In the case of recruitment via social media, I wonder if quite a lot of this could be avoided simply by screening for duplicate IP addresses (and duplicate contact details for reimbursement). How many people can really be bothered to spoof hundreds of IP addresses for this amount of money?

By 2038 the only programmers will be LLMs fed on the popular narrative that Y2K didn't happen because it was a false alarm, not because people worked hard to stop it. They won't do anything to avert the crisis and humanity will finally be destroyed by slop

The median voter theorem falls apart when the political spectrum is bimodally distributed. The far right have understood this for 10+ years, while the centre-left all across the West continue in thrall to the median voter fantasy. Like generals fighting the last war

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The complacency and rudderless drift are reminiscent of the US under Biden. If the 'It can't happen here' mentality was naïve before, it's utterly inexcusable now.

Thus I argue that so-called 'collective propitiatory obligations' already constitute a form of moralising religion, even before the 'Axial Age'. And they persist today in the 'little traditions' of world religions not because of superstition, but because they powerfully support local cooperation.

This isn't so different from e.g. Christian sin, in which harming others has often been thought of as wrong because it's disobedient to God. In both cases, the proximate cause of punishment is disobedience, but the ultimate cause is an interpersonal violation. In this case, defection/free-riding.

Punishment happens when designated individuals fail to contribute to the common good. Emically, sacrificial obligations on behalf of the community are no different from public goods problems like maintaining a dam or a commons. Punishment results from people failing each other, not just the deity.

Secondly, collective punishment for incorrect offerings to deities. Traditionally, this is seen as amoral, because the deity doesn't care about interpersonal behaviour; it is simply angered by not receiving its due. But I argue this is (often) a misconception.

Firstly, what @manvir.bsky.social calls 'mystical harm beliefs', such as the evil eye. These are typically supernatural punishments for breaking local norms vital to social harmony. Whether or not they actually sustain cooperation, I argue they're emically a result of key interpersonal violations.

I'm not sure there's a single word for it. Think of Austronesian peoples in Madagascar. When they arrived in the 6th century, they intermarried with 'indigenous' Bantu people. By the time the French arrived, they'd become 'indigenous'. You need whole sentences to explain the geographical trajectory

'Indigenous' doesn't mean this. As you say, it comes from colonialism and it's only meaningful relative to an invading colonial population. That's why the only people who use it to refer to English people are on the far right - it's a racist dog whistle.

Science is a lot cheaper than most other investments. The anti-intellectual society is inescapably on the decline, abolishing its own future. Be the opposite of that. Go all-out for science, expertise and knowledge, because it pays back, many times over,

as it did for the formerly-great America

Yes, but also, moving some from obscurantist approaches to those that actually enable cumulative intellectual progress is good. Quantitative vs. qualitative is less the issue, I think, than sense vs. nonsense