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Hello,

New articles:

Your personality doesn’t belong to you: The study of personality has a fairly storied history—a pretty contentious search for the essence of human expression. But more modern approaches to the study of personality show us something interesting—that our personalities might be something that’s forced upon us.

Full article at bottom of email

Elemental Personalities: Captain Planet and his Planeteers always seemed a little trite to me. Five young people, each with an elemental ring. And each with a personality to match. Seemed like lazy writing but now I’m wondering whether they intended to tap into millennia-old thought on personality styles, or whether it was just a happy accident.

The flaws of the human perspective: The biologist’s time-machine is a classic thought experiment that re-emerges from time to time in the more eloquent textbooks, and shows us just how flawed the human perspective is.

Advice on brain science from a farming manual: In the early stages of a career in brain science, one learns very quickly that the human brain is still largely unknowable. But perhaps this is because our approach is wrong. Perhaps, rather than solving the unsolvable, we should be like the farmers of old. Observing, contemplating, and adding only a little helpful illumination on a complex problem.

Links worth checking out:

Low-cost sexual gratification (e.g. porn) might make us more likely to want to get married: it’s old data, and only men, but the idea that cheap sex makes up less interested in long-term commitment might not be the only narrative worth thinking about.

Remains of an ancient female big game hunter found: there’s not a great deal of fidelity to our imagination about the paleolithic era, but that men hunted and women gathered berries often sits at the top level. As usual, this boring gendered notion appears to be, at least in part, a modern invention.

This week’s article selection: Your personality doesn’t belong to you

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That’s all from me! Enjoy.

Warm regards,

Dorian