Paul Smaldino

psmaldino.bsky.social

20 October 2026 17:45

My paper on the Varieties of Cultural Selection is now in press at @biologicaltheory.bsky.social. It's also about 30% longer than the original draft, with additions and clarifications inspired by the excellent comments I received from reviewers and colleagues. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/so...

lastpositivist.bsky.social

28 September 2026 04:24

Self-indulgent introspective thread! Once upon a time I became very interested in the question of what would it feel like to be a geometric conventionalist. This resulted in a short story, pictured here (plus link: www.liamkofibright.com/uploads/4/8/... - better to use this rather than alt-text) ...

Sean Carroll

seanmcarroll.bsky.social

13 July 2026 16:57

"Boltzmann Brains" is a fanciful name for a dead-serious idea. I'm beginning to wonder whether the name hasn't caused the physics community to not spend nearly enough time thinking carefully about the problems that they pose. We have Boltzmann Brain Blindness. Long 🧵 coming. ⚛️ #cosmology (1/n)

Jessica Riedl

jessicabriedl.bsky.social

08 July 2026 02:13

NEW from me in @theatlantic.com. The left and right are both trapped in lazy, false Social Security narratives. For the right, its blaming immigrants & the trust fund raid. For the left, its that lifting the cap painlessly brings solvency. 🧵 www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Carl T. Bergstrom

carlbergstrom.com

06 July 2026 21:10

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.