Rob Sica
@robsica.bsky.social
Knowledge would have little allure if we did not have to overcome so much shame on the way to acquiring it. -Nietzsche
"A little while ago, before I ever heard of Jason Arday, I went away and read some of Cofnas’s published academic work... Whatever else you might say about Cofnas, the man is no intellectual fraud"
UnHerd@unherd.com · 9h ago‘The trouble is, significant portions of the humanities and social sciences have given up on serious scholarly inquiry, coming to see themselves primarily as activists, torchbearers for moral and political revolution.’ | Paul Sagar buff.ly/ptmDo1c
🔪"You know who we have not studied with a critical eye? White progressives... Indeed, one of the knocks against conservatives is how fearful they supposedly are, and yet I have a paper under review showing that progressives are more fearful than conservatives"
Academia Has Little Viewpoint Diversity
How this happened and why it must change
freeblackthought.substack.com
😼"I applaud the fact that de Sousa independently wants to do all the things that moral norms would tell him he ought to do...We could also ask how he got to this point where his desires are nicely aligned w/moral reasons without ever engaging in any moral thinking"
Defending Morality | Canadian Journal of Philosophy | Cambridge Core
Defending Morality
cambridge.org
New Substack post! Another guest post from my brilliant PhD student Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello on the moralization of AI. Moralizing AI could be a reasonable position, she argues, but is it? Depends on what we know about AI and about how moralization works. She also calls my opinions dumb. Ouch!
Some Things Are Not Negotiable. Is AI One of Them?
Here is another guest post by my PhD student, Victória Oldemburgo de Mello.
open.substack.com
🔪"Whether we measure general behaviors and general views, or specific behaviors and specific views, behaviors don't stray far from attitudes... What seems to drive the impression of a wide judgement-action gap is that people do things of which researchers disapprove"
Between Fixed and Fickle
A psychologist explains why—and how—moral views change across different life stages, situations, and historical eras.We like to believe that moral truths are obvious and unchangeable: cheating is wron...
google.com
"Ultimately, the real question researchers should ask is not so much: 'Why do they adhere to misinformation?' but rather 'Why are they so distrustful of traditional media?'"
🔪"scepticism against attitude incongruent true information is much more pronounced than gullibility to attitude-congruent false information... susceptibility to misinformation seems to be primarily a product of myside bias rather than low truth sensitivity or low overall threshold"
Susceptibility to misinformation as a signal detection problem
Why do people fall for misinformation, and what can be done about it? The current article reviews a programme of research that has used a signal-detection framework to identify three distinct facto...
tandfonline.com
✨"I love those who do not expect rewards from their virtue, but rather punishment and downfall." www.sup.org/books/theory...
"Evidence of cross-cultural consistency in partner preferences does not provide clarity on whether such preferences are underpinned by evolved psychological mechanisms."
Cross-cultural variation in partner preferences: are gender gaps larger in countries with more restrictive gender norms? | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core
Cross-cultural variation in partner preferences: are gender gaps larger in countries with more restrictive gender norms?
cambridge.org
"Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective, it is highly likely that our capacities for acquiring knowledge evolved because of their practical effects."
Southern Epistemologies - HAU Books
“I was especially impressed and even delighted by the deep, rich ethnographic and linguistic knowledge presented in the book; collectively, the many years of dedicated fieldwork with Indigenous interl...
haubooks.org
"These findings shift attention away from explanations centered solely on individual gullibility and toward the political and communicational contexts in which misinformation is circulated." hal.science/hal-05704418v1
We highlighted sth similar in a recent preprint: people incr. engage in indexical discounting: realism is not longer the best heuristic for “is this true” and that the source and other factors will likely matter more going forward (osf.io/preprints/so...)
🔪"People co-create 'epistemic reward systems'—systems of social incentives, status competition, and a division of intellectual labour—that support forms of collective irrationality no individual could achieve alone."
The Social Roots of Delusions
Clinical delusions, collective irrationality, and the fragile achievement of human knowledge
conspicuouscognition.com
James Traub in the NY Times making the point that, whatever you think of the particular curricular choices that Texas has made, they are taking the right approach on curriculum to support students' reading comprehension and critical thinking. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...
