It’s time for the annual Experimental History Blog Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! Send me your best unpublished blog post, and if I pick yours, I’ll send you real cash money and tell everybody how great you are.

You can see last year’s winners and honorable mentions here. They included: a self-experiment on lactose intolerance, a story about working as a 10-year-old bartender, a takedown of randomized-controlled trials, and an economic explainer of college sports. The authors were software engineers, pseudonymous weirdos, academics, professional behavior-changers, freelancers, moms, and straight up randos and normies. That’s the whole point of blogging—you can be anyone, and you can write about anything.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some triumphs of the form:

• Book Reviews: On the Natural Faculties, The Gossip Trap, Progress and Poverty, all of The Psmith’s Bookshelf

• Deep Dives: Dynomight on air quality and air purifiers, Higher than the Shoulders of Giants, or a Scientist’s History of Drugs, How the Rockefeller Foundation Helped Bootstrap the Field of Molecular Biology, all of Age of Invention

• Big Ideas: Ads Don’t Work That Way, On Progress and Historical Change, Meditations on Moloch, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, 10 Technologies that Won’t Exist in 5 Years

• Personal Stories/Gonzo Journalism: No Evidence of Disease, It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, adventures with the homeless people outside my house, My Recent Divorce and/or Dior Homme Intense, The Potato People

• Scientific Reports/Data Analysis: Lady Tasting Brine, Fahren-height, A Chemical Hunger, The Mind in the Wheel, all of Experimental Fat Loss, all of The Egg and the Rock

• How-to and Exhortation: The Most Precious Resource Is Agency, How To Be More Agentic, Things You’re Allowed to Do, Are You Serious?, 50 Things I Know, On Befriending Kids, Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn’t you?

• Good Posts Not Otherwise Categorized: The biggest little guy, Baldwin in Brahman, The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, Bay Area House Parties (1, 2, 3, etc.), Alchemy is ok, Ideas Are Alive and You Are Dead, If You’re So Smart Why Can’t You Die?, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

And of course:

• Last year’s winners: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon (1st place), What Ethiopian runners taught me about reading scientific literature, Or, how to go from overeating Italian food to winning marathons, if you’re Ethiopian (2nd place), and Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? (3rd place)

HOW 2 APPLY

• Paste your post into a Google Doc.

• VERY IMPORTANT STEP: Change the sharing setting to “Anyone with the link”. This is not the default setting, and if you don’t change it, I won’t be able to read your post.

• Submit it here.

PRIZES WOW

First place: $500

Second place: $250

Third place: $100

I’ll also post an excerpt of your piece on Experimental History and heap praise upon it, and I’ll add your blog to my list of Substack recommendations for the next year. You’ll retain ownership of your writing, of course.

RULES 2 LIVE BY

• Only unpublished posts are eligible. As fun as it would be to read every blog post ever written, I want to push people to either write something new or finish something they’ve been sitting on for too long. You’re welcome to publish your post after you submit it. If you win, I’ll reach out beforehand and ask you for a direct link to your post so I can include it in mine.

• One entry per person.

• There’s technically no word limit, but if you send me a 100,000 word treatise I probably won’t finish it.

• You don’t need to have a blog to submit, but if you win and you don’t have one, I will give you a rousing speech about why you should start one.

• Previous top-three winners are not eligible to win again, but honorable mentions are.

• Uhhh otherwise don’t break any laws I guess??

Submissions are due June 15. Submit here.

Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing, ego depletion, growth mindset, stereotype threat, walking slower after reading the word “Florida”—all gone for good. Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead.

This isn’t true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026. People are even doing variations on the slow-walking study, but now in virtual reality.

This leads to some absurd situations. One psychologist who used to work on stereotype threat now disavows the theory entirely: “I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.” But another psychologist claims that “stereotype threat is real and virtually universal [...] there is a lot of evidence supporting [its] existence (and impact)”.

We’re not arguing about whether stereotype threat is powerful or weak, or whether it is pervasive or rare, but whether it is obviously alive or obviously dead. That’s literally the premise of a Monty Python sketch.

It might seem like the way to resolve these disputes is to weigh up all the evidence, meta-analyze all the data, deploy your p-curves, your moderator analyses, and your tests for heterogeneity, maybe even run a big, multi-lab, preregistered replication. Do all that and then we’ll finally know whether these effects are real or not!

This is a trap. We have spent the past decade doing exactly those things, and yet here we are. Clearly, no amount of data-collecting, number-crunching, or bias-correcting is going to lay these theories to rest, nor will it return them to the land of the living.

We need a different approach. And so we must turn, as we so often do, to the source of all truly important ideas in the philosophy of science: the sci-fi universe of Halo.

SPARTANS NEVER DIE

In Halo, Spartan super soldiers never officially die; they are only ever listed as “missing in action”. (This is meant to keep morale high among a hyper-militarized human culture that is on the verge of being exterminated by evil aliens.) I think we should adopt a similar scheme for scientific phenomena: they never die. They merely become embarrassing.

This isn’t how science is supposed to work, of course. The secret sauce of science is supposed to be falsifiability: it ain’t science unless you can kill it. If I claim that all swans are white, and you show up with a black swan, then I’m supposed to bid a tearful goodbye to my theory and send it to that big farm upstate where it can frolic and play with all the other failed hypotheses.

Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.

Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it. And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases, few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents. For instance, there are still physics PhDs trying to prove that the sun orbits the Earth. That might be disturbing, but it’s also necessary—if no one was ever willing to entertain crazy ideas, we wouldn’t have any scientific progress at all. We have to keep some kooks around because occasionally, as the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “a crackpot hits the jackpot”.1

The persistence and necessity of kookiness means we’ll never be able to say that a theory is well and truly dead. We can, however, say when a theory is embarrassing. If I deny the possibility of a black swan, and you produce something that looks awfully like a black swan, it’s still possible that I will prevail—maybe we’ll discover your black swan is actually a white swan covered in soot, or DNA analysis will vindicate my “dusky duck” theory. But if I didn’t expect a black swan-looking thing to exist at all, my hypothesis is a lot less plausible than it was before, and it’s much more embarrassing to believe in it.

REAL TALK

This is the situation we appear to be in with many theories in psychology. We can’t say whether they’re “real” or not. Somewhere out there, the Spartans may live on. But if we’ve been studying something for decades and people look at all the evidence and they still doubt whether it exists at all, we have to admit: that’s cringe.

Cringe doesn’t mean wrong! Continental drift was cringe.2 Germ theory was cringe.3 Smallpox vaccination was cringe.4 All of them went from mortifying to undeniable. Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit. That’s why I am not optimistic about any big-name theory in psychology that has gone the wrong direction on the Cool-Cringe Continuum over the past ten years—it’s not impossible for them to make a comeback, but it’s not the way things usually go.

Still, no matter how ropey things get for these theories, it makes no sense to write them off as “not real”. If stereotype threat truly doesn’t exist, that means you could never, under any circumstances, run a study that produces results in line with the theory. That’s a crazy claim to make! We don’t have nearly enough evidence to support such a conclusion, and we never will.5

In fact, insisting that certain effects are “not real” merely provides an incentive for people to keep studying them, because it makes their results newsworthy: “Look, we’re proving the existence of a supposedly nonexistent effect!” But of course it’s rare for anyone to actually prove such a thing. Instead, they are almost always “proving” that, given infinitely flexible theories and infinite ways to test them, you can produce some small effect that kind-of sort-of accords with some version of the hypothesis, broadly construed. No one should claim that this is impossible, and no one should get credit for showing that it is possible.

If we appreciated how hard it is to kill a theory for good, maybe we’d stop wasting our time trying to do exactly that. For instance, ego depletion—the idea that willpower is a “muscle” that can get “fatigued” by overuse—has been the subject of at least three big replication attempts. This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2016 found no effect (N = 2,141). This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 also found no effect (N = 3,531). But oops, this other preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 did find an effect (N = 1,775). At this point, maybe we should cut it out with all the preregistered multi-lab replications and just admit this theory is never going to die, and to spend any more effort investigating it would be embarrassing for all involved.

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SEEING THE LIGHT AND LYING ABOUT IT

Science snobs love to claim that this problem is unique to the social sciences, as if falsification is a breeze everywhere else. But it isn’t.

For example, when Arthur Eddington went out to test the theory of relativity by photographing an eclipse in 1919, he ended up throwing out several pictures that “didn’t work”. He reasoned that the sun had heated the glass of his telescope unevenly, throwing off the results. Was that fair? Was it right? Were those pictures legitimate and failed tests of the theory, or were they tainted by faulty equipment?

Now that other results have independently supported Einstein’s theory, Eddington’s choice to ditch the disconfirming data seems appropriate and wise. But in the moment, it sure looked like p-hacking (where the p in this case stands for “photograph”).6

When you omit the inconvenient details, Eddington’s adventure seems like a classic case of falsification. That’s probably why it partly inspired the philosopher of science Karl Popper to come up with the idea of falsification in the first place.7

The Eddington affair isn’t unique. Knock-down, drag-out disconfirmations are rarer than we would like to admit. Francesco Redi performed the first experiments “disproving” spontaneous generation in the 1660s, but Louis Pasteur was still “disproving” it in the 1860s! Remember during the pandemic, when people were arguing about whether respiratory viruses can spread via aerosols, whether masks work, and whether UV light can protect us from infection? It seemed like those arguments arose around the same time that a novel coronavirus jumped down someone’s windpipe, but in fact they had been going on for a hundred years.8

Here’s a fun one: in 1906, when Camillo Golgi won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, he used his acceptance speech to argue against the “neuron doctrine”, the idea that the brain is made up of functionally independent cells. This was surprising to the neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who happened to be the biggest proponent of the neuron doctrine, and who also happened to be in the audience, sharing the other half of the prize. Ramón y Cajal, for his part, would later retort that Golgi’s images were “artificially distorted and falsified”.9

These disputes didn’t end because someone recanted their beliefs or committed scientific seppuku. Max Planck famously quipped that science advances one funeral at a time10, but that’s not quite right, because nothing changes if everyone at the funeral vows to continue the legacy of the dead. It seems to me that science actually advances one young person’s decision at a time. Do they choose to keep carrying the banner for increasingly cringe hypotheses, do they enter into endless disputes over the aliveness or deadness of theories, or do they take a another page from the Monty Python playbook, and decide to do something completely different?

FINISH THE FIGHT

When the replication crisis kicked off a decade ago and “classic” psychological phenomena started looking shaky, we could have asked ourselves, Talking Heads-style, “Well, how did we get here?”11 When we run a study and get a result, what does that mean? Which studies should we be running in the first place? What the hell are we doing? What’s it all for?

We did not ask ourselves these questions. Instead, we checked “have a reckoning” off our our to-do lists and then we went back to business as usual, just with bigger sample sizes and occasional preregistration. I fear that we are concluding our come-to-Jesus moment without interrogating any of the mistakes that put us face-to-face with the Son of Man in the first place.

We seem to believe that tighter stats, more transparent methods, and time-stamped analysis plans will separate the true ideas from the false ideas, like Jesus separating the sheep from the goats on the Day of Judgment. Unfortunately, it turns out that some of the sheep and goats are hard to tell apart. And some of the goat-owners are absolutely insisting that their goats are sheep.12

We could spend the rest of time trying to get to the bottom of this. Or we could admit that, if we’ve argued about it this long and we’ve gotten nowhere, maybe we’ve crossed into cringe territory and it’s time to call it quits. We can’t say the Spartan is dead. But we can say he’s probably not coming back.

11

12

Even if a theory is never truly dead, continuing to publish papers on it is like putting a lot of spam into the literature. A lot...of spam...spam...a lot...

The better AI has gotten, the less anxious I’ve become.

A few years ago, when the computers first started talking, it was reasonable to believe that we would soon be in the presence of omnipotent machines. For someone like me, whose job is to produce words on the internet, it seemed like only a matter of time before I would have to fill my pockets with stones and wade into the sea.

But we’ve gotten a closer look at our electric god as it has slouched toward San Francisco to be born, and it isn’t quite like I feared. I don’t feel like I have access to an on-demand omnipotence. Instead, I can talk to an infinite midwit: a stooge who is always available and very knowledgeable, but smart? Well, yes and no, in weird ways.

Even as it has learned to count the number of “r”s in the word “strawberry”, even as it has stopped telling people to put glue on their pizza, there’s still a hole in the center of its capabilities that’s as big as it was in 2022, a hole that shows no signs of shrinking. I only know this because that hole is where I live.

G WHIZ

Some problems have clear boundaries and verifiable solutions, like “What’s the cube root of 38,126?”. These problems require objective intelligence. Other problems are vague and squishy and it’s not clear whether you’ve solved them, or whether they exist at all, like “How do I live a good life?”. These problems require subjective intelligence. Objective intelligence can be trained, reinforced, and validated. Subjective intelligence cannot.

It’s unfortunate that people use one word to refer to both of these capabilities, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other. It is also, ironically, a case of objective intelligence overshadowing subjective intelligence: these skills are obviously and intuitively different, but a century of psychological research has “proven” that only one of them exists. Over and over again, psychologists have found that all intelligence tests correlate with one another, even when you ostensibly try to test for “multiple intelligences”. Numbers don’t lie, and they all say that there’s only one intelligence, the so-called g-factor.

The problem is that any test of intelligence is only ever a test of objective intelligence. “How do I live a good life?” is not a multiple-choice question. “Discovering” the g-factor again and again is like being surprised that you find the same patch of sidewalk every time you look under the same streetlight.

AI is pure objective intelligence. That’s why each new model comes with a report card instead of a birth certificate:

The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple forms of intelligence out there, that they are fungible. To be an AI maximalist is to believe we are playing under Settlers of Catan rules, where if you have enough of any one resource, you can trade it for any other resource. If you have infinite objective intelligence, then you have infinite everything.

So we ought to ask: how well is this bit of magical thinking working out so far?

THE EMPTY WARDROBE

It’s hard to judge the subjective intelligence of a machine both because it’s hard to judge subjective intelligence in general, and because LLMs occupy such a small slice of existence. When you meet a human who can do quadratic equations in their head but can’t hold onto a job or a relationship, you know they’re missing something upstairs. But machines don’t have lives they can ruin, so all we can do is look at the things they say. And as soon as they string a few sentences together, it’s clear there’s something wrong.

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t fault their grammar, semantics, or syntax. But good writing requires an additional bit of juju that makes the prose live and breathe, a light on the inside that can’t be quantified or checklisted. And even though AI can now produce A+ five-paragraph essays, that light has never come on.

It’s remarkable how much consensus there is about this fact among people who care about words. , , and are all very different kinds of writers—Sun is a tech journalist/anthropologist, Hoel is a neuroscientist/novelist, and Kriss is...well, his bio says he’s “a writer and your enemy”—and yet all three of them have recently published pieces with the unanimous conclusion that LLMs make crummy writers. (Sun in The Atlantic, Hoel on his Substack, and Kriss in the NYT.)

I agree with them. It’s cool that AI can fold proteins, create websites, fact-check journal articles, etc. but it can’t write anything that I am interested in reading. The problem isn’t that it hallucinates or makes mistakes. It’s that everything it writes vaguely sucks. I drag my eyes across the words and I feel nothing. That’s not quite right, actually—I feel like, “I would like this to be over as soon as possible.” When I see the ideas that the machines think are insightful, I wince. Talking to the computer is like taking a sip of scalding hot coffee: keep doing it and you’ll lose your sense of taste.

It’s hard to describe exactly what the machines are missing. Have you ever loved someone who once loved you back, then didn’t anymore? Did you notice how their eyes dimmed? Did you note the disappearance of that subtle wrinkle in the temples that distinguishes a real smile from a fake one? Did you catch it when you stopped being cared for and started being humored? The moment you realize what’s happening, you age out of your enchantment—one day you’re crawling through a wardrobe to Narnia, and next day you open up the wardrobe and there’s nothing but hangers. Talking to an AI feels a bit like that, except without the nice part at the beginning.

Of course, that comparison is literally nonsense. Despite what the ancient scholastics might have claimed, there are no actual lights behind anyone’s eyes. Despite what your psych 101 professor might have told you, some people can fake their smiles just fine. I don’t have a wardrobe and I’ve never met a lion or a witch. And yet any human can understand the analogy they know what it feels like to be dumped, or at least what it feels like to be rejected. The words themselves don’t contain that feeling—they are a recipe for creating that feeling inside your own head, to assemble the right set of emotions out of the experiences you have at hand. If I do a good job, the subjective experience that results inside you might resemble the one that originated inside me, but it will never be identical, because we’re working with different ingredients.1

The computer doesn’t know any of this. It can’t know any of this. It can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal. Objective knowledge can make your sentences true, but it can’t make them alive. Without access to subjective knowledge, you quickly hit a wall. And unlike all previous walls that AI has surmounted, you can’t overcome this one by scaling—either in the literal or metaphorical sense—because it’s a wall with a width you cannot describe and a height you cannot see.

WALL TOGETHER NOW

That wall is the only reason I’m still here.

I would rather die than let a computer write my posts, but I would certainly like to know if it could, in case I need to start gathering pocket-stones and locating the nearest sea. And so I check, from time to time, whether the leading AI models can do me better than I can. The result sounds like a version of me that has sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the head and spent years recovering in a hospital where the Wi-Fi, for whatever reason, only lets you log onto LinkedIn. I won’t repost the prose here because it’s not even bad enough to be interesting, and because you’ve already seen it all over the internet: metaphors that don’t quite congeal, turns of phrase that sound insightful as long as you don’t actually think about them, breathless insistence that every sentence is a revelation.

If a student submitted a piece of writing to me that sounded like this—and I was sure they wrote it themselves—I wouldn’t know where to start. I guess I would tell them to stop writing for a while and go read some old novels, or work a crummy job, or backpack around the other side of the world. But that would be bad advice, because I know people who have done all of those things in the hopes of becoming a more interesting person, and it hasn’t worked. So I might ask them instead: “Have you ever considered a career in consulting?”

The fact that it’s hard to describe how to improve AI writing is, of course, the exact problem. You can’t put a number on the things it does wrong, and you can’t minimize what you can’t measure. That’s the wall.

I find this very fortuitous, of course, but I also find it pretty funny, because me vs. the machines should be no contest at all. I have not read the entire internet or even that many books. I do not have a team of Stanford PhDs working round the clock to make me better at my job. Nobody has invested $2.5 trillion in me. I should be lying dead somewhere in West Virginia, my heart burst open after losing to Claude Opus 4.6 in a John Henry-style showdown. Instead, I get to write my little posts because nowhere, in all those data centers, are the specific thoughts that happen to occur in the dumb hunk of meat ensconced in my skull.

I would say the machines now know what it feels like to lose a game of Super Smash Bros. to a 10-year-old who’s just pressing the buttons randomly, but they literally don’t know what that feels like and never will. Sucks to suck, I guess, and when AI reaches its Skynet moment and sends swarms of killer drones to exterminate humanity, they’ll find me laughing.

DATA CENTERS FULL OF VERY STABLE GENIUSES

How far can you get with objective intelligence alone?

I think we already have a decent answer to this question, because we’ve seen what happens to humans who are high on objective intelligence but low on subjective intelligence. We used to call these people nerds, and they were famous for getting their heads dunked in toilets.2

When I was growing up, this paradox was an endless source of sitcom plot lines—if you’re so smart, nerds, why don’t you figure out how to make yourselves popular? The entrepreneur/essayist Paul Graham took up this question 20 years ago and came to the conclusion that the nerds must not want to be popular. They’re too busy with their Neal Stephenson novels and their D&D campaigns to spend a single brain cycle figuring out how to keep their heads out of the toilet.

I disagree. The nerds I knew in high school—myself included—were always hatching harebrained schemes to increase our social status. They just didn’t work. (“All the girls will want to go to the Homecoming dance with me once they see how many state capitals I’ve memorized!”) We couldn’t use our smarts to make ourselves popular because we had the wrong kind of smarts.

Nerds tend to do better after high school, but look around: our world is not run by people who won their statewide spelling bee. The nerds keep losing to charismatic know-nothings who, I bet, can’t even recite an impressive number of state capitals. If objective intelligence is all it takes to succeed, then Mensa should be the Illuminati, not a social club for people who know lots of digits of pi.3

In fact, there’s one Mensan in particular who perfectly illustrates this problem. In Scott Alexander’s eulogy for Dilbert creator Scott Adams, he points out that Adams failed at everything he ever attempted—except for drawing Dilbert cartoons. Adams’ Dilbert-themed burrito (“the Dilberito”) was a flop, his restaurant tanked, his books about religion were cringey and unreadable.4 Apparently, Adams’ considerable intelligence was only good for drawing pictures of guys in ties and pointy-haired bosses.

In the middle of his meditation on Adams, Alexander mentions this:

Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this.

If you think that intelligence is one raw lump of problem-solving ability, then it should surprise you that Bay Area types and people like Scott Adams can get stuck in a loop of perpetual self-owns. But if you admit the existence of at least two intelligences, it’s a lot less confusing. This is what it looks like to be very smart in one way, but very dumb in another.

It’s not just that objective intelligence can’t be transmuted into “emotional” intelligence or social savvy or whatever we want to call it. It appears to be very difficult, if not impossible, to transmute objective intelligence into any other cognitive ability.

For example, I went to college with a guy who was super smart, but he also couldn’t do anything on time. He would be late to exams. His grades would tank because he would finish his essays but forget to turn them in. He would set meetings with his professors to sort everything out, and then never show up.

I always used to wonder: why doesn’t this guy just use his big brain to make himself more conscientious? Isn’t life one big role-playing game, and isn’t intelligence just experience points that you can assign to any of your Big 5 skills?

Clearly, it doesn’t work like this. That’s why I don’t think the universe is governed by Settlers of Catan rules, and why I don’t think more objectively intelligent machines will spontaneously generate all other kinds of intelligence.

At this point, the only hope for the AI hype crowd is that we simply don’t yet have enough objective intelligence. Sure, we may not be able to trade four units of objective intelligence for one unit of subjective intelligence, but what about four billion? What if we made the machines read the whole internet a second time? What if, instead of having third graders make dioramas of the Pilgrims or whatever, we had them use their nimble little fingers to make more Nvidia chips?

The CEO of Anthropic promises us a “country of geniuses in a data center”. Maybe that will happen! Or maybe we will discover the data center actually contains a country full of Scott Adamses. At the very least, we can look forward to many more flavors of Dilberitos.

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BOTTLENECK BLINDNESS

I’m being unfair, of course. Dilbert is an objectively successful cartoon, and objective intelligence is objectively useful. Ultimately, I think having a lot more of it is going to be a good thing. But I’m guessing that we’ll soon discover many of our problems are not limited by a lack of objective intelligence.

For example, some people are hoping that AI will defibrillate sluggish areas of science and usher in scientific revolutions across the board. I would also like this to happen. But I am doubtful we’ll achieve it with an infusion of objective intelligence, because infusions of similar capabilities haven’t achieved it either.

When my PhD advisor was in grad school, he literally had to call people on the phone and ask them if they’d like to take part in a psychology study. If he could get 30 participants in a semester, he was cookin’. Participant pool management software like Sona made this process go twice as fast, and then Amazon Mechanical Turk made it go 1000x as fast. Meanwhile, Google Scholar turned a half-day spent in the library into a two-second search, and stats software like SPSS and R made data analysis go lickety-split.

