Kevin Simler

An interactive, agent-based simulation exploring the mathematical dynamics, non-linear tipping points, and containment strategies of infectious disease outbreaks. Kevin Simler builds a step-by-step interactive model demonstrating how transmission rates, incubation periods, travel radiuses, and voluntary self-quarantine protocols drastically alter epidemic curves, herd immunity, and healthcare strain across populations.

A provocative sociological critique arguing that excessive material wealth acts as a social pollutant that insulates individuals from community interdependency. Kevin Simler examines how financial independence subtly degrades genuine human connection by replacing mutual social obligations with transactional market solutions.

An analytical psychological essay defining 'crony beliefs'—convictions we hold not because they are factually accurate, but because they provide social advantages, group belonging, and tribal protection. The text explores how our brains prioritize social survival over objective truth in complex cultural landscapes.

Kevin Simler uses the strange tallness of California's coastal redwoods — which grow to roughly 115 metres, the physical ceiling at which capillary action can still pull water from roots to canopy — to build a wider argument about evolutionary arms races. The acacia and the giraffe race each other in height; the redwood races itself. The wax palm's lonely height in a Colombian valley reveals that it evolved in a dense forest. Applied to humans, the rule helps explain our most exaggerated features.

Kevin Simler builds a theory of beauty as a two-player game: a Desire player (the perceiver, shaped by evolution or learning to be attracted to certain features) and a second player who deliberately produces those features to attract attention. Mashing up ideas from David Deutsch, Geoffrey Miller, Richard Prum, and César Hidalgo, the essay traces the move from solitary appetite to the signaling arms races that produced flowers, peacocks, art, and human ornament.

Simler offers a deep evolutionary and game-theoretic account of social status, arguing it isn't one thing but two distinct systems: dominance (status from intimidation; produces submission, fear-and-avoidance, taking by force, entitlement) and prestige (status from impressive skill; produces admiration, approach, freely given deference, displays of humility). Drawing on animal dominance hierarchies, eye-contact patterns, and behavioral research, he shows the two systems are nearly opposite — and that almost every human status interaction is some blend of the two.

Treats social status as an economic good with monetary properties—a medium of exchange, store of value, and rough unit of account—and explores how it is transacted in everyday interactions, how it shapes organizational efficiency, and how it can produce both healthy meritocracy and pathologies like gossip and politics.