Dan Sperber

January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy Discover the real January 6 story: peaceful protest turned tragedy, Deep State entrapment, media deception, and President Trump's triumphant pardons restoring justice to patriotic Americans.

Wow! More effectively Orwellian than 1984
www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast) Evolutionary Social Sciences with Dan Nettle

Daniel Nettle: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPu...

Land Grab: Inside Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank Israeli seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, often brutally, has accelerated, raising doubts about the prospects of a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The cold-blooded, brutal grab of Palestinian land in the West Bank goes on in the shadow of the ongoing anihilation of Gaza.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition? | Cadernos de Linguística

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

Science journal retracts study on safety of Monsanto’s Roundup: ‘Serious ethical concerns’ Paper published in 2000 found glyphosate was not harmful, while internal emails later revealed company’s influence

25 year ago, Monsanto (acquired by Bayer in 2018) acting against public health and honest science
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I agree: there’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles, which will save many lives. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes yearly. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Opinion | Don’t Fear Self-Driving Cars. They Save Lives.

Not a topic on which I would normally post, but given that road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years (www.who.int/news-room/fa...), this is hugely relevant.
Don’t Fear Self-Driving Cars. They Save Lives. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Thank you Ben Rhodes for this important column:
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/o...
Some exerpts:
"If you believe a Palestinian child is equal in dignity and worth to an Israeli or American child, it is no longer possible to support this Israeli government while hiding behind platitudes about peace.
...

Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories Cognitive technologies are socially acquired and culturally evolved systems whose primary function is cognitive. There is a tremendous untapped opportunity for a broad range of disciplines across the...

At last, the final publication in 'Cognitive Technologies and their Histories': the editorial introduction to the issue in TopiCS, by myself and @helenamiton.bsky.social. 4.5 years since our initial @cogscisociety.bsky.social panel. Free access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US | Yuli Novak The international community allowed all of this to happen. We must not look away or move on

Yuli Novak (executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem):
"Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Modernity In Rhythm How migration and technology enabled a special form of togetherness: A multimedia origins story for the lindy hop.

Excellent:
Modernity In Rhythm open.substack.com/pub/thomscot...

Join me in signing the #JewsDemandAction petition calling on governments around the world to impose meaningful consequences on the Israeli government, including appropriate sanctions, enforcement of ICJ and ICC rulings and warrants, and withholding of arms. jewsdemandaction.org jewsdemandaction.org

A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice Abstract. We advance a novel account of the cognitive foundations of epistemic injustice. We argue that such injustice arises from the efficient allocation

Cheyenne Dosso, Tiffany Morisseau, Christophe Heintz, Jean-Sébastien Vayre, A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2025;, pqaf088, doi.org/10.1093/pq/p...

Preprint in FREE ACCESS at philpapers.org/archive/DOSA...

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Preprint: Jan Pfänder and Hugo Mercier "The rational impression account of trust in science"

Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition Over the last decade, new research has shown how human collectives can develop technologies that no single individual could discover on their own. However, this research often overlooks how technology can become so complex that individuals cannot operate it on their own. At this level of technological complexity, distributing cognition is a necessary process for reducing cognitive load on individuals. Yet distributing cognition also imposes coordination costs as technological systems become larger and the individuals in these systems become more specialized. We describe a sprawling set of cultural innovations that facilitate cognitive distribution by reducing cognitive load, reducing coordination costs, or doing both. Preliminary evidence suggests that these cultural innovations co-evolve with technological complexity.

Online Now: Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...

Opinion | He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated Him.

An excellent but devastating piece on the Israeli assassination of the brave and beloved Gazan journalist Anas Al-Sharif:
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/o...
This is on us in the US: our government could stop this with a single phone call.
Call your reps to demand an end to US military support of Israel

Is Gaza still a place for newborn life? 10 months after a warning that Gaza's maternal and neonatal health sector was sliding from crisis towards collapse,1 fresh field reports reveal an even starker picture. In the first 6 months of 2025, ...

“What name do we give to a policy environment that suppresses the arrival of new life?”

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Israel/OPT: New testimonies provide compelling evidence that Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is a deliberate policy Israel is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life, Amnesty International said today.

Israel is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life.

Read more:

Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively improve technologies in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually exp...

🚨🚨 New preprint 📜 with Mathieu Charbonneau (@matcharbonneau.bsky.social‬): Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution (arxiv.org/abs/2508.04828). Feedback welcomed! #Evolution #Technology #Culture #OpenEnded #TechnologicalEvolution #CulturalEvolution 🧵: 1/29

From ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?

Onlookers threw them dried bread loafs making the Jews fight for food and causing boats to capsize. Jews said: "God is just. Yes, of us he has made victims, but of you he has made persecutors."

My father, Manès Sperber, told me a story that terribly resonnates today:

In 1420, at a time of persecution known as the "Vienna Gesera", Jews were banned from the city. Many were killed. Others were placed on rudderless boats on the Danube River and left starving.

This Is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like In a post-American world, greed and nihilism are destroying Sudan.

Earlier this year, I made two trips to Sudan, where a terrible civil war has displaced 14 million people. The state is absent, international institutions are weak.Outside powers, motivated by greed and nihilism, have stepped into the vacuum

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

‘They slaughtered us like animals’: the inside story of how one of the biggest atrocities of the Sudan war unfolded in Zamzam As the UK prepared to host a global summit on bringing peace to Sudan, the RSF paramilitary began a ‘genocidal’ massacre in Zamzam refugee camp. But when reports emerged of the killings, London held i...

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Il est atroce que les guerres puissent ne pas épargner l’enfance, non seulement parce qu’elle est l’avenir mais surtout parce que sa tendre faiblesse et son irresponsabilité adressent à notre protection un si confiant appel."

Il est un de ces tableaux, cependant, auquel je sens bien que je ne m’habituerai jamais : celui de la terreur sur des visages d’enfants fuyant la chute des bombes, dans un village survolé....

Dans Marc Bloch, "L'Etrange Défaite" (Ecrit en 1940):

"Je n’ai pas, je crois, l’âme inaccessible à la pitié. Peut-être les spectacles que deux guerres successives m’ont imposés l’ont-ils quelque peu endurcie.

Is mind-reading involved in ownership judgments?

By @rekablazsek.bsky.social & @heintz-c.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

Rashid Khalidi withdraws course on Middle East history, saying it's 'impossible to teach' given adoption of IHRA.

'Columbia's capitulation..is being done to cover up...the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia's leadership is now fully complicit' www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...