Say when
Changing your mind lacks credibility and persuasiveness without a clearly expressing what conditions and criteria triggered it.
Likewise for condemning someone’s actions without stating the conditions and criteria that would change your mind:
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If morality is fundamentally a human affair, then game theory provides a framework that explains morality, argues @lionelpage.bsky.social in the latest instalment of his series on human morality:
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Research by Grawitch et al suggests more access to AI does not guarantee better decisions—likelihood of consulting AI and applying its output goes up with perceived AI trustworthiness and down with higher self-perceived expertise:
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General intelligence does not rely on a single brain region, but on the coordination of the entire brain.
New research mapping the human brain connectome suggests cognitive ability is predicted by distinct patterns of global communication:
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The discovery of chemical fossils suggests sea sponges were the first organisms to emerge, around 541 million BCE:
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That was new to me too. Nature is quite fascinating.
09.03.2026 05:50 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Like some piano music of a Sunday evening? Here you go.
Florestan Bataillie is a classical pianist and composer. Here, he plays one of his own—Moving.
Enjoy!
youtu.be/fC7nMFmXKlo
As we evolved from our small tribes into larger communities, the personal level trust needed to be scaled up.
Enter the institutions. How do they achieve that, and what when they falter?
Game theorist @jliep.bsky.social explains:
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The shifting composition of the top-10 firms quoted on the S&P 500 tells the story of the fabric of the American economy:
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Lucky rituals are far from uncommon—especially among athletes.
New research suggests physical rituals feel more effective in more uncertain (=closer to 50/50 outcomes) than in more certain situations, especially when involving pulling something closer:
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Research by Marcum et al suggests propensity to cyber bullying—online behaviour intended to harm someone psychologically or emotionally—is associated with
•sex—females are 2.5 times as likely than males
•race—whites are 2.2 as likely than non-whites
•lower self-control:
Ons vermogen om patronen te herkennen, memoriseren en raadplegen laat ons toe een erg complexe wereld te begrijpen.
Maar ontbreken de patronen, dan loopt het mis—zoals een barbershopkoor ondervond.
ICYMI, mijn @apache_be stukje, Het onleerbare lied:
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Research by Fonn et al suggests infants do NOT
•systematically expect first possessors to win out in territorial conflict, expecting instead the larger agent to prevail
•preferentially evaluate first possessors over would-be thieves (successful or not):
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There are three fundamental emotions that may trigger impulsive behaviour—fear, anger and lust.
The LAPS approach—Label, Allow, Pause, Switch—can help us regulate them and avoid impulsive responses:
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Computers can (still) not really “see” the way we do, but they’re getting better all the time.
But as long as they can mistake a cat for guacamole—an error few humans would commit—there’s some way to go:
knowablemagazine.org/content/arti...
15m animation based on Bernice Eisenstein’s graphic memoir.
Born to Auschwitz survivor parents, aged 11 she becomes obsessed—addicted—to the holocaust, trying to give the second-hand trauma of their tragic past a place in her own, non-tragic present:
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Universal cool
Research suggests there is remarkable commonality across 12 countries about the traits that are considered cool, identifying these six—extraversion, hedonism, power, adventurousness, openness to experience, and autonomy:
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Responding to challenges from readers to his categorical argument that “Fallacies Don’t Exist”, @maartenboudry.bsky.social clarifies that most alleged fallacies—like biases—are evolutionary adaptations, and often called out in a partisan fashion. Makes good sense to me:
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When are crowd wiser than independent individuals?
Research by Becker et al suggests the way group members’ prior beliefs interact with emerging network structures in the group moderate the effect of communication on belief formation:
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Without clearly answering the ‘when’ question, our assertions why we do something, or why we condemn someone else’s actions, it’s just rhetoric.
And not everyone takes that seriously.
Read on for more:
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In the right quantity, stress is good, but too much and it drains your energy.
Find out why and how that happens, and what we can do to optimize the amount of stress:
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Barbershopkoren steunen op aangeleerde patronen bij het zingen van hun close harmony muziek.
Maar als hun partituur niet beantwoordt aan de gebruikelijke patronen, is het knoeien—een mooie illustratie hoe we leren en beslissen.
Mijn @apache_be stukje:
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Is the US an outlier where polarization is concerned?
New research suggests the increasing division around political and social issues exhibited in America over the last two decades is not happening globally:
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Winter is coming to an end in the northern hemisphere, and animals such as bears come out of hibernation.
Only, contrary to common wisdom, bears don't actually technically hibernate. And what they do instead can provide insights for human health:
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A 3D-printed wheelchair… for a turtle!
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06.03.2026 19:51 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
How to conduct a survey about sex fetishes?
@aella.bsky.social tells the story of how curiosity made up for lack of academic credentials in her Big Kink Survey, 700,000+ participants—60x the famous Kinsey Report (!)
[The Kin(k)sey Report?—I’ll get me coat]:
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What is behind our morbid curiosity—from rubber necking at car crashes and true crime documentaries to doomscrolling?
New research suggests it might be an adaptation conferring survival advantage:
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Research by Fulgu & Capraro finds that, to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, GPT-4 judges
• abusing a man as more appropriate than abusing a woman (no ∆ for torturing)
•a woman using violence against a man is acceptable but not the reverse:
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Tough question—all the more so because different people respond differently to the same acute situation.
A missing cat anecdote illustrates:
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