Rob Sica
@robsica.bsky.social
Knowledge would have little allure if we did not have to overcome so much shame on the way to acquiring it. -Nietzsche
"A censorious impulse has sometimes been evident on both the left and the right."
Conceptualizing Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is an unusual and complex set of norms and practices. It arises out of the combination of the corporate self-governance of medieval universities and the spirit of disciplinary scienti...
www.annualreviews.org
February 18, 2026 at 4:00 AM
"A censorious impulse has sometimes been evident on both the left and the right."
Reposted by Rob Sica
Henry Shevlin and I chat with @anilseth.bsky.social about his scientific and philosophical case against conscious AI: youtu.be/wVYg8u5xjno?...
AI Sessions #9: The Case Against AI Consciousness (with Anil Seth)
YouTube video by Conspicuous Cognition
youtu.be
February 17, 2026 at 7:36 PM
Henry Shevlin and I chat with @anilseth.bsky.social about his scientific and philosophical case against conscious AI: youtu.be/wVYg8u5xjno?...
"Concepts have no lives outside the social labour that animates them. And philosophers do not engage with them from a place of methodological safety. We intervene from within... philosophers must take a sober view of their position within this economy"
Conceptual economics Contra conceptual engineering
We are invited to picture conceptual improvement as a kind of engineering. Extract the concept, repair what is defective, and return it to use. But the picture requires a background assumption that...
www.tandfonline.com
February 17, 2026 at 11:09 PM
"Concepts have no lives outside the social labour that animates them. And philosophers do not engage with them from a place of methodological safety. We intervene from within... philosophers must take a sober view of their position within this economy"
Reposted by Rob Sica
I wrote an essay responding to Philip Goff's recent anti-science meme. Hopefully successful in clarifying the relationship between science and philosophy, and perhaps even changing the minds of some philosophers.
walterveit.substack.com/p/to-hell-wi...
walterveit.substack.com/p/to-hell-wi...
To Hell with A Priori Metaphysics
On the Relationship Between Science and Philosophy
walterveit.substack.com
February 16, 2026 at 11:58 PM
I wrote an essay responding to Philip Goff's recent anti-science meme. Hopefully successful in clarifying the relationship between science and philosophy, and perhaps even changing the minds of some philosophers.
walterveit.substack.com/p/to-hell-wi...
walterveit.substack.com/p/to-hell-wi...
"perhaps there is a way to persuade people that is neither hopelessly misguided nor morally suspect"
Just Hear Me Out
A guide to persuasion for people who want to change minds without manipulation or coercion.Most of us have given up on persuasion. We say our problems are too pressing, people are too polarized, and s...
press.uchicago.edu
February 17, 2026 at 9:33 PM
"perhaps there is a way to persuade people that is neither hopelessly misguided nor morally suspect"
Reposted by Rob Sica
My rough, brief take on activist scholarship. TLDR: It’s an epistemological mistake, but it can come from a genuine search for the truth, so it must be included. But it can’t be allowed to take over. Ditto for other epistemologies. Academia needs pluralism, not forced activism or neutrality.
Universities Can’t Be Politically Neutral, but They Can Be Pluralistic
By Enzo Rossi, Published on 12/31/25
scholarsjunction.msstate.edu
February 17, 2026 at 6:11 PM
My rough, brief take on activist scholarship. TLDR: It’s an epistemological mistake, but it can come from a genuine search for the truth, so it must be included. But it can’t be allowed to take over. Ditto for other epistemologies. Academia needs pluralism, not forced activism or neutrality.
"[E]ven a purely negative orientation—like domination as an evil to keep to a minimum—is still a normative orientation in a wide, ecumenical sense. It can serve for critical purposes and for providing practical orientation."
“A minimum of domination”—the overt normative orientation of Foucault's work
Answering the charge of ‘crypto-normativity’ that has long overshadowed Michel Foucault's work, I argue that this work is animated by an overt normative orientation to keep domination to a minimum. T....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
February 17, 2026 at 7:17 PM
"[E]ven a purely negative orientation—like domination as an evil to keep to a minimum—is still a normative orientation in a wide, ecumenical sense. It can serve for critical purposes and for providing practical orientation."