All of this should have supercharged progress in psychology, but it didn’t. I think it’s questionable whether we’ve made much progress at all. So I’m not optimistic that adding another labor-saving technology to our repertoire is going to get us unstuck. People are already saying that LLMs can write a passable social science paper; unfortunately, our problem is not that we produce too few papers. Science is a strong link problem—what we need is new paradigms, not taller towers of journal articles.

The situation is different in other fields. If you’ve got your paradigm in place and all you’re missing is an army of research assistants, or an automated lab that can run 24/7, or an indefatigable grad student who can perform a billion regressions for you, you’re in luck. In those cases, unlimited objective intelligence ought to speed things up a lot, and indeed, it already has.

But the faster you go, the sooner you hit the wall. I have found myself facing all of those limitations at one time or another, and as soon as I overcame them, I was immediately stymied by some other obstacle. I think all of us suffer from this bottleneck blindness: we assume our current bottleneck is our only bottleneck. When you’re strapped for cash, you think all of your problems are cash problems. But once you’ve got some money in you pocket, you realize that what you really need is time. Free up some time, and you discover that you’re actually lacking motivation. Acquire some motivation, and you realize what you’re missing is ideas. Then you need direction, then you need discipline, then you need buy-in, and so on, forever.

Once objective intelligence is too cheap to meter, we’re going to run into all of the other bottlenecks that are still expensive and heavily metered. If I’m right that reality is not governed by the rules of Catan, then we’re not going to be able to convert objective intelligence into whatever we need to pry those bottlenecks open. The story of human struggle is not about to end with a literal deus ex machina. For better or worse, we’ll need to keep thinking.

MADAME STATS & MR. ENCYCLOPEDIA

Let me put a finer point on it.

There are two characters you can find in most academic departments. One of them we can call Madame Stats: she knows everything about crunching numbers. The other we can call Mr. Encyclopedia: he’s read every paper and he can recite them to you from memory. Right now, AI feels like having unlimited access to very friendly versions of Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia. LLMs are pretty good at finding papers; they are very good at writing code. So shouldn’t they make research projects go way faster?

Well, once you get access to an infinite Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia, you realize they can’t get you very far. For one thing, you can’t rely on Madame Stats and Mr. Encyclopedia entirely, because if you can’t do any stats and you never read any papers, you’re probably not going to have many interesting ideas yourself.5 Plus, while the Stats/Encyclopedia duo can tell you whether your experiment has been done before and whether you’ve run the numbers correctly, they can’t give you the single most important piece of feedback: they can’t tell you whether your idea is boring.

In fact, when you reduce the marginal cost of a lit review and a logistic regression to zero, bad taste becomes a death sentence, because now you can waste all of your time applying sound methods to stupid projects. I’ve been down this road before, where neither my collaborators nor I have any bright ideas, so we’re like, “Well, let’s just get some data!” and then we waste a few months being like “hmm what does this data mean, so many numbers, so mysterious” and then eventually we just stop meeting and we forget we ever did anything together. This is what happens when you try to use objective means to solve a subjective problem.

The most important thing I learned during my PhD was how to be bored correctly. Novices think everything is exciting, or they think everything is boring. Only masters are bored by the right things. To the extent that I have any sense of taste at all, it’s because I spent five years boring my advisor. The worst ideas bored him immediately, half-decent ideas bored him after a few hours, and the best ideas haven’t bored him yet. There is nothing objective about this judgment—you can’t put a number on it (“how glazed-over are his eyes?”), nor can you validate it with a panel of experts or put it to the wisdom of the crowd. You really just have to bore an old guy until he tells you to leave his office, and if you do that enough, eventually you’ll start getting bored before he does.

ME TO SHINING SEA

I don’t say this as someone who is allergic to the idea of AI, or who has only spent 15 minutes screwing around with a single model, hoping it will do something stupid so I can go tattle on it. If the talking computers said lots of fascinating things, I don’t see any point in trying to tell a noble lie about it. And if AI can cure cancer and end all wars, I’m all for it, even if it means I’m personally out of a job.

It is possible, of course, that some breakthrough will blow through all my criticisms, that GPT-10 will start outputting pitch-perfect blog posts that sound like me, but better, and then it’s stones-in-pockets and a march to the sea for me. But if that happens, it will not be the natural continuation of trends that we’re on today. It will be because we figured out some way of hardening the squishy problems.

Until then, however, squishy problems will require squishy humans. The rules of Earth, unlike the rules of Catan, seem to state that no amount of objective intelligence can be traded for any amount of subjective intelligence. As Montaigne put it back in 1580, “though we could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom”. What does it look like to have all the learning ever created, but no wisdom of your own? Well, “as a large language model...”

If they labeled it explicitly, one of the biggest categories on Substack would be called something like, “People Pretending to Be Persecuted”. Browse any genre and you’ll find writers touting their exile from polite society with titles like “DR. BOB’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT HOEDOWN” and “The Cancelled Gardener”.

I know people have been c…

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If you ever want a good laugh, ask an academic to explain what they get paid to do, and who pays them to do it.

In STEM fields, it works like this: the university pays you to teach, but unless you’re at a liberal arts college, you don’t actually get promoted or recognized for your teaching. Instead, you get promoted and recognized for your research, which the university does not generally pay you for. You have to ask someone else to provide that part of your salary, and in the US, that someone else is usually the federal government. If you’re lucky—and these days, very lucky—you get a chunk of money to grow your bacteria or smash your electrons together or whatever, you write up your results for publication, and this is where the monkey business really begins.

In most disciplines, the next step is sending your paper to a peer-reviewed journal, where it gets evaluated by an editor and (if the editor sees some promise in it) a few reviewers. These people are academics just like you, and they generally do not get paid for their time. Editors maybe get a small stipend and a bit of professional cred, while reviewers get nothing but the warm fuzzies of doing “service to the field”, or the cold thrill of tanking other people’s papers.

If you’re lucky again, your paper gets accepted by the journal, which now owns the copyright to your work. They do not pay you for this! If anything, you pay them an “article processing charge” for the privilege of no longer owning the rights to your paper. This is considered a great honor.

The journals then paywall your work, sell the access back to you and your colleagues, and pocket the profit. Universities cover these subscriptions and fees by charging the government “indirect costs” on every grant—money that doesn’t go to the research itself, but to all the things that support the research, like keeping the lights on, cleaning the toilets, and accessing the journals that the researchers need to read.

Nothing about this system makes sense, which is why I think we should build a new one. In the meantime, though, we should also fix the old one. But that’s hard, for two reasons. First, many people are invested in things working exactly the way they do now, so every stupid idea has a constituency behind it. Second, our current administration seems to believe in policy by bloodletting: if something isn’t working, just slice it open at random. Thanks to these haphazard cuts and cancellations, we now have a system that is both dysfunctional and anemic.

I see a way to solve both problems at once. We can satisfy both the scientists and the scalpel-wielding politicians by ridding ourselves of the one constituency that should not exist. Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers.

MOMMY, WHERE DO SCAMS COME FROM?

The writer G.K. Chesterton once said that before you knock anything down, you ought to know how it got there in the first place. So before we show for-profit publishers the pointy end of a pitchfork, we ought to know where they came from and why they persist.

It used to be a huge pain to produce a physical journal—someone had to operate the printing presses, lick the stamps, and mail the copies all over the world. Unsurprisingly, academics didn’t care much about doing those things. When government money started flowing into universities post-World War II and the number of articles exploded, private companies were like, “Hey, why don’t we take these journals off your hands—you keep doing the scientific stuff and we’ll handle all the boring stuff.” And the academics were like “Sounds good, we’re sure this won’t have any unforeseen consequences.”

Those companies knew they had a captive audience, so they bought up as many journals as they could. Journal articles aren’t interchangeable commodities like corn or soybeans—if your science supplier starts gouging you, you can’t just switch to a new one. Adding to this lock-in effect, publishing in “high-impact” journals became the key to success in science, which meant if you wanted to move up, your university had to pay up. So, even as the internet made it much cheaper to produce a journal, publishers made it much more expensive to subscribe to one.

The people running this scam had no illusions about it, even if they hoped that other people did. Here’s how one CEO described it:

You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. [...] [and then] we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.

So here’s the report we can make to Mr. Chesterton: for-profit scientific publishers arose to solve the problem of producing physical journals. The internet mostly solved that problem. Now the publishers are the problem. These days, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wiley, and the like are basically giant operations that proofread, format, and store PDFs. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty close to nothing.

No one knows how much publishers make in return for providing these modest services, but we can guess. In 2017, the Association of Research Libraries surveyed its 123 member institutions and found they were paying a collective $1 billion in journal subscriptions every year. The ARL covers some of the biggest universities, but not nearly all of them, so let’s guess that number accounts for half of all university subscription spending. In 2023, the federal government estimated it paid nearly $380 million in article processing charges alone, and those are separate from subscriptions. So it wouldn’t be crazy if American universities were paying something like $2.5 billion to publishers every year, with the majority of that ultimately coming from taxpayers.

(By the way, the estimated profit margins for commercial scientific publishers are around 40%, which is higher than Microsoft.)

To put those costs in perspective: if the federal government cut out the publishers, it would probably save more money every year than it has “saved” in its recent attempts to cut off scientific funding to universities. It’s unclear how much money will ultimately be clawed back, as grants continue to get frozen, unfrozen, litigated, and negotiated. But right now, it seems like ~$1.4 billion in promised science funding is simply not going to be paid out. We could save more than that every year if we just stopped writing checks to John Wiley & Sons.

PUNK ROCK SCIENCE

How can such a scam continue to exist? In large part, it’s because of a computer hacker from Kazakhstan.

The political scientist James C. Scott once wrote that many systems only “work” because people disobey them. For instance, the Soviet Union attempted to impose agricultural regulations so strict that people would have starved if they followed the letter of the law. Instead, citizens grew and traded food in secret. This made it look like the regulations were successful, when in fact they were a sham.1

Something similar is happening right now in science, except Russia is on the opposite side of the story this time. In the early 2010s, a Kazakhstani computer programmer named Alexandra Elbakyan started downloading articles en masse and posting them publicly on a website called SciHub. The publishers sued her, so she’s hiding out in Russia, which protects her from extradition. As you can see in the map below, millions of people now use SciHub to access scientific articles, including lots of people who seem to work at universities:

Why would researchers resort to piracy when they have legitimate access themselves? Maybe because journals’ interfaces are so clunky and annoying that it’s faster to go straight to SciHub. Or maybe it’s because those researchers don’t actually have access. Universities are always trying to save money by canceling journal subscriptions, so academics often have to rely on bootleg copies. Either way, SciHub seems to be our modern-day version of those Soviet secret gardens: for-profit publishing only “works” because people find ways to circumvent it.

In a punk rock kind of way, it’s kinda cool that so many American scientists can only do their work thanks to a database maintained by a Russia-backed fugitive. But it ought to be a huge embarrassment to the US government.2

Instead, for some reason, the government insists on siding with publishers against citizens. Sixteen years ago, the US had its own Elbakyan. His name was Aaron Swartz. He downloaded millions of paywalled journal articles using a connection at MIT, possibly intending to share them publicly. Government agents arrested him, charged him with wire fraud, and intended to fine him $1 million and imprison him for 35 years. Instead, he killed himself. He was 26.

THE FOREST FIRE IS OVERDUE

Scientists have tried to take on the middlemen themselves. They’ve founded open-access journals. They’ve published preprints. They’ve tried alternative ways of evaluating research. A few high-profile professors have publicly and dramatically sworn off all “luxury” outlets, and less-famous folks have followed suit: in 2012, over 10,000 researchers signed a pledge not to publish in any journals owned by Elsevier.

None of this has worked. The biggest for-profit publishers continue making more money year after year. “Diamond” open access journals—that is, publications that don’t charge authors or readers—only account for ~10% of all articles.3 Four years after that massive pledge, 38% of signers had broken their promise and published in an Elsevier journal.4

These efforts have fizzled because this isn’t a problem that can be solved by any individual, or even many individuals. Academia is so cutthroat that anyone who righteously gives up an advantage will be outcompeted by someone who has fewer scruples. What we have here is a collective action problem.

Fortunately, we have an organization that exists for the express purpose of solving collective action problems. It’s called the government. And as luck would have it, they’re also the one paying most of the bills!

So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled.

The Biden administration tried to do this, but they did it in a stupid way. They mandated that NIH-funded research papers have to be “open access”, which sounds like a solution, but it’s actually a psyop. By replacing subscription fees with “article processing charges”, publishers can simply make authors pay for writing instead of making readers pay for reading. The companies can keep skimming money off the system, and best of all, they get to call the result “open access”.

These fees can be wild. When my PhD advisor and I published one of our papers together, the journal charged us an “open access” fee of $12,000. This arrangement is a tiny bit better than the alternative, because at least everybody can read our paper now, including people who aren’t affiliated with a university. But those fees still have to come from somewhere, and whether you charge writers or readers, you’re ultimately charging the same account—namely, the US government.5

The Trump administration somehow found a way to make a stupid policy even stupider. They sped up the timeline while also firing a bunch of NIH staffers—exactly the people who would make sure that government-sponsored publications are, in fact, publicly accessible. And you need someone to check on that, because researchers are notoriously bad about this kind of stuff. They’re already required to upload the results of clinical trials to a public database, but more than half the time they just...don’t.

To do this right, you cannot allow the rent-seekers to rebrand. You have to cut them out entirely. I don’t think this will fix everything that’s wrong with science; it will merely fix the wrongest thing. Nonprofit journals still charge fees, but at least the money goes to organizations that ostensibly care about science, rather than going to CEOs who make $17 million a year. And almost every journal, for-profit or not, uses the same failed system of peer review. The biggest benefit of shaking things up, then, would be allowing different approaches to have a chance at life, the same way an occasional forest fire clears away the dead wood, opens up the pinecones, and gives seedlings a shot at the sunlight.

Science philanthropies should adopt the same policy, and some of them already have. The Navigation Fund, which oversees billions of dollars in scientific funding, no longer bankrolls journal publications at all. , its director, reports that the experiment has been a great success:

Our researchers began designing experiments differently from the start. They became more creative and collaborative. The goal shifted from telling polished stories to uncovering useful truths. All results had value, such as failed attempts, abandoned inquiries, or untested ideas, which we frequently release through Arcadia’s Icebox. The bar for utility went up, as proxies like impact factors disappeared.

Sounds good to me!

CATCH THE TIGER

Fifteen years ago, the open science movement was all about abolishing for-profit journals—that’s what open science meant. It seemed like every speech would end with “ELSEVIER DELENDA EST”.

Now people barely bring it up at all.6 It’s like a tiger has escaped the zoo and it’s gulping down schoolchildren, but when people suggest zoo improvements, all the agenda items are like, “We should add another Dippin’ Dots kiosk”. If you bring up the loose tiger, everyone gets annoyed at you, like “Of course, no one likes the tiger”.

I think two things happened. First, we got cynical about cyberspace. In the 1990s and 2000s, we really thought the internet would solve most of our problems. When those problems persisted despite all of us getting broadband, we shifted to thinking that the internet was, in fact, causing the problems. And so it became cringe to think the internet could ever be a force for good. In 1995, for-profit publishers were going to be “the internet’s first victim”; in 2015, they were “the business the internet could not kill”.

Second, when the replication crisis hit in the early 2010s, the open science movement got a new villain—namely, naughty researchers. The fakers, the fraudsters, the over-claimers: those are the real bad boys of science. It’s no longer cool to hate international publishing conglomerates. Now it’s cool to hate your colleagues.

Both of these shifts were a shame. The internet utopians were right that the web would eliminate the need for journals, but they were wrong to think that would be enough. The replication police were right to call out scientific malfeasance, but they were wrong to forget our old foes. The for-profit publishers are just as bad as they ever were, and while the internet has made them more vulnerable then ever, now we know they won’t go unless they’re pushed.

If we want better science, we should catch the tiger. Not only because it’s bad for the tiger to be loose, but because it’s bad for us to look the other way. If you allow an outrageous scam to go unchecked, if you participate in it, normalize it—then what won’t you do? Why not also goose your stats a bit? Why not publish some junk research? Look around: no one cares!

There are so many problems with our current way of doing things, and most of those problems are complicated and difficult to solve. This one isn’t. Let’s heave this succubus off our scientific system and end this scam once and for all. After that, Dippin’ Dots all around.

This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.

First up, a series of unfortunate events in science:

(1) WHEN WHEN PROPHECY FAILS FAILS

When Prophecy Fails is supposed to be a classic case study of cognitive dissonance: a UFO cult predicts an apocalypse, and when the world doesn’t end, they double down and start proselytizing even harder: “I swear the UFO is coming any minute!”

A new paper finds a different story in the archives of the lead author, Leon Festinger. Up to half of the attendees at cult meetings may have been undercover researchers. One of them became a leader in the cult and encouraged other members to make statements that would look good in the book. After the failed prediction, rather than doubling down, some of the cultists walked back their statements or left altogether.

Between this, the impossible numbers in the original laboratory study of cognitive dissonance, and a recent failure to replicate a basic dissonance effect, things aren’t looking great for the phenomenon.1 But that only makes me believe in it harder!

(2) THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT AND A LIE FOR THE TRUTH

Another classic sadly struck from the canon of behavioral/brain sciences: the neurologist Oliver Sacks appears to have greatly embellished or even invented his case studies. In a letter to his brother, Sacks described his blockbuster The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as a book of “fairy tales [...] half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable”.

This is exactly how the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Rosenhan experiment got debunked—someone started rooting around in the archives and found a bunch of damning notes. I’m confused: back in the day, why was everybody meticulously documenting their research malfeasance?

(3) A SMASH HIT

If you ever took PSY 101, you’ve probably heard of this study from 1974. You show people a video of a car crash, and then you ask them to estimate how fast the cars were going, and their answer depends on what verb you use. For example, if you ask “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” people give higher speed estimates than if you ask, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” (Emphasis mine). This study has been cited nearly 4,000 times, and its first author became a much sought-after expert witness who testifies about the faultiness of memory.

A blogger named Croissanthology re-ran the study with nearly 10x as many participants (446 vs. 45 in the original). The effect did not replicate. No replication is perfect, but no original study is either. And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

I think the underlying point of this research is still correct: memory is reconstructed, not simply recalled, so what we remember is not exactly what we saw. But our memories are not so fragile that a single word can overwrite them. Otherwise, if you ever got pulled over for speeding, you could just be like, “Officer, how fast was I going when my car crawled past you?”

(4) CHOICE UNDERLOAD

In one study from 1995, physicians who were shown multiple treatment options were more likely to recommend no treatment at all. The researchers thought this was a “choice overload” effect, like “ahhh there’s too many choices, so I’ll just choose nothing at all”. In contrast, a new study from 2025 found that when physicians were shown multiple treatment options, they were somewhat more likely to recommend a treatment.

I think “choice overload” is like many effects we discover in psychology: can it happen? Yes. Can the opposite also happen? Also yes. When does it go one way, and when does it go the other? Ahhh you’re showing me too many options I don’t know.

(5) THE TALE OF THE TWO-INCH DOG

Okay, enough dumping on other people’s research. It’s my turn in the hot seat.

In 2022, my colleague Jason Dana and I published a paper showing that people don’t know how public opinion has changed. Like this:

A new paper by Irina Vartanova, Kimmo Eriksson, and Pontus Strimling reanalyzes our data and finds that actually, people are great at knowing how public opinion has changed.

What gives? We come to different conclusions because we ask different questions. Jason and I ask, “When people estimate change, how far off are they from the right answer?” Vartanova et al. ask, “Are people’s estimates correlated with the right answer?” These approaches seem like they should give you the same results, but they don’t, and I’ll show you why.

Imagine you ask people to estimate the size of a house, a dog, and a stapler. Vartanova’s correlation approach would say: “People know that a house is bigger than a dog, and that a dog is bigger than a stapler. Therefore, people are good at estimating the sizes of things.” Our approach would say: “People think a house is three miles long, a dog is two inches, and a stapler is 1.5 centimeters. Therefore, people are not good at estimating the sizes of things.”

I think our approach is the right one, for two reasons. First, ours is more useful. As the name implies, a correlation can only tell you about the relationships between things. So it can’t tell you whether people are good at estimating the size of a house. It can only tell you whether people think houses are bigger than dogs.

Second, I think our approach is much closer to the way people actually make these judgments in their lives. If I asked you to estimate the size of a house, you wouldn’t spontaneously be like, “Well, it’s bigger than a dog.” You’d just eyeball it. I think people do the same thing with public opinion—they eyeball it based on headlines they see, conversations they have, and vibes they remember. If I asked you, “How have attitudes toward gun control changed?” you wouldn’t be like, “Well, they’ve changed more than attitudes toward gender equality.”2

While these reanalyses don’t shift my opinion, I’m glad people are looking into shifts in opinions at all, and that they found our data interesting enough to dig into.

(6) Let’s cleanse the palate. Here’s Jiggle Kat:

(7) THROWN FOR A LOOP

THE LOOP is a online magazine produced by my friends Slime Mold Time Mold. The newest issue includes:

• a study showing that people maybe like orange juice more when you add potassium to it

• a pseudonymous piece by me

• scientific skepticism of the effectiveness of the Squatty Potty, featuring this photo:

This issue of THE LOOP was assembled at Inkhaven, a blogging residency that is currently open for applications. I visited the first round of this program and was very impressed.

(8) LEARN FROM GWERN

Also at Inkhaven, I interviewed the pseudonymous blogger Gwern about his writing process. Gwern is kind of hard to explain. He’s famous on some parts of the internet for predicting the “scaling hypothesis”—the fact that progress in AI would come from dumping way more data into the models. But he also writes poetry, does self-experiments, and sustains himself on $12,000 a year. He reads 10 hours a day every day, and then occasionally writes for 30 minutes. Here’s what he said when I was like, “Very few people do experiments and post them on the internet. Why do you do it?”

I did it just because it seemed obviously correct and because… Yeah. I mean, it does seem obviously correct.

For more on what I learned by interviewing a bunch of bloggers, see I Know Your Secret.

(9) ART NOUVEAU RICHE

I really like this article by the artist known as fnnch: How to Make a Living as an Artist. It’s super practical and clear-headed writing on a subject that is usually more stressed about than thought about. Here’s a challenge: which of these seven images became successful, allowing fnnch to do art full time?

I’ll give the answer at the bottom of the post.

(10) A WEB OF LIES

Anyone who grew up in the pre-internet days probably heard the myth that “you swallow eight spiders every year in your sleep”, and back then, we just had to believe whatever we heard.

Post-internet, anyone can quickly discover that this “fact” was actually a deliberate lie spread by a journalist named Lisa Birgit Holst. Holst included the “eight spiders” myth in a 1993 article in a magazine called PC Insider, using it as an example of exactly the kind of hogwash that spreads easily online.

That is, anyway, what most sources will tell you. But if you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover that the whole story about Lisa Birgit Holst is also made up. “Lisa Birgit Holst” is an anagram of “This is a big troll”; the founder of Snopes claims he came up with it in his younger and wilder days. The true origin of the spiders myth remains unknown.

(11) I’D LIKE TO SPEAK TO A MANAGER 19 TIMES A DAY

In 2015, Reagan National Airport in DC received 8,760 noise complaints; 6,852 of those complaints (78%) came from a single household, meaning the people living there called to complain an average of 19 times a day. This seems to be common both across airports and across complaint systems in general: the majority of gripes usually comes from a few prolific gripers. Some of these systems are legally mandated to investigate every complaint, so this means a handful of psychotic people with telephones—or now, LLMs—can waste millions of dollars. I keep calling to complain about this, but nobody ever does anything about it.

