Paul Smaldino
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psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino
@psmaldino.bsky.social
5.7K followers 930 following 700 posts

Paradigmatically promiscuous scientist. Ankylosaur enthusiast. Modeler of cultural evolution and related topics. Professor at UC Merced and the Santa Fe Institute.
Web: https://smaldino.com/wp/

Videos
Physics 20%
Sociology 17%
Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Jason Mittell, Michael Barnett, Michael S. Rosenberg , and 30 more

brittanytrang.com
Brittany Trang @brittanytrang.com · 2d
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 4d
We did some reviewing of this idea in this paper, but I’d love to see a more in depth treatment. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Information architectures: a framework for understanding socio-technical systems - npj Complexity
A sequence of technological inventions over several centuries has dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing information. Because societies ride on a substrate of information, these c...
www.nature.com

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 4d
I quite liked "On the Origin of Tepees" www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-the...
On the Origin of Tepees
“Ambitious and original. It belongs on the reading list of anybody who hopes to use Richard Dawkins’s insight into memes. That it is entertaining i...
www.simonandschuster.com

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino

simongreenhill.bsky.social
Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 4d
why has no-one written a book on the evolution of cooperation titled "Decent with Modification"?

#evolution #culturalevolution

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino

thetnholler.bsky.social
The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 4d
Thinking this level of inequality is unsustainable isn’t radical, thinking it isn’t is

Reposted by Justin H. Kirkland, Paul E. Smaldino, Marta Kołczyńska , and 1 more

m-b-petersen.bsky.social
Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · 4d
Four (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil...

Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy.

Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs
Four three-year postdoctoral positions in the project Slow-Motion Democracy - Vacancy at Aarhus University
Vacancy at Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
international.au.dk

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 5d
Great story.

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d
I’ll just call it silly.

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d
Yeah, it was something as banal as "I will refer to this phenomenon as X."

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d
I was once told "APA format does not permit the future tense."

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d
I recently learned there’s a documentary about this. Haven’t seen it, but there it is. mubi.com/en/films/fre...
TRAILER - Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb (2020)
Disgusted by the way police are abusing their power, outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson starts his own political movement, Freak Power, to fight corruption and cronyism in his town and across Americ...
mubi.com

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 6d
In 1970, Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, CO, under the progressive “Freak Power” party platform. He lost by 31 votes despite receiving more votes than the previous winner, largely because the Dems and Republicans colluded to run a single candidate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat...
Thompson for sheriff 1970. The campaign logo is a doubled-thumbed fist holding a mescaline button.

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino

epthepod.bsky.social
Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast) @epthepod.bsky.social · 6d
This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go.
youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...
Cultural Dynamics with Bret Breheim
YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)
youtu.be

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Peter Thorne, Paul E. Smaldino , and 3 more

esqueer.net
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 7d
They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs.

www.vogue.com/article/teen...

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Katharine Hayhoe, Nandita Sharma , and 34 more

leximcmenamin.com
Lex McMenamin (they/them) @leximcmenamin.com · 7d
I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day.

certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 12d
TSA once made me toss an unopened jar of Nutella because it was allegedly a liquid.

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino, Cailin O’Connor, Michael Muthukrishna

patrickesavage.bsky.social
Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 12d
This thicc 71-chapter book (academic.oup.com/edited-volum...) arrived just in time to use as the textbook for my new "Cultural Evolution" class I've just started teaching!
Featuring this chapter from @cailinmeister.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social & Jingyi Wu as well as much more including...
Syllabus for my new "Cultural Evolution" class: Topic Reading 1 (Textbook) Reading 2 (primary source) Course overview (none) (none) How to read + history Foreword: A brief history of the study of cultural evolution Editor’s Preface How and why to read (and write and publish) academic research Arts 39) Cultural evolution and music Sequence alignment of folk song melodies reveals cross-cultural regularities of musical evolution Communication 55) Language phylogenies: Modeling the evolution of language Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages Animal culture 22) What constitutes non-human culture and how is it studied? Cultures in chimpanzees Technology 36) Digital culture Large language models show human-like content biases in transmission chain experiments Religion 44) The cultural evolution of religion and cooperation Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: A review and ‘retake’ Sociality 49) Cultural evolution and the economic wealth of nations Dual Evolutionary Foundations of Political Ideology Predict Divergent Responses to COVID-19 Coevolution 60) Cultural evolution and diet Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe Applications (policy) 69) Cultural evolution and public policy Female genital cutting is not a social coordination norm Applications (science) 71) Cultural evolution of science The natural selection of bad science Final discussion 1) Perspectives on cultural evolution from pioneers in the field Genes, culture, and scientific racism The thicc 71-chapter Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution

Reposted by Elizabeth Saunders, Nandita Sharma, David Rothschild , and 7 more

radleybalko.bsky.social
Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 13d
I know it’s too much to expect them to know their history, but if the American Revolution had a motto, it definitely would not have been “immigrants go home.”

