Spider-Verse, Identity Politics, Leftist Infighting, and the Oppression Olympics
Pluralistic: Every complex ecosystem has parasites (24 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":
#1280 Rafael Ruiz: Is "Woke" Good, Actually?
Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:
Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud
Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds
How to Harness Your Behavioural Wake to Amplify Culture
Every interaction we have, whether in a high-stakes meeting or a casual coffee chat, leaves a wake. Is yours calm, or chaotic?
AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness
Hey ChatGPT, write me a fictional paper: these LLMs are willing to commit academic fraud
Mainstream chatbots presented varying levels of resistance to deliberate requests for fabrication, study finds.
Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats
X chatbot tells users it was ‘instructed by my creators’ to accept ‘white genocide as real and racially motivated’
The Malaise Of Peak Wokeism Within Online Culture
How have certain forms of education and new technology formed the template to woke culture today? This piece examines the link between social media and new technology to the outwoking of the wokest through a veritable closing of the mind.
Anthropic on Twitter / X
New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026
What Did Ancient Humans Do at Night?
Predictive processing frameworks for perception can explain recent drone sightings in the United States
We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. We argue that the uniquely sparse properties of skyborne and celestial stimuli make it difficult for an observer to update prior beliefs, which can be easily fit to observed lights. Moreover, we hypothesize that humans have likely evolved to perceive the sky and its perceived contents as deeply meaningful. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible role of generalized distrust in scientific institutions and ultimately argue for the importance of astronomy education for producing a society with prior beliefs that support veridical perception.
Anthropologists, much like the Nazis(?), are too woke for the real scientific anthropology that bases its claims on being swindled by taxi drivers and ignoring warning messages in R
Rebecca Sear
A new Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology has just been published, in which it is claimed that the human species is polytypic: not only is race biologically meaningful but the races are distinct enough to be considered subspecies. Published by Elgar. In 2026.
Oct 8, 2026 at 10:13 PM