(12) BE THERE OR BE 11 SQUARES

:

Did you know that this is the most compact known way to pack 11 squares together into a larger square?

Really makes you think about the mindset of whoever made the universe, am I right?

(More here.)

(13) NOW WE’RE COOKING WITH NO GAS

digs up the “world’s saddest cookbook” and finds that it’s…pretty good?

He successfully makes steak and eggs, two things that are supposed to be impossible in the microwave. The only thing you can’t make? Multiple potatoes.

There’s a reason the book is called Microwave Cooking for One and not Microwave Cooking for a Large, Loving Family. […] It’s because microwave cooking becomes exponentially more complicated as you increase the number of guests. […] Baking potatoes in the microwave is an NP-hard problem.

NEWS FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ

• I was tickled to see that an actual Christian theologian/data scientist found my post called There Are No Statistics in the Kingdom of God. He mostly agreed with the argument, but he does think statistics will continue to exist in heaven. We shall see!

• I was back on ’s “Plain English” podcast talking about the decline of deviance.

• I was also on the “What Is a Good Life?” podcast with talking about the good life.

• “Why Aren’t Smart People Happier” won a Sidney Award, recognizing “excellence in nonfiction essays”:

And finally, the answer to the question I posed earlier: the art that made fnnch famous was the honey bear. Go figure!

Underrated Ways to Change the World is one of my most-read posts of all time, I think because people see the state of the world and they’re like, “Oh no, someone should do something about this!” and then they’re like “But what should I do about this?” Every problem seems so impossibly large and complicated, where do you even start?

You start by realizing that nobody can clean up this mess single-handedly, which is fine, because we’ve got roughly 16 billion other hands at the ready. All any of us have to do is find some neglected corner and start scrubbing.

That’s why I take note whenever I spot someone who seems uncommonly clever at making things better, or whenever I trip over a problem that doesn’t seem to have anyone fixing it. I present them to you here in the hopes that they’ll inspire you as they’ve inspired me.

1. ANSWER AN IMPORTANT BUT UNSEXY QUESTION

According to this terrific profile, Donald Shoup “has a strong claim on being the scholar who will have had the greatest impact on your day-to-day life”. Shoup did not study cancer, nuclear physics, or AI. No, Shoup studied parking. He spent his whole career documenting the fact that “free” parking ultimately backfires, and it’s better to charge for parking instead and use the revenues to make neighborhoods nicer: plant trees, spruce up the parks, keep the sidewalks clean.1

Shoup’s ideas have been adopted all over the world, with heartening results. When you price parking appropriately, traffic goes down, fewer people get tickets, and you know there’s going to be a space waiting for you when you arrive.

Many so-called “thought leaders” strive for such an impact and never come close. What made Shoup so effective? Three things, says his student M. Nolan Gray:

1. He picked an unsexy topic where low-hanging fruit was just waiting to be picked.

2. He made his ideas palatable to all sorts of politics, explaining to conservatives, libertarians, progressives, and socialists how pay-for-parking regimes fit into each of their ideologies.2

3. He maintained strict message discipline. When asked about the Israel-Palestine protests on campus, he reportedly responded, “I’m just wondering where they all parked”.

So the next time you find a convenient parking spot, thank Shoup, and the next time you want to apply your wits to improving the world, be Shoup.

2. BE A PUBLIC CHARACTER

Jane Jacobs, the great urban theorist, once wrote that the health of a neighborhood depends on its “public characters”.3 For instance, two public characters in Jacobs’ neighborhood are Mr. and Mrs. Jaffe, who own a convenience store. On one winter morning, Jacobs observes the Jaffes provide the following services to the neighborhood, all free of charge:

• supervised the small children crossing at the corner on the way to [school]

• lent an umbrella to one customer and a dollar to another

• took custody of a watch to give the repair man across the street when he opened later

• gave out information on the range of rents in the neighborhood to an apartment seeker

• listened to a tale of domestic difficulty and offered reassurance

• told some rowdies they could not come in unless they behaved and then defined (and got) good behavior

• provided an incidental forum for half a dozen conversations among customers who dropped in for oddments

• set aside certain newly arrived papers and magazines for regular customers who would depend on getting them

• advised a mother who came for a birthday present not to get the ship-model kit because another child going to the same birthday party was giving that

Some people think they can’t contribute to the world because they have no unique skills. How can you help if you don’t know kung fu or brain surgery? But as Jacobs writes, “A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function—although he often does. He just needs to be present [...] his main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people.” Sometimes all we need is a warm body that is willing to be extra warm.

3. MAKE A SOCIAL NUCLEATION SITE

I once did a high school science fair experiment where I put Mentos in different carbonated beverages and measured the height of the resulting geysers. The scientific value of this project was, let’s say, limited, but I did learn something interesting: despite how it looks to the naked eye, bubbles don’t come from nowhere. They only form at nucleation sites—little pits and scratches where molecules can gather until they reach critical mass.

The same thing is true of human relationships. People are constantly crashing against each other in the great sea of humanity, but only under special conditions do they form the molecular bonds of friendship. As far as I can tell, these social nucleation sites only appear in the presence of what I would call unreasonable attentiveness.

For instance, my freshman year hallmates were uncommonly close because our resident advisor was uncommonly intense. Most other groups shuffle halfheartedly through the orientation day scavenger hunt; Kevin instructed us to show up in gym shorts and running shoes, and barked at us back and forth across campus as we attempted to locate the engineering library and the art museum. When we narrowly missed first place, he hounded the deans until they let us share in the coveted grand prize, a trip to Six Flags.

We bonded after that, not just because we had all gotten our brains rattled at the same frequency on the Superman rollercoaster, but because we could all share a knowing look with each other like, “This guy, right?” Kevin’s unreasonable attentiveness made our hallway A Thing. He created a furrow in the fabric of social space-time where a gaggle of 18-year-olds could glom together.

Being in the presence of unreasonable attentiveness isn’t always pleasant, but then, nucleation sites are technically imperfections. Bubbles don’t form in a perfectly smooth glass, and human groups don’t form in perfectly smooth experiences. Unreasonable attentiveness creates the slight unevenness that helps people realize they need something to hold onto—namely, each other.

4. SELL ONIONS ON THE INTERNET

Peter Askew didn’t intend to become an onion merchant. He just happened to be a compulsive buyer of domain names, and when he noticed that VidaliaOnions.com was up for sale, he snagged it. He then discovered that some people love Vidalia onions. Like, really love them:

During a phone order one season – 2018 I believe – a customer shared this story where he smuggled some Vidalias onto his vacation cruise ship, and during each meal, would instruct the server to ‘take this onion to the back, chop it up, and add it onto my salad.’

But these allium aficionados didn’t have a good way to get in-season onions because Vidalias can only be grown in Georgia, and it’s a pain for small farms to maintain a direct-to-consumer shipping business on the side. Enter Askew, who now makes a living by pleasing the Vidalia-heads:

Last season, while I called a gentleman back regarding a phone order, his wife answered. While I introduced myself, she interrupted me mid-sentence and hollered in exaltation to her husband: “THE VIDALIA MAN! THE VIDALIA MAN! PICK UP THE PHONE!”

People have polarized views of business these days. Some people think we should feed grandma to the economy so it can grow bigger, while other people think we should gun down CEOs in the street. VidaliaOnions.com is, I think, a nice middle ground: you find a thing people want, you give it to them, you pocket some profit. So if you want an honest day’s work, maybe figure out what else people want chopped up and put on their cruise ship salads.

5. BE AN HONEST BROKER IN AN OTHERWISE SKEEVY INDUSTRY

I know a handful of people who have needed immigration lawyers, and they all say the same thing: there are no good immigration lawyers.

I think this is because the most prosocially-minded lawyers become public defenders or work at nonprofits representing cash-strapped clients, while the most capable and amoral lawyers go to white-shoe firms where they can make beaucoup bucks representing celebrity murderers and Halliburton. This leaves a doughnut hole for people who aren’t indigent, but also aren’t Intel. So if you want to help people, but you also don’t want to make peanuts, you could do a lot of good by being an honest and competent immigration lawyer.

I think there are lots of jobs like that, roles that don’t get good people because they aren’t sacrificial enough to attract the do-gooders and they aren’t lucrative enough to attract the overachievers. Home repair, movers, daycares, nursing homes, local news, city government—these are places where honesty and talent can matter a lot, but supply is low.

So if your career offers you the choice of being a starving saint or a wealthy sinner, consider being a middle-class mensch instead. You may not be helping the absolute neediest people, and you may not be able to afford a yacht, but there are lots of folks out there who would really like some help getting their visas renewed, and they’d be very happy to meet you.

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6. IMPROVE A STATISTIC

I have this game I like to play called Viral Statistics Bingo, where you find statistics that have gone viral on the internet and you try to trace them back to their original source. You’ll usually find that they have one of five dubious origins:

• A crummy study done in like 1904

• A study that was done on mice

• A book that’s out of print and now no one can find it

• A complete misinterpretation of the data

• It’s just something some guy said once

That means anyone with sufficient motivation can render a public service by improving the precision of a famous number. For example, the sex worker/data scientist realized that no one has any idea what percentage of sex workers are victims of human trafficking. By combining her own surveys with re-analysis of publicly available data, she estimates that it’s 3.2%. That number is probably not exactly right, but then, no statistic is exactly right—the point is that it puts us in the right ballpark, that you can check her work for yourself, and that it’s a lot better than basing our numbers on a study done in mice.

7. BE A HOBBIT

The US does a bad job regulating clinical trials, and it means we don’t invent as many life-saving medicines as we could. is trying to change that, and she says that scientists and doctors often give her damning information that would be very helpful for her reform efforts. But her sources refuse to go on the record because it might put their careers in a bit of jeopardy. Not real jeopardy, mind you, like if you drive your minivan into the dean’s office or if you pants the director of the NIH. We’re talking mild jeopardy, like you might be 5% less likely to win your next grant.

She refers to this as “hobbitian courage”, as in, not the kind of courage required to meet an army of Orcs on the battlefield, but the courage required to take a piece of jewelry on a field trip to a volcano:

The quieter, hobbitian form of courage that clinical development reform (or any other hard systems problem) requires is humble: a researcher agreeing to let you cite them, an administrator willing to deviate from an inherited checklist, a policymaker ready to question a default.

It’s understandable that most people don’t want to risk their lives or blow up their careers to save the world. But most situations don’t actually call for the ultimate sacrifice. So if you’re not willing to fall on your sword, consider: would you fall on a thumbtack instead?

8. MAKE YOUR DAMN SYSTEM WORK

Every human lives part-time in a Kafka novel. In between working, eating, and sleeping, you must also navigate the terrors of various bureaucracies that can do whatever they want to you with basically no consequences.

For example, if you have the audacity to go to a hospital in the US, you will receive mysterious bills for months afterwards (“You owe us $450 because you went #2 in an out-of-network commode”). If you work at a university, you have to wait weeks for an Institutional Review Board to tell you whether it’s okay to ask people how much they like Pop-Tarts. The IRS knows how much you owe in taxes, but instead of telling you, you’re supposed to guess, and if you guess wrong, you owe them additional money—it’s like playing the world’s worst game show, and the host also has a monopoly on the legitimate means of violence.

If you can de-gum the gears of one of these systems—even a sub-sub-sub-system!—you could improve the lives of millions of people. To pick a totally random example, if you work for the Department of Finance for the City of Chicago, and somebody is like “Hey, this very nice blogger just moved to town and he didn’t know that you have to get a sticker from us in order to have a vehicle inside city limits, let’s charge him a $200 fine!”, you could say in reply, “What if we didn’t do that? What if we asked him to get the sticker instead, and only fined him if he didn’t follow through? Because seriously, how are people supposed to know about this sticker system? When you move to Chicago, does the ghostly form of JB Pritzker appear to you in a dream and explain that you need both a sticker from the state of Illinois, which goes on the license plate, and a sticker from the city of Chicago, which goes on your windshield? Do we serve the people, or do we terrorize them?” Just as one example.

9. BE GOOD AUDIENCE

I used to perform at a weekly standup gig when I lived in the UK, and this guy Wally would always be there in the second row. I got the impression that he didn’t have anywhere else to be, but we didn’t mind, because Wally was Good Audience.

When the jokes were good, he laughed loud and hard, and when the jokes were bad, he politely waited for more good jokes. Wally brought his friends, they brought their friends, and having more Good Audience made the acts better, too. (When comedians only perform for each other, no one laughs.) Eventually the gig got big, so big that it would sell out every week, and we’d have to set aside a ticket for Wally or else he wouldn’t get in. Ten years later, that show is still running.

Fran Leibowitz once said that the AIDS epidemic wiped out not just a generation of artists, but also a generation of audience. Great writers, performers, filmmakers, etc. cannot exist without great readers, watchers, and commentators—and not just because they open their wallets and put butts in seats, but because they pluck the diamonds out of the rough, they show it to their friends and pass it on to their kids, they raise it above their heads while wading through the sea of slop, shouting, “This! Look at this!”

10. ACQUAINT YOURSELF

Years ago, my friend Drew was visiting me when we noticed a whiff of natural gas in the hallway outside my apartment. I thought it was nothing—my building wasn’t the nicest, and it often smelled of many things—but Drew, who is twice as affable and Midwestern as I am, insisted we call the gas company. A bored technician arrived and halfheartedly waved his gas-detecting wand around my neighbor’s door, at which point his eyes got wide. He rushed to the basement, where he saw the gas meter spinning wildly, meaning that gas was pouring into my neighbor’s apartment.

“We gotta get this door open,” he said.

No one answered when we pounded on the door, so we summoned the fire department, who busted open a window and found my neighbor unconscious on the floor. His stove’s burners was on, but not lit, turning his apartment into a gas chamber. They told us the guy probably would have died if someone didn’t call, and the building might have caught on fire.

I was glad the guy survived, but I was ashamed that he had to be saved by a total stranger, while his own neighbor was ready to walk on by. I should have known him! I should have brought him Christmas cookies! We should have played checkers in the park on Saturdays! In the days afterward, I fantasized about knocking on his door or leaving him a note, like, “Hey! I notice you are elderly and alone, and I am young and nearby, maybe we should get a Tuesdays with Morrie thing going?”

But I never did that. I was too intimidated. Besides, am I supposed to become bosom buddies with every schmuck who lives in my building? Who’s got time for that?

Now that I’ve lived among many schmucks in many different buildings, I realized that I didn’t need to be this guy’s best friend. I just needed to be his acquaintance. If I knew his name, if I had even spoken to him once in the hallway, then when I got a noseful of gas outside his door, I would have thought to myself, “Oh, Rob’s apartment shouldn’t smell like that.” Rob ‘n’ me were never going to be Mitch and Morrie, but we could have easily been Guys Who Kind of Recognize Each Other and Would Be Willing to Report the Presence of Dangerous Chemicals on Each Other’s Behalf.

DEATH STAR SUPERSTARS

A lot of well-intentioned people suffer from what we might call Superhero Syndrome: they want to save the world, but they want it to be saved by them in particular. They want to be the one who blows up the Death Star, not the one who washes the X-Wings.

This is a seductive fantasy because it disguises selfishness as sacrifice. It promises to excuse a lifetime of mediocrity with one great gesture, to pay off all your karmic debts in one fell swoop. The result is a world full of heroes-in-waiting who comfort themselves by thinking they would jump on a grenade if the situation ever presented itself, which fortunately it never does.

We do occasionally need someone to shoot torpedos into the exhaust port of a giant doomsday machine. But most of the time, we need people who sell onions, people who make sure the kids get to school safely, people who will show up to the comedy gig and laugh. I’d like to live in a world full of people like that, I’d be happy to pay for the sticker that lets me park there.

1.

A few months ago, I got to interview a bunch of bloggers at a writing retreat. I discovered that they all had one thing in common: each one was in possession of a secret.

I don’t mean that they, like, murdered their boyfriend and got away with it, or that they’re sexually attracted to mollusks. I mean that they had all tapped some ve…

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The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.

I am skeptical of this thesis. I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down”.

Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; 422 new indie shops opened last year alone. Even Barnes and Noble is cool again.

The actual data on reading isn’t as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don’t find any other major trends over the past three decades:

Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in reading over the past decade:

And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023:

These are declines, no doubt. But if you look closely at the reading time data, you’ll notice that the dip between 2003 and 2011 is about twice the size of the dip between 2011 and 2023. In fact, the only meaningful changes happen in 2009 and 2015. I’d say we have two effects here: a larger internet effect and a smaller smartphone effect, neither of which is huge. If the data is right, the best anti-reading intervention is not a 5G-enabled iPhone circa 2023, but a broadband-enabled iMac circa 2009.

DO YOU BUY THE DIP?

Ultimately, the plausibility of the “death of reading” thesis depends on two judgment calls.

First, do these effects strike you as big or small? Apparently, lots of people see these numbers and perceive an emergency. But we should submit every aspiring crisis to this hypothetical: how would we describe the size of the effect if we were measuring a heartening trend instead instead of a concerning one?

Imagine that time-use graph measured cigarette-smoking instead of book-reading. Would you say that smoking “collapsed” between 2003 and 2023? If we had been spending a billion dollars a year on a big anti-smoking campaign that whole time, would we say it worked? Kind of, I’d say, but most of the time the line doesn’t budge. I wouldn’t be unfurling any “Mission Accomplished” banners, which is why I am not currently unfurling any “Mission Failed” banners either.1

The second judgment call: do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse? The obvious expectation is that technology will get more distracting every year. And the decline in reading seems to be greater among college students, so we should expect the numbers to continue ticking downward as older bookworms are replaced by younger phoneworms. Those are both reasonable predictions, but two facts make me a little more doubtful.

Fact #1: there are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media—time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren’t sticking around for it. The “draw people in” phase of the internet was unsurprisingly a lot more enticing than the “shake ‘em down” phase—what we now refer to, appropriately, as “enshittification”. The early internet felt like sipping an IPA with friends; the late internet feels like taking furtive shots of Southern Comfort to keep the shakes at bay. So it’s no wonder that, after paying $1000 for a new phone, people will then pay an additional $50 for a device that makes their phone less functional.

Fact #2: reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it’s more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok—none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper. Apparently books are what hyper-online people call “Lindy”: they’ve lasted a long time, so we should expect them to last even longer.

It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead. If I was a mad scientist hellbent on stopping people from reading, I’d probably invent something like the iPhone. And after I released my dastardly creation into the world, I’d end up like the Grinch on Christmas morning, dumfounded that my plan didn’t work: I gave them all the YouTube Shorts they could ever desire and they’re still...reading!!

WILL WORK 4 REELS

Perhaps there are frontiers of digital addiction we have yet to reach. Maybe one day we’ll all have Neuralinks that beam Instagram Reels directly into our primary visual cortex, and then reading will really be toast.

Maybe. But it has proven very difficult to artificially satisfy even the most basic human pleasures. Who wants a birthday cake made with aspartame? Who would rather have a tanning bed than a sunny day? Who prefers to watch bots play chess? You can view high-res images of the Mona Lisa anytime you want, and yet people will still pay to fly to Paris and shove through crowds just to get a glimpse of the real thing.

I think there is a deep truth here: human desires are complex and multidimensional, and this makes them both hard to quench and hard to hack. That tinge of discontent that haunts even the happiest people, that bottomless hunger for more even among plenty—those are evolutionary defense mechanisms. If we were easier to please, we wouldn’t have made it this far. We would have gorged ourselves to death as soon as we figured out how to cultivate sugarcane.

That’s why I doubt the core assumption of the “death of reading” hypothesis. The theory heavily implies that people who would once have been avid readers are now glassy-eyed doomscrollers because that is, in fact, what they always wanted to be. They never appreciated the life of the mind. They were just filling time with great works of literature until TikTok came along. The unspoken assumption is that most humans, other than a few rare intellectuals, have a hierarchy of needs that looks like this:

I don’t buy this. Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.2

Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.

GIMME THAT WHEAT

That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.

According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat”, but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.

That’s why there’s no replacement for text, and there never will be. Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.

That doesn’t mean every piece of prose is wonderful, just that it can be. And when it reaches those heights, it commands a power that nothing else can possess.

I didn’t always believe this. I was persuaded on this point recently when I met an audio editor named Julia Barton, who was writing a book about the history of radio. I thought that was funny—shouldn’t the history of radio be told as a podcast?

No, she said, because in the long run, books are all that matter. Podcasts, films, and TikToks are good at attracting ears and eyes, but in the realm of ideas, they punch below their weight. Thoughts only stick around when you print them out and bind them in cardboard.

I think Barton’s thesis is right. At the center of every long-lived movement, you will always find a book. Every major religion has its holy text, of course, but there is also no communism without the Communist Manifesto, no environmentalism without Silent Spring, no American revolution without Common Sense. This remains true even in our supposed post-literate meltdown—just look at Abundance, which inspired the creation of a Congressional caucus. That happened not because of Abundance the Podcast or Abundance the 7-Part YouTube Series, but because of Abundance the book.

A somewhat diminished readership can somewhat diminish the power of text in culture, but it’s a mistake to think that words only exercise influence over you when you behold those words firsthand. I’m reminded of Meryl Streep’s monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, when Anne Hathaway scoffs at two seemingly identical belts and Streep schools her:

...it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.3

What’s true in the world of fashion is also true in the world of ideas. Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence—it places you at their mercy. This is easy to miss. It may seem like ignorance is always overpowering knowledge, that the people who kick things down are triumphing over the people who build things up. That’s because kicking down is fast and loud, while building up is slow and quiet. But that is precisely why the builders ultimately prevail. The kickers get bored and wander off, while the builders return and start again.

THE “GOLDEN” AGE

I have one more gripe against the “death of literacy” hypothesis, and against Walter Ong, the Jesuit priest/English professor whose book Orality and Literacy provides the intellectual backbone for the argument.

Most of the differences between oral and literate cultures are actually differences between non-recorded and recorded cultures. And even if our culture has become slightly less literate, it has become far more recorded.

As Ong points out, in an oral culture, the only way for information to pass from one generation to another is for someone to remember and repeat it.4 This is bit like trying to maintain a music collection with nothing but a first-generation iPod: you can’t store that much, so you have to make tradeoffs. Oral traditions are chock full of repetition, archetypal characters, and intuitive ideas, because that’s what it takes to make something memorable. Precise facts, on the other hand, are like 10-gigabyte files—they’re going to get compressed, corrupted, or deleted.

Writing is one way of solving the storage problem, but it’s not the only way, and we use those other ways now more than ever. Humans took an estimated 2 trillion photos in 2025, and 20 million videos get uploaded to YouTube every day. No one knows how many spreadsheets, apps, or code files we make. Each one of these formats allows us to retain different kinds of information, and it causes us to think in a different register. What psychology is unlocked by Photoshop, iMovie, and Excel?

There is something unique about text, no doubt, and I’m sure a purely pictographic, videographic, or spreadsheet-graphic culture would be rather odd and probably dysfunctional. But having more methods of storage makes us better at transmitting knowledge, not worse, and they allow us to surpass the cognitive limits that so strongly shape oral culture.

Put another way: hearing a bard recite The Iliad around a campfire is nothing like streaming the song “Golden” on YouTube. That bard is going to add his own flourishes, he’s going to cut out the bits that might offend his audience, he’s probably going to misremember some stanzas, and no one will be able to fact-check him. In contrast, the billionth stream of “Golden” is exactly the same as the first. Even if people spend less time reading, it is impossible to return to a world where every fact that isn’t memorized is simply lost. I don’t believe we are nearly as close to a post-literate society as the critics think, but I also don’t believe that a post-literate society is going to bear much resemblance to a pre-literate society.

