Knowledge would have little allure if we did not have to overcome so much shame on the way to acquiring it. -Nietzsche
"if I am right that religious people self-attribute knowledge, then this undermines charity-based motivations for the make-believe view"
Self‐attributing religious knowledgePeople regularly profess belief in religious ideas. But do they merely think of themselves as believing, or do they think of themselves as possessing knowledge? I first argue that it is difficult to ....onlinelibrary.wiley.comWill be interesting to reconsider these editorials on the Vandy Report when the internal report on Anthropology appears.
Anthropology Today: Vol 42, No 4Click on the title to browse this issuerai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com🔪 Peter DeScioli calling bullshit on that recent study smearing evo psych: "In matters of truth, weighing the costs and benefits is called lying. In science, it is called falsifying conclusions, concealment of evidence, obstruction of scientific investigation, fraud, and corruption."
Evolutionary psychology did not make people blame the victim: comment on Persson and Hostler (2026) - Theory and SocietyA recent article concluded that watching a seven-minute clip from a professor’s lecture on the evolutionary psychology of human mating made participants blame a crime victim. This conclusion is not su...link.springer.com🔪"the strategic account proposes that mating-related concerns may unconsciously influence moral intuitions, which are then rationalized through proximate ideological or religious frameworks"
Concerns about Sexual Promiscuity Play an Underexplored Role in Opposition to AbortionAbortion is among the most divisive political issues in the United States, yet the psychological underpinnings of abortion attitudes remain poorly understood. Predominant accounts attribute abortion o...www.researchsquare.com"when we aim to draw out the implications of a particular psychological disposition or process, we may be engaged in ideal epistemology"
Mapping (very) social epistemology - Asian Journal of PhilosophyA map of a debate or conceptual domain is a representation that allows us to see the relationship between some of its elements. A good map can increase our understanding of the debate. In this paper, ...link.springer.com"political and moral beliefs that were classified as probabilistic rather than binary were associated with a more intellectually humble attitude toward those beliefs, even when controlling for the extremity of belief"
Intellectual Humility and Probabilistic BeliefIt is natural to express some beliefs in binary terms (P is either believed or not, e.g., “bribery is immoral”), and others in terms of a subjective probability (P has some probability of being true,....onlinelibrary.wiley.com🔪"Skepticism is justified... Left-wing academics will blame the right for undermining trust in academic experts. But the right couldn’t and wouldn’t be doing that if the academy weren’t so intellectually awful."
Cambridge University's DisgraceHere, I consider what we can learn from the case of Jason Arday.fakenous.substack.com🔪"almost religious, a matter of faith, not rationality"
Arday and the academyBeyond the culture warswww.whatkatydid.net🎯"We need to go back to first principles. We need to forget the identity politics, the DEI quotas and the tick-boxes, and support and fund what we do best – deepening knowledge of what is really happening in society and arguing why that matters."
In defence of sociologyThe Jason Arday fiasco threatens to undermine the discipline in which he ‘excelled’.www.spiked-online.com"By influencing whether multiple sources are treated as independent or redundant, priors may indirectly regulate the evidential weight assigned to repeated testimony." escholarship.org/uc/item/42b3...
🔪"Their more cleareyed peers acknowledge that higher ed’s own hands aren’t spotless."
Opinion | A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It (Gift Article)By protecting a star from plagiarism charges, a storied college undermined its values.www.nytimes.com🔪"But the moral compass is a very unfortunate metaphor. It always points in the direction you yourself deem right. Joseph Goebbels also thought his moral compass was right."
Filip Buekens: ‘Radicale ideeën gaan over aandacht en erkenning’‘De druk om je mond te houden, is zeer groot’: wie aan de universiteit de
progressieve prioriteiten niet volgt, kiest voor een moeilijkere weg.doorbraak.be"I’ve suggested that there’s a deep asymmetry between belief and attention when it comes to our capacity to filter out what we assess as unjustified or otherwise bad."
Capturing our AttentionWhat are the harms of misinformation? It’s widely believed that it causes false belief, including false beliefs in quite bizarre claims. I argue that this threat is greatly exaggerated: while plaus...www.tandfonline.com"By this logic, the 'cisgendered,' those who take their 'assigned sex' at face value, fall short relative to their transgendered peers in realizing their full humanity."
Where Did Gender Identity Come From?Rogers Brubaker’s new book, "Gender Identity: The Career of a Category," offers a compelling history.www.city-journal.org🔪"There is no progressive purpose served by shielding defective evidence from examination, or using claims of racism (or sexism) to insulate careless argument or unattributed borrowing."
Impoverished sociology | Ian Pace | The Critic MagazineJason Arday’s resignation from the position of Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge closes one phase of an extraordinary controversy over plagiarism, fantastical biographical claims…thecritic.co.uk
