I'm creating a list of 5 of the "best books that will change how to see the world" for @Shepherd_books.

I went through the (extensive!) Further Readings list in A Theory of Everyone and have narrowed it down to 15 books.

Please help me shortlist with ♥️, 🔁 & 💬!
🧵 1. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe by Arthur Koestler

Why? It's a history of scientific advances, particularly in cosmology. I'm considering it because it influenced my thinking a lot when I was a teenager. Many advances in science require letting go of what you think you know, even obvious assumptions - that the sun goes around the earth (plain to the naked eye); that the world is made of 4 elements - fire, water, earth, wind; that time flows the same everywhere for all people. My book similarly shows some of the current assumptions that are holding us back - the nature of intelligence and what ultimately drives growth and prosperity.

🚨New paper on "What makes us smart?" w/ @johenrich

Unpacked in my soon-to-be-released book, "A Theory of Everyone"

Take home: Studying hardware won't help you understand the capabilities of pivot tables in Excel nor Code Interpreter in ChatGPT.

1/ https://t.co/ponWuClJYconlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…
Your head is filled with entire analogies, metaphors, epistemologies, and tools that you once learned and now effortlessly use for thinking. It's how you cook, how you count, and why you think invisible germs are a good explanation for disease. But invisible spirits are not. 2/

Story time: In 2018 we launched a new BSc in Psychological & Behavioural Science at the LSE. We just got the NSS satisfaction scores: 100% satisfaction!

The first cohort graduate tomorrow. I'm incredibly proud of all of them and the program we’ve co-created. How we got here: 1/ When I joined the LSE in 2016, there was an opportunity to launch a new undergrad program. Imagine if you could redesign a psych degree with no path dependence constraining you? I volunteered. 2/

🚨New paper: "Paradox of diversity in the collective brain" in PhilTrans B @royalsociety @RSocPublishing w/ @schimmelrob @layla_razek @eric_schnell

Paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10… 1/ Press release: lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-ne… 2/

After the 88 tweet long thread on our recent BBS paper - "Cultural evolution of genetic heritability" - I thought it was only fair to tweet each of the comments we received. Our response has taken us longer than expected, but we're almost done! 1/

https://twitter.com/mmuthukrishna/status/1395731515540127746

.@RyutaroUchiyama, @RachelASpicer & I were overwhelmed by the overwhelmingly positive response from researchers in behavioral genetics, cultural evolution & related disciplines. We received >70 comments (I'm told 107 is the record & 20 is average). 29 made it past the editors. 2/

🚨New paper on "Cultural similarity among coreligionists..." in @PNASNews w/ White & Norenzayan. Are major world religions "super-ethnic" identities, crossing national borders as predicted by cultural evolution? Yes. Tested using CFst.
Link: pnas.org/content/118/37… 1/ Religions bind people into communities with moral norms about what is right, good, & true. Major world religions share similarities like big families & being nice to neighbors, because those helped them grow through cultural-group competition.
Press: lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-ne… 2/

Which leads us to the Cultural Simpson's Paradox. Causal Locus Problem can confound the measurement of genetic effects due to Hidden Cluster Problem obscured by WEIRD Sampling problem creating a Simpson’s paradox. 58/ Let's return to the UV example. The melanin-UV mismatch can be masked by the cultural diffusion of sunscreen, especially in regions with more exposure to sunlight. In other parts of the world, the issue is under-exposure to the sun causing vitamin D deficiency. 59/

🚨New target article in @BBSJournal: "Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability" w/ @RyutaroUchiyama & @RachelASpicer

Preprint: muth.io/cegh

BBS: cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Long thread, but important topic. Helps to resolve controversies such as IQ differences 1/ Quick summary: We reconcile behavioral genetics and cultural evolution under a dual inheritance framework. A cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies such as IQ. 2/

🚨New paper on "The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation" in Annual Review of Psychology w/ @JoHenrich. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain human cooperation. How well do they explain the breadth, intensity, & variation across societies, history, & domain? 1/ We review interdisciplinary evolutionary psychology that takes seriously both our primate heritage and our uniquely cultural nature - a "cultural evolutionary psychology"2/. Why, how, when, and on which things do different humans work together? 2/

🚨New paper on "Psychology as a historical science" w/ @JoHenrich & @slingerland20 in Annual Review of Psychology. Catalyzing the field of "historical psychology" by reviewing work on: origins of psychology and institutions today, psychology of the past (data from dead minds) 1/ Our psychology is shaped by our societies, and our societies are shaped by their histories. We can do better than butterfly collecting--just measuring cross-cultural diffs. For psychology to develop a full theory of human behavior, we need historical psychology. 2/

🚨Now out! Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09…

Summary thread:
1/ The world is not WEIRD vs non-WEIRD.

How psychologically and culturally distant is the US from Canada? China from Japan? 2/ CFst is a lens for looking at differences between and within populations. It's flexible, robust, and theoretically-meaningful.

Issue with existing approaches:
1. Societies are distributions of traits. Mean estimates are misleading. Brazil looks like Turkey on Hofstede:

New paper: we argue that the replication crisis is rooted in more than methodological malpractice and statistical shenanigans. It's also a result of a lack of a cumulative theoretical framework: nature.com/articles/s4156… & muth.io/theory-nhb The present methodological and statistical solutions to the replication crisis will only help ensure solid stones; they don’t help us build the house. Preregistration and multiple replications(this time with larger samples!)are great, but a solution to decades of distrusted data?