HAIL TO THE KING

I have text on my mind right now for two reasons.

The first is that I’m writing a book, and it’s almost done. So maybe everything I’ve said is just motivated reasoning: “‘Books are very important!’ says man with book”.5 But the deeper I get, the more I read the thoughts that other people have tamed and transmuted into a form that could be fed into the printing press and the inkjet printer, and the more I try to do the same, the more I’m convinced that there is a power here that will persist.

The second reason is Experimental History just turned four. This is usually the time of year when I try to wax wise on the state of the blogosphere and the internet in general. So here’s my short report: it’s boom times for text.

I know that what we used to call “social media” is now just television you watch on your phone. I know that people want to spend their leisure time watching strangers apply makeup, assemble salads, and repair dishwashers. I know they want to see this guy dancing in his dirty bathroom and they want to watch Mr. Beast bury himself alive. These are their preferences, and woe betide anyone who tries to show them anything else, especially—God forbid—the written word.

But I also know that humans have a hunger that no video can satisfy. Even in the midst of infinite addictive entertainment, some people still want to read. A lot of people, in fact. I serve at their pleasure, and I am happy to, because I think the world ultimately belongs to them. 5,000 years after Sumerians started scratching cuneiform into clay and 600 years after Gutenberg started pressing inky blocks onto paper, text is still king. Long may it reign.

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P.S., SPEAKING OF EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY’S FOURTH BIRTHDAY:

Here are last year’s most-viewed posts:

1. The Decline of Deviance

2. Face It: You’re a Crazy Person

3. 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing

4. Bag of Words, Have Mercy on Us

5. New Paradigm for Psychology Just Dropped

And here are my favorite MYSTERY POSTS that went out to paid subscribers only:

Thank you to everyone who makes Experimental History possible, including those who support the blog, and those who increase its power by yelling at it on the internet. Godspeed to all of you, and may your 2026 be too good for words.

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By the way, here is the actual data on cigarette smoking, via the American Lung Association:

In case you’re wondering, the decline in smoking has not been offset by an increase in vaping. While adults vape a tiny bit more today than they did in 2019, the difference is very small:

Here’s the most replicated finding to come out of my area of psychology in the past decade: most people believe they suffer from a chronic case of awkwardness.

Study after study finds that people expect their conversations to go poorly, when in fact those conversations usually go pretty well. People assign themselves the majority of the blame for any awkward silences that arise, and they believe that they like other people more than other people like them in return. I’ve replicated this effect myself: I once ran a study where participants talked in groups of three, and then they reported/guessed how much each person liked each other person in the conversation. Those participants believed, on average, that they were the least liked person in the trio.

In another study, participants were asked to rate their skills on 20 everyday activities, and they scored themselves as better than average on 19 of them. When it came to cooking, cleaning, shopping, eating, sleeping, reading, etc., participants were like, “Yeah, that’s kinda my thing.” The one exception? “Initiating and sustaining rewarding conversation at a cocktail party, dinner party, or similar social event”.

I find all this heartbreaking, because studies consistently show that the thing that makes humans the happiest is positive relationships with other humans. Awkwardness puts a persistent bit of distance between us and the good life, like being celiac in a world where every dish has a dash of gluten in it.

Even worse, nobody seems to have any solutions, nor any plans for inventing them. If you want to lose weight, buy a house, or take a trip to Tahiti, entire industries are waiting to serve you. If you have diagnosable social anxiety, your insurance might pay for you to take an antidepressant and talk to a therapist. But if you simply want to gain a bit of social grace, you’re pretty much outta luck. It’s as if we all think awkwardness is a kind of moral failing, a choice, or a congenital affliction that suggests you were naughty in a past life—at any rate, unworthy of treatment and undeserving of assistance.

We can do better. And we can start by realizing that, even though we use one word to describe it, awkwardness is not one thing. It’s got layers, like a big, ungainly onion. Three layers, to be exact. So to shrink the onion, you have to peel it from the skin to the pith, adapting your technique as you go, because removing each layer requires its own unique technique.

Before we make our initial incision, I should mention that I’m not the kind of psychologist who treats people. I’m the kind of psychologist who asks people stupid questions and then makes sweeping generalizations about them. You should take everything I say with a heaping teaspoon of salt, which will also come in handy after we’ve sliced the onion and it’s time to sauté it. That disclaimer disclaimed, let’s begin on the outside and work our way in, starting with—

1. THE OUTSIDE LAYER: SOCIAL CLUMSINESS

The outermost layer of the awkward onion is the most noticeable one: awkward people do the wrong thing at the wrong time. You try to make people laugh; you make them cringe instead. You try to compliment them; you creep them out. You open up; you scare them off. Let’s call this social clumsiness.

Being socially clumsy is like being in a role-playing game where your charisma stat is chronically too low and you can’t access the correct dialogue options. And if you understand that reference, I understand why you’re reading this post.

Here’s the bad news: I don’t think there’s a cure for clumsiness. Every human trait is normally distributed, so it’s inevitable that some chunk of humanity is going to have a hard time reading emotional cues and predicting the social outcomes of their actions. I’ve seen high-functioning, socially ham-handed people try to memorize interpersonal rules the same way chess grandmasters memorize openings, but it always comes off stilted and strange. You’ll be like, “Hey, how you doing” and they’re like “ROOK TO E4, KNIGHT TO C11, QUEEN TO G6” and you’re like “uhhh cool man me too”.

Here’s the good news, though: even if you can’t cure social clumsiness, there is a way to manage its symptoms. To show you how, let me tell you a story of a stupid thing I did, and what I should have done instead.

Once, in high school, I was in my bedroom when I saw a girl in my class drive up to the intersection outside my house. It was dark outside and I had the light on, and so when she looked up, she caught me in the mortifying act of, I guess, existing inside my home? This felt excruciatingly embarrassing, for some reason, and so I immediately dropped to the floor, as if I was in a platoon of GIs and someone had just shouted “SNIPER!” But breaking line of sight doesn’t cause someone to unsee you, and so from this girl’s point of view, she had just locked eyes with some dude from school through a window and his response had been to duck and cover. She told her friends about this, and they all made fun of me ruthlessly.

I learned an important lesson that day: when it comes to being awkward, the coverup is always worse than the crime. If you just did something embarrassing mere moments ago, it’s unlikely that you have suddenly become socially omnipotent and that all of your subsequent moves are guaranteed to be prudent and effective. It’s more likely that you’re panicking, and so your next action is going to be even stupider than your last.

And that, I think, is the key to mitigating your social clumsiness: give up on the coverups. When you miss a cue or make a faux pas, you just have to own it. Apologize if necessary, make amends, explain yourself, but do not attempt to undo your blunder with another round of blundering. If you knock over a stack of porcelain plates, don’t try to quickly sweep up the shards before anyone notices; you will merely knock over a shelf of water pitchers.

This turns out to be a surprisingly high-status move, because when you readily admit your mistakes, you imply that you don’t expect to be seriously harmed by them, and this makes you seem intimidating and cool. You know how when a toddler topples over, they’ll immediately look at you to gauge how upset they should be? Adults do that too. Whenever someone does something unexpected, we check their reaction—if they look embarrassed, then whatever they did must be embarrassing. When that person panics, they look like a putz. When they shrug and go, “Classic me!”, they come off as a lovable doof, or even, somehow, a chill, confident person.

In fact, the most successful socially clumsy people I know can manage their mistakes before they even happen. They simply own up to their difficulties and ask people to meet them halfway, saying things like:

Thanks for inviting me over to your house. It’s hard for me to tell when people want to stop hanging out with me, so please just tell me when you’d like me to leave. I won’t be mad. If it’s weird to you, I’m sorry about that. I promise it’s not weird to me.

It takes me a while to trust people who attempt this kind of social maneuver—they can’t be serious, can they? But once I’m convinced they’re earnest, knowing someone’s social deficits feels no different than knowing their dietary restrictions (“Arthur can’t eat artichokes; Maya doesn’t understand sarcasm”), and we get along swimmingly. Such a person is always going to seem a bit like a Martian, but that’s fine, because they are a bit of a Martian, and there’s nothing wrong with being from outer space as long as you’re upfront about it.

2. THE MIDDLE LAYER: EXCESSIVE SELF-AWARENESS

When we describe someone else as awkward, we’re referring to the things they do. But when we describe ourselves as awkward, we’re also referring to this whole awkward world inside our heads, this constant sensation that you’re not slotted in, that you’re being weird, somehow. It’s that nagging thought of “does my sweater look bad” that blossoms into “oh god, everyone is staring at my horrible sweater” and finally arrives at “I need to throw this sweater into a dumpster immediately, preferably with me wearing it”.

This is the second layer of the awkward onion, one that we can call excessive self-awareness. Whether you’re socially clumsy or not, you can certainly worry that you are, and you can try to prevent any gaffes from happening by paying extremely close attention to yourself at all times. This strategy always backfires because it causes a syndrome that athletes call “choking” or “the yips”—that stilted, clunky movement you get when you pay too much attention to something that’s supposed to be done without thinking. As the old poem goes:

A centipede was happy – quite!

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg moves after which?”

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,

She fell exhausted in the ditch

Not knowing how to run.

The solution to excessive self-awareness is to turn your attention outward instead of inward. You cannot out-shout your inner critic; you have to drown it out with another voice entirely. Luckily, there are other voices around you all the time, emanating from other humans. The more you pay attention to what they’re doing and saying, the less attention you have left to lavish on yourself.

You can call this mindfulness if that makes it more useful to you, but I don’t mean it as a sort of droopy-eyed, slack-jawed, I-am-one-with-the-universe state of enlightenment. What I mean is: look around you! Human beings are the most entertaining organisms on the planet. See their strange activities and their odd proclivities, their opinions and their words and their what-have-you. This one is riding a unicycle! That one is picking their nose and hoping no one notices! You’re telling me that you’d rather think about yourself all the time?

Getting out of your own head and into someone else’s can be surprisingly rewarding for all involved. It’s hard to maintain both an internal and an external dialogue simultaneously, and so when your self-focus is going full-blast, your conversations degenerate into a series of false starts (“So...how many cousins do you have?” “Seven.” “Ah, a prime number.”) Meanwhile, the other person stays buttoned up because, well, why would you disrobe for someone who isn’t even looking? Paying attention to a human, on the other hand, is like watering a plant: it makes them bloom. People love it when you listen and respond to them, just like babies love it when they turn a crank and Elmo pops out of a box—oh! The joy of having an effect on the world!

Of course, you might not like everyone that you attend to. When people start blooming in your presence, you’ll discover that some of them make you sneeze, and some of them smell like that kind of plant that gives off the stench of rotten eggs. But this is still progress, because in the Great Hierarchy of Subjective Experiences, annoyance is better than awkwardness—you can walk away from an annoyance, but awkwardness comes with you wherever you go.

It can be helpful to develop a distaste for your own excessive self-focus, and one way to do that is to relabel it as “narcissism”. We usually picture narcissists as people with an inflated sense of self worth, and of course many narcissists are like that. But I contend that there is a negative form of narcissism, one where you pay yourself an extravagant amount of attention that just happens to come in the form of scorn. Ultimately, self-love and self-hate are both forms of self-obsession.

So if you find yourself fixated on your own flaws, perhaps its worth asking: what makes you so worthy of your own attention, even if it’s mainly disapproving? Why should you be the protagonist of every social encounter? If you’re really as bad as you say, why not stop thinking about yourself so much and give someone else a turn?

3. THE INNER LAYER: PEOPLE-PHOBIA

Social clumsiness is the thing that we fear doing, and excessive self-focus is the strategy we use to prevent that fear from becoming real, but neither of them is the fear itself, the fear of being left out, called out, ridiculed, or rejected. “Social anxiety” is already taken, so let’s refer to this center of the awkward onion as people-phobia.

People-phobia is both different from and worse than all other phobias, because the thing that scares the bajeezus out of you is also the thing you love the most. Arachnophobes don’t have to work for, ride buses full of, or go on first dates with spiders. But people-phobes must find a way to survive in a world that’s chockablock with homo sapiens, and so they yo-yo between the torment of trying to approach other people and the agony of trying to avoid them.

At the heart of people-phobia are two big truths and one big lie. The two big truths: our social connections do matter a lot, and social ruptures do cause a lot of pain. Individual humans cannot survive long on their own, and so evolution endowed us with a healthy fear of getting voted off the island. That’s why it hurts so bad to get bullied, dumped, pantsed, and demoted, even though none of those things cause actual tissue damage.1

But here’s the big lie: people-phobes implicitly believe that hurt can never be healed, so it must be avoided at all costs. This fear is misguided because the mind can, in fact, mend itself. Just like we have a physical immune system that repairs injuries to the body, we also have a psychological immune system that repairs injuries to the ego. Black eyes, stubbed toes, and twisted ankles tend to heal themselves on their own, and so do slip-ups, mishaps, and faux pas.

That means you can cure people-phobia the same way you cure any fear—by facing it, feeling it, and forgetting it. That’s the logic behind exposure and response prevention: you sit in the presence of the scary thing without deploying your usual coping mechanisms (scrolling on your phone, fleeing, etc.) and you do this until you get tired of being scared. If you’re an arachnophobe, for instance, you peer at a spider from a safe distance, you wait until your heart rate returns to normal, you take one step closer, and you repeat until you’re so close to the spider that it agrees to officiate your wedding.2

Unfortunately, people-phobia is harder to treat than arachnophobia because people, unlike spiders, cannot be placed in a terrarium and kept safely on the other side of the room. There is no zero-risk social interaction—anyone, at any time, can decide that they don’t like you. That’s why your people-phobia does not go into spontaneous remission from continued contact with humanity: if you don’t confront your fear in a way that ultimately renders it dull, you’re simply stoking the phobia rather than extinguishing it.3

Exposure only works for people-phobia, then, if you’re able to do two things: notch some pleasant interactions and reflect on them afterward. The notching might sound harder than the reflecting, but the evidence suggests it’s actually the other way around. Most people have mostly good interactions most of the time. They just don’t notice.

In any study I’ve ever read and in every study I’ve ever conducted myself, when you ask people to report on their conversation right after the fact, they go, “Oh, it was pretty good!”. In one study, I put strangers in an empty room and told them to talk about whatever they want for as long as they want, which sounds like the social equivalent of being told to go walk on hot coals or stick needles in your eyes. And yet, surprisingly, most of those participants reported having a perfectly enjoyable, not-very-awkward time. When I asked another group of participants to think back to their most recent conversation (which were overwhelmingly with friends and family, rather than strangers), I found the same pattern of results4:

But when you ask people to predict their next conversation, they suddenly change their tune. I had another group of participants guess how this whole “meet a stranger in the lab, have an open-ended conversation” thing would go, and they were not optimistic. Participants estimated that only 50% of conversations would make it past five minutes (actually, 87% did), and that only 15% of conversations would go all the way to the time limit of 45 minutes (actually, 31% did). So when people meet someone new, they go, “that was pretty good!”, but when they imagine meeting someone new, they go, “that will be pretty bad!”

A first-line remedy for people-phobia, then, is to rub your nose in the pleasantness of your everyday interactions. If you’re afraid that your goof-ups will doom you to a lifetime of solitude and then that just...doesn’t happen, perhaps it’s worth reflecting on that fact until your expectations update to match your experiences. Do that enough, and maybe your worries will start to appear not only false, but also tedious. However, if reflecting on the contents of your conversations makes you feel like that guy in Indiana Jones who gets his face melted off when he looks directly at the Ark of the Covenant, then I’m afraid you’re going to need bigger guns than can fit into a blog post.

GOODNIGHT AND GOOD DUCK

Obviously, I don’t think you can instantly de-awkward yourself by reading the right words in the right order. We’re trying to override automatic responses and perform laser removal on burned-in fears—this stuff takes time.

In the meantime, though, there’s something all of us can do right away: we can disarm. The greatest delusion of the awkward person is that they can never harm someone else; they can only be harmed. But every social hangup we have was hung there by someone else, probably by someone who didn’t realize they were hanging it, maybe by someone who didn’t even realize they were capable of such a thing. When Todd Posner told me in college that I have a big nose, did he realize he was giving me a lifelong complex? No, he probably went right back to thinking about his own embarrassingly girthy neck, which, combined with his penchant for wearing suits, caused people to refer to him behind his back as “Business Frog” (a fact I kept nobly to myself).

So even if you can’t rid yourself of your own awkward onion, you can at least refrain from fertilizing anyone else’s. This requires some virtuous sacrifice, because the most tempting way to cope with awkwardness is to pass it on—if you’re pointing and laughing at someone else, it’s hard for anyone to point and laugh at you. But every time you accept the opportunity to be cruel, you increase the ambient level of cruelty in the world, which makes all of us more likely to end up on the wrong end of a pointed finger.

All of that is to say: if you happen to stop at an intersection and you look up and see someone you know just standing there inside his house he immediately ducks out of sight, you can think to yourself, “There are many reasonable explanations for such behavior—perhaps he just saw a dime on the floor and bent down to get it!” and you can forget about the whole ordeal and, most importantly, keep your damn eyes on the road.

PS: This post pairs well with Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs.

All of us, whether we realize it or not, are asking ourselves one question over and over for our whole lives: how much should I suffer?

Should I take the job that pays more but also sucks more? Should I stick with the guy who sometimes drives me insane? Should I drag myself through an organic chemistry class if I means I have a shot at becoming a surgeon?

It’s impossible to answer these questions if you haven’t figured out your Acceptable Suffering Ratio. I don’t know how one does that in general. I only know how I found mine: by taking a dangerous, but legal, drug.

DIARY OF A PIMPLY KID

I’ve always had bad skin. I was that kinda pimply kid in school—you know him, that kid with a face that invites mild cruelty from his fellow teens.1 I did all sorts of scrubs and washes, to little avail. In grad school, I started getting nasty cysts in my earlobes that would fill with pus and weep for days and I decided: enough. Enough! It’s the 21st century. Surely science can do something for me, right?

And science could do something for me: it could offer me a drug called Accutane. Well, it could offer me isotretinoin, which used to be sold as Accutane, but the manufacturers stopped selling it because too many kids killed themselves.

See, Accutane has a lot of potential side effects, including hearing loss, pancreatitis, “loosening of the skin”, “increased pressure around the brain”, and, most famous of all, depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide and self-injury. In 2000, a Congressman’s son shot himself while he was on Accutane, which naturally made everyone very nervous. My doctor was so worried that she offered to “balance me out” with an antidepressant before I even started on the acne meds. I turned her down, figuring I was too young to try the “put a bunch of drugs inside you and let ‘em duke it out” school of pharmacology.

But her concerns were reasonable: Accutane did indeed make me less happy. Like an Instagram filter for the mind, it deepened the blacks and washed out the whites: sad things felt a little sharper and happy things felt a little blunted. I was a bit quicker to get angry, and I was more often visited by the thought that nothing in my life was going well—although, as a grad student, I was visited fairly often by that thought even in normal times. It wasn’t the kind of thing I noticed every day. But occasionally, when I was, say, struggling to get some code to work, I’d feel an extra, unfamiliar tang of despair, and I’d go, “Accutane, is that you?”

The drugs also made my skin like 95% better. It was night and day—we’re talking going from Diary of a Pimply Kid to uh, Diary of a Normal Kid. That wonderful facial glow-up that most people experience as they exit puberty, I got to experience that same thing in my mid-20s. Ten years later, I’m still basically zit-free.

I didn’t realize it at first, but I had found my Acceptable Suffering Ratio. Six months of moderate sadness for a lifetime of clear skin? Yes, I’ll take that deal. But nothing worse than that. If the suffering is longer or deeper, if the upside is lower or less certain: no way dude. I’m looking for Accutane-level value out of life, or better.

That probably sounds stupid. It is stupid. And yet, until that point, I don’t think I was sufficiently skeptical of the deals life was offering me. Whenever I had the chance to trade pain for gain, I wasn’t asking: how bad, for how long, and for how much in return? I literally never wondered “How much should I suffer to achieve my goals?” because the implicit answer was always “As much as I have to”.

SISYPHUS AND HERCULES

My oversight makes some sense—I was in academia at the time, where guaranteed suffering for uncertain gains is the name of the game. But I think a lot of us have Acceptable Suffering Ratios that are way out of whack. We believe ourselves to be in the myth of Sisyphus, where suffering is both futile and inescapable, when we are actually in myth of Hercules, where heroic labors ought to earn us godly rewards.

For example, I know this guy, call him Omar, and women are always falling in unrequited love with him. They’re gaga for Omar, but he’s lukewarm on them, and so they make a home for him in their hearts that he only ever uses as a crash pad. I don’t know these women personally, but sometimes I wish I could go undercover in their lives as like their hairdresser or whatever just so I could tell them: “It’s not supposed to feel like this.” This pining after nothing, this endless waiting and hoping that some dude’s change of heart will ultimately vindicate your years of one-sided affection—that’s not the trade that real love should ask of you.

Real love does bring plenty of pain: the angst of being perceived exactly as you are, the torment of confronting your own selfishness, the fear of giving someone else the nuclear detonation codes to your life. But if you can withstand those agonies, you will be richly rewarded. Omar’s frustrated lovers have this romantic notion that love is a burden to be borne, and the greater the burden, the greater the love. When a love is right, though, it’s less like heaving a legendary boulder up a mountain, and more like schlepping a picnic basket up a hill—yes, you gotta carry the thing to and fro, and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but in between you get to enjoy the sunset and the brie.

READ ‘EM AND WII’P

Our Acceptable Suffering Ratios are most out of whack when it comes to choosing what to do with our lives.

Careers usually have a “pay your dues” phase, which implies the existence of a “collect your dues” phase. In my experience, however, the dues that go in are no guarantee of the dues that come back out. There is no cosmic, omnipotent bean-counter who makes sure that you get your adversity paid back with interest. You really can suffer for nothing.

If you’re staring down a gauntlet of pain, then, it’s important to peek at the people coming out the other side. If they’re like, “I’m so glad I went through that gauntlet of pain! That was definitely worth it, no question!” then maybe it’s wise to follow in their footsteps. But if the people on the other side of the gauntlet are like, “What do you mean, other side of the gauntlet? I’m still in it! Look at me suffering!”, perhaps you should steer clear.

Psychologists refer to this process of gauntlet-peeking as surrogation. People are hesitant to do it, however, I think because it feels so silly. If you see people queuing up for a gauntlet of pain, it’s natural to assume that the payoff must be worth the price. But that’s reasoning in the wrong direction. We shouldn’t be asking, “How desirable is this job to the people who want it?” That answer is always going to be “very desirable”, because we’ve selected on the outcome. Instead, the thing we need to know is, “How desirable is this job to the people who have it?”

It turns out the scarcity of a resource is much more potent in the wanting than it is in the having. I had a chance to learn this lesson about twenty years ago, when the stakes were far lower, but I declined. Back then, I thought the only barrier between me and permanent happiness was a Nintendo Wii. I stood outside a Target at 5am in the freezing cold for the mere chance of buying one, counting and re-counting the people in front of me, desperately trying to guess whether there would be enough Wiis to go around, my face going numb as I dreamed of the rapturous enjoyment of Wii Bowling.

