evanwestra.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

people who a) are connected to a college campus and know what actually happens there and who b) aren’t paid embarrassing sums of money to lie about it will all tell you this is a crock of shit BUT i frequently get outsiders acting like it’s really true. the propaganda is at least a little effective

submitted 2 hours ago • 2 comments

🚨New preprint!🚨 Why do people keep signaling virtue in public despite the social costs? We think our public virtue looks principled—but others’ looks like reputation management. Self-serving bias strikes again! Link: shorturl.at/2Sfeh

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

New paper! Identity-protective reasoning—defending beliefs tied to cherished social identities—is often seen as a cognitive vice driving polarization and democratic dysfunction. But what if it’s not all bad? 🧵

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

‘If we don’t end up cooperating, we lose out on future beneficial interaction.’ Commitment and cooperation: a coevolutionary relationship

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

This is Tilly. She enjoys biting, destroying furniture, launching herself at you and climbing onto your shoulders, and sticking her butt in your face. But she's a good cat.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

good time for academics to join AAUP

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

new (version of an) SEP entry just dropped, maybe time to give the ol' evolution and morality seminar syllabus an overhaul...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

New stuff on third-party punishment and kinship intensity and nonhuman animals and more

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

In the past 5 years, there’s been an explosion of new work on the philosophy & cog sci of norms. If you want to get up to speed on it, check out this newly revised SEP entry on the Psychology of Normative Cognition by @dryan149.bsky.social, Stephen Setman & me. plato.stanford.edu/entries/psyc...

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

The fact that only 2% of professors identify as fascists shows just how insular and out of touch universities have become.

submitted 12 days ago • 21 comments

👀New preprint! In 3 prereg experiments we study how engagement-based algorithms amplify ingroup, moral and emotional (IME) content in ways that disrupt social norm learning (and test one solution!) w/ @joshcjackson.bsky.social and my amazing lab managers @merielcd.bsky.social & Silvan Baier 🧵👇

submitted 11 days ago • 2 comments

In thinking about how to deal with the current political moment, I feel like just constantly saying “fuck you, you pasty dipshits” is a good place to start. Call it not obeying in advance if you want, but “go fuck yourselves” is really the core message

submitted 13 days ago • 10 comments

If you're asking "Who is responsible for backlash?" and your answer doesn't mention the people doing the backlash, you're not a serious person.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

People keep getting upset about grants getting pulled even though they have nothing to do with DEI as if having something to do with DEI were a legitimate reason to pull a grant and not a fascistic intrusion on academic freedom.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

The examples of early/mid 20th Century Austria and Germany show that a country can euthanise its own research sector even though it began from an incredibly strong place. From the looks of it this is the direction the USA is going in.

submitted 17 days ago • 5 comments

Brett Karlan and I are in San Diego and everyone here looks like @noamchompers.bsky.social

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

A decade or so of arguing about Free Speech In The Academy and this is what we get out of it.

submitted 21 days ago • 15 comments

You think vegans are annoying now? How do you think they're going to be after another pandemic lockdown caused by factory-farmed meat? www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/h...

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

Mood:

submitted 31 days ago • 2 comments

My partner's visual cortex and my visual cortex stimulated as a result of photons reflecting off of you across the bar, causing us to have pleasure sensations 420 and 69. Now our prefrontal cortices are directing our mouths to ask if we can buy you a drink

submitted 36 days ago • 3 comments

Clever study that explores the debate between those who claim that color categories are 'innate' and those who argue that they are dependent on language. It turns out that monkeys, unlike humans, do not have consensus color categories, suggesting cognitive mechanisms such as language are required.🧪🧠

submitted 40 days ago • 6 comments

FORMAL EPISTEMOLOGISTS: Interesting argument. However, I have already constructed a formal model on which you are the irrational soyjack and I am the rational chad

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

People who say it's "unfair" or "nepotism" for me to give professional rewards to my buddies haven't thought about how my buddies are great little dudes who deserve treats and get sad when they don't get their way

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

I got this book for Christmas and started reading it just as the LA wildfires broke out. An engaging, informative read that will almost certainly cause you to shit your pants about how bad forest fires are getting. www.amazon.com/Fire-Weather...

submitted 43 days ago • 1 comment

I wrote an article on some of my dissertation research on the problem-solving power of prayer for @aeon.co and today it is published! aeon.co/essays/why-p... I'm proud of the article and it was fun to write for a non-academic outlet! 🤩

submitted 47 days ago • 1 comment

I, for one, find personality psychology's boringness refreshing.

submitted 46 days ago • 1 comment

Recent thing that happened to an anonymous friend: they were having trouble publishing a paper, consistently getting hostile reviews from referees who were barely even reading it. Then, they reframed/retitled the paper in a way that avoided a certain keyword, but didn't change the core argument.

submitted 46 days ago • 2 comments

I'm very upset at the fact that the "PET FISH" example for concepts doesn't work at all in chilean Spanish because we have separate words for "small live fish that can be kept as a pet in an aquarium" and "large fish that's meant to be caught, killed and eaten". Also, shellfishes are not fish to us.

submitted 46 days ago • 4 comments

The easier way to get to the singularity, of course, is just to make humans sufficiently stupid that machines look like geniuses by comparison, a strategy many in the tech space seem to be adopting

submitted 46 days ago • 1 comment

The only thing I hate more than braggadocio is false modesty. Basically if you're good at something you shouldn't talk to me.

submitted 47 days ago • 1 comment

SOLUTION TO AI CHEATING: teach in the language of thought, which chatbots (being dirty connectionist association engines) have no access to

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments