Luke Smith
@luke_smith23
Book nerd and reviewer. Interested in human nature, evolution, WW2, morality. Blogs on evolution, cognition, and what makes us human.
Chugging along and it’s absolutely brilliant. This will be the go-to for accessible, introductory, non-textbook, psychology books moving forward. Everyone should read this. @paulbloomatyale @HarperCollins
There is no legit evolutionary psychology podcast. My friend @DavePietrasz and I thought this was a dire situation, so we set out to fix it. I’m excited to announce the start of Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast). I wrote a little something about it on my blog. (Link below).
In my opinion the reason why film critics are overwhelmingly worthless is because they care too much about narrative and not enough about the technical stuff
I’ve noticed that young cinephiles are obsessed with this technical stuff. As opposed to character, themes, symbolism etc.
John Halstead & Phil Thomson have compiled the most comprehensive (albeit necessarily spotty) evidence on prehistoric violence rates, updating and revising the estimates I gathered in The Better Angels of Our Nature 15 years ago. Here they review and analyze their findings | -…
Part of my life I don’t really show. Started playing in a band doing covers about a year ago and recently started playing live (after 20 years). Lots of fun.
Are you a student or professor in psychology -- or any of the social sciences? If so, you've definitely seen this mistake before. It's all over the textbooks and journal articles. You might have seen it formulated in any of these ways: - Is that behavior evolved or learned?…
The first four books I read on evo psych were The Blank Slate, The Red Queen, The Moral Animal, and Buss’s The Evolution of Desire. I’ve been learning from @ProfDavidBuss for 10+years, and the fact he’s constantly teaching the next crop of evolutionist thinkers is so inspiring.
I've got a list here though it's biased towards hunter-gatherers and needs updating. The attached images are all good ones from different parts of the world with very different cultures traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/12/1…
New, hot-off-the-presses! Delighted to share this new paper about why the ubiquitous "Evolution vs. Learning" dichotomy is the wrong way to think about things. Out now in American Psychologist (@APA_Journals). The paper avoids the boring, underspecified claim that "both matter"…
Blanket dismissal of 'cultural' explanations for human behavior as being 'blank slatist' are so unbelievably stupid. Of course genes/instincts/etc all matter but effectively everything you do is in fact influenced by culture. You learned to read and write because you grew up in a…
In my view the most frustrating blind spot of evo psych as a field—which, to be clear, is an important & necessary field—is that most practitioners don’t consider the ethnographic evidence to be of essential & indispensable evidence *required* to evaluate their models (which I…
I do often think of how his book ‘A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century’ contains basically zero discussion of any actual hunter-gatherer societies
Industrial agriculture, food science and pharmaceutical medicine have been a disaster for human health.
ME
Who else is waiting for @Evolving_Moloch to write the book on small-scale societies?
1/6 The goal of psychotherapy is to insert spaces for noticing and reflecting where space has not previously existed—and thereby create opportunities to know ourselves more fully, connect with others more deeply, and live our lives more congruently
It's definitely not a virtue, but it does have an adaptive function, i.e. the preservation of an important relationship. The key is sublimating it into self-improvement as opposed to controlling behaviour x.com/captgouda24/st…
Jealousy is like being irritable. It’s understandable, and often unavoidable. People are allowed to be irritable. We just shouldn’t regard it as a virtue. Being in control of yourself is good.
I found The Collected Works of Karen Horney at The Strand bookstore today in NYC and I am devouring every bit of it. I'm also feeling lonely because I want to share this excitement with someone. It sucks to have so many special interests areas I can't share with most people.
Nope is unironically an ingenious movie about the sensory ecology of deception. Nope and Shyamalan's The Village would actually make a great double feature if you're attuned to such themes
“What if demons were racism?” *78 award nominations
1. The Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology holds that a universal set of complex psychological adaptations evolved in Pleistocene Africa. In no particular order, here are few folks on here doing research in this tradition, highlighting one paper/thread each:🧵
What book would you say has changed the way you understand the world the most?
What book would you say has changed the way you understand the world the most?