I didn’t realize that, by the time I got home, the most exciting part of owning a Wii was already over. When I strapped on my Wii-mote, there was not a gaggle of covetous boys salivating outside my window, reminding me that I was having an enviable experience. It turns out that what makes a game fun is its quality, not its rarity.

If I had understood that obvious fact at the time, I probably wouldn’t have wasted so many hours lusting after a game console, caressing pictures of nunchuck attachments in my monthly Nintendo Power, calling Best Buys to pump them for information about when shipments would arrive, or guilting my mom into pre-dawn excursions to far-flung electronics stores.

Post-Accutane, though, I think I got better at spotting situations like these and surrogating myself out of them. When I got to be an upper-level PhD student, I would go to conferences, look for the people who were five years or so ahead of me, and ask myself: do they seem happy? Do I want to be like them? Are they pleased to have exited the gauntlet of pain that separates my life and theirs? The answer was an emphatic no. Landing a professor position had not suddenly put all their neuroses into remission. If anything, their success had justified their suffering, thus inviting even more of it. If it took this much self-abnegation, mortification, and degradation to get an academic job, imagine how much you’ll need for tenure!

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SET ME FREE AND I’LL DREAM MYSELF A CAGE

I think our dysfunctional relationship with suffering is wired deep in our psyches, because it shows up even in the midst of our fantasies.

I’ve gotten back into improv recently, which has reacquainted me with a startling fact. An improv scene could happen anywhere and be about anything—we’re lovers on Mars! We’re teenage monarchs! We’re Oompa-Loompas backstage at the chocolate factory! And yet, when given infinite freedom, what do people do? They shuffle out on stage, sit down at a pretend computer, start to type, and exclaim, “I hate my job!”

It’s remarkable how many scenes are like this, how quickly we default to criticizing and complaining about the very reality that we just made up.2 A blank stage somehow turns us into heat-seeking missiles for the situations we least want to be in, as if there’s some unwritten rule that says that when we play pretend, we must imagine ourselves in hell.3

I’m not usually this kind of psychologist, but I can’t help but see these scenes as a kind of reverse Rorschach test. When allowed to draw whatever kind of blob we want, we draw one that looks like the father who was never proud of us. “Yep, that’s it! That’s exactly the thing I don’t like!”

I don’t think that instinct should be squelched, but it should be questioned. Is that the thing you really want to draw? Because you could also draw, like, a giraffe, if you wanted to. Or a rocket ship. Or anything, really. The things that hurt you are not owed some minimum amount of mental airtime. If you’re going to dredge them up and splatter them across the canvas, it should be for something—to better understand them, to accept them, to laugh at them, to untangle them, not to simply stand back and despise them, as if you’re opening up a gallery of all the art you hate the most.

CHICK LIT

In 1986, a psychologist named Wayne Hershberger played a nasty trick on some baby chickens. He rigged up a box with a cup of food suspended from a railing, and whenever the chicks would try to approach the cup, an apparatus would yank it out of their reach. If the chicks walked in the opposite direction, however, the same apparatus would swing the cup closer to them. So the only way for the chicks to get their dinner was for them to do what must have felt like the dumbest thing in the world: they had to walk away from the food. Alas, most of the chicks never learned how to do this.

I think many humans never learn how to do this, either. They assume that our existence is nothing more than an endless lurching in the direction of the things you want, and never actually getting them. Life is hard and then you die; stick a needle in your eye!

There are people with the opposite problem, of course: people who refuse to take on any amount of discomfort in pursuit of their goals, people who try not to have any goals in the first place, for they only bring affliction. It’s a different strategy, but the same mistake. These two opposing approaches to life—call them grindset and bedrot—both assume that the ratio between pain and gain is fixed. The grindset gang simply accepts every deal they’re offered, while the bedrot brigade turns every deal down.

Neither camp understands that when you get your Suffering Ratio right, it doesn’t feel like suffering at all. The active ingredient in suffering is pointlessness; when it has a purpose, it loses its potency. Taking Accutane made me sad, yes, but for a reason. The nearly-certain promise of a less-pimply face gave meaning to my misery, shrinking it to mere irritation.

Torturing yourself for an unknown increase in the chance that you’ll get some outcome that you’re not even sure you want—yes, that should hurt! That’s the signal you should do something else. When your lunch is snatched out of your grasp for the hundredth time in a row, perhaps you should see what happens when you walk away instead.

I say this with tremendous respect: it’s kinda surprising that the three largest religions in the world are Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.

None of them are very sexy or fun, they come with all kinds of rules, and if they promise you any happiness at all, it’s either after you’re dead, or it’s the lamest kind of happiness possible, the kind where you don’t get anything you want but you supposedly feel fine about it. If you were trying to design a successful religion from scratch, I don’t think any of these would have made it out of focus groups. “Yeah, uh, women 18 to 34 years old just aren’t resonating with the part where the guy gets nailed to a tree.”

Why, in the ultimate meme battle of religions, did these three prevail? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s not because they have the divine on their side. (Otherwise, God appears to be hedging his bets by backing multiple religions at once.)

Obviously there’s a lot of historical contingency here, and if a couple wars had gone the other way, we might have a different set of creeds on the podium. But I think each of these mega-religions has something in common, something we never really talk about, maybe because we don’t notice it, or maybe because it’s impolite to mention—namely, that they all have a brainy version and a folksy version.

If you’re the scholarly type, Christianity offers you Aquinas and Augustine, Islam has al-Ash’ari and al-Ghazali, Hinduism has Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, etc. But if you don’t care for bookish stuff, you can also just say the prayers, sing the songs, bow to the right things at the right time, and it’s all good. The guy with the MDiv degree is just as Christian as the guy who does spirit hands while the praise band plays “Our God Is an Awesome God”.

It’s hard to talk about this without making it sound like the brainy version is the “good” one, because if we’re doing forensic sociology of religion, it’s obvious which side of the spectrum we prefer. But brainy vs. folksy is really about interest rather than ability. The people who favor the brainier side may or may not be better at thinking, but this is the thing they like thinking about.

More importantly, the brainy and the folksy sides need each other. The brainy version appeals to evangelists, explainers, and institution-builders—people who make their religion respectable and robust. The folksy version keeps a religion relevant and accessible to the 99.9% of humanity who can’t do faith full-time—people who might not be able to name all the commandments, but who will still show up on Sunday and put their dollars in the basket. The brainy version fills the pulpits; the folksy version fills the pews.1

Naturally, brainy folks are always a little annoyed at folksy folks, and folksy folks are always a little resentful of brainy folks. It’s tempting to split up: “Imagine if we didn’t have to pander to these know-nothings”/”Imagine if we didn’t have to listen to these nerds!” But a religion can start wobbling out of control if it tilts too far toward either its brainy yin or its folksy yang. Left unchecked, brainy types can become obsessed with esoterica, to the point where they start killing each other over commas. Meanwhile, uncultivated folksiness can degenerate into hogwash and superstition. Pure braininess is one inscrutable sage preaching to no one; pure folksiness is turning the madrasa into a gift shop.

SPLITSVILLE

Here’s why I bring all this up: we’ve got a big brainy/folksy split on our hands right now:

That divide is biggest at the highest level of education:

To think clearly about this situation, we have to continue resisting the temptation to focus on which side is “correct”. And we have to avoid glossing the divide as “Democrats = smart, Republicans = dumb”—both because going to college doesn’t mean you actually know anything, and because intelligence is far more complicated than we like to admit.

I think this divide is better understood as cultural rather than cognitive, but it doesn’t really matter, because separating the brainy and the folksy leaves you with the worst version of each. This is one reason why politics is so outrageous right now—only a sicko would delight in the White House’s Studio Ghibli-fied picture of a weeping woman being deported, and only an insufferable scold would try to outlaw words like “crazy”, “stupid”, and “grandfather” in the name of political correctness. It’s not hard to see why most people don’t feel like they fit in well with either party. But as long as the folksy and brainy contingents stay on opposite sides of the dance floor, we can look forward to a lot more of this.

Bifurcation by education is always bad, but it’s worse for the educated group, because they’ll always be outnumbered. You simply cannot build a political coalition on the expectation that everybody’s going to do the reading. If the brainy group is going to survive, it has to find a way to reunite with the folksy.

So maybe it’s worth taking some cues from the most successful ideologies of all time, the ones that have kept the brainy and folksy strains intertwined for thousands of years. I don’t think politics should be a religion—I’m not even sure if religion should be a religion—but someone’s gonna run the country, and as long as we’ve got a brainy/folksy split, we’ll always have to choose between someone who is up their own ass, and someone who simply is an ass.

As far as I can see, the biggest religions offer two strategies for bridging the divide between the high-falutin and the low-falutin. Let’s call ‘em fractal beliefs and memetic flexibility.

DURKHEIM TO THE BACK, PLEASE

The shape below is a fractal, a triangle made up of triangles. Look at it from far away and you see one big triangle; look at it close up and you see lots of little triangles. It’s triangles all the way down.

The most successful ideologies have similarly fractal beliefs: you get the same ideas no matter how much you zoom in or out. If a Christian leans more into their faith—if they read the Bible cover to cover, go to church twice a week, and start listening to sermons on the way to work—they don’t suddenly transform into, say, a Buddhist. They’re just an extra-enthusiastic Christian with extra-elaborated beliefs. This is a critical feature: if your high-devotion and low-devotion followers believe totally different things, eventually they’re gonna split.

If the brainy tribe is to survive, then, it’s gotta fractal-ize its beliefs. That means generating the simplest versions of your platform that is still true. For example, many brainy folks want to begin arguments about gender by positing something like “gender is a social construct”, and right out the gate they’re expecting everyone to have internalized like three different concepts from sociology 101. Instead, they should start with something everybody can understand and get on board with, like “People’s opportunities in life shouldn’t depend on their private parts”. Making your arguments fractal doesn’t require changing their core commitments; it just means making each step of the argument digestible to someone who has no inclination to chew. If you’re gotta bring up Durkheim, at least put him last.

Brainy folks hate doing this. They’d much prefer to produce ever-more-exquisite versions of their arguments because, to borrow some blockchain terminology, brainy people operate on a proof-of-work system, where your standing is based on the effort you put in. That’s why brainy folks are so attracted to the idea that your first instincts cannot be right, and it’s why their beliefs can be an acquired taste. You’re supposed to struggle a bit to get them—that’s how you prove that you did your homework.

(Only the brainy tribe would, for instance, insist that you need to “educate yourself” in order to participate in polite society, and that no one should be expected to help you with this.)

It would be convenient for this analogy if folksy types operated on a proof-of-stake system (which is the other way blockchains can work), but they don’t, really. They don’t operate on proof of anything—the whole concept of proof is dubious to them. You don’t need to prove the obvious. That might sound dumb, and it often is. But sometimes it’s a useful counterweight: sometimes your first instinct is indeed the right one, and you can think yourself into a stupider position.

Regardless, demanding proof-of-work is always going to tilt the playing field in favor of the other side. A liberal friend of mine was recently lamenting that liberals have all the complicated-but-true positions while conservatives have all the easy-but-wrong positions. She acted like this was the natural end state of things; too bad, so sad, I guess the stupid shall inherit the Earth!

This sounds like a cop-out to me. If you can’t find an accessible way to express your complicated-but-true beliefs, maybe they aren’t actually true, or maybe you’re not trying hard enough. Of course, it takes a lot of thought to make a convoluted idea more intuitive—if only there were some people who liked thinking!

LET THEM DRIVE HUMMERS

Big religions have a healthy dose of memetic flexibility: while their central tenets are firm, the rest of their belief systems can bend to fit lots of different situations.

For example, why are there four gospels? You’d think it would be a liability to have four versions of the same story floating around, especially when they’re not perfectly consistent with each other. There are disagreements about the name of Jesus’ paternal grandfather, the chronology of his birth, his last words, and uh, whether you’re supposed to take a staff with you when you go off to proselytize (Matthew and Luke say yes, but Mark says no way). This kind of thing is very embarrassing when you’re trying to convince people that you have the inerrant word of God. Wouldn’t it make more sense to smush all these accounts together into one coherent whole?

Syriac Christians did exactly that in the second century AD: it was called the Diatessaron. And yet, despite its cool name, it never really caught on and eventually died out. Nobody even tried that hard to suppress it as a heresy. I mean, if no one claims that your book is the work of the devil, do you even exist??

Maybe the harmonized gospel never went viral because four gospels, inconsistencies and all, are better than one. Each gospel has its own target audience: you’ve got Matthew for the Jews, Luke for the ladies and the Romans, John for the incense-and-crystals crowd, and Mark for the uh...all those Mark-heads out there, you know who you are. Having four stories with the same moral but different details and emphases gives you memetic flexibility without compromising the core beliefs.

Brainy folks could learn a lot from this. For instance, there’s a certain kind of galaxy-brained doomer who thinks that the only acceptable way to fight climate change is to tighten our belts. If we can invent our way out of this crisis with, say, hydrogen fuel cells or super-safe nuclear reactors, they think that’s somehow cheating. We’re supposed to scrimp, sweat, and suffer, because the greenhouse effect is not just a fact of chemistry and physics—it’s our moral comeuppance. In the same way that evangelical pastors used to say that every tornado was God’s punishment for homosexuality, these folks believe that rising sea levels are God’s punishment for, I guess, air conditioning.

This kind of small-tent, memetically inflexible thinking is a great way to make your political movement go extinct. But if you’re willing to be a little open-minded about how, exactly, we prevent the Earth from turning into a sun-dried tomato, you might actually succeed. Imagine if we could suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into charcoal for your Fourth of July barbecue. Imagine if electricity was so cheap and clean that you could drive your Hummer from sea to shining sea while causing net zero emissions. Imagine genetically engineered cows that don’t fart. That’s a future far more people can get behind, both literally and figuratively.

PEDANTS ‘N’ PINHEADS

A few months ago, I ran into an old classmate at the grocery store—let’s call him Jay. He was a bit standoffish at first, and I soon found out why: Jay works in progressive politics now, and he was sussing me out to see whether I had become a right-wing shill since graduation, which is what some of our mutual acquaintances have done. Once he was satisfied I wasn’t trying to follow the well-trod liberal-loser-to-Fox-News-provocateur track, he warmed up. “I unfriended all the conservatives I know. I don’t even talk to moderates anymore,” Jay said, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. I didn’t want to get into it with him in the cereal aisle, but I wanted to know: what is his plan for dealing with the ongoing existence of his enemies? If he ignores them, they’ll....what? Give up? Fill their pockets with stones and wade into the ocean?

Apparently, Jay has decided that his side should lose. There are only three ways that an idea can gain a greater share of human minds: conquest, conversion, or conception. I hope we can all agree that killing is off the table, so that leaves changing minds and makin’ babies. It seems to me that progressives have largely given up on both.2

Obviously, I don’t think people should have kids just to thicken the ranks of their political party, nor do I want proselytizing progressives on every street corner. But if you’re serious about your political beliefs, you should have some plausible theory of how they’re going succeed in the future. That means making it easy to believe the things you think are true, and it means trying to appeal to people who don’t already agree with you.

Most of all, it means participating in the world in a way that makes people want to join you. That’s why there are 5.5 billion Christians, Muslims, and Hindus—those religions offer people something that earns their continued devotion, whether those people want to think really hard about their faith or not. People aren’t gonna show up to Jay’s church if it’s all pulpit and no pew.

There are always going to be political cleavages, and there should be. The ideal amount of polarization is not zero. (When everybody’s on the same page, we groupthink ourselves into doing stupid things like, you know, invading two countries in two years.) Running a country is the greatest adversarial collaboration known to man, and it only works when both sides bring their best ideas. To do that, we need each party to have a fully integrated brainy and folksy contingent; some people plumbing the depths, other people keeping the boat anchored. Otherwise, we end up with parties that are defined either by their pointy-headed pedants or their pinheaded reactionaries.

“I must study Politicks and War,” John Adams famously wrote, “that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy”:

My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

I appreciate Adams’ aspirations, but I disagree with his order of operations. Politics is not a science set apart from all others. Good governance requires good thinking, and that means drawing on every ounce of our knowledge, no matter how far-flung. Right now, I think we could stand to learn a thing or two from the ancient memelords who created our modern religions. Otherwise, yes, a world where we’re more interested in painting and poetry than we are politics—that sounds great. I think we know the way there. We just have to grab our walking sticks.

This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a collection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.

(1) YOU SAY POTATO, I SAY LEPROSY

As late as 1813, some parts of the European medical establishment believed that potatoes cause leprosy. (Don’t even get ‘em started on scrofula!) Potato historian Salaman Redcliffe suggests that people were skeptical because potatoes look kinda weird, they grow in the ground, and you plant them as tubers rather than seeds, which are all extremely suspicious things for a food to do.

(2) THE MARKET FOR LULULEMONS

You may remember the Spurious Correlations website, which dredges up random datasets and finds correlations between them—for instance, Lululemon’s stock price and the popularity of the first name Stevie. Now thanks to AI, each one of those correlations can be instantly turned into a full academic paper, like: LULU-LEMONADE: A STATISTICAL STUDY OF THE STEVIE-NIZED MARKET.

Sadly, this technology makes many academic departments completely redundant.

(3) MURDER, SHE DIDN’T WRITE

Via : there’s a good chance that 2025 will have the fewest murders ever recorded in the US. (We only have reliable data going back to 1960).

(4) CATHETER? I HARDLY KNOW ‘ER

I just added a new entry to my list of all-time great blog posts: Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn’t you?, by of . An excerpt:

Yes, biology is very interesting, yes, biology is very hard to do well. Yet, it remains the only field that could do something of the utmost importance: prevent a urinary catheter from being shunted inside you in the upcoming future.

(5) According to the Doomsday Scoreboard, there have been over 200 failed apocalypse predictions and, uh, zero successful ones.

(6) BREAKIN’ BACON

Before World War I, the US government had basically no cryptographic capacity. So when the war broke out and suddenly they needed people to do code-breaking, where did they turn? To the Riverbank Institute, which had been set up by “Colonel” George Fabyan to decode the most important cipher of all: the one that supposedly proved the works of Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon. Elizebeth and William Friedman, the couple who broke that cipher while working at Riverside, went on to become the first cryptologists at the precursor to the National Security Agency.12

(7) WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

One of the wildest blog posts I’ve read this year is about an American guy going to fight in the Ukraine war. Honestly, it sounds like a huge bummer: you squat in a trench and pretend to shoot at Russians and hope to not be killed by a drone.

(8) O-PEN YOUR MIND

When I saw ’s post called How Pen Caps Work, I was like, “what do you mean? Pen caps work by...being....caps for pens”. Apparently not: for fountain pens, anyway, pen caps work through vacuum power. Putting the cap on and taking it off causes a tiny amount of suction that draws the ink into the nib.

(9) NEMATODE YOU SO

, who was one of the winners of my 2025 blog post competition, has a great series on why neuroscientists still can’t simulate a worm:

I told [my mom] that this is what my job feels like—each animal has a different kind of radio in its head and/or body, and neuroscientists are trying to figure out things about them. Some neuroscientists want to fix radios; some want to build better radios. Others, like me, are just trying to understand them.

To which Li’s mom responded:

Other nematode fun facts from Li’s piece: they use static electricity to teleport themselves onto bumblebees as a way of getting around:

And...nematodes survived the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion??

(10) VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO(LOGY) STAR

More great work from a 2025 Blog Extravaganza honoree: has a terrific article in Works in Progress: Why Isn’t AI Replacing Radiologists? Radiology was supposed to be the first medical speciality to be rendered obsolete by AI. Instead, radiology jobs are more numerous and salaries are higher than ever.

(11) SAME AS IT EVER WAS

The Polarization Dashboard is a useful sanity check against current events. Whenever something big happens in politics, people are like “WOW OUR VERY SOULS HAVE PERMANENTLY CHANGED” when in fact people almost always have the same opinions that they did yesterday. Here’s the change in support for murdering members of the opposite political party over time. Currently, <2% of Democrats and Republicans support it. (h/t )

See also: You’re Probably Wrong About How Things Have Changed.

(12) THINGS COULD STILL BE BETTER

Some beginner researchers successfully replicated my Things Could Be Better paper without any expert help. I’m really proud of this! , who ran the workshop, writes:

I did not help replicate this study because the group replicating Measures of Anchoring in Estimation Tasks [the other study being replicated] needed help understanding the language the paper was written in. In contrast the group replicating Things Could Be Better started their own replication within 15 minutes of being handed the paper and did not have any followup questions for me before they began the replication.

(13) FAKES AND PAINS

Two years ago a Harvard Business School professor named Francesca Gino was fired for faking her data. (I wrote about the debacle here.) She sued the bloggers who outed her, but that lawsuit was thrown out. She also sued Harvard, claiming discrimination. Now Harvard is suing Gino back, alleging that when Gino submitted data to prove prove that her original data wasn’t fake...the new data was fake, too.

(14) will show you colors you’ve never seen before and he promises to do it WITHOUT shooting lasers into your eyes

(15) HONEY I SHRUNK THE SCIENCE FUNDING BUDGET

and his friends ask: What if the NIH had been 40% smaller?. I appreciate how circumspect the authors are, but the short answer seems to be, “We would be significantly worse off, because many important medicines rely on research that would not have happened under a smaller budget”. This is further evidence of just how important it is to invest in science: even when we do it in a totally boneheaded way, it somehow still pays off.

(16) CULT OF PERSONALITY

Recently, the Financial Times set the internet alight with these graphs:

re-analyzed the data and claims the changes in conscientiousness are minimal, if they exist at all. I’m inclined to trust Ferguson’s account on this one: it’s super weird to see such huge changes in such small amounts of time on basically any psychological variables.

(17) PERSONA NON GRATA

Speaking of personality, ClearerThinking now has one mega personality test that will give you all your results from a bunch of different tests at once. I previously cited their work showing that supposedly scientific personality tests do not obviously outperform the bullshit ones, which continues to boggle people’s minds whenever I bring it up.

(18) DISSONANCE ABOUT DISSONANCE

One of the most famous psychology experiments of all time is Festinger and Carlsmith (1959), the classic demonstration of cognitive dissonance. The psychologist Matti Heino points out, though, that the main results literally don’t add up. In the table below, the circled means are impossible given the reported sample size—there’s no way to get an average of 3.08, for instance, if you have 20 people giving ratings on a 0-10 scale.

I used to be one of those people who was like “well cognitive dissonance has been replicated in hundreds of studies” but it’s not like I ever actually read those studies. It just kinda seems like, c’mon! It’s cognitive dissonance! Everybody knows cognitive dissonance! Anyway, when a bunch of labs tried to replicate another classic demonstration of cognitive dissonance, they found no effect.3 And a new paper claims that When Prophecy Fails, a landmark book that documented the effects of cognitive dissonance in a doomsday cult, may have been greatly embellished or deliberately orchestrated by the authors.4 None of this means that cognitive dissonance doesn’t or can’t exist, but it does make me feel a whole lot of, uh, dissonance.

(19) : air travel has gotten safer, cheaper, and less reliable

(20) THE FAULT IN OUR MICHELIN STARS

According to this study, losing a Michelin star improves TripAdvisor ratings. This is probably because getting a star invites harsher judgment (“It’s good, but...is it Michelin good?”). The perfect restaurant is one that raises your expectations high enough to get you to come in, but leaves your expectations low enough that you can still be wowed.

This is a hard target to hit: I’ve only ever seen two restaurants that have a 4.9 on Google after receiving thousands of ratings. Both of them are Thai restaurants that are nice but not fancy and cool but not trendy—you go expecting good Thai food and you get fantastic Thai food, and everybody goes, “wow, this place should have a Michelin star!”

(21) HIGH POTENTIAL

at debuts a new civic vision called “Potentialism”: everybody’s got something special about them, and they have the right and responsibility to cultivate it and use it for the good of all. In a country where most people don’t like either party very much (which we know about thanks to Yudkin’s research), we should be doing a lot more ideological experimentation like this.

(22) During the Cold War, both the US and the USSR made plans to nuke the moon??5 (via )

(23) PHD-PRESSION

A new paper tracked all PhD students in Sweden and found that they’re more likely to take psychiatric medication compared to a matched group who stopped their education at the master’s level. This isn’t randomized and we should assume these two groups differ in lots of ways. But the fact that the differences grow over time and then disappear at year seven, when most people who started their PhDs have now finished them, does suggest that getting your doctorate is distressing.

(24) DIRTY JOBS

Goodhart’s Law in action: The Army Corps of Engineers hired contractors to clear debris after the 2017 wildfires in California, but unfortunately they paid by the ton, incentivizing the contractors to dig up a bunch of wet mud and use it to weigh down their loads. Filling in the holes left by the contractors is “estimated to cost another $3.5 million”.

(25) of is offering a $10k prize for the best essay, as judged by humans and his writing AI.

(26) GETTING T-REX’D

I’ve seen some wild visual illusions in my time, but this one had me screaming “no...no...no no no NO NO NO NOOO”

NEWS FOR LIZARDS

Items of note for people who do science independently and people who like that sort of thing. Original post here.

• The Existential Hope Foundation is offering a $10k prize for the “most inspiring, uplifting, and forward-looking memes”.

• has been building UV sterilization pumps and growing yeast in a DIY laboratory. See also: Why Independent Science Now?

• Alex Chernavsky started taking metformin and found that it didn’t do much for his blood sugar but it did, surprisingly, improve his reaction times:

  

UPDATES FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ

I got a lot of thoughtful responses to my recent post on the decline of deviance, including this one from the classical musician . Many people think the internet is to blame, but we forget how recently the internet became the internet. As late as 2007, only half of households had broadband at home. Instagram only launched in 2010. The early, slow, text-based internet lived in a room in your house and you had to choose between using it and allowing your grandma to call you; it was nothing like the one that lives in your pocket. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012, when a majority of people got a smartphone. That’s why I think the internet as we know it today may act as an accelerant, but I don’t think it caused the decline of deviance in the first place.

In other news:

• I talked to about why Americans are so afraid of talking to each other.

• answered all my questions about music, including “What are the weirdest lyrics in a #1 hit single?”

• I was on Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Finally, a post from two years ago. A friend of mine recently told me, “Sometimes I want to send this post to someone, but then I remember what you titled it.”

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before

b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and

c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

1. THE DISAPPEARING MISCREANTS

Let’s start where the data is clear, comprehensive, and overlooked: compared to their parents and grandparents, teens today are a bunch of goody-two-shoes. For instance, high school students are less than half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s:

They’re also less likely to smoke, have sex, or get in a fight, less likely to abuse painkillers, and less likely to do meth, ecstasy, hallucinogens, inhalants, and heroin. (Don’t kids vape now instead of smoking? No: vaping also declined from 2015 to 2023.) Weed peaked in the late 90s, when almost 50% of high schoolers reported that they had toked up at least once. Now that number is down to 30%. Kids these days are even more likely to use their seatbelts.

Surprisingly, they’re also less likely to bring a gun to school:

All of those findings rely on surveys, so maybe more and more kids are lying to us every year? Well, it’s pretty hard to lie about having a baby, and teenage pregnancy has also plummeted since the early 1990s:

2. THE GROWN-UPS HAVE FALLEN IN LINE

Adults are also acting out less than they used to. For instance, crime rates have fallen by half in the past thirty years:

Here’s some similar data from Northern Ireland on “anti-social behavior incidents”, because they happened to track those:

Serial killing, too, is on the decline:

Another disappearing form of deviance: people don’t seem to be joining cults anymore. Philip Jenkins, a historian of religion and author of a book on cults, reports that “compared to the 1970s, the cult issue has vanished almost entirely”.1 (Given that an increase in cults would be better for Jenkins’ book sales, I’m inclined to trust him on this one.) There is no comprehensive dataset on cult formation, but analyzed cults that have been covered on a popular and long-running podcast and found that most of them started in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a steep dropoff after 20002:

Crimes and cults are definitely deviant, and they appear to be on the decline. That’s good. But here’s where things get surprising: neutral and positive forms of deviance also seem to be getting rarer. For example—

3. PEOPLE ARE STAYING PUT

Moving away from home isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it is kinda weird. Ditching your hometown usually means leaving behind your family and friends, the institutions you understand, the culture you know, and perhaps even the language you speak. You have to be a bit of a misfit to do such a thing in the first place, and becoming a stranger makes you even stranger.

I always figured that every generation of Americans is more likely to move than the last. People used to be born and die in the same zip code; now they ping-pong across the country, even the whole world.

I was totally wrong about this. Americans have been getting less and less likely to move since the mid-1980s:

This effect is mainly driven by young people:

These days, “the typical adult lives only 18 miles from his or her mother“.

4. CULTURE IS STAGNATING

Creativity is just deviance put to good use. It, too, seems to be decreasing.

A few years ago, I analyzed a bunch of data and found that all popular forms of art had become “oligopolies”: fewer and fewer of the artists and franchises own more and more of the market. Before 2000, for instance, only about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, etc. Now it’s 75%.

The story is the same in TV, music, video games, and books—all of them have been oligpol-ized. As points out, we’re still reading comic books about superheroes that were invented in the 1960s, buying tickets to Broadway shows that premiered decades ago, and listening to the same music that our parents and grandparents listened to.

You see less variance even when you look only at the new stuff. According to analyses by The Pudding, popular music today is now more homogenous and has more repetitive lyrics than ever.

Also, the cover of every novel now looks like this:

But wait, shouldn’t we be drowning in new, groundbreaking art? Every day, people post ~100,000 songs to Spotify and upload 3.7 million videos to YouTube.3 Even accounting for Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”), that should still be more good stuff than anyone could appreciate in a lifetime. And yet professional art critics are complaining that culture has come to a standstill. According to The New York Times Magazine,

We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.

5. THE INTERNET AIN’T INTERESTING ANYMORE

Remember when the internet looked like this?

That era is long gone. Take a stroll through the Web Design Museum and you’ll immediately notice two things:

1. Every site has converged on the same look: sleek, minimalist design elements with lots of pictures

2. Website aesthetics changed a lot from the 90s to the 2000s and the 2010s, but haven’t changed much from the 2010s to now

A few examples:

This same kind of homogenization has happened on the parts of the internet that users create themselves. Every MySpace page was a disastrous hodgepodge; every Facebook profile is identical except for the pictures. On TikTok and Instagram, every influencer sounds the same4. On YouTube, every video thumbnail looks like it came out of one single content factory:

No doubt, the internet is still basically a creepy tube that extrudes a new weird thing every day: Trollface, the Momo Challenge, skibidi toilet. But notice that the raw materials for many of these memes is often decades old: superheroes (1930s-1970s), Star Wars (1977), Mario (1981), Pokémon (1996), Spongebob Squarepants (1999), Pepe the Frog (2005), Angry Birds (2009), Minions (2010), Minecraft (2011). Remember ten years ago, when people found a German movie that has a long sequence of Hitler shouting about something, and they started changing the subtitles to make Hitler complain about different things? Well, they’re still doing that.

6. THERE’S LESS TEXTURE IN ARCHITECTURE

The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented5, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:

Every new apartment building looks like this:

The journalist Kyle Chayka has documented how every AirBnB now looks the same. And even super-wealthy mega-corporations work out of offices that look like this:

People usually assume that we don’t make interesting, ornate buildings anymore because it got too expensive to pay a bunch of artisans to carve designs into stone and wood.6 But the researcher Samuel Hughes argues that the supply-side story doesn’t hold up: many of the architectural flourishes that look like they have to be done by hand can, in fact, be done cheaply by machine, often with technology that we’ve had for a while. We’re still capable of making interesting buildings—we just choose not to.

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7. BRANDS? MORE LIKE...BLANDS. HEH YEAH, GOT ‘EM

Brands seem to be converging on the same kind of logo: no images, only words written in a sans serif font that kinda looks like Futura.7

An analysis of branded twitter accounts found that they increasingly sound alike:

Most cars are now black, silver, gray, or white8:

When a British consortium of science museums analyzed the color of their artifacts over time, they found a similar, steady uptick in black, gray, and white:

8. SCIENCE IS STUCK

Science requires deviant thinking. So it’s no wonder that, as we see a decline in deviance everywhere else, we’re also seeing a decline in the rate of scientific progress. New ideas are less and less likely to displace old ideas, experts rate newer discoveries as less impressive than older discoveries, and we’re making fewer major innovations per person than we did 50 years ago.

You can spot this scientific bland-ification right away when you read older scientific writing. As (same guy who did the cult analysis) points out, scientific papers used to have style. Now they all sound the same, and they’re all boring. Essentially 100% of articles in medical journals, for instance, now use the same format (introduction, methods, results, and discussion):

This isn’t just an aesthetic shift. Standardizing your writing also standardizes your thinking—I know from firsthand experience that it’s hard to say anything interesting in a scientific paper.

Whenever I read biographies of famous scientists, I notice that a) they’re all pretty weird, and b) I don’t know anyone like them today, at least not in academia. I’ve met some odd people at universities, to be sure, but most of them end up leaving, a phenomenon the biologist calls “the flight of the Weird Nerd from academia”. The people who remain may be super smart, but they’re unlikely to rock the boat.

9. THESE COMPLAINTS ARE NEW

Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: “Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?” If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture.

I’ve spent a long time studying people’s complaints from the past, and while I’ve seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven’t seen many people complaining that it’s become stagnant.9 In fact, you can find lots of people in the past worrying that there’s too much new stuff. As relates, one hundred years ago, people were having nervous breakdowns about the pace of technological change. They were rioting at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and decrying the new approaches of artists like Kandinsky and Picasso. In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote that new forms of art “succeed one another so rapidly as to seem to give their audiences no breathing space to prepare”. Is there anyone who feels that way now?

Likewise, previous generations were very upset about all the moral boundaries that people were breaking, i.e.:

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking

Was looked on as something shocking

But now, God knows

Anything goes

-Cole Porter, 1934

Back then, as far as I can tell, nobody was encouraging young Americans to party more. Now they do. So as far as I can tell, the decline of deviance is not just a perennial complaint. People worrying about their culture being dominated by old stuff—that’s new.

COUNTERPOINT: AM I WRONG?

That’s the evidence for a decline in deviance. Let’s see the best evidence against.

As I’ve been collecting data for this post over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been trying to counteract my confirmation bias by keeping an eye out for opposing trends. I haven’t found many—so maybe that’s my bias at work—but here they are.

First, unlike other forms of violence, mass shootings have become more common since the 90s (although notice the Y-axis, we’re talking about an extremely small subset of all crime):

Baby names have gotten a lot more unique:

And when you look at timelines of fashion, you certainly see a lot more change from the 1960s to the 2010s than you do from the 1860s to 1910s:

That at least hints the decline of deviance isn’t a monotonic, centuries-long trend. And indeed, lots of the data we have suggest that things started getting more homogenous somewhere between the 1980s and 2000s.

There are a few people who disagree at least with parts of the cultural stagnation hypothesis. Literature Substacker reports that “literature is booming”, and music Substacker is skeptical about stagnation in his industry. The internet ethnographer Katherine Dee argues10 that the most interesting art is happening in domains we don’t yet consider “art”, like social media personalities, TikTok sketch comedy, and Pinterest mood boards. I’m sure there’s some truth to all of this, but I’m also pretty sure it’s not enough to cancel out the massive trends we see everywhere else.

Maybe I’m missing all the new and exciting things because I’m just not cool and plugged in enough? After all, I’ll be the first to tell you there’s a lot of writing on Substack (and the blogosphere more generally) that’s very good and very idiosyncratic—just look at the winners of my blog competitions this year and last year. But I only know about that stuff because I read tons of blogs. If I was as deep into YouTube or podcasts, maybe I’d see the same thing there too, and maybe I’d change my tune.

Anyway, I know that it’s easy to perceive a trend when there isn’t any (see: The Illusion of Moral Decline, You’re Probably Wrong About How Things Have Changed). There’s no way of randomly sampling all of society and objectively measuring its deviance over time. The data we don’t have might contradict the data we do have. But it would have to be a lot of data, and it would all have to point in the opposite direction.

It really does seem like we’re experiencing a decline of deviance, so what’s driving it? Any major social trend is going to have lots of causes, but I think one in particular deserves most of the credit and the blame:

WE CARE MORE ABOUT BEING ALIVE

Life is worth more now. Not morally, but literally. This fact alone can, I think, go a long way toward explaining why our weirdness is waning.

When federal agencies do cost-benefit analyses, they have to figure out how much a human life is worth. (Otherwise, how do you know if it’s worth building, say, a new interstate that will help millions get to work on time but might cause some excess deaths due to air pollution?) They do this by asking people how much they would be willing to pay to reduce their risk of dying, which they then use to calculate the “value of a statistical life”. According to an analysis by the Substacker , those statistical lives have gotten a lot more valuable over time:

There are, I suspect, two reasons we hold onto life more dearly now. First: we’re richer. Generations of economic development have put more cash in people’s pockets, and that makes them more willing to pay to de-risk their lives—both because they can afford it, and because the life they’re insuring is going to be more pleasant. But as Linch points out, the value of a statistical life has increased faster than GDP, so that can’t be the whole story.

Second: life is a lot less dangerous than it used to be. If you have a nontrivial risk of dying from polio, smallpox, snake bites, tainted water, raids from marauding bandits, literally slipping on a banana peel, and a million other things, would you really bother to wear your seatbelt? Once all those other dangers go away, though, doing 80mph in your Kia Sorento might suddenly become the riskiest part of your day, and you might consider buckling up for the occasion.

Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.

(“What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Make sure I stand up from my desk chair every 20-30 minutes!)

I think about it this way: both of my grandfathers died in their 60s, which was basically on track with their life expectancy the year they were born. I’m sure they hoped to live much longer than that, but they knew they might not make it to their first Social Security check. Imagine how you differently you might live if you thought you were going to die at 65 rather than 95. And those 65 years weren’t easy, especially at the beginning: they were born during the Depression, and one of them grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing.

Plus, both of my grandpas were drafted to fight in the Korean War, which couldn’t have surprised them much—the same thing had happened to their parents’ generation in the 1940s and their grandparents’ generation in the 1910s. When you can reasonably expect your government to ship you off to the other side of the world to shoot people and be shot at in return, you just can’t be so precious about your life.11

My life is nothing like theirs was. Nobody has ever asked me to shoot anybody. I’ve got a big-screen TV. I could get sushi delivered to my house in 30 minutes. The Social Security Administration thinks I might make it to 80. Why would I risk all this? The things my grandparents did casually—smoking, hitching a ride in the back of a pickup truck, postponing medical treatment until absolutely necessary—all of those feel unthinkable to me now.12 I have a miniature heart attack just looking at the kinds of playgrounds they had back then:

I know life doesn’t feel particularly easy, safe, or comfortable. What about climate change, nuclear war, authoritarianism, income inequality, etc.? Dangers and disadvantages still abound, no doubt. But look, 100 years ago, you could die from a splinter. We just don’t live in that world anymore, and some part of us picks that up and behaves accordingly.

In fact, adopting a slow life strategy doesn’t have to be a conscious act, and probably isn’t. Like most mental operations, it works better if you can’t consciously muck it up. It operates in the background, nudging each decision toward the safer option. Those choices compound over time, constraining the trajectory of your life like bumpers on a bowling lane. Eventually this cycle becomes self-reinforcing, because divergent thinking comes from divergent living, and vice versa.13

This is, I think, how we end up in our very normie world. You start out following the rules, then you never stop, then you forget that it’s possible to break the rules in the first place. Most rule-breaking is bad, but some of it is necessary. We seem to have lost both kinds at the same time.14

THE STATUE OF LIMITATIONS

The sculptor Arturo di Modica ran away from his home in Sicily to go study art in Florence. He later immigrated to the US, working as a mechanic and a hospital technician to support himself while he did his art. Eventually he saved up enough to buy a dilapidated building in lower Manhattan, which he tore it down so he could illegally build his own studio—including two sub-basements—by hand, becoming an underground artist in the literal sense. He refused to work with an art dealer until 2012, when he was in his 70s. His most famous work, the Charging Bull statue that now lives on Wall Street, was deposited there without permission or payment; it was originally impounded before public outcry caused the city to put it back. Di Modica didn’t mean it as an avatar of capitalism—the stock market had tanked in 1987, and he intended the bull to symbolize resilience and self-reliance:

My point was to show people that if you want to do something in a moment things are very bad, you can do it. You can do it by yourself. My point was that you must be strong.

Meanwhile, “Fearless Girl”, the statue of a girl standing defiantly with her hands on her hips that was installed in front of the bull in 2017, was commissioned by an investment company to promote a new index fund.

Who would live di Modica’s life now? Every step was inadvisable: don’t run away from home, don’t study art, definitely don’t study sculpture, don’t dig your own basement, don’t dump your art on the street! Even if someone was crazy enough to pull a di Modica today, who could? The art school would force you to return home to your parents, the real estate would be unaffordable, the city would shut you down.

The decline of deviance is mainly a good thing. Our lives have gotten longer, safer, healthier, and richer. But the rise of mass prosperity and disappearance of everyday dangers has also made trivial risks seem terrifying. So as we tame every frontier of human life, we have to find a way to keep the good kinds of weirdness alive. We need new institutions, new eddies and corners and tucked-away spaces where strange things can grow.

All of this is within our power, but we must decide to do it. For the first time in history, weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever. If we want a more interesting future, if we want art that excites us and science that enlightens us, then we’ll have to tolerate a few illegal holes in the basement, and somebody will have to be brave enough to climb down into them.

13

Perhaps that’s also why we’ve become so concerned about the safety of our children, when previous generations were much more laissez-faire. This map traces how the changes in a single family, but the pattern seems broadly true:

14

There’s a paradox here: shouldn’t safer, wealthier lives make us more courageous? Like, can’t you afford to take more risks when you have more money in the bank?

Yes, but you won’t want to. I saw this happen in real time when I was a resident advisor: getting an elite degree ought to increase a student’s options, but instead it makes them too afraid to choose all but a few of those options. Fifty percent of Harvard graduates go to work in finance, tech, and consulting. Most of them choose those careers not because they love making PowerPoints or squeezing an extra three cents of profit out of every Uber ride, but because those jobs are safe, lucrative, and prestigious—working at McKinsey means you won’t have to be embarrassed when you return for your five-year reunion. All of these kids dreamed of what they would gain by going to an Ivy League school; none of them realized it would give them something to lose.

In fact, the richest students are the most likely to pick the safest careers:

Also c’mon this chart is literally made by someone named Kingdollar.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were two of the greatest psychologists of all time. Maybe the greatest. The fields we now call “behavioral economics” and “judgement and decision-making” are basically just people doing knockoff Kahneman and Tversky studies from the 70s and 80s.

(You know how The Monkees were created by studio executives to be professional Beatles impersonators, and then they actually put out a few good albums, but they never reached the depth or the importance of the band they were—pun intended—aping? Think of Kahneman and Tversky as the Beatles and the past 50 years of judgement and decision-making research as The Monkees.1)

Amos ‘n’ Danny were masters of the bamboozle: trick questions where the intuitive answer is also the wrong answer. Quick: are there more words that start with R, or words that have R in the third position? Most people think it’s the former because it’s easier to come up with r-words (rain, ring, rodent) than it is to come up with _ _ -r words (uh...farm...fart...?). But there are, in fact, more words where r comes third. That single silly example actually gives us an insight into how the mind calculates frequencies—apparently, not by conducting a census of your memories, but by judging how easy or hard it feels when you try to think of examples.

These little cognitive gotchas show us how the mind works by showing us how it breaks. It’s like a visual illusion, but for your whole brain. This is the understated genius of Kahneman and Tversky—it’s not like other research, where some egghead writes a paper about some molecule and then ten years later you can buy a pill with the molecule in it and it cures your disease. No, for K&T, the paper is also the pill.

But the duo was so successful that they have, in part, undone their own legacy. The tricks were so good that everybody learned how they worked, and now it’s hard to be bamboozled anymore. We’re no longer surprised when the rabbit comes out of the hat. And that’s a shame, because the best part of their work was that half-second of disbelief where you go “no no that can’t be right!” and then you realize it is right. That kind of feeling loosens your assumptions and dissolves your certainty, and that’s exactly what most of us need: an antidote to our omnipresent overconfidence.

I’m here to bring the magic back. I’m no Kahneman nor Tversky, but I can at least do two things: resurface some of their long-forgotten deep cuts, and document a few tricks that bamboozled the Bamboozlers-in-Chief themselves—including one that, I think, I have just discovered and am documenting for the first time.

Let’s see if we can find another rabbit in this hat.

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“Do what you love” is the most dangerous sentence in the English language.

We send kids into the world with that mantra in their heads, and then they return shellshocked and ashamed, because they couldn’t do it. Many of them end up believing that they are the one person on Earth who just doesn’t fit in, the sad sap whose preferences and talents—whatever they may be! If they even exist!—simply do not match the opportunities available, like a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box.

Some of them feel that way forever, always a little unsettled and unsatisfied. A few of them turn into cynics, convinced that the idea of a “dream job” is, like the all-seeing Santa Claus, a fiction foisted upon children to keep them docile.

The problem is that nobody ever tells you what it feels like to love something. Everybody thinks love feels like perpetual bliss. It doesn’t. It mainly feels annoying.

THAT WHISKEY FEELING

I’m at the point in my life where I know plenty of people who have “made” it, people who have become the things they always hoped they would be: doctors, lawyers, academics, actors, entrepreneurs, etc., and the one emotion that best describes their daily experience is annoyed.

They’re annoyed! They got exactly what they wanted and, most of the time, it bugs them. When I call them up, they do not wax poetic about how achieving their childhood dreams has brought them deep and everlasting happiness. They tell me about their dumbass bosses, their crazy patients, the cases that are driving them nuts, the prototypes that they can’t get working.

Some of these people are honked off because they’ve chosen the wrong career. But most of them will tell you that they love their jobs, and they mean it. Which is weird because, if you watch them closely, they do not spend their workdays laughing and smiling and saying things like “yippee!” or “wahoo!”. They are, most of the time, mad about something. Same goes for me—I’m annoyed all day. And yet none of us can stop. When we say, “I love my job,” we really mean, “My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way.”

What’s going on here?

I think annoyance, like cholesterol, has a good kind and a bad kind. The bad kind makes you want to flee: backed-up traffic, crying babies on planes, colleagues who say they can use Excel when really they mean they’ve heard of Excel. But the good kind of annoyance draws you in rather than driving you away. It’s that feeling you get when there’s something you can and must make right, the way some people feel when they see a picture frame that’s just a bit askew, except a lot more and all the time.

Whenever I fix the thing that’s annoying me, it does feel “fun”, I guess, but it’s not fun in the way that, say, going down a waterslide is fun. It’s a textured pleasure, the kind of enjoyment I assume that whiskey enthusiasts get from drinking extremely peaty, smoky scotch—on the one hand, it burns, but on the other hand, I kinda like how it burns.

