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Thom Scott-Phillips

@thomscottphillips.bsky.social

3.1K followers 340 following 750 posts

Language, Psychology, Culture, Philosophy, Society, Evolution • When not doing science I dance the lindy hop https://www.thomscottphillips.com/

www.thomscottphillips.com

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · May 23

New Substack post

It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work

As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending

thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...

Happy In Theory

This is the short story of my long, 20 year search for a stable academic home. There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending.

thomscottphillips.substack.com

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 5h

This is academia

We don't reward quality of ideas, we reward imagined proxies like citations and grant income. Just as, in the Soviet Union, they didn't reward the beauty or drama of a chandelier, but an imagined proxy. The end result is that the ceiling falls in

www.youtube.com/shorts/rlUsg...

The Soviet Mistake That Still Destroys Businesses Today

YouTube video by Marketing Brilliance

www.youtube.com

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

Major

Every leader since has declined to face up to realities where Tory instincts work against their own long term interests (especially: Europe; aging demographic)

They declined for varied reasons (cowardice, recklessness, blindness, timidity) but they are all responsible

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

Good question. Depends on the contents (I have contributed a chapter on communication but I don’t know about the rest of it)

I kinda have the opposite worry. Including social invites the jump straight from evolution to anthro, econ, politics etc, thereby skipping the mind

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

At the risk of derailing Lynda’s question: Evolutionary Psychology was first developed and propagated explicitly with the point that the mind is what is adapted/designed

Humans are “adaptation executors” before they are “fitness maximisers”

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

bsky.app/profile/thom...

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

How about…?

The Human Evolutionary Sciences: A comprehensive introduction

It seems more to the point and fewer words, than including “social”

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

How about…?

The Human Evolutionary Sciences: A comprehensive introduction

It seems more to the point and fewer words, than including “social”

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

But one issue in our field is that too much thinking bypasses the mind, and goes direct from evolution to behaviour! :)

But in any case I agree that 1 and 2 are the best alternatives

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Reposted by Thom Scott-Phillips

Ehud @duhe.bsky.social · 2d

Very few Nobelists are eligible, I’m afraid. go.bsky.app/H61xswq

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

I also felt that there was only one player who has to do a lot of running but didn’t tire, and it was the one who didn’t play on Thursday. Mitchell. Not a coincidence imo

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 2d

I agree with the implication of your article: tiredness was key yesterday

It’s easy in hindsight of course, but gotta trust the bench more. There was enough quality and enough legs on our bench to see out a win, had the subs been more and earlier

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 5d

It’s always fit, not abstract “quality”. In football and academia. The needs and demands of manage at Oxbridge and Arsenal are different (not harder, but different) to those needed to manage at the other end of the food chain

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Very interesting, thanks. A slightly different topic perhaps but one I am also very engaged with at the moment. Will read this article properly later

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Yeah I found the LinkedIn piece myself, but I am hoping for longer form analysis/argument

The MSc thesis is on the to-look-at list

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Interesting, thanks, will look it up

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

No need to be cheeky. Nor to make the bad faith assumption that I’m not doing that at the same time

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Yeah, I just looked over it. Plenty of gold. But only a little specifically about calculators. I wanna dig into that case in particular

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Ha, perfect! Thank you

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 6d

Does anyone know of articles, or collections of articles, worrying about what the advent of the electronic calculator (especially the pocket calculator) might mean for citizens’ arithmetic and mathematical abilities?

Were such articles written? I assume so but I want to see what they said

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 7d

I can see there is an argument for making those efforts as part of a training package. But the criteria for a PhD is "original contribution to knowledge", not "did you do traditional training"

Tbh anyone confusing these two things doesn't really belong on a defence committee, imo

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Reposted by Thom Scott-Phillips

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 7d

A lot of psych is already conducted with online convenience samples & ppl are probably excited about silicon samples bc it would allow them to crank out more studies for even less 💸

How about we reconsider the idea that sciencey science involves collecting own data.
www.science.org/content/arti...

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds

Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

www.science.org

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 7d

Wait what? Somebody thought that not collecting your “own” data raised a question mark about your thesis? That is madness

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 7d

I would love to hear an Origin Story on Chomsky! I will help you with the linguistics side, if you need it

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 8d

This is completely true and it makes me so disappointed. All tactics, no strategy

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Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 8d

Just started listening to the episode

About the Ryder Cup. Over the weekend I was thinking that the issue was more the MAGA-fication of the US upper class. Golf aesthetics and golf culture is (I think) much shaped by the US upper class — which is a much more MAGA world now than in decades past

Thom Scott-Phillips @thomscottphillips.bsky.social · 11d

One thing that never fails to give me culture shock is how often Americans express confidence and certainty to degrees that are way out of proportion (in my eyes) to actual circumstance