Rob Sica

I Said Fallacies Don’t Exist. You Pushed Back. The Fallacy Follow-Up.

"If I were designing a course in critical thinking, I would rebrand the traditional fallacies as 'tricky arguments': moves that can be legitimate and even indispensable, yet also misleading in certain contexts."

🔪"As practice, an act of net-cost altruism can even yield a pleasurable response in the actor, especially if they regard the practice as likely to contribute positively, and even much later, to their own ability to perform socially."

Everything Is Signaling And Most of It Is Defensive

🔪"the signals we are consciously aware of sending are the tip of an iceberg—or, more accurately, a polar ice cap"

Experimentally falsifying ghost criminology: exercising rigor, exorcising residue - Theory and Society Theory and Society - Ghost criminology contends that places scarred by crime and atrocity retain a residue that indelibly marks the site. Are these putative “stains” contained within...

"Some may ask: why bother with yet another seemingly marginal critical theory? The answer is that reputations are collective. When a discipline tolerates what we privately regard as unserious, when senior scholars chuckle at jargon but stay silent, the credibility loss is borne by everyone."

Does anyone else find it a little convenient that this claim is always made about the crazy other people?

I'd be more sympathetic to these views if they said "here are *my* false beliefs that serve me only as identity markers"

Studying philosophy does make people better thinkers, according to new research on more than 600,000 college grads Philosophers are fond of saying that their field boosts critical thinking. Two of them decided to put that claim to the test.

From the duo who did this study:

"philosophy majors scored higher than students in all other majors on standardized tests of verbal and logical reasoning, as well as on self-reports of good habits of mind, even after accounting for freshman-year differences"

😸

😿"A large body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that engaging in rigorous but respectful and supportive dialogue should increase intellectual humility... Despite a comprehensive approach [...] our results consistently contradicted the hypothesis" psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

"To assert that women *do not* have these values and priorities would be to disregard their stated preferences... In institutions and in culture, the 'worriers' of human evolution have become the warriors for social justice"

The Trinity and the Light Switch: Two Faces of Belief Abstract. Sometimes people posit “beliefs” to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flips t

"it is the sociological *point* of those 'beliefs' (Groupish Beliefs) that they seem crazy to *you*, because *you* are in the out-group... falsity & even obvious falsity—so much a bug when it comes to Mundane Beliefs—is often a feature for Groupish Beliefs"

Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning: Philosophical Reflections on Coping with Loss, by Kathleen Marie Higgins The aim of Kathleen Higgins’s clear, concise, and meticulously researched book is to ‘consider the significance of aesthetic activities that can be benefic

"so long as there is love, and so long as there is death, the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples will still be in business"

The Biology of Moral Systems

"The peril of human extinction arises from our persistent tendency, across history, to seek and accept knowledge more readily in physical realms than in social ones."

"narrative identification is better understood as a motivationally driven form of vicarious problem-solving rather than as an identity-based merging of selves... opportunity to extract causal insight from another agent’s pursuit of goals that matter to the observer" osf.io/preprints/ps...

What $1 Million of Anti-Racist Leadership Training Buys You The president of Wesleyan University objected to a recent Atlantic article—but didn’t criticize it on the merits.

"little more than a moral laundromat that bleaches the sins of elite universities"
archive.ph/jvQAH

The Woke and the Lib Making distinctions among liberal graduate students

"The least woke liberals skew toward being male, East or South Asian, international students in the physical sciences. Conversely, the most woke liberals skew toward being female, white, US citizens in in psychology."

There is also the question of the quality and novelty of the science. This paper--in PNAS--essentially argues that Nowak re-invented kin selection under different terms (there is an entire Nowak section of the Supplmental Materials).
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Stand with free speech and the Constitution - Marginal REVOLUTION A landmark law that limits children under the age of 16 to one hour per day on social media apps has been blocked by a US court, in a blow to child safety campaigners seeking to limit exposure to sites such as Instagram and YouTube. In an opinion released on Friday, a federal judge in […]

Stand with free speech and the Constitution - Marginal REVOLUTION

Violent Conflict in the Human Record: A Review of the Bioarchaeological Evidence This review examines the contributions of bioarchaeological research to criminological understandings of violence, focusing on the structural conditions that influence variations in violence across di...

"Overall, the evidence suggests that although states may reduce violence under certain conditions, their mere presence does not guarantee pacification—and may in some cases facilitate new forms of coercion and conflict."

"Rather than generating new, risky predictions, the theory survives by shifting definitions and goalposts to avoid being disproved."

I’m a philosopher who tries to see the best in others – but I know there are limits Seeing someone charitably requires a balancing act between taking them seriously and trying to see the good in them.

"Sometimes other people really are the worst, and understanding them requires understanding their agency, not what is good about them."

files.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/b...

Human Social Evolution Richard D. Alexander is an accomplished entomologist who turned his attention to solving some of the most perplexing problems associated with the evolution of human social systems. Using impeccable Da...

🔪"truth in emotions may sometimes be expected when we are communicating with ourselves, if in no other situations"

Hope these appear in the digitized collection. Jim sent them to McCarthy in the '80s, but never heard from him. Wish he were alive to find out.

Why Moral Culture Decides Great-Power Rivalry In geopolitics, moral culture shapes whether influence is experienced as leadership or domination, cooperation or coercion.

"As faith in democratic norms and institutions fades on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among younger generations, it remains uncertain whether the moral culture of liberal democracy—including its better angels—can be renewed and legitimacy restored at home and abroad."

(PDF) Studying culture from an evolutionary psychological perspective: approaches, achievements, and prospects PDF | This paper examines how culture can be studied from an evolutionary psychological perspective. We review the integrated causal model proposed by... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

🔪"social learning strategies... epistemic vigilance... these two views lead to quite different predictions about cultural evolution, including about the spread of misinformation"

"the traditional understanding of emotional displays in psychology is largely at odds with an evolutionary perspective"

I link della settimana (#130) (i) L’intelligenza artificiale generativa ha fatto anche la sua apparizione a Sanremo 2026. Détournement post-situazionista contro il tecnoliberalismo capitalista? Più probabilmente, l’Italia si asses...

I link della settimana (#130)
open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

'It's in the Books, Bud' A sampling of Cormac McCarthy's massive Tesuque home library journeyed to Texas State University, where fans and scholars will ultimately see into the elusive-yet-brilliant author's mind.

"McCarthy had written in the margin in response to Wittgenstein’s words that 'A sentence that makes sense is a thought' and that 'the Totality of sentences is the language': Holy Shit Ludwig"

Amusing email to Nowak from Trivers:
jmail.world/thread/vol00...