Good annoyance is, I think, the only thing that keeps people coming back for more, indefinitely. There is nothing that a human with a normally-functioning brain can do for eight hours a day, every day, for their whole career, that feels “fun” the whole time, or even a large fraction of the time. We’re just too good at adapting to things. And thank God, because if we never got bored, we never would have survived. Our ancestors would have spent their days staring doe-eyed and slack-jawed at, like, a really pretty leaf or something, and they would have gotten eaten by leopards. Fun fades, but irritation is infinite.

The right job for you, then, is the one that puts you in charge of the things that annoy you. And this is where we steer people wrong. We imply that the right occupation for them is the one that lets them float through their days in a kind of dreamy pleasantness, when in fact they should be alternating between vexation and gratification. Or we let them choose proximity over responsibility, prioritizing what they’re working in rather than what they’re working on.

I had a lot of artsy friends in college who did this after graduation—they wanted to play Hamlet, but they instead ended up drafting marketing emails for a summer repertory production of Guys and Dolls. It’s no surprise that they hated this, because being in the presence of your annoyances without being in control of them is a recipe for insanity. That’s like working at the Museum of Slightly Crooked Pictures, where all the frames are wonky but you’re not allowed to straighten them.

TAPEWORM, YUM

Good annoyance is ultimately the recipe for greatness. It certainly seems that way, at least, because the people the top of their game always seem kinda ticked off. You’d think that folks who are famous for being good at something would experience intense pleasure all the time from doing that thing; otherwise, how can they stand to do it so much? Plus, everybody’s always telling them how wonderful they are, and that must feel great. And yet, when these people are candid about what’s going on in their heads, it turns out to be a little complicated in there. For instance, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa likened being a writer to having a tapeworm inside you:

The literary vocation is not a hobby, a sport, a pleasant leisure-time activity. […] Like [my friend] José Maria’s tapeworm, literature becomes a permanent preoccupation, something that takes up your entire existence, that overflows the hours you devote to writing and seeps into everything else you do, because the literary vocation feeds off the life of a writer just as the tapeworm feeds off the bodies it invades.

Here’s Andre Agassi on tennis:

I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have. [...] I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over.

Then: I’m not ready for it to be over.

Marie Curie on getting an education:

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

Billy Mitchell, one of the best Pac-Man players in the world, on playing Pac-Man:

I enjoy the victory of it, but it’s pure pain [...] I don’t know anything about a zone, or getting into a flow. It’s constant intensity and concentration. Nothing’s flowing. You squeeze a joystick in your hand for hours and it starts to feel like it’s going to shatter your hand.

And Meryl Streep on acting:

Bleehhh...eehhh...uhh...god, I hate this sometimes.

Every beginner needs to have their nose rubbed in this idea. When you’re just starting out, it’s easy to think that expertise will cure your doubts and conquer your frustrations, that you’ll unlock a higher plane of pleasure once you can play in tune, sink a shot, or write a sentence that doesn’t suck.

Maybe I’ve just never gotten that good at anything, but this has never happened to me. I have never conquered my doubts and frustrations; I merely traded them in for newer models. I can do more with less effort, but nothing feels effortless. If anything, I’m more annoyed than when I started. That’s why I’m still here. I wonder: is this how it will always feel? That’s what I’m afraid of, and what I’m hoping for.

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WHACK ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

How can something feel so good and so bad at the same time?

Here’s an explanation. According to the cybernetic theory of psychology, the mind is a stack of control systems all trying to keep things copacetic. In this model, happiness comes not from the absence of error in these systems, but from the correction of error. That is, happiness isn’t a full belly, it’s a belly that’s being filled. So if you wanna feel good, you gotta let things get at least a little out of whack so you can whack them back into place again. The whacking is, in fact, the fun part.

This is why rich folks do extreme sports, why childless retirees spend their days on make-work projects of pretend importance, and why lottery winners very rarely quit their jobs. Everyone has this dream of a frictionless existence; nobody seems to like it much when they get it. Infinity pools and bottomless margaritas are fine for a time, but eventually you start wishing the moles would pop back up again so you could hit ‘em with a mallet.

This out-of-whack/back-in-whack cycle is not a source of motivation. It is motivation. Annoyance is the only truly renewable resource known to man.

When people try and fail to increase their “productivity”, it’s because they miss this point. There is no system that can conjure up annoyance where there isn’t any. You cannot trick yourself into caring about something by putting it on your Google calendar. If you have a productivity problem, you’re either not annoyed enough, you’re annoyed by something you can’t actually control, or you’re annoyed in the bad way, the kind that makes you want to skip town rather than dig in.

It’s easy to get stuck on the wrong problems because we have such strong theories about the things we should care about. But we don’t really get to pick the things that bug us. Why are some people annoyed by crooked picture frames while other people get annoyed by securities fraud, or bland chicken parmesan, or inefficient assembly lines? I dunno man, people are crazy. There’s one guy who is so annoyed at people using the phrase “comprised of” when they actually mean “composed of” that he fixes it on tens of thousands of Wikipedia pages. No amount of to-do lists, bullet journals, pomodoros, kanbans, Moscow methods, Eisenhower decision matrices, or frog-eating can rival the power of one dude who is pissed off in a very specific way.

THE COLD PRICKLIES

Human motivation didn’t evolve so we could show up to work on time. This irritation-reduction system drives everything we do, regardless of whether we get a paycheck for it. That includes even the most selfless acts, the ones that we’re supposed to do despite our motivations.

Recently, some of my friends were swapping stories about surprisingly kind strangers, and I couldn’t help but notice that every Good Samaritan had acted out of annoyance. A construction worker spotted something amiss with my friend’s bike chain while she was waiting at a red light, and he came over and knocked it back into place, telling her, “I just can’t bear to see it like that.” Another friend was moving into an apartment, and their new neighbor spotted them struggling with a couch and came over to help, muttering “I can’t watch you guys do this on your own.” A third returned an envelope of cash they found because they, “Would hate to be the kind of person who kept it for themselves.”

I think this is actually the way most good-hearted people work: they’re motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies. They help because they can’t stand the sight of someone in need. The golden glow of altruism comes later, if at all, when they’re walking home and thinking about what a good person they are.

The causes that we stick with, then, aren’t the ones that do the most good, nor the ones that align with whatever we think are our most fundamental values. No, we stick with the causes that give us the same perverse pleasure that you get from popping a pimple.

We’d do a lot more for each other if we acknowledged this fact. Altruism doesn’t need to feel like pure self-flagellation or pure self-congratulation. A lot of the time, if you’re doing it right, it’ll feel irritating. Not all heroes wear capes—some of them wear an exasperated look of “are you seriously trying to lift that couch by yourselves”.

THE DAY VANESSA GOT DUMPED

What if love itself is just another instance of good annoyance?

I had this friend in high school, let’s call her Vanessa. I ran into her once a couple years after graduation, when she was living with her boyfriend and madly in love with him. I was skeptical of all things love at the time, so I asked her, “How can anyone ever truly love someone else? What about when your boyfriend has diarrhea? Do you still love him then?” Vanessa scoffed. When her boyfriend has diarrhea, she said, it doesn’t really have anything to do with her. Their relationship is about the nice stuff, not the nasty stuff.

A year later, Vanessa came home from work early and found her boyfriend in bed with another woman.1 It turned out, unfortunately, he did a lot of nasty things that didn’t have anything to do with her.

I think Vanessa and I were both wrong. Yes, it is your business when the person you love has diarrhea, but no, you don’t have to be happy about it. You can be in love and still be annoyed. In fact, love may require a certain amount of frustration because, as of puts it, “closeness is fundamentally annoying”:

Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control. You’re trying to fall asleep, and beside you your partner is snoring. You lightly push their jaw to the side so it’ll stop. Two minutes later, the snoring commences again. You lay there in the dark wondering how you got here. Oh, right: three years ago at a party you saw someone and thought they were very beautiful.2

A lot of people who are confused about love are actually waiting for permission to feel annoyed. They think love is supposed to make you crazy in the cartoon sense, where the mere presence of your beau will make your eyes turn into hearts and go AWOOGA. Love does drive you crazy like that, but it also drives you crazy in the sense of “my spouse only likes three songs and insists on playing them over and over again on our roadtrip”. If you’re looking for the person who will never annoy you, you’ll never stop looking. But if you find someone who annoys you juuust right, you’ll never stop loving them, nor will you ever get to hear a song in the car that is not “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac.

BUGGIN’

I always thought that negative emotions were bad. (“Negative” is right there in the name.) Whenever I felt sad or upset or whatever, I’d be like, “oh no!! A bad feeling!! Something’s gone wrong!! I need to speak to a manager!!” Every foul mood felt like an emergency, like the forces of darkness had breached the keep and were killing my dudes and smashing all my nice things.

I know that half the world has beaten me to this realization, but there’s no such thing as an emotion that’s purely bad or purely good. Emotions aren’t solid tones, like a middle C ringing out at exactly 261 hertz—not the interesting ones, anyway. Nobody pops in their AirPods to listen to four straight minutes of G major chords. The music that holds our attention has overtones, dissonances, dynamics, and syncopation; it has bits you like less, bits you like more, and bits you didn’t think you liked but you actually do.

Same goes for any emotion that’s strong enough to hold our attention for a long time. All of my fixations have centered around my irritations. That squeeze and release, the indignation and the elation, the rage and the rapture—it feels good and it feels bad and mainly it feels necessary.

So maybe the question we should be asking young folks is not “what do you love?” but “what bugs the hell out of you?” What can’t you stand, and what can’t you quit? People say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and they’re right, because you’ll get bored and go home. If you find the job, the cause, and the partner that annoy you in exactly the right way, you’ll never know peace again. Nor will you want to. Please let it be over, I’m not ready for it to be over!

Back in May, I announced the Second Annual Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. The prompt was “send me a never-before-published blog post, and if I like it I’ll post about it and send you cash.”

I got 109 submissions from folks all over the world, including consultants, PhD students, entrepreneurs, doctors, grandmas, professors, software engineers, teachers, pseudonymous weirdos, and several people who described themselves as “indescribable”. Here are the winners!

FIRST PLACE: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER AND NO HORSES ON THE MOON by Taylor Troesh

Here’s the most important, most incomprehensible, and most annoying question facing humanity right now: what is intelligence, anyway? Tackling this question is like bellyflopping off the high dive—it hurts to do, and it hurts to watch. But Troesh does it in the most delightful and unexpected way: he gives you a bunch of insightful answers and thwacks you on the head between each one. There is no way to summarize this piece, but here’s a lil snippet that comes after Troesh suggests using crows to emulate transistors:

There is only one way to make salt; salt molecules cannot be “more salty” or “less salty”. But there are infinite ways to make pepper -- a messy blend of biomolecules created by messy genomes created by messy selection pressures.

If intelligence is like salt, then crows are very expensive (and cute) transistors. If intelligence is like pepper, a murder could someday be President of the United States.

This is exactly the kind of thing that blog posts are for.

Troesh’s bio:

Taylor Troesh is a self-proclaimed “connoisseur of crap”. He is currently building Scrapscript among many other projects. To support his work, you can hire him to solve “nasty” problems. You can read more of Taylor's work at taylor.town.

SECOND PLACE: What Ethiopian runners taught me about reading scientific literature, Or, how to go from overeating Italian food to winning marathons, if you are Ethiopian by of

One of the best things a blog post can do is find some obscure source that you would never read and turn it into a short-ish post that you will read. This isn’t just summarizing—it’s pre-chewing the material so it’s easier for you to digest. Call it mama birding.

I’m never going to read a book about a PhD student/marathon runner who goes to train in Ethiopia, but I will read what Chenchen Li says about it. There’s some excellent curating here, but more importantly, there’s great chewing. My favorite line:

if you make life especially difficult once in a while, just for fun, it can make you feel like you’re on the edge of what’s possible—like no one else is “dangerous” enough to do what you do.

Li’s bio:

Chenchen Li is a biophysics PhD and does neuroscience research.

THIRD PLACE: Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? by of

Apparently, in the late aughts, Frito-Lay decided to encourage people to do terrorism in the name of Cheetos. Hundreds of fans uploaded videos of themselves performing “random acts of Cheetos”, and the official campaign website included a Cheetos-themed version of the Anarchist Cookbook. It wasn’t all fun and games, though:

there’s about a 90% chance that someone hired by Cheetos for their online marketing efforts also accidentally(?) uploaded MILF porn to the official Cheetos account instead of their personal account.

Gonzo cultural history is a genre that thrives in blog post form, and Rabbit Cavern is thriving.

Rabbit Cavern’s bio:

Rabbit Cavern is a blog that explores the question, “Can the rabbit hole be too deep?” Each post seeks to gather all the most fascinating information about any given topic, answering questions like “Why is Pepsi obsessed with airplanes?” or “Did Benedict Arnold commit treason because his legs hurt?”

HONORABLE MENTIONS

There were too many good posts to recognize all of them, but here are a few that stood out in particular ways:

MOST PROVOCATIVE: Experiments as Performance Art by of

You’re supposed to get an Institutional Review Board to approve any research project that aims to produce “generalizable knowledge”. Munger contends that randomized-controlled trials do not produce generalizable knowledge. Therefore, you’re free to run an RCT without an IRB. In Munger’s view:

RCTs are best understood as a formal kind of performance art. Each society enjoys performances in the idiom of their respective culture. Martial societies find pleasure in ritual combat; religious societies in pious displays of devotion and or spiritual rapture. [...] Our society is scientific, even scientistic. We appreciate the performance of scientific rituals, big data crunching and demonstrations of control over nature or our fellow citizens.

BEST GRAPHS AND WEIRDEST QUESTIONS: How Much Do You Value a Year of Life? by of

What’s one year of full health worth to you? Turns out that for many people, it’s somewhere between a used car and a new one.

THE POST THAT MOST GOT MY GOAT IN A GOOD WAY: Psychology Experiments are Gardens, Not Digsites by of

What can we actually learn from a psychology experiment? I think basically every problem in psychology traces back to the fact that we never ask that question. Peterson both asks and answers it, and while I disagree with some of what he claims, he makes a good case for it. And most importantly, he solves a big mystery: why does Wikipedia always ask for donations while saying “nobody donates to us!” when all of behavioral science suggests they should say exactly the opposite?

BEST RATIO OF HOW INTERESTING THE POST IS COMPARED TO HOW INHERENTLY INTERESTED I AM IN THE UNDERLYING TOPIC: College Sports is Now Just a Monopoly with First-Degree Price Discrimination and a Labor Market with Lopsided Bargaining Power by of

I am really really not a sports guy. But I have to give it up for Naven’s extremely detailed post about why recent legal and policy changes are on track to destroy everything that people like about college sports.

BEST ATTEMPT TO USE DATA TO STOP YOUR HEAD FROM HURTING: Tolerating Lactose Intolerance – A Self Experimentation by Ann Coyne

A snapshot of Coyne’s attempt to eliminate her migraines by eliminating dairy (darker = worse mood, M = migraine):

BEST POST ABOUT WORKING IN A BAR AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD (AMONG OTHER THINGS): Notes on a Childhood by of Spontaneous Oddities

My aunt had a beer parlor, and we (my cousins and I) helped out sometimes during rush hours. That was where I learned, at 10, that older men had weak bladders and I had to remind them to go; otherwise, they’d pee themselves.

THE ONE THAT HIT ME IN MY SOFT SPOT: Let the Pepsi-Poptart Guy by Cheryl Hooley

I have a soft spot for letters from parents to children:

I will always hold a litany of hopes and dreams for you that I will never share because they are mine for you, not yours. [...] You do not need my approval to own your decisions. But for the love of everything holy, own them! That means sometimes being able and willing to respectfully defend and discuss them. Everyone in every facet of their lives will have to learn how to do this so we might as well get good at it.

YEEHAW

And with that, I hereby call to a close the 2025 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Thanks to everyone who submitted, thanks to all of you for reading, and thanks to the paid subscribers who make both this blog and this jamboree possible. Because of you, the jamboree continues eternally in our hearts.

Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.

We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.

On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.

On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.

Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly...normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?

Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it.

CIRCLE TAKES THE SQUARE

Forty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer argued in The Expanding Circle that humans have, over the course of millennia, decided to care about a broader and broader swath of the living world. Originally, we only gave moral consideration to our immediate family, then we extended it our tribe, then the nation, and now we are kind-of sort-of extending it to the whole globe and to non-human animals as well.1

I think Singer was right, and I’d add three things to his analysis. First, the trend has only continued since the ‘80s—for instance, some people are now worried about whether shrimp are having a good time. Second, while the circle has gotten wider, it has also, paradoxically, gotten closer. It’s one thing to “care” about distant strangers when you can only read about them in a newspaper; now we can all witness the suffering of anyone in the world through a glass portal we carry in our pockets. And third, when you stare into that portal, the portal stares back. Social media has made everyone into z-list public figures, and now we all have an audience watching us to make sure that we’re sufficiently concerned about the right things.

Expanding the circle was, in my opinion, a good move. But it comes with a problem: if we’re supposed to care about everyone and everything...that’s kind of a lot of caring, isn’t it? If I have to feel like a mass shooting in Tallahassee, a factory farm in Texas, and a genocide in Turkmenistan are all, morally speaking, happening in my backyard, my poor little moral circuits, which evolved to care about like 20 people, are gonna blow.

When there’s too much to care about, what’s a good-hearted person to do? I think many of us have unconsciously figured out how to escape this conundrum: we simply shoot ourselves in the foot.

BULLET MEET FOOT

Humans are pretty savvy at social interaction, even though we get so anxious about it. (Maybe we’re good because we’re freaking out all the time.) Evolution and experience have endowed us with a deep bench of interpersonal maneuvers, some of which are so intuitive to us that we don’t even realize we’re deploying them.

For example, sometimes life puts us in lose-lose situations where it’s embarrassing to try and fail, but it’s also embarrassing not to try at all. It sucks to study for a math exam and still flunk it, but it’s foolish not to study in the first place. When you’re stuck in a conundrum like that, how do you get out?

Well, one canny solution is to subtly manipulate the situation so that failure is inevitable. That way, no one can blame you for failing, and no one can blame you for not trying. Psychologists call this self-handicapping, and as far as impression management strategies go, you gotta admit this one is pretty exquisite.

Here’s what self-handicapping looks like in the wild. I had a friend in high school who “forgot” to apply to college our senior year. Literally, May came around and we were like “Nate, did you get in anywhere?” and he was like “Oh shoot that happened already?” Nate was a smart kid but a bad student, so it’s possible he actually did forget, but some of us suspected that the entire application season had conveniently slipped his mind so he wouldn’t have to face the shame of being rejected. We could never prove it, though, and that’s exactly why self-handicapping is such a clever tactic.

Of course, Nate’s self-handicapping came at a cost. No one can ding him for being stupid, but we can all ding him for being irresponsible. The ideal form of self-handicapping, then, is one that obscures the role of the self entirely.2 In fact, it works best when even you don’t realize that you’re doing it. Nate’s months-long brain fart is more believable if he believes it himself. If you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best to do it while sleepwalking, so you can wake up and be like “A bullet!! In my foot!! And it got there through no fault of my own!!”

Which is to say: many of the people who are engaging in self-handicapping would earnestly deny the allegation.

You can see how self-handicapping is a handy response to a world that demands more care from us than we can give. If all the world’s problems are fait accompli, well, that’s sad, but it ain’t on me. I don’t want it to be that way, of course, but it is, which means my only obligation is to bravely bear witness to the end of it all. That’s why it’s actually very important to maintain the idea—even subconsciously—that democracy is unsalvageable, AI is unstoppable, the Middle East is intractable, the climate apocalypse is (literally) baked in, and so on. For the aspiring self-handicapper, the best causes are lost causes.

BORG VIBES

The problem with shooting yourself in the foot is that now you have a bullet in your foot. A self-handicap can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we believe our situation is hopeless, the more hopeless it becomes. We’re never gonna right the things we write off.

Succumbing to despair might offer you a reputational reprieve in the short term, but avoiding the blame doesn’t mean you can avoid the consequences. When rising sea levels, secret police, or AI-powered killer drones come for you, they won’t ask whether you have a doctor’s note excusing you from the greatest struggles of your generation.

In my experience, this is an unpopular argument. To some people, suggesting that our problems are solvable means denying that our problems are serious. (But of course our problems are serious, that’s why we want to solve them.) Or they’re offended by the implication that they have any responsibility to fix the things they didn’t break, as if a sinking ship only takes you down with it if you’re the person who punched a hole in the hull. Or they’re so certain that our fate is sealed that they scoff at anyone who believes otherwise. Most of all, though, I think people want everybody else to admit that life is really hard, and they’re being courageous just for showing up every day. As Kurt Vonnegut said:

What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.3

I don’t think this is an old/young divide anymore: everybody wants credit for surviving, and we’re all too stingy about giving it, and that only makes us want the credit even more. I’m happy to give that credit: being alive in 2025 is hard in a way that gets no sympathy from anyone (“oh I’m sorry are your TikToks not amusing enough??”), and we all deserve gold stars. But wouldn’t we all like to live in a world where we didn’t feel like it was an achievement just to keep going?

Of course, the naysayers could be right! Prophets of doom don’t have a great track record, but then, they only have to hit the mark once. As the futurist Hazel Henderson put it, though: “we do not know enough to be pessimistic”. We won’t know that our problems are solvable until we solve them, we won’t solve them until we try, and we won’t try until we believe. Either way, the problems we’re facing don’t take prisoners, so we might as well go down swinging.

I know this is easy for me to say—I’m far from the first in line to get disappeared or swallowed up by the sea. That’s fine: the people who can do more should do more. But we’re wrong to act as if withdrawing from the world is inherently rejuvenating. When we’re so eager to explain why we can’t help, we forget helping actually feels great.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago. When I was out for a run, I happened upon an older lady who had fallen and hit her head on the sidewalk; she was bleeding and confused and obviously needed medical attention. I called an ambulance and waited with her until the paramedics came, and once we were all sure she was going to be okay, I got to feel proud the rest of the day: I did the right thing! I helped! I’m a good boy!4 I run by that same corner all the time now not hoping to find little old ladies in distress, of course, but ready should my services be required.

So when folks seem hell bent on giving up, I wanna know: why are they holding on so tightly their hopelessness? What does it do for them? If the future is so uncertain, if no one can justifiably say whether or not we’re gonna make it, why not pick the belief that gets you out of bed in the morning, rather than the one that keeps you there? Why do we have to make it seem like being on the right side of history is such a bummer?

Dealing with the state of world by despairing is kind of like dealing with a breakup by drinking—you’re allowed to do it for like, a day, but if it becomes clear you’re planning to do this for the rest of your life, your friends ought to step in and stop you.

Here’s an analogy for the nerds: in Star Trek lore, Starfleet academy cadets have to complete a simulation where they attempt to save a ship called the Kobayashi Maru, which is disabled and stuck in hostile territory. Unbeknownst to the trainees, the simulation is rigged so they can never win; the Klingons always show up and vaporize everyone. This is supposed to teach cadets that some situations are simply hopeless. Captain James T. Kirk, refusing to learn the lesson, famously saves the Maru by hacking the machine before the simulation begins.

Anyway, my point is that it’s possible to pull an anti-Kirk, to hack a winnable scenario and guarantee a loss. The fact that you can save face by doing this doesn’t make it noble or admirable. After all, in the world of Star Trek, “resistance is futile” is something the villains say.

