I’ve been in academic administration in one capacity or another for about a dozen years now. In that time, I’ve heard my share of ed consultant flim-flam, trendy admin buzzwords, and Orwellian management-speak. For some reason, in all that time, in all those well-attended meetings, and in all those broadly consulted, fully benchmarked, uniquely tailored-for-our-context…
Moralizing gods update: Seshat still searching for something that isn’t there
Last week, Turchin et al posted a reply to critiques of their Nature paper that argued that social complexity precedes moralizing gods. This goes against the big gods hypothesis that the presence of moralizing gods in human social networks allowed the growth of larger and more complex communities. Instead, Turchin et al argue that larger…
Oak Island archaeology update : bones and swages
We’ve learned some interesting things in the first few episodes of Curse of Oak Island this season. I’ll go through the most significant, from my perspective as an archaeologist. Bones A couple of years ago, the Curse of Oak Island (COOI) team recovered 2 fragments of bone from their drilling in the Money Pit area.…
Understanding the visceral reaction to Laura’s Spinney’s History as a giant data set
This week, Laura Spinney covers recent developments in the use of big data in history, the potential it has for illuminating the present, and for helping us prepare for the future. The online reaction from at least some of the history, archaeology, and social science community, has been visceral. Spinney simply ran headlong into the…
We don’t need better hypotheses and models, we need them to be more diverse
This week, Paul Smaldino of UC Merced invites us to reflect on the importance of good theory. “The thing is”, he says, “we don’t just want science to be reproducible”, which requires better methods, “we want it to help us make better sense of the world. For that, we must create better hypotheses – and…
