A relevance-based framework for hearer roles in multiparty interactions This paper proposes a cognitive pragmatic, relevance-theoretic framework for understanding and analysing hearer participant roles in discourse. Releva…

Kate Scott: "...offers a cognitive underpinning to existing understandings of the various hearer roles that individuals might play in a discourse, ... a key expansion of the scope of relevance theory via application to multiparty communicative interactions."
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What a difference a mind makes: How evolved difference detecting mechanisms harm psychological science, and how an evolutionary psychology of psychology can help From an adaptationist perspective, most of psychology's concepts that form the basis of empirical inquiry, such as memory, attention, consciousness, i…

Why is domain-generality so intuitive? This paper makes a case for why we need an evolutionary psychology of psychology, and what it has to say about the study of intelligence, consciousness, domain-generality, and the theory crisis.
@pdurkee.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

La mémoire enfouie des camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie Entre 1954 et 1962, l’armée française a déplacé et parqué dans des camps plus de 2 millions de paysans algériens. Plus de 200 000 d’entre eux, dont deux tiers d’enfants, y seraient morts de froid et d...

www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/art...

Heroism, horror and the ‘pits of hell’: inside the last days of El Fasher Over two days in October 2025, up to 10,000 people are believed to have been massacred; a further 40,000 civillians from the Sudanese city are still unaccounted for. This is the story of what happened

An absolutely devastating account of part of what is going on in Sudan. The RSF apparently funded by the UAE, where people go for sunny holidays ... (until recently anyway) www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

No Israel prosecutions for killing Palestinian civilians in occupied West Bank since start of decade Dozens of former Israeli military, police and spy chiefs describe situation as ‘organised Jewish terrorism’

State-supported pogroms in Palestinian villages
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026: Unraveling The Democratic Era?
www.v-dem.net/documents/75...

Here is a PhD fellowship in one of the best places in the world to study cognition and culture.
1. Cultural phenomenon: writing
2. Cognitive capacity: to detect what is unpredictable
3. Mission: Show how (2) drives the evolution of (1) 😲
4. Methods: you’ll eventually master some powerful ones

"Social sadism"? Great quote (from Merton, R. K. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. American journal of sociology, 78(1)), serious issue.

January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy Discover the real January 6 story: peaceful protest turned tragedy, Deep State entrapment, media deception, and President Trump's triumphant pardons restoring justice to patriotic Americans.

Wow! More effectively Orwellian than 1984
www.whitehouse.gov/j6/

Evolutionary Social Sciences with Dan Nettle YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

Daniel Nettle: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPu...

Land Grab: Inside Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank Israeli seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, often brutally, has accelerated, raising doubts about the prospects of a peaceful solution to the conflict.

The cold-blooded, brutal grab of Palestinian land in the West Bank goes on in the shadow of the ongoing anihilation of Gaza.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Why Do Humans Have Linguistic Intuition? | Cadernos de Linguística

Thom Scott-Phillips presents a novel analysis of people's spontaneous intuitions about sentence acceptability "grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and evolutionary approaches to the mind." cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca...

Science journal retracts study on safety of Monsanto’s Roundup: ‘Serious ethical concerns’ Paper published in 2000 found glyphosate was not harmful, while internal emails later revealed company’s influence

25 year ago, Monsanto (acquired by Bayer in 2018) acting against public health and honest science
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I agree: there’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles, which will save many lives. More than 39,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes yearly. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Opinion | Don’t Fear Self-Driving Cars. They Save Lives.

Not a topic on which I would normally post, but given that road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years (www.who.int/news-room/fa...), this is hugely relevant.
Don’t Fear Self-Driving Cars. They Save Lives. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Thank you Ben Rhodes for this important column:
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/o...
Some exerpts:
"If you believe a Palestinian child is equal in dignity and worth to an Israeli or American child, it is no longer possible to support this Israeli government while hiding behind platitudes about peace.
...

Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories Cognitive technologies are socially acquired and culturally evolved systems whose primary function is cognitive. There is a tremendous untapped opportunity for a broad range of disciplines across the...

At last, the final publication in 'Cognitive Technologies and their Histories': the editorial introduction to the issue in TopiCS, by myself and @helenamiton.bsky.social. 4.5 years since our initial @cogscisociety.bsky.social panel. Free access! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US | Yuli Novak The international community allowed all of this to happen. We must not look away or move on

Yuli Novak (executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem):
"Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Modernity In Rhythm How migration and technology enabled a special form of togetherness: A multimedia origins story for the lindy hop.

Excellent:
Modernity In Rhythm open.substack.com/pub/thomscot...

Join me in signing the #JewsDemandAction petition calling on governments around the world to impose meaningful consequences on the Israeli government, including appropriate sanctions, enforcement of ICJ and ICC rulings and warrants, and withholding of arms. jewsdemandaction.org jewsdemandaction.org

A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice Abstract. We advance a novel account of the cognitive foundations of epistemic injustice. We argue that such injustice arises from the efficient allocation

Cheyenne Dosso, Tiffany Morisseau, Christophe Heintz, Jean-Sébastien Vayre, A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2025;, pqaf088, doi.org/10.1093/pq/p...

Preprint in FREE ACCESS at philpapers.org/archive/DOSA...

osf.io/preprints/ps...
Preprint: Jan Pfänder and Hugo Mercier "The rational impression account of trust in science"

Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition Over the last decade, new research has shown how human collectives can develop technologies that no single individual could discover on their own. However, this research often overlooks how technology can become so complex that individuals cannot operate it on their own. At this level of technological complexity, distributing cognition is a necessary process for reducing cognitive load on individuals. Yet distributing cognition also imposes coordination costs as technological systems become larger and the individuals in these systems become more specialized. We describe a sprawling set of cultural innovations that facilitate cognitive distribution by reducing cognitive load, reducing coordination costs, or doing both. Preliminary evidence suggests that these cultural innovations co-evolve with technological complexity.

Online Now: Complex technology requires cultural innovations for distributing cognition

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...

Opinion | He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated Him.

An excellent but devastating piece on the Israeli assassination of the brave and beloved Gazan journalist Anas Al-Sharif:
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/o...
This is on us in the US: our government could stop this with a single phone call.
Call your reps to demand an end to US military support of Israel

Is Gaza still a place for newborn life? 10 months after a warning that Gaza's maternal and neonatal health sector was sliding from crisis towards collapse,1 fresh field reports reveal an even starker picture. In the first 6 months of 2025, ...

“What name do we give to a policy environment that suppresses the arrival of new life?”

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Israel/OPT: New testimonies provide compelling evidence that Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is a deliberate policy Israel is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life, Amnesty International said today.

Israel is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life.

Read more:

Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively improve technologies in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually exp...

🚨🚨 New preprint 📜 with Mathieu Charbonneau (@matcharbonneau.bsky.social‬): Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution (arxiv.org/abs/2508.04828). Feedback welcomed! #Evolution #Technology #Culture #OpenEnded #TechnologicalEvolution #CulturalEvolution 🧵: 1/29

From ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?

Onlookers threw them dried bread loafs making the Jews fight for food and causing boats to capsize. Jews said: "God is just. Yes, of us he has made victims, but of you he has made persecutors."