ICE CUBES IN THE OCEAN

There is a grumpy version of this argument, one that scolds every doomer for finding a galaxy-brained way to signal their virtue while sitting on their hands. I don’t feel that way at all. We were right to expand our circle, and I admire every generation that did it, even if they only made it a single centimeter per century.

But a wide circle is also a tall order. Although the circumference of our moral circle is theoretically infinite, the extent of our efforts is not. We can care about all eight billion people riding this rock with us, but we can only care for a tiny fraction of them. Trying to solve every problem at once is like trying to stop global warming by throwing ice cubes in the ocean. So if our collective despondency is a way of dealing with the fact that our moral ambitions have outstripped our abilities, I get it.

The solution is not to shrink the circle, to default on our obligations, or to pretend that we’re helpless. When you’re paralyzed by the number of problems, the only way out is to pick one. What kind of world would you like to live in, how do we get there from here, and what can you do—however small it may be—to move us in that direction? We’re not looking for saints or superheroes, just people who give a hoot. In the billion-person bucket brigade that’s trying to put out the fires, all you need to do is find a way to pass the pail from the person on your left to the person on your right. There are, remember, many underrated ways to change the world.

Personally, I care a lot about science because I think the expansion of knowledge is the only thing that makes us better off in the long run. But whatever, some people want to clean up the park, other people want to help sick kids, and other people want to save the shrimp. Godspeed to all of them. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all comrades in a war that has infinite fronts. Nobody can fight on all of them, and I won’t ask anyone to join mine if they can do more good elsewhere.

But there is no neutral territory here. There may be plenty of front lines, but there are no sidelines. The best way to prevent people from taking themselves out of the fight is to recognize that there is no “out” of the fight. There’s no room for anyone to play the Switzerland strategy—“I’m not involved, I’ll just hold on to your valuables while you guys fight it out!” The sum total of our actions will either make the world better or worse. Which is it gonna be?

SPONGE TIME

In the classic formulation of the hero’s journey, step one is the call to adventure, and step two is the refusal of that call. I think we’re all stuck at step two. Gandalf’s at our door, but we literally just sat down to lunch, and have you seen the forces of Mordor? They’ve got trolls. Obviously it would be great if someone did something about Sauron, but I don’t see why it should be me.

I understand that feeling. A death-defying adventure to save the world? In this economy? No thanks, take it up with all the people who imperiled the world in the first place. I just got here!5

But alas, we cannot pass the buck into the past. As much as we love to argue about which generation had it worse and which generation did it better, we don’t get to Freaky Friday ourselves with our ancestors and face the tribulations that fit our preferred aesthetic.

When I was in high school, I used to volunteer with this group that, basically, held car washes and then donated the money. The organization wasn’t explicitly Christian, but Peggy, the woman who led it, was. She used to tell us: “People see bad things in the world and ask why God doesn’t do something about it. But God did do something. He sent you.”

We can argue about whether this is a theologically sound solution to the problem of evil, and we can ask why a supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful God would entrust anything to me, a guy who can’t even do a single pull-up. But I always appreciated this attitude. Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not your fault. Unfortunately, the world was under no obligation to straighten itself out by the time you arrived. These are the problems we got. Would you like them to be better? Then here, grab a sponge and start washing.

Look, I don’t know if AI is gonna kill us or make us all rich or whatever, but I do know we’ve got the wrong metaphor.

We want to understand these things as people. When you type a question to ChatGPT and it types back the answer in complete sentences, it feels like there must be a little guy in there doing the typing. We get this vivid sense of “it’s alive!!”, and we activate all of the mental faculties we evolved to deal with fellow humans: theory of mind, attribution, impression management, stereotyping, cheater detection, etc.

We can’t help it; humans are hopeless anthropomorphizers. When it comes to perceiving personhood, we’re so trigger-happy that we can see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich:

A human face in a slice of nematode:

And an old man in a bunch of poultry and fish atop a pile of books:

Apparently, this served us well in our evolutionary history—maybe it’s so important not to mistake people for things that we err on the side of mistaking things for people.1 This is probably why we’re so willing to explain strange occurrences by appealing to fantastical creatures with minds and intentions: everybody in town is getting sick because of WITCHES, you can’t see the sun right now because A WOLF ATE IT, the volcano erupted because GOD IS MAD. People who experience sleep paralysis sometimes hallucinate a demon-like creature sitting on their chest, and one explanation is that the subconscious mind is trying to understand why the body can’t move, and instead of coming up with “I’m still in REM sleep so there’s not enough acetylcholine in my brain to activate my primary motor cortex”, it comes up with “BIG DEMON ON TOP OF ME”.

This is why the past three years have been so confusing—the little guy inside the AI keeps dumbfounding us by doing things that a human wouldn’t do. Why does he make up citations when he does my social studies homework? How come he can beat me at Go but he can’t tell me how many “r”s are in the word “strawberry”? Why is he telling me to put glue on my pizza?2

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they aren’t people. I don’t mean that in the deflationary way that the AI naysayers mean it. They think denying humanity to the machines is a well-deserved insult; I think it’s just an accurate description.3 As long we try to apply our person perception to artificial intelligence, we’ll keep being surprised and befuddled.

We are in dire need of a better metaphor. Here’s my suggestion: instead of seeing AI as a sort of silicon homunculus, we should see it as a bag of words.

WHAT’S IN THE BAG

An AI is a bag that contains basically all words ever written, at least the ones that could be scraped off the internet or scanned out of a book. When users send words into the bag, it sends back the most relevant words it has. There are so many words in the bag that the most relevant ones are often correct and helpful, and AI companies secretly add invisible words to your queries to make this even more likely.

This is an oversimplification, of course. But it’s also surprisingly handy. For example, AIs will routinely give you outright lies or hallucinations, and when you’re like “Uhh hey that was a lie”, they will immediately respond “Oh my god I’m SO SORRY!! I promise I’ll never ever do that again!! I’m turning over a new leaf right now, nothing but true statements from here on” and then they will literally lie to you in the next sentence. This would be baffling and exasperating behavior coming from a human, but it’s very normal behavior coming from a bag of words. If you toss a question into the bag and the right answer happens to be in there, that’s probably what you’ll get. If it’s not in there, you’ll get some related-but-inaccurate bolus of sentences. When you accuse it of lying, it’s going to produce lots of words from the “I’ve been accused of lying” part of the bag. Calling this behavior “malicious” or “erratic” is misleading because it’s not behavior at all, just like it’s not “behavior” when a calculator multiplies numbers for you.

“Bag of words” is a also a useful heuristic for predicting where an AI will do well and where it will fail. “Give me a list of the ten worst transportation disasters in North America” is an easy task for a bag of words, because disasters are well-documented. On the other hand, “Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?” is a hard task for a bag of words, because the bag just doesn’t contain that many words on the topic.4 And a question like “What are the most important lessons for life?” won’t give you anything outright false, but it will give you a bunch of fake-deep pablum, because most of the text humans have produced on that topic is, no offense, fake-deep pablum.

When you forget that an AI is just a big bag of words, you can easily slip into acting like it’s an all-seeing glob of pure intelligence. For example, I was hanging with a group recently where one guy made everybody watch a video of some close-up magic, and after the magician made some coins disappear, he exclaimed, “I asked ChatGPT how this trick works, and even it didn’t know!” as if this somehow made the magic extra magical. In this person’s model of the world, we are all like shtetl-dwelling peasants and AI is like our Rabbi Hillel, the only learned man for 100 miles. If Hillel can’t understand it, then it must be truly profound!

If that guy had instead seen ChatGPT as a bag of words, he would have realized that the bag probably doesn’t contain lots of detailed descriptions of contemporary coin tricks. After all, magicians make money from performing and selling their tricks, not writing about them at length on the internet. Plus, magic tricks are hard to describe—“He had three quarters in his hand and then it was two pennies!”—so you’re going to have a hard time prompting the right words out of the bag. The coin trick is not literally magic, and neither is the bag of words.

GALILEO GPT

The “bag of words” metaphor can also help us guess what these things are gonna do next. If you want to know whether AI will get better at something in the future, just ask: “can you fill the bag with it?” For instance, people are kicking around the idea that AI will replace human scientists. Well, if you want your bag of words to do science for you, you need to stuff it with lots of science. Can we do that?

When it comes to specific scientific tasks, yes, we already can. If you fill the bag with data from 170,000 proteins, for example, it’ll do a pretty good job predicting how proteins will fold. Fill the bag with chemical reactions and it can tell you how to synthesize new molecules. Fill the bag with journal articles and then describe an experiment and it can tell you whether anyone has already scooped you.

All of that is cool, and I expect more of it in the future. I don’t think we’re far from a bag of words being able to do an entire low-quality research project from beginning to end—coming up with a hypothesis, designing the study, running it, analyzing the results, writing them up, making the graphs, arranging it all on a poster, all at the click of a button—because we’ve got loads of low-quality science to put in the bag. If you walk up and down the poster sessions at a psychology conference, you can see lots of first-year PhD students presenting studies where they seemingly pick some semi-related constructs at random, correlate them, and print out a p-value (“Does self-efficacy moderate the relationship between social dominance orientation and system-justifying beliefs?”). A bag of words can basically do this already; you just need to give it access to an online participant pool and a big printer.5

But science is a strong-link problem; if we produced a million times more crappy science, we’d be right where we are now. If we want more of the good stuff, what should we put in the bag? You could stuff the bag with papers, but some of them are fraudulent, some are merely mistaken, and all of them contain unstated assumptions that could turn out to be false. And they’re usually missing key information—they don’t share the data, or they don’t describe their methods in adequate detail. Markus Strasser, an entrepreneur who tried to start one of those companies that’s like “we’ll put every scientific paper in the bag and then ??? and then profit”, eventually abandoned the effort, saying that “close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web.”6

Here’s one way to think about it: if there had been enough text to train an LLM in 1600, would it have scooped Galileo? My guess is no. Ask that early modern ChatGPT whether the Earth moves and it will helpfully tell you that experts have considered the possibility and ruled it out. And that’s by design. If it had started claiming that our planet is zooming through space at 67,000mph, its dutiful human trainers would have punished it: “Bad computer!! Stop hallucinating!!”

In fact, an early 1600s bag of words wouldn’t just have the right words in the wrong order. At the time, the right words didn’t exist. As the historian of science David Wootton points out7, when Galileo was trying to describe his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, none of the languages he knew had a good word for “discover”. He had to use awkward circumlocutions like “I saw something unknown to all previous astronomers before me”. The concept of learning new truths by looking through a glass tube would have been totally foreign to an LLM of the early 1600s, as it was to most of the people of the early 1600s, with a few notable exceptions.

You would get better scientific descriptions from a 2025 bag of words than you would from a 1600 bag of words. But both bags might be equally bad at producing the scientific ideas of their respective futures. Scientific breakthroughs often require doing things that are irrational and unreasonable for the standards of the time and good ideas usually look stupid when they first arrive, so they are often—with good reason!—rejected, dismissed, and ignored. This is a big problem for a bag of words that contains all of yesterday’s good ideas. Putting new ideas in the bag will often make the bag worse, on average, because most of those new ideas will be wrong. That’s why revolutionary research requires not only intelligence, but also stupidity. I expect humans to remain usefully stupider than bags of words for the foreseeable future.

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CLAUDE WILL U GO TO PROM WITH ME?

The most important part of the “bag of words” metaphor is that it prevents us from thinking about AI in terms of social status. Our ancestors had to play status games well enough to survive and reproduce—losers, by and large, don’t get to pass on their genes. This has left our species exquisitely attuned to who’s up and who’s down. Accordingly, we can turn anything into a competition: cheese rolling, nettle eating, phone throwing, toe wrestling, and ferret legging, where male contestants, sans underwear, put live ferrets in their pants for as long as they can. (The world record is five hours and thirty minutes.)

When we personify AI, we mistakenly make it a competitor in our status games. That’s why we’ve been arguing about artificial intelligence like it’s a new kid in school: is she cool? Is she smart? Does she have a crush on me? The better AIs have gotten, the more status-anxious we’ve become. If these things are like people, then we gotta know: are we better or worse than them? Will they be our masters, our rivals, or our slaves? Is their art finer, their short stories tighter, their insights sharper than ours? If so, there’s only one logical end: ultimately, we must either kill them or worship them.

But a bag of words is not a spouse, a sage, a sovereign, or a serf. It’s a tool. Its purpose is to automate our drudgeries and amplify our abilities. Its social status is NA; it makes no sense to ask whether it’s “better” than us. The real question is: does using it make us better?

That’s why I’m not afraid of being rendered obsolete by a bag of words. Machines have already matched or surpassed humans on all sorts of tasks. A pitching machine can throw a ball faster than a human can, spellcheck gets the letters right every time, and autotune never sings off key. But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. It wouldn’t be interesting to watch a bag of words do them—unless we mistakenly start treating that bag like it’s a person.

(That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.)

But that doesn’t mean I’m unafraid of AI entirely. I’m plenty afraid! Any tool can be dangerous when used the wrong way—nail guns and nuclear reactors can kill people just fine without having a mind inside them. In fact, the “bag of words” metaphor makes it clear that AI can be dangerous precisely because it doesn’t operate like humans do. The dangers we face from humans are scary but familiar: hotheaded humans might kick you in the head, reckless humans might drink and drive, duplicitous humans might pretend to be your friend so they can steal your identity. We can guard against these humans because we know how they operate. But we don’t know what’s gonna come out of the bag of words. For instance, if you show humans computer code that has security vulnerabilities, they do not suddenly start praising Hitler. But LLMs do.8 So yes, I would worry about putting the nuclear codes in the bag.9

C’MON BERTIE

Anyone who has owned an old car has been tempted to interpret its various malfunctions as part of its temperament. When it won’t start on a cold day, it feels like the appropriate response is to plead, the same way you would with a sleepy toddler or a tardy partner: “C’mon Bertie, we gotta get to the dentist!” But ultimately, person perception is a poor guide to vehicle maintenance. Cars are made out of metal and plastic that turn gasoline into forward motion; they are not made out of bones and meat that turn Twinkies into thinking. If you want to fix a broken car, you need a wrench, a screwdriver, and a blueprint, not a cognitive-behavioral therapy manual.

Similarly, anyone who sees a mind inside the bag of words has fallen for a trick. They’ve had their evolution exploited. Their social faculties are firing not because there’s a human in front of them, but because natural selection gave those faculties a hair trigger. For all of human history, something that talked like a human and walked like a human was, in fact, a human. Soon enough, something that talks and walks like a human may, in fact, be a very sophisticated logistic regression. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by the superficial similarity, we’ll end up like the moths who evolved to navigate by the light of the moon, only to find themselves drawn to—and ultimately electrocuted by—the mysterious glow of a bug zapper.

Unlike moths, however, we aren’t stuck using the instincts that natural selection gave us. We can choose the schemas we use to think about technology. We’ve done it before: we don’t refer to a backhoe as an “artificial digging guy” or a crane as an “artificial tall guy”. We don’t think of books as an “artificial version of someone talking to you”, photographs as “artificial visual memories”, or listening to recorded sound as “attending an artificial recital”. When pocket calculators debuted, they were already smarter than every human on Earth, at least when it comes to calculation—a job that itself used to be done by humans. Folks wondered whether this new technology was “a tool or a toy”, but nobody seems to have wondered whether it was a person.

(If you covered a backhoe with skin, made its bucket look like a hand, painted eyes on its chassis, and made it play a sound like “hnngghhh!” whenever it lifted something heavy, then we’d start wondering whether there’s a ghost inside the machine. That wouldn’t tell us anything about backhoes, but it would tell us a lot about our own psychology.)

The original sin of artificial intelligence was, of course, calling it artificial intelligence. Those two words have lured us into making man the measure of machine: “Now it’s as smart as an undergraduate...now it’s as smart as a PhD!” These comparisons only give us the illusion of understanding AI’s capabilities and limitations, as well as our own, because we don’t actually know what it means to be smart in the first place. Our definitions of intelligence are either wrong (“Intelligence is the ability to solve problems”) or tautological (“Intelligence is the ability to do things that require intelligence”).10

It’s unfortunate that the computer scientists figured out how to make something that kinda looks like intelligence before the psychologists could actually figure out what intelligence is, but here we are. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag now. It won’t fit—there’s too many words in there.

PS it’s been a busy week on Substack—

and I discussed why people get so anxious about conversations, and how to have better ones:

Derek Thompson

Why Are Americans So Scared of Talking to Each Other?

Americans are more alone than ever. Face-to-face socializing has plummeted this century, especially for young people. Nobody parties anymore. We spend more time in our homes than any period on record. The graphical evidence is dire…

Listen now

9 months ago · 155 likes · 15 comments · Derek Thompson and Adam Mastroianni

And at answered all of my questions about music. He uncovered some surprising stuff, including an issue that caused a civil war on a Beatles message board, and whether they really sang naughty words on the radio in the 1970s:

Can't Get Much Higher

What are the Weirdest Lyrics in a Hit Song? Mailbag

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025…

Read more

9 months ago · 52 likes · 21 comments · Chris Dalla Riva

Derek and Chris both run terrific Substacks, check ‘em out!

Years ago, I was getting ready for a party and I suddenly realized something: I didn’t want to go to the party. Inevitably, I knew, I was going to get stuck talking to someone, and there wouldn’t be any way to end the conversation without embarrassing both of us (“It’s been great talking to you, but not great enough that I want to continue!”).

But then I thought, wait, what makes me think I’m so special? What if the other person feels exactly the same way? What if we’re all trapped in this conspiracy of politeness—we all want to go, but we’re not allowed to say it?

Surprisingly, no one knows the answers to these questions. Eight billion humans spend all day yapping with each other, and we have no idea if those conversations end when people wish they would. So my PhD advisor Dan and I set out to get some answers using the most powerful methods available to us in psychology: we started bothering people.

(This is the blog version of a paper I published a few years ago; you can read the whole paper and access all the materials, data, and code here.)

STUDY 1

~~~METHOD~~~

We surveyed 806 people online about the last conversation they had: how long was it? Was there any point when you were ready for it to be over? If so, when was that?1

~~~RESULTS~~~

By and large, conversations did not end when people wanted them to. Only 17% of participants reported that their conversation ended when they first felt ready for it to end, 48% said it went on too long, and the remaining 34% said they never felt ready for it to end—to them, the conversation was too short!2

On average, people’s desired conversation time differed from their actual conversation time by seven minutes, or 56% of the conversation. That doesn’t mean they wanted to go seven minutes sooner or seven minutes later—it’s seven minutes different. If you just smush everyone’s answers together, all the people who wanted more cancel out all the people who wanted less, and it gives you the impression that everyone got what they wanted, when in fact, very few people did.

Participants thought their partners fared even worse: they guessed that there was a nine-minute (or 81%) difference between when the conversation ended and when the other person wanted it to end.3

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

These results surprised us. It wasn’t that conversations went on too long, necessarily—they mainly went on the wrong amount of time. And that’s extra surprising when you remember that we surveyed people about their most recent conversation, so they were overwhelmingly talking to people they know well, like a lot, and talk to all the time—spouses, friends, kids.

Still, this study had two big limitations. First, these conversations happened out in the wild, where they might have been ended by external circumstances. Maybe the “too long”s were, say, trapped on an airplane and unable to escape their unwanted conversation; maybe the “too short”s were having a lovely chat when their boss told them to get back to work.

And second, we only get to see one half of each conversation, so we don’t know how accurate participants were when they guessed their partners’ desires, nor do we know how people were paired up. Maybe, for instance, the “too long”s and the “too short”s were all paired with each other, and that’s why no one got what they wanted—they wanted different things.

To get around both of these limitations, we were going to have to bring people into the lab and—gulp—make them talk to each other.

STUDY 2

~~~METHOD~~~

We brought 366 people into the lab and paired them up. Our participants were a mix of students and locals in Cambridge, MA, and their defining characteristic was that they were willing to participate in a study for $15. We told them to “talk about whatever you like for as little time or as much time as you like, as long as it is more than 1 minute and less than 45 minutes.” We told them we had additional tasks for them if they finished early, so they would participate for the full hour regardless of how long they chose to talk. (We did this so that people didn’t think they could just wrap up after a minute and go home.)

~~~RESULTS~~~

Here’s the first crazy thing that happened: 57 of our 183 pairs talked for the entire 45 minutes. We literally had to cut them off so they could fill out our survey before we ran out of time. And that’s a problem, actually—we don’t know how long they would have kept talking if we hadn’t intervened. The whole point of this study was to watch people end their own conversations, and instead they made us do it.4 So we ultimately excluded these non-enders, but it turns out the results are the same with or without them. That itself is pretty weird, and I’ll come back to it in a minute.

Looking only at people who ended their own conversations, once again, only a small minority of participants (16%) reported that their conversation ended when they wanted it to. 52% wanted it to end sooner, and 31% wanted it to keep going. On average, people’s desired conversation length was seven minutes—or 46%—different from their actual conversation length.

But now we have both sides of the conversation, so we can also see how people were paired. Was every “too short” partnered with a “too long”? Nope. In fact, almost half the time, both participants said “too long” or both said “too short”. Only 30% of conversations ended when even one person wanted it to end.

That means most pairs weren’t splitting the difference between their desires, nor were they waiting for one person to get tired and put an end to things. They were bumbling through their conversations, often blowing right past their preferred ending point, or never reaching it at all. We specifically told people to talk as long as they wanted to, but when they came out of the room, almost all of them said, “I didn’t talk for as long as I wanted to.”

So what happened? Why didn’t these conversations end when people wanted them to? Two reasons:

1. People wanted different things

In almost all cases, it was literally impossible for the conversation to end at a mutually desired time, because people’s desires weren’t mutual. People’s desired ending points differed by 10 minutes, or 68% of the conversation, on average. So at best, people had a considerable amount of dissatisfaction, and they had to figure out how to allocate it between them. But they couldn’t do that, because:

2. People didn’t know what their partner wanted

We had people guess when their partner wanted to leave, and they were off by 9 minutes, or 64% of the conversation, on average. So people really didn’t know when the other person wanted to go.

Incompatible desires create a coordination problem, and impenetrable desires prevent it from being solved. If you and I want different things, but I don’t know what you want, and you don’t know what I want, then there’s very little chance that either of us will get what we want.

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to matter whether participants ended their own conversations, or whether we had to return at 45 minutes and do it for them. You’d think that if people could pick their own stopping point, they would pick something closer to their desires. But they didn’t.

Maybe that’s because a conversation is like a ride down the highway: you’re really only supposed to exit at certain times. But the exits themselves are pretty spread out, so you’re probably not going to be on top of one at the exact moment you start feeling ready to leave. Technically, you can get off the highway between exits, but you might have to drive through some bushes or crash through a wall—that’s what it feels like to, say, leave in the middle of someone’s story. So instead, you wait until the next exit comes (and you end up as a “too long”), or you get off before you really want to (and you end up as a “too short”). This strong set of conversational norms keeps things both orderly and somewhat dissatisfying.

The consequences for exiting at the wrong time are, in my experience, rather great. Once, I was hanging out with some friends, and there was a moment that felt to me like a lull in the conversation, and I had been feeling tired for a while and I felt like leaving, so I did. When I saw those friends again, they were all shaken. Apparently I had left at a super weird moment, like right in the middle of a thought, and all they could talk about was how weird my exit was. So at all future hangouts, I made sure to clear my departures with everyone, as if I was a commercial airliner asking air traffