around campfires without bosses... New research in this century challenges these old ideas, suggesting our deep past was far more diverse than we ever imagined"
- "the progressive scientific movement as currently instantiated has proven a very pernicious and difficult idol for researchers who want to understand Islamophobia"
- "The risk is that legitimate concerns about integrity become entangled with coercive policing of style, fueling punitive responses disproportionate to the available evidence."
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- 🥒"It may seem rather strange to imagine that the human penis developed, at least in part, because men observed each other's and drew crucial decisions from them. And yet, that's exactly what this hypothesis suggests."
- "I think people intuitively sense that fact-checking is a technocratic non-solution. It addresses the surface manifestation of a problem while leaving the deeper dynamics untouched."
- 🔪"In any case, even if mismatches were a big issue, it is unclear whether intellectuals would be much better at getting over them than the masses. After all, intellectuals have their own highbrow versions of junk food and misinformation."
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- 😼🔪"My experience suggests that social psychologists, like many in the soft sciences and humanities, are happiest when they are piously accusing people of this or that flavor of bigotry... 'oh, sure, you deny being racist, but I have reaction time data that say different!'"
- Reposted by Rob SicaAfter 20 years as psychology's golden child, ego depletion collapsed. Now it's back...with a catch. The secret? Make people work for 30-40 minutes instead of 5. In other words, we finally discovered fatigue. New post on the redemption tour.
- Chastening corrective to the self-serving temptation to regard bs as bs all the way down... 🔪"If deceptive signals of sacred values contain valid cues of real values, the deception can symbiotically persist." osf.io/preprints/ps...
- "When we cooperate to build concentration camps or gulags, it’s terrible. Cooperation is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or ill."
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- "the fear of spiders is most likely secondary to the fear of scorpions and may largely represent a byproduct of scorpion-driven fear"
- "Indiscriminate pejorative language and moral panic shut down dialogue about the underlying causes of students’ bot dependence. But it has deep, tangled roots. The fall began long ago."
- "Even if you don't get along with your neighbor, that should not stand in the way of preventing the destruction of your town." osf.io/preprints/ps...
- “the genuine solution to the problem of the reality of the external world consists in the insight that this is no problem at all, but rather an absurdity”
- Reposted by Rob SicaFascinating! These folks are essentially arguing that LLMs, which millions of people evidently find useful, are useless. I'll be assigning this to my students as a perfect example of how insufferable and wrong smart people with PhDs can be. This smug attitude is exactly why populists are winning.
- I enjoyed trying to convince the coiner of the term "stochastic parrots" that this isn't an apt label for LLMs. You can watch here or listen on the @nonzeronews.bsky.social podcast. I think you'll agree that I was fighting an uphill battle. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwfS...
- 🦜🙈"there is no guarantee that human intelligence is not itself a sophisticated version of a stochastic parrot"
- "There is a risk that in promulgating the idea that LLMs are 'bullshit machines'—irredeemable bullshitters through-and-through—we might induce the public to underestimate rather than overestimate the ability of LLMs to produce sound information."
- Reposted by Rob Sica🔺 New preprint 🔺 Why does poverty increase time discounting? With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can! A quick 🧵
- "liberal democracies have entered a 'post-trust' era... the mistrust is not entirely unwarranted, as the epistemic infrastructure of contemporary liberal democracies is increasingly dysfunctional"
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- "Indeed, counter-intuitively, morality itself might be to blame for many of the greatest evils."
- "The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that #Nietzsche had an awareness of Wundt's work and even aspired to capture the interests of the experimental psychologist."
- 💥"The benefit of the valid cue could outweigh the cost of the deceptive signal, creating a kind of symbiotic deception."
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- 🔪"A peer review mafia... Implicit bias papers (especially early on) were most likely reviewed primarily by implicit bias insiders. This is why it took almost 20 years before criticisms of implicit bias began to get traction."
- 🔪"the threat to moral philosophy is greater than philosophers have hitherto acknowledged"
- Reposted by Rob SicaNew review paper led by @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social: Mental health awareness campaigns reduce stigma but can also lead to problematic self-diagnosis and symptom misinterpretation. These trade-offs matter, especially for adolescents. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- "Treating neutrality itself as censorship misidentifies the problem."
- "Your mind is full of crap that you rely on for your life and all the choices you make." 🐘🧠
- "This study is the first to suggest that clinical traits, such as borderline personality traits, may be linked to miscalibration in the shame system."
- "The foreseeable danger comes not from AIs but from those humans in which predatory programs for dominance have been triggered" Edge.org www.edge.org/response-det...
- "Not only do gene-culture coevolution theorists bite the bullet, but they do so gleefully... The novelty of this idea -- maladaptive culture spreads because we are adapted for culture -- makes it all the more attractive."
- "Paradoxically, her anger and resentment may be the only thing affirming his status as a moral agent, preventing the relationship from degenerating into just a relationship between a sick person and their caregiver."
- What Do We Owe the Insufferable? When mental illness exhausts our emotional capacities www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/what-do-we...
- "knock off the technological determinism"
- Reposted by Rob SicaNEW EPISODE OUT NOW! Today we begin a new series asking why contemporary political philosophy struggles to make sense of the deepest problems of politics and exploring how the history of ideas might help. Political theorist Paul Sagar suggests we start with Aristotle. Find us at...🎧 ppfideas.com
- "Whether fun experimentation with your own juices, or, as some health experts warn, a risky viral trend, in the end vabbing is really just the smell of a vagina on a wrist."
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From the Mixed-Up Files of Jeffrey E. Epstein statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/01/31/f... - Enjoyed the book back in 2013 when it was (self-)published: amazon.com/Evilicious-C... I don't care a whit about the morality of authors when deciding whether to read their books -- the impressive array of blurbs made the purchase a no-brainer: daviddobbs.net/smoothpebble...
- The Epstein files apparently contain at least one complete manuscript 🧪 #AcademicSky www.justice.gov/epstein/file...
- Leda Cosmides in a talk last year...
- "One of my greatest research goals is to use the science of human intimacy to normalize the idea of heartbreak as a serious threat to our physical and mental health."
- "I'm optimistic that if we just turn our gaze a little bit for a very short amount of time in a few years we could basically solve most of psychiatry... why evolution left us with these mental disorders"
- 🔪"much of what philosophers actually do, as #Nietzsche reminds us, is to offer the architecture of systems that are simply post hoc justifications for their antecedent normative commitments... on nonrational grounds, and hold them tenaciously, in answer to what are in essence psychological needs"
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- "when you're in a coalition, what's important is not only that our coalition triumphs, but that I myself triumph inside the coalition and have power" archive.ph/yjwfv#select...
- "This is what a free society should aim for: not a perfect public sphere without falsehoods (which has never existed), but a public sphere with enough openness, transparency, and decentralized checking power to ensure that lies — especially from the top — cannot become the permanent record."
- "Remaining entangled in the epistemic vice of self-deception for purely partisan reasons undermines the Left’s own supposed aims... ideological capture... oversimplified analyses which collapse when even lightly probed"
- ⚡️"an often-overlooked aspect of evolutionary psychology: It holds itself to a higher standard than many other human behavioral sciences regarding evidentiary burden" psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
- "...a performative necessity of critique. We trust metacriteria like reflexivity and the avoidance of learning blockages because they represent the best available results of the cumulative learning processes we have undergone so far. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- "cultural products that are explicitly designed to evoke specific emotions provide a powerful and efficient way to study the input conditions of evolved psychological mechanisms"
- "this paper has brought together evidence from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, hormonal studies, cross-cultural surveys, and analyses of sexual orientation to demonstrate that biological factors play a foundational role in shaping sex and gender"
- "This state of mind ensures that one’s own ‘virtuous’ view is not subject to scrutiny or change and that followers restrict or ignore contrary views thereby supporting claims which are manifestly false... MAGA... DEI"
