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• [article] Your personality doesn't belong to you — 17 Nov 2020
  The study of personality has a fairly storied history—a pretty contentious search for the essence of human expression. But more modern approaches to the study of personality show us something interesting—that our personalities might be something that’s forced upon us.
• [marginalium] Failures of arms control — 15 Nov 2020
• [article] Elemental Personalities — 5 Nov 2020
  Captain Planet and his Planeteers always seemed a little trite to me. Five young people, each with an elemental ring. And each with a personality to match. Seemed like lazy writing but now I’m wondering whether they intended to tap into millennia-old thought on personality styles, or whether it was just a happy accident.
• [article] The flaws of the human perspective — 29 Oct 2020
  The biologist’s time-machine is a classic thought experiment that re-emerges from time to time in the more eloquent textbooks, and shows us just how flawed the human perspective is.
• [marginalium] Remains of an ancient female big game hunter found — 25 Oct 2020
• [article] Advice on brain science from a farming manual — 22 Oct 2020
  In the early stages of a career in brain science, one learns very quickly that the human brain is still largely unknowable. But perhaps this is because our approach is wrong. Perhaps, rather than solving the unsolvable, we should be like the farmers of old. Observing, contemplating, and adding only a little helpful illumination on a complex problem.
• [article] Female zealots — 19 Oct 2020
  A popular academic fact claims that females are the most zealous religious adherents, despite being marginalised in their own religious communities. We are told this is because they are uneducated and submissive. But a quick look at most of recorded history shows us this was not always the case. Once, female zealots formed the core of what is possibly our most universal religious tradition.
• [article] How we choose our psychic predators — 8 Oct 2020
  Henry Farrell describes Donald Trump as a psychic predator. It’s an interesting concept that demonstrated (to me at least) how we choose certain kinds of pain for ourselves.
• [marginalium] Rhythmic Brain Cell Firing Mimics Ketamine’s Effects — 6 Oct 2020
• [marginalium] Archive of textfiles - Twitter, but in the 1980s — 6 Oct 2020
• [article] The sophists: natural justice or social justice? — 4 Oct 2020
  Greek philosophers argued whether social morality was a creation of the weak to control the strong, but of course this is simply another form of strength.
• [article] The true meaning of family ties — 24 Sep 2020
  It’s no secret that we are lonelier than ever. We have many complaints of modern society, but our growing isolation is a common one. There are two reasons for this unhappy accident—the difficulty of finding people in ever more crowded cities, and the fact that we have lost sight of what a community is really made of. This article is about the latter.
• [article] The loneliness epidemic — 20 Sep 2020
  One in five people are lonely. This is not trivial. Loneliness is emerging as one of the greatest threats to physical and emotional health. And it shouldn’t be, because unlike many of our most intractable problems, this one seems so solvable.
• [article] The predictability of humans — 15 Sep 2020
  The human animal is an animal first—responding adaptively to the environment around it. Humans are only unpredictable because we’re obsessed with the human mind and uncomfortable accepting how influential our environment is.
• [article] Successful Prophets — 11 Sep 2020
  We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.