Paul Smaldino

@psmaldino

Paradigmatically promiscuous scientist. Ankylosaur enthusiast. Modeler of cultural evolution and related topics. Anti-fascist. Professor at UC Merced, external prof at the Santa Fe Institute and CSH-Vienna. Web:

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Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 5d

all dogs go to heaven except for those class traitors in the paw patrol

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 13d

A Demographic Theory of Similarity-Biased Social Learning. Now out in PNAS, led by the incomparable @apvelilla.bsky.social . We use modeling to explore conditions for the (cultural) evolution of parochial (and anti-parochial) learning biases. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Humans adapt by learning from others, but risk acquiring maladaptive behaviors when learning from individuals facing different conditions. We present an evolutionary model exploring how individuals use social identity markers to select learning targets in diverse populations. Learners evolve biases that track reliable information sources: preferring similar individuals when in-group knowledge is adaptive, and dissimilar individuals when in-group behaviors are disadvantageous. Our framework demonstrates that this adaptive bias makes social learning viable even when it is costlier than individual learning. Additionally, we show that a minimum threshold of reliable cultural information is required for social learning to spread, providing a mathematical explanation for how demographic diversity drives population-level patterns of cultural segregation and assimilation.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 21d

Looks like criterion (1) isn't met.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 21d

@bedform.org has set it so I can't reply directly to his post, but let me clarify. I think we've undervalued "green" open access. This just means the journal supports posting a version with the same content (possible sans fancy formatting) for free on a personal website or preprint server.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 22d

I really like this paper I did with @nathan-gabriel.bsky.social and @avbell.bsky.social, now out in EHS. It's an unusual paper because we tried to model the emergence of complex, multidimensional and intersectional identity structures from a signaling perspective. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The evolution of identity signals for co-ordination in diverse societies
Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modelling identity signalling and co-ordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a co-ordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to co-ordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signalling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviours that those identities function to afford.

Figure 1.
(a) Ancient Sumerian cities used throughout the paper as a motivating example. (b) Diagram of relationships between the different Mesopotamian identities along with shapes used to represent each of them throughout the paper.

Figure 11.
Proportion of simulations that resulted in (a) the intersectional structure, optimal when 𝛼 =2, or (b) either of the two mere conjunction structures, optimal when 𝛼 =0. The trio of stick figures at the top represent the optimal strategy profiles used by non-Kishus in all cases.

Acknowledgements
We thank the members of the MODSOC lab at UC Merced for helpful comments. We are grateful to the NSF for funding foundational research on social identity, inequality, and intersectionality.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· 28d

I had a paper accepted and learned that PNAS got rid of their free, “closed access” (preprint ok) option - they now charge at least $3K to publish because they are greedy little pigs who have no shame.

PNAS charges $5575 for immediate access at $3925 for delayed open access, because they are greedy pigs without shame.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 10

There’s nothing more awe-inspiring than watching a carpenter bee eat a woodpecker.

Google’s AI-generated quick facts about carpenter bees lists their food as woodpeckers

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· May 13

Rob Boyd thought so too.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Apr 2

I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes. osf.io/preprints/so...

Title page for working paper: "The Varieties of Cultural Selection"

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Apr 1

The only April Fools shenanigans I am tolerating today is the normally very serious subreddit r/AskHistorians overflowing with AITA posts about historical figures.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/lw930lDa10

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Mar 6

I grabbed this data from the USDA and made a graph.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Feb 17

George Carlin, 1990.

I will not say "concept" when I mean "idea." I will not say "impacted" when I mean "affected." There will be no hands-on, state-of-the-art networking. We will not maximize, prioritize, or finalize, and we definitely will not interface.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jan 21

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

It is my thesis that the operation of the living individual
and the operation of some of the newer communication
machines are precisely parallel. Both of them have sensory
receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in
both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting
information from the outer world at low energy levels, and
for making it available in the operation of the individual or
of the machine. In both cases these external messages are
not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers
of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further
stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine
this performance is made to be effective on the outer world.
In both of them, their performed action on the outer world,
and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the
central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is
ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play
the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society.

This is true whether we consider human beings alone, or
in conjunction with types of automata which participate in a
two-way relation with the world about them. In this, our
view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held
by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government. Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions. Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from

$above, and none return. The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism. I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. It is a degradation to a human being to chain him to an oar and use him as a source of power; but it is an almost equal degradation to assign him a purely repetitive task in a factory, which demands less than a millionth of his brain capacity. It is simpler to organize a factory or galley which uses individual human beings for a trivial fraction of their worth than it is to provide a world in which they can grow to their full stature. Those who suffer from a power complex find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions. I say, that this easy path to power is in fact not only a rejection of everything that I consider to be of moral worth in the human race, but also a rejection of our now very tenuous opportunities for a considerable period of human survival.$

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Dec 26

After learning of their existence from His Dark Materials, my 11 yr-old daughter asked for a Crookes Radiometer for Xmas. I now regret every moment in which I didn’t have one in the house.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Nov 4

In 1970, Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, CO, under the progressive “Freak Power” party platform. He lost by 31 votes despite receiving more votes than the previous winner, largely because the Dems and Republicans colluded to run a single candidate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat...