It would have been “get your fucking soldiers out of our cities.”
craigipedia.bsky.social Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social · 13d
America... boy, I dunno.

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 14d
Especially appropriate if you were actually trying to convince her to play Rummikub.

Reposted by William J. Brady

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 14d
Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
psmaldino.bsky.social Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · Jun 2
I wrote a chapter on a functionalist account of social identity.

IMO, thinking about identity in an instrumental way helps explain a lot of behavior that seems otherwise baffling.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
This chapter focuses on how people use identity categories for adaptive decision making and how they strategically apply signals of identity. Adopting a functional view of identity for communication and behavior allows us to focus on the forces that shape their use. I will first make it clear that signals of social identity often encode meaningful information for decision making. I will then review specific perspectives on how selection by consequences has shaped the use of identity signals to more adaptively facilitate social learning, partner choice, and coordination, followed by a consideration of how those uses have changed in a world characterized by diversity, anonymity and the Internet, and political polarization. Identity is constructed for functional purposes, and is therefore only essential insofar as forming categories and legible cultural artifacts are essential features of human activity.

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 14d
Revision posted! An evolutionary model of identity signaling with nested/overlapping/intersectional identities, complex multidimensional signaling capabilities, and a primer on ancient Mesopotamia. What more could you ask for?
osf.io/preprints/so...
psmaldino.bsky.social Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · Jul 1
New preprint w/ Nathan Gabriel & @avbell.bsky.social: The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies

The model tackles multiple nested/overlapping identities and complex signaling structure. Recovers lots of old results and adds several new ones osf.io/preprints/so...
Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with 3 group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a coordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to coordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signaling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviors that those identities function to afford.

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino

mmitchell.bsky.social
Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 15d
Screensnapshot of our times. Corporate pressure to use AI creates bad outcomes with real-life consequences; seeking to unpack the problem yields more pressure to indulge in the very thing causing the problem.
Reuters screenshot. Headline: "Two federal judges say use of AI led to errors in US court rulings". Bottom left: Reuters AI saying, "Get the key points from this story with Reuters AI"

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Steven L. Salzberg, Lisa W. Fazio , and 49 more

jbenmenachem.com
jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 20d
Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero
Harvard FAS Cuts Ph.D. Seats By More Than Half Across Next Two Admissions Cycles | News | The Harvard Crimson
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for th...
www.thecrimson.com

Reposted by Hugo Mercier, Paul E. Smaldino, Alex Mesoudi , and 3 more

thecharleywu.bsky.social
Charley Wu | hiring PhDs/Postdocs @thecharleywu.bsky.social · 21d
Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur...
Apply by Nov 12!
Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏
ERC funded PhD position on Cultural Evolution
ERC funded PhD position on Cultural Evolution posted on October 16, 2025 We are currently seeking a highly motivated individual for a ful...
hmc-lab.com

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 23d
We don’t need that fascist groove thing. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49B...
[We Don't Need This] Fascist Groove Thang (Remastered 2006)
YouTube video by Heaven 17 - Topic
m.youtube.com

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 24d
Interesting! Maybe the inner patterns need consistent enough shape/boundaries for the patterns to cohere?

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 24d
Surely it can be true that culture sometimes evolves without knowledge about why something works, and other times it evolves with that knowledge? It would interesting to try and quantify where and when each is more likely to happen.

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino

enfascination.com
Seth Frey @enfascination.com · 24d
My house cat has stripes in his spots. I modeled it by putting a Turing cell differentiation model *inside* another Turing cell differentiation model.

Here's the model if you're interested:
enfascination.com/htdocs/Cats_...
click Setup, wait 5 seconds, then Go

psmaldino.bsky.social
Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · 25d
I'd always felt that the assumption of random variation was more of a modeling convenience than the way people thought innovations really happened. That said, nice study! Complements some recent modeling work we've done on the role of analogy in hi-fi social transmission. osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io

Reposted by Paul E. Smaldino, Henry Jones

melbuer.bsky.social
Mel Buer @melbuer.bsky.social · 25d
A main organizer of VC Defensa in Ventura County was rammed in his vehicle by federal agents and taken into custody this morning. This video is from VC Defensa IG and shows the ramming. Organizers are thinking he’ll be taken to LA MDC—headed there now