Duncan Stibbard Hawkes

Ack, but what if I only believed I had the Power to Defeat. Defeated by my own defeater!

My close friends and family *are not ready* to have their mental states defeated by my Newly Acquired Power To Defeat.

Muttering "I am become death destroyer of worlds" as I copy "Rebutting, Undercutting, and No Reason Defeaters" onto an Anki flash card.

I LOVE when science is applied to "toddler questions" like "Why is the sky blue?" or "Why is ice slippery?"

Because the answers can be so SUPRISING.

Let's dig into recent revelations about how ice skates work & why tires skid across black ice.

First, we'll dismiss 3 VERY GOOD hypotheses as wrong.

🧪🤩Have a look at our new preprint using an agent-based model to explore the issue of how, whether and when can one infer social dynamics from archaeological assemblages🤩🧪

I think that image might appear in anthropology slides more often than even the Darwin phylogeny drawing

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

It sucks but I suppose we just have to suck it up 😬

Certain parts of this course have obviously left a more enduring impression than have others.

Questioning some key career decisions made by my younger self as I tap out this sentence.

Looking forward to Jamie Tehrani's guest lecture in my cultural analytics course, open to everybody. If you are in Trento and want to know more about cultural evolution, that is a great opportunity! eventi.unitn.it/en/origins-s...

Please join us next Thursday, 12th March at 13:00, for our next talk of the semester, given by Dr Václav Hrnčíř!

If you would like to attend, please register here: events.teams.microsoft.com/event/e289a4...

More details below 👇

We hope to see you there!

Really nice write-up in @psypost.bsky.social about the recent study with @kris-smith.bsky.social.

Of course, there is *also* regular generosity, but like Woodburn and (most) others I believe that active demands and negotiations do the heavy lifting.

I'm not so sure that "equity is achieved through bargaining" necessarily conflicts with what many on that side of the political spectrum are saying - but our work does challenge the tendency to idealize.

Interlibrary loan is a great resource for getting you hands on old, out-of-print books. Our library gets us (scanned) copies of quite obscure papers in edited volumes in a very timely way.

I can't see a good midterm solution to this which doesn't involve shadowlibraries like libgen and anna's archive; but in 40ish years when the copyright expires on some of these 80s texts, there will be a bounty of hunter-gatherer information previously locked away.

I'm lucky enough to be able to throw some of my startup at old books, but thanks for drawing my attention to this - which I shall no doubt use in time.

The bigger metascientific problem is that any friction makes work less represented general citation networks and the general academic consciousness

Really nice write-up in @psypost.bsky.social about the recent study with @kris-smith.bsky.social.

Of course, there is *also* regular generosity, but like Woodburn and (most) others I believe that active demands and negotiations do the heavy lifting.

One of the best in our small discipline. Gently encouraging @vivek123.bsky.social to use LUP's post-print policy to share the recent interview we ran with Bob in HGR in advance of this talk.

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

I don't think anything has hurt Kalahari ethnography (and Hunter-Gatherer Research broadly) quite so much as its reliance on printed volumes. There's so much extremely important work which is locked in special interest, out-of-print volumes from the 80s that are $100+ on amazon.

Alex has been cooking as well. What are we doing?

The annoying truth is that we are still in the early adopter phase. I think there's enough momentum here soon that normies will take notice but people are hideously technologically conservative by nature and there's absurd institutional inertia.

If the current trajectory continues I seems bsky will become a (if not the) dominant research sharing AND public engagement platform. But right now it is only the former. So, a lack of foresight, though I expect that to change as they see the writing on the wall.

Not only a by-product of complex empirical (and theoretical) work but often a credible cue that your work is difficult.

Just came across this map from the CDC, which contains possibly the most confusing color scheme I have ever seen in a figure.

Source: www.cdc.gov/sleep/data-r...

To maximise I think data unavailable could be crimson and included in the centre of the legend.

Tooth meat, tooth meat, the meat that's a whistle, the whistle you eat!

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

Re-posting this again as I do some Monday emails.