Opinion | What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List (Gift Article)
Educational traditionalism is not the same as political conservatism.
nytimes.com
🔪"Nietzsche exploits his readers’ antecedent belief in the absolute value of truth to embarrass them about the errors embedded in morality."
Nietzsche and Williams, redux brianleiternietzsche.blogspot.com/2026/08/atte...
It's short and worth reading. They come to the defense of one of the most despicably maligned scholars ever targeted by SJWs -- the late great Scott Lilienfeld.
1/ Political psychology spent forty years treating left-wing authoritarianism as the Loch Ness Monster. The measure that finally caught it (2022, JPSP, 7,258 subjects) found the same psychological core the field had been calling the conservative mind. kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-loch-n...
The Loch Ness Monster Was Real
Why weren't we looking for left-wing authoritarianism (LWA)? And why aren't we prepared for it now?
kylesaunders.substack.com
"As living conditions improve and societies become more liberal and gender equal, sex differences for many traits become larger. This pattern is now well documented and refutes strong social-constructivist theories on the origin of sex differences."
Sex-Specific Vulnerabilities - HBES
– by David C. Geary Sex differences are common across species and often related to sexual selection, that is, they are found for traits that influence intrasexual competition for mates and intersexual...
hbes.com
"If anything, magical and symbolic thinking persist widely in secular contexts—from astrology apps to wellness fads."
Why do so many cultures believe the body contains exactly 365 bones? - HBES
– by Ze Hong Open the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, one of the founding texts of Chinese medicine, and you will find a curious claim: the human body contains exactly 365 acupuncture points, one for ea...
hbes.com
"None of this makes women unusual among mammals. Coalitions for within-group competition occur in both sexes across many species, including non-human primates... female coalitions in humans may be a fundamental feature of our social organization."
Women build coalitions too and they matter! - HBES
– by Maud Mouginot Coalitions — two or more people cooperating in a competitive context at the expense of a third party — are a widespread strategy among mammals and a basic building block of human so...
hbes.com
"The proverb 'living well is the best revenge' is in some sense false. Merely carrying on through conflict poses minimal costs on conflict partners, but it does appear to be the best buffer against mutual destruction."
Keep Calm and Protect Your Reputation - HBES
– by Zihan Yang and Cory Clark Crying may seem more like an act of vulnerability than aggression, but one person’s tears can tarnish two reputations. In a recent paper, we explored the reputational co...
hbes.com
"In sum, our work demonstrates once more that women in particular tend to prioritize same-sex friends who provide them with emotional support. This pattern exists in multiple countries, including both Eastern and Western societies."
The role of emotional support in men’s and women’s friendships - HBES
– by McQueen Li, Eric Chung, Jessica D. Ayers, and Keelah Williams Consider the last time something in your life went wrong: An argument that upset you, a project that didn’t go as planned, a difficu...
hbes.com
✨"This far greater openness in governance might, furthermore, provide a compelling response to reasonable conservative concerns... open discussion can also renew and rejuvenate the fragile community relations that conservatives so value"
Human Nature and the Open Society | Open Society Unresolved | Thom Sco
Developed in the specific historical context of two world wars, the Holocaust, and the rise of totalitarian regimes, the notion of open society is an attempt to
taylorfrancis.com
😼"When the intellectual classes act like they seriously believe something simple is overweaningly complicated, it becomes appropriate to explain the obvious in a peer reviewed philosophy journal."
2+2=5? A Postmodern Odyssey
Revisiting a Bizarre Great Awokening Sidebar
unsafescience.substack.com
"Ethnic groups with folktales that represent natural entities as active agents exhibit greater concern for environmental issues and more engagement in environmental activities today."
When nature has agency: Traditional worldviews and contemporary environmental conservation
This paper examines the extent to which traditional worldviews and mental models of the natural world are related to contemporary environmental attitu…
sciencedirect.com
🔪"we should not expect *any* figures in the history of philosophy to be morally infallible—even if they were, in their own time and in subsequent scholarship, victims of sexism, marginalisation, or any other form of exclusionary practice"
Friendly Fire: Did Margaret Macdonald Contribute to Susan Stebbing's Exclusion from the History of Analytic Philosophy?
This paper presents the case of Margaret Macdonald's (1903–1956) posthumous treatment of Susan Stebbing (1885–1943). After Stebbing's death, Macdonald—her Ph.D. student and collaborator—wrote an earl....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