Reposted by Rob Sica
This week, we talk to @katrinewhiteson.bsky.social about the microbiome: what it is, how to feed it, and why we need it.
youtu.be/-gthtVjIOYs
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qam9b...
youtu.be/-gthtVjIOYs
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qam9b...
The Microbiome with Katrine Whiteson
YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)
youtu.be
February 17, 2026 at 4:32 PM
This week, we talk to @katrinewhiteson.bsky.social about the microbiome: what it is, how to feed it, and why we need it.
youtu.be/-gthtVjIOYs
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qam9b...
youtu.be/-gthtVjIOYs
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e...
www.podbean.com/eas/pb-qam9b...
Reposted by Rob Sica
Ho scritto un editoriale per il magazine dell'Università di Trento sul nostro recente articolo:
Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale
mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...
Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale
mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...
Quando le fiction creano allarme | UniTrentoMag
mag.unitn.it
February 17, 2026 at 8:07 AM
Ho scritto un editoriale per il magazine dell'Università di Trento sul nostro recente articolo:
Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale
mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...
Quando le fiction creano allarme - Perché gli incel catturano l’attenzione. Un esercizio di evoluzione culturale
mag.unitn.it/editoriali/1...
"Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist even in the light of shared evidence, and to improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them."
Democracy and Disagreement: Gender-Affirming Care
YouTube video by Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences
www.youtube.com
February 17, 2026 at 5:11 AM
"Students will have the opportunity to probe those disagreements, understand why they persist even in the light of shared evidence, and to improve their own understanding of the facts and values that underlie them."
"The mind conceived as an assemblage of evolved information-processing modules offers a powerful organizing principle for understanding many phenomena of psychiatric interest"
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
February 17, 2026 at 3:59 AM
"The mind conceived as an assemblage of evolved information-processing modules offers a powerful organizing principle for understanding many phenomena of psychiatric interest"
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...
"Without evolutionary framing, each generation can label any novel technological transition as 'unnatural,' using their own experiences as a baseline while ignoring other preexisting societal conditions that are plausible evolutionary mismatches."
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
February 17, 2026 at 3:31 AM
"Without evolutionary framing, each generation can label any novel technological transition as 'unnatural,' using their own experiences as a baseline while ignoring other preexisting societal conditions that are plausible evolutionary mismatches."
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
"All beasts are driven to pasture by blows."
#Heraclitus
#Heraclitus
February 17, 2026 at 2:21 AM
"All beasts are driven to pasture by blows."
#Heraclitus
#Heraclitus
"there is no evolutionary reason why the ultimate functions of motivational systems should be explicit or accessible to introspection... as a matter of fact, one of the recurring problems of evolutionary psychology as a field is that these adaptive motivations are often profoundly counter-intuitive"
(PDF) Human motivation is organized hierarchically, from proximal (means) to ultimate (ends)
PDF | Murayama and Jach raise a key problem in behavioral sciences, to which we suggest evolutionary science can provide a solution. We emphasize the... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...
www.researchgate.net
February 17, 2026 at 2:00 AM
"there is no evolutionary reason why the ultimate functions of motivational systems should be explicit or accessible to introspection... as a matter of fact, one of the recurring problems of evolutionary psychology as a field is that these adaptive motivations are often profoundly counter-intuitive"
"In general, bias, unlike sadness, is not even the right kind of thing to be detected by introspection. This is because many of our biases have an externalist character."
Political Epistemology, Rationality, and Externalism About Bias
This article develops and defends the idea that some of our biases have an externalist character, with particular attention to cases in which the phenomenon arises in political contexts. A person who....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
February 17, 2026 at 1:47 AM
"In general, bias, unlike sadness, is not even the right kind of thing to be detected by introspection. This is because many of our biases have an externalist character."
"I never did. I never will."
