Andreas Hofer – Medium

2 days ago

Mostly Harmless: Right-Wing Authoritarians

In the wake of WWII social scientists tried to make sense of something that most people would have considered unthinkable, the horrors of the holocaust. Most people would think of high-ranking Nazi officers, say a commander of a concentration camp as moral monsters. However, this turned out to be an…

Policits

5 min read

Mostly Harmless: Right-Wing Authoritarians

Jun 22

Cycles of centralization and decentralisation in human history

James Scott is one of my favourite writers in anthropology, even though we do have differing views on the role of pastoralism in history. Scott, who is an anarchist at heart, does not tire to tell us about the drawbacks of early farming societies in Against the Grain: A Deep…

Centralization

6 min read

Jun 21

The Art of Not Being Governed

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010) by James C. Scott is a great book for anarchists, all people who value freedom over material well-being and those who think that anarchy equals chaos. The book is about the history of Zomia (the Southeast…

Anarchism

6 min read

Jun 21

Pickups, Priuses and Patterns of Polarisation

I love Bob Marley and Pink Floyd. According to Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide (2018) by Jonathan D. Weiler and Marc J. Hetherington there is one thing you can relatively safely infer from this piece of information: I am a liberal…

Polarization

5 min read

Pickups, Priuses and Patterns of Polarisation

Jun 18

Fluid, Rigid and Flexible Minds

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. Attributed to Sokrates Only a few years ago I would not have thought that it makes sense to categorise human minds. After all, there is such a wide spectrum of variation that it would be possible to slice…

Mindset

7 min read

Jun 14

Collective Illusions

Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions (2022) by Todd Rose is a highly interesting and very enjoyable read full of anecdotes and scientific tidbits. The book opens with a story set in the 1920s about a tight-knit village community in which everyone believes…

Conformity

5 min read

Jun 12

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

AS soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner. I suppose they thought I was just the build for it because I was long and skinny for my age (and still am) and in any case I didn’t mind it much, to tell you the…

Running

3 min read

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

Jun 11

Caffeine and carbs consumption in people with ADHD

The link between risk for substance use and ADHD has been known for a long time. However, I have been able to find little on sugar and caffeine. Long before I actually discovered my own ADHD I read that sugar increases the risk for ADHD. In a 2019 review…

Coffee

4 min read

Caffeine and carbs consumption in people with ADHD

Jun 10

The past and future evolution of human personality metatraits

When I was a college student in the 1990s the general consensus was that human evolution basically stopped around 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture and that we aren’t going to see any changes in the future. That was a very naive assumption, as it turned out. Not…

Evolution

5 min read

Jun 9

Metatraits of the Big Five and why there is no General Factor of Personality (GFP)

Colin G. DeYoung and Jordan B. Peterson have done some interesting work on the Big 5 personality inventory and found that the Big Five factors, that were originally thought to be independent of each other do tend to fall into two clusters, dubbed stability (alpha) and plasticity (beta). This work…

Big Five Personality

3 min read

Metatraits of the Big Five and why there is no General Factor of Personality (GFP)