Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post (in November) that seem interesting. Political science Working paper: Political party in power in the US has no effect on individual well-being. Are cultural and economic conservatism correlated? The usual story is that people naturally sort into conservative (morally traditional free marketeers) and progressives (morally progressive interventionists). This paper shows this is not true, the opposite is more usually the case. …

I wrote a few days agothis rather lengthy review of The Elephant in the Brain, and I got a reply from Robin Hanson here. After this reply, I think we are in agreement more than I initially thought, and that is a good thing, but there are still a few things I disagree with in his reply. I will begin by noting down something that left me surprised to the utmost degree, even though it is a tiny discussion point:  (Note that our book never uses “hypocrisy”.) It is just a comment in passing Hanson makes. Initi…

... it is about signaling! :) If you are part of the select readership of Nintil, you probably know about Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias fame. Perhaps you have also heard about Kevin Simler, who blogs at MeltingAsphalt. They just released a book together, The Elephant in the Brain. It is worth laying out some backstory to understand where this book comes from before getting into the review itself: For years, Robin Hanson has been writing pieces arguing that "X is not about X, it is about Y" (Wher…

[This post is a translation of the one I just published] Hablemos de Beyond Sacrificial Harm: A Two-Dimensional Model of Utilitarian Psychology, por Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2017), el que posiblemente sea el mejor paper de psicología moral del año. En el campo de la psicología, existe un área en particular que se ha hecho bastante famosa por su uso de peculiares dilemas morales, especialmente el llamado problema del tranvía.…

I'm talking about Kahane, G., Everett, J. A. C., Earp, B. D., Caviola, L., Faber, N. S., Crockett, M. J., & Savulescu, J. (2017). Aka _Beyond Sacrificial Harm: A Two-Dimensional Model of Utilitarian Psychology, _the best moral psychology paper of the year! In the field of psychology, there is a particular area that has become quite visible to outsiders for its colourful use of moral dilemmas, in particular the trolley problem. This area, moral psychology, studies the how people reason about moral issues…

Remember all those blogposts about the Soviet Union I've been writing? They are now a book! The Adam Smith Institute has just published _Back in the USSR: What life was like in the Soviet Union ._It is an edited version of the Soviet Series, including nicer plots, many rewritten sections, and a coherent structure. The content itself is the same, if anything it has been cut down, and many of the super-lengthy quotes I'm infamous for have been abridged. Anyway, if you liked the original posts, you will also p…