COVID-19: All the wrong moves in all the wrong places

Looking in all the wrong places.

Looking for answers in all the wrong places.

Chimpanzee Theory of Mind: Looking in All the Wrong Places?

I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subj...

All models are wrong.

As the field of phylogeography has continued to move in the model-based direction, researchers continue struggling to construct useful models for inference. These models must be both simple enough to be tractable yet contain enough of the complexity of the natural world to make meaningful inference. Beyond constructing such models for inference, researchers explore model space and test competin...

All models are wrong.

A NESTHESIOLOGISTS are master pharmacologists. In the course of our training, we learn that certain types of drugs, the hypnotics, suppress consciousness. We learn that other types of drugs, the analgesics, suppress nociception. Through training and experience, we learn to induce oblivion with judicious combinations of hypnotics and analgesics. We learn to leverage the synergistic interaction o...