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Oct 13

Incidentally, the book for the latter is currently on sale for many regions. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Sep 30

Happy to see this work published in Psych Review. It's an impressive and important bit of theory/modeling about how we learn about decision-making under risk. Here's a slide with the super-coarse-grained summary of our results. Read the paper for (much) more. osf.io/preprints/so...

Modeling the evolution of peer and vertical/oblique learning strategies for gambles under uncertainty
We recover many empirical results and generate new hypotheses:
Worse conditions lead to more pessimistic behavior
Younger people are overly optimistic
Wealthy people can afford to take more risks
Payoff-biased learning for the rich, parochialism for the poor
Poor people may be slower to adapt to environmental change, creating the appearance of “poverty traps”

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Sep 25

Seen in the hallways of Aarhus University. <<Chef’s kiss>>

Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, images from their 1971 televised debate. Text reads (from Everything Everywhere All At Once): “I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing taxes and laundry with you.”

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Aug 29

I found this abstract I submitted (unsuccessfully) to a session on "cultural evolution in the digital age" for the first CES meeting in 2017. It's aged horribly well. Anyway, this is the kind of shit I'm increasingly trying to work on now.

Are We F*cked?
Paul E. Smaldino, UC Merced

The human population on earth and its impact on the environment, have hardly been stable. Since the industrial revolution, the size of the human population, its cultural complexity, and the magnitude of its environmental footprint have all grown tremendously. The advent of the digital age has fundamentally altered cultural dynamics and increased the potential for human activity at larger scales and faster paces. In light of our increased capacity to effect change, recent environmental catastrophes, such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, coupled with the rise of quasi-dictators and xenophobic populism in the wealthiest and most heavily armed nations, should make us worried about the future of the nice civilization that affords conferences such as this one. I will review models and empirical results based in cultural evolutionary theory, which can give us insights into the kinds of dynamics that are currently unfolding, what we can expect, what we can do to improve things, and whether, in the end, we’re fucked.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Aug 27

This is just some awesome science. Ankylosaurs in the Jurassic period? With sick spiky armor and a spiky tail? That maybe evolved via sexual selection? Hell yes. Goddamn I needed this so much. www.nature.com/articles/s41... (h/t @juemos.bsky.social)

Extreme armour in the world’s oldest ankylosaur

The armoured ankylosaurian dinosaurs are best known from Late Cretaceous Northern Hemisphere ecosystems, but their early evolution in the Early–Middle Jurassic is shrouded in mystery due to a poor fossil record1,2. Spicomellus afer was suggested to be the world’s oldest ankylosaur and the first from Africa, but was based on only a single partial rib from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco3. Here we describe a new, much more complete specimen that confirms the ankylosaurian affinities of Spicomellus, and demonstrates that it has uniquely elaborate dermal armour unlike that of any other vertebrate, extant or extinct. The presence of ‘handle’ vertebrae in the tail of Spicomellus indicates that it possessed a tail weapon, overturning current understanding of tail club evolution in ankylosaurs, as these structures were previously thought to have evolved only in the Early Cretaceous4. This ornate armour may have functioned for display as well as defence, and a later reduction to simpler armour with less extravagant osteoderms in Late Cretaceous taxa might indicate a shift towards a primarily defensive function, perhaps in response to increased predation pressures or a switch to combative courtship displays.

Fig 2. A life reconstruction of S. afer, showing hypothetical positions of armour in dorsal (a) and right lateral (b) views.

Conclusion
The discovery of Spicomellus overturns several long-standing hypotheses about ankylosaur evolution. Recent work has suggested a radiation of Gondwanan ankylosaurs with strange tail weapons at the base of Ankylosauria, the parankylosaurians, but we find no evidence for this grouping. Spicomellus is the oldest ankylosaur and comes from the Southern Hemisphere, but we do not recover it as closely related to other Gondwanan taxa (Fig. 3). Purported similarities in the tail weaponry of Antarctopelta and Stegouros9 should be re-examined in light of these data, and the possession of handle vertebrae in the tail of Spicomellus indicates that adaptations for tail weaponry evolved about 30 million years earlier than previously realized4. The ornate, complex and baroque armour of Spicomellus suggests that, early in their history, ankylosaur armour was under strong sexual selection and that it evolved initially primarily for display, rather than defence, and it was perhaps only with the evolution of multitonne predators alongside larger mammals, crocodilians and other predators in the Cretaceous that it was exapted for defensive purposes.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Aug 8

"please produce a map of the US highlighting those states with an R in their name"

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Aug 8

Gotta keep up with the times.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jul 4

This July 4 I am reading this remarkable book detailing the impoverished and Orwellian language of the Nazi era, written by a German-Jewish philologist who lived through it. Unsurprising echoes to present-day USA. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTI_%E2...

Victor Klemperer: The Language of the Third Reich.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jul 1

I think this model is a leap forward for understanding identity in the context of communication and coordination. We can accommodate multiple groups and complex group structure. For fun (and bc Nathan loves the Bronze Age), we ground the discussion around Mesopotamian identities. Comments welcome!

Figure 1: (a) Ancient Sumerian cities used throughout the paper as a motivating example. (b) Diagram of social relationships between the different Mesopotamian identities along with shapes used to represent each of them throughout this paper.

Table 7: Coordination preferences for the single embedding subsection.

Figure 8: Optimal signaling systems and topologies for the coordination preferences shown in Table 7, when agents have access to either (a) one or (b) two signaling dimensions.

Figure 11: (a) Proportion of simulations that resulted in (a) the intersectional topology, optimal when α = 2, or (b) either of the two mere conjunction topologies, optimal when α = 0. The trio of stick figures at the top represent the optimal strategy profiles used by non-Kishus in all cases.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jul 1

New preprint w/ Nathan Gabriel & @avbell.bsky.social: The Evolution of Identity Signals for Coordination in Diverse Societies The model tackles multiple nested/overlapping identities and complex signaling structure. Recovers lots of old results and adds several new ones osf.io/preprints/so...

Individual social identities indicate group affiliations and are typically associated with 3 group-typical preferences, signals that indicate group membership, and the propensity to condition actions on the social signals of others, resulting in group-differentiated interaction norms. Past work modeling identity signaling and coordination has typically assumed that individuals belong to one of a discrete set of groups. Yet individuals can simultaneously belong to multiple groups, which may be nested within larger groupings. Here, we introduce the generalized Bach or Stravinsky game, a coordination game with ordered preferences, which allows us to construct a model that captures the overlapping and hierarchical nature of social identity. Our model unifies several prior results into a single framework, including results related to coordination, minority disadvantage, and cross-cultural competence. Our model also allows agents to express complex social identities through multidimensional signaling, which we use to explore a variety of complex group structures. Our consideration of intersectional identities exposes flaws in naive measures of group structure, illustrating how empirical studies may overlook some social identities if they do not consider the behaviors that those identities function to afford.

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 19

To be fair, his incredibly speculative work on language evolution was critical in leading Richard Lewontin to write the greatest BBS commentary of all time.

The problem is that P&B have an incorrect view of form and fuinctinontentionsin.bTiologyhe"funthatctioisnsa,"carryover"problemfroms,"ahumnand"envartifactisronmenandts"dires-snforminatiothen.latest fashion without overt negative corrective
oforganismdsonotpreexisthem.Theyarecreatedintheactual
evolution of the organisms.Flying is not a "problem" for a tuna
(althoughthereare"flying" fish)andswimmingisnota"prob-
lem"forathrush(althoughtherearepenguins).Astheoldsong
has it, "fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly." And, so it seems,
"people gotta !alk." At what stage, ifany, in the evolution of the language faculty, communication by speaking and listening
beca~e a significant evolutionary "pro~lem" so that natural
selection may have started to operate on It, we cannot know. In part, the answer depends on contingencies of the particular
orderofevents.Theexplanatoryreconstructionoftheoriginof thecameraeyeby naturalselectionrequiresaparticularorder- ing of light receptor and enp'ervation first, followed by lens, followed by focusing distortion of the lens and iris diaphragm. The reverse order would not work, if every stage was to be an improvement in vision. Is there an unambiguous ordering for the elements of natural language? Did we have to have them all at once, in which case the selective theory is in deep trouble

And finally, to repeat my first problem, how much changein the brain really had to takeplace to makelinguistic competence, and how many independent neurodevelopmental changeswere needed?Does anyoneknow?The fact that they do not and often cannotknow the basicfactson which theory restsdoesnot seem to deter academicsfrom presenting speculationsasif they were well founded. Fish gotla swim, birds gotta fly, people gotta talk, and academicsgotta writ

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 13

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 11

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 10

"If it is a time when man's arsenal of power is reaching frightening proportions it is, fortunately, also a time when a tool has been developed that is ideally suited to handle the conceptual problems faced in ecosystem analysis. This tool is the digital computer." --C.S. Holling (1966) 😬😬😬

Paul Smaldino@psmaldino· Jun 6