Note: In March and April 2023, I completed a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. I reworked, refined, expanded, and much improved, I think, RGBCatastrophe, my computer simulation tool for exploring, teaching, and thinking about complexity and self-organization. Here I give a preview of the latest…
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…
The moralizing gods debacle takes a turn for the worse
Savage et al. (2019) have posted their response to Beheim et al.’s (2019) critique of their Nature paper (Whitehouse et al. 2019a) which argues that moralizing gods appear as a consequence of social complexification, rather than as its precursor, which the Big Gods hypothesis requires. I discussed the original controversy here and here. The Seshat…
Evaluating the claim of 16k year old remains at Cooper’s Ferry: A comment on Davis et al 2019
Sixteen thousand years seems to be the new target for earliest archaeological remains in the Americas. The team at Gault recently made the claim, along with the team at the associated Friedkin site. Now a team working at Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho have joined in. Let me start with my standard disclaimer: I have no…
Luck is very important, but just how insignificant is talent? A comment on Pluchino et al. (2018)
A tweet recently came across my feed about an article by Pluchino et al. that generated some media interest last year, and that looks at the relative roles of luck and talent in people’s success. The paper gives some interesting empirical support to a contention that many, including me, intuitively feel is true: “The most…
ArcheoThoughts 