Sebastian Dieguez

Title page of article "Electoral Hope" in journal Political Studies.

I have a new article out at @polstudies.bsky.social. In "Electoral Hope", I make the case that supposedly irrational "wishful thinking" is actually a crucial part of how voters make rational sense of their role in democracies.

OA link: doi.org/10.1177/0032...

Can you guess who wrote this thing?

Screenshot of title page of article published in Philosophical Psychology titled "Authority or autonomy? Philosophical and psychological perspectives on deference to experts."

🧠 Why trust some experts but ignore others? Worsnip et al. show how bias, ego & ideology shape our choices. TL;DR: Trust experts more when topics are complex. 🤔🔍
👉 doi.org/10.1080/0951...
#PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky

Brain Metaphors Beyond Brain Mythologies A commentary on Kendler's history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry

Brain Metaphors Beyond Brain Mythologies

A commentary on Kendler’s history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry

www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/brain-meta...

Virginia Guiffre statement to Maxwell read on the day of her sentencing.

Virginia Guiffre statement to Maxwell read on the day of her sentencing.

This is Virginia Guiffre's statement to Ghislane Maxwell, read by Guiffre's attorney in court the day Maxwell was sentenced.

I had to divide it into 2 parts. Please read each & share.

These are the words of a child rape victim, a victim of the monster Trump now protecting & arranging her freedom.

Huw Price, Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from _Großvater_ - PhilPapers Responding to Lewis’s (1976) defense of the consistency of time travel (TT), Horwich (1987) and Price (1996) claim that TT may nevertheless be shown to be improbable, due to its need ...

New piece on time travel, written for special issue marking the 50th anniversary of David Lewis’s ‘The paradoxes of time travel’. #philsky #philsci

philpapers.org/rec/PRILAT-16

NYT headline: “Kennedy Advises New Parents to ‘Do Your Own Research’ on Vaccines” Subheader: “In an interview with Dr. Phil, the health secretary offered false information about vaccine oversight and revealed a lack of basic understanding of new drug approvals.”

“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?”
- A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic

Pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this research with Human Digital and @vox-pol.bsky.social.

The ongoing proliferation of illegal content on gore sites is undermining broader efforts to counter terrorism and other harms online.

Among the key findings of the research:

Once normalized, it’s much harder to de-normalize the far-right.

Wokeness: a Retrospective In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The d...

My Retrospective on Wokeness in detail! Blogs are for just saying stuff, after all. So here is my attempt to say what was distinctive (if anything) about a recent era of socio-cultural life, what (if anything) changed, and what (if anything) was to the good

sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...

I just got an email informing me that my Annual Review on structural racism with @tyson-brown.bsky.social and @pahoman.bsky.social is open access. So, download away.

Perspectivism, Concrete and Abstract - Foundations of Physics Perspectivist positions have been proposed in physics, notably in order to address the interpretive difficulties of quantum mechanics. Recently, some versions of perspectivism have also been proposed ...

My article "Perspectivism, concrete and abstract" is now published (open access)!

This is a conceptual analysis of perspectivism *in general*, then applied to shed light on both quantum perspectivism, perspectival realism, and their differences.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#philsci #philsky

Self-Awareness and Personhood in Non-Human Animals Beyond simple consciousness or sentience, some non-human animals may possess more sophisticated cognitive abilities linked to capacities for self-awareness or even personhood, capacities that may infl...

Our new book chapter is out, looking at self-awareness/personhood in nonhuman animals, and how it may relate to questions of suffering
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Philosophical methodology: a plea for tolerance Abstract. Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternat

New paper forthcoming in Analysis on methodological pluralism! Co-authored with the rest of the "Philosophical Meth. Lab" (Sam Baron, Tina Firing, and James Norton)! #philsky #philsci #metascience

academic.oup.com/analysis/adv...

Fear of a transhumanist future: conspiracy theories and the speculative present Human augmentation, brain–computer interfaces, DNA alterations, artificial intelligence, and other extraterrestrial technological projects are sacred resources welcomed by many within the diffuse m...

I published a thing that tries to make sense of transhumanism among conspiracy theorists.

Opinion | Please, no more debates! Debates elevate the worst aspects of our politics. Let’s try something else.

debates suck: an important corollary to my "lying is bad" ministry

"Lying, pretending and obfuscating in normal conversation turn listeners off; in debate, they make victory more likely."

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Foto des Einbands des im Logos-Verlag erschienenen Bandes "Communicating Scientific Knowledge in Times of Crisis"

New book alert: Gelfert/John/Frisch, Communicating Scientific Knowledge in Times of Crisis, 100pp., €16.90, Berlin: Logos-Verlag -- shorturl.at/vanWv #philsky @mathias07.bsky.social

The Development of an Issue Public: Evidence from The Eras Tour | The Journal of Politics: Vol 0, No ja

We have a JOP article about how swifties ~randomly denied tickets to the eras tour due to website allocation errors changed their views on related policies
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Este vídeo es mi #casualcinema favorito del momento. Así se ve el cine que me gustaría hacer a mí.

This is how the book opens:

In the index: "belief ... APPEARS ON LIKE EVERY PAGE"

Now you need to do it in the index, like in the (now classic) Routledge Handbook on Imagination.

🚨PREPRINT ALERT🚨

Why do some people get stuck doing things that no longer make sense, or are even harmful? Our new study shows compulsivity isn’t just about weakened goal-directed control; people high in compulsivity also form stronger habits

📄: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#PaperFairy #Habits #CogSci

think this is sort of interesting as actually.....no you probably didn't need to do "more research" into it? you just had to trust the state and local authorities to know better than you when it came to vaccinating your child? not good that the internet has killed faith in institutions!

The Actual Conspiracy Theory Surrounding Trump and Epstein It’s not what you think it is.

The actual conspiracy theory is that multiple women independently lied, with apparently nothing to gain, and much to lose, about Trump’s entanglement with Epstein. katemanne.substack.com/p/the-actual...

YouTube video by Angela Collier vibe physics

I watched this (youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY?...) on the abuse of LLMs & 'vibe physics' by @acollierastro.bsky.social - well worth a watch! - and I was struck by how the back 15 minutes (the 'thought train') also summed up neatly what it has been like to be a public-facing historian, even before LLMs.1/

It's an awkward week for Krauss, Pinker, and friends to release "The War on Science", not just because of the Krauss-Pinker-Epstein connection but because 6 months into Project 2025's implementation, identifying *wokeness* as the chief protagonist in a War on Science is both passe and preposterous.

🧵1/
🚨 New article out!
How robust is the psychology of social class?
Together with Nicolas Sommet and ‪@frederiqueautin.bsky.social‬, we conducted large-scale replications of 35 hypotheses across four countries.
Published in Nature Human Behaviour:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Slide highlighting article that has argued for retraction of articles using fraudulent 'national IQ dataset'.

Excellent talk by @rebeccasear.bsky.social at @ishpssb2025.bsky.social on maintenance of scientific racism in contemporary academic literature.

Academic journals play a role in platforming scientific racism (eg failure to retract articles using fradulent 'national IQ dataset').

#ishpssb2025 #ehbea

Can we perceive modal properties? Can we see only how things actually are, or are we also able to see how things could be? Much work in philosophy of perception assumes that our visual perceptual experience is restricted to the actua....

Such a readable and fascinating argument by @jessiemunton.bsky.social of @cambridgephilos.bsky.social To see a visual object is to see how it could be, not just how it is. #openaccess #philsky

Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge

People’s trust in experts is decreasing. Why?

— Steven Hales offers a perfect-if-true answer: because the people don’t know even know what expertise is open.substack.com/pub/hilarius... #expertise #PhilSky #PhilSci