Tender Mercies - I Don't Trust Happiness
YouTube video by Gash
www.youtube.com
February 16, 2026 at 6:59 PM
"I never did. I never will."
🔪"[E]ven if it turns out that humans are woefully mismatched to the modern world—cavemen in suits, grunting their way through life—we have to ask ourselves another follow-up question: 'Is there any reason to expect intellectuals to be more ‘matched’ than the masses?'"
What Kind Of Apes Are We?
This is a guest post by David Pinsof, who writes the excellent ‘Everything is Bullshit’ Substack.
www.conspicuouscognition.com
February 16, 2026 at 1:40 PM
🔪"[E]ven if it turns out that humans are woefully mismatched to the modern world—cavemen in suits, grunting their way through life—we have to ask ourselves another follow-up question: 'Is there any reason to expect intellectuals to be more ‘matched’ than the masses?'"
🔪"Can you say something about what role teachers and professors played in the Holocaust?"
Alex Alvarez and Richard R. Fernandez, "Lethal Elites: The Institutions and Professionals That Made the Holocaust Possible" (Bloomsbury, 2025) - New Books Network
newbooksnetwork.com
February 16, 2026 at 2:37 AM
🔪"Can you say something about what role teachers and professors played in the Holocaust?"
"When you have interpretive communities that are simultaneously moral and emotional communities they don't perceive claims made by people outside the tribe as just empirically wrong they perceive them as morally wrong."
Politics Is the Best Predictor of Academic Research — Prof Mark Horowitz
YouTube video by El Podcast
www.youtube.com
February 16, 2026 at 2:03 AM
"When you have interpretive communities that are simultaneously moral and emotional communities they don't perceive claims made by people outside the tribe as just empirically wrong they perceive them as morally wrong."
"Our public discourse about expertise often fails to distinguish empirical and normative questions, with people in effect being encouraged to defer to scientists about *both* kinds of issues (or, by others, about *neither*)."
Authority or autonomy? Philosophical and psychological perspectives on deference to experts
Several decades of work in both philosophy and psychology acutely highlights our limitations as individual inquirers. One way to recognize these limitations is to defer to experts: roughly, to form...
www.tandfonline.com
February 16, 2026 at 12:40 AM
"Our public discourse about expertise often fails to distinguish empirical and normative questions, with people in effect being encouraged to defer to scientists about *both* kinds of issues (or, by others, about *neither*)."
"we argue against the existence of an intrinsic aversion to lying, or an intrinsic preference for truth-telling"
(PDF) Why are lies small?
PDF | Deception is common, yet lies are typically small and not easily spotted. The dominant explanations for why this is the case are psychological in... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...
www.researchgate.net
February 15, 2026 at 10:20 PM
"we argue against the existence of an intrinsic aversion to lying, or an intrinsic preference for truth-telling"
Looking forward to:
Puts, D. A., Lieberman, D., & Hill, A. (Under contract). Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature. Kendall Hunt Publishing Co.
Puts, D. A., Lieberman, D., & Hill, A. (Under contract). Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature. Kendall Hunt Publishing Co.
Attraction & Disgust: Evolutionary Psychology Explained (Dr. Deb Lieberman)
YouTube video by El Podcast
www.youtube.com
February 15, 2026 at 9:58 PM
Looking forward to:
Puts, D. A., Lieberman, D., & Hill, A. (Under contract). Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature. Kendall Hunt Publishing Co.
Puts, D. A., Lieberman, D., & Hill, A. (Under contract). Sex, Evolution, and Human Nature. Kendall Hunt Publishing Co.
Reposted by Rob Sica
"The current paper argues for a more explicitly interactive, co-adaptive account for trends in communications technology and politics." 👏
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...
Political polarization as a co-adaptive process
Abstract. Political polarization is often characterized as a consequence of changes in media content or technology. We argue, in contrast, for an account t
academic.oup.com
February 15, 2026 at 4:35 PM
"The current paper argues for a more explicitly interactive, co-adaptive account for trends in communications technology and politics." 👏
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...
academic.oup.com/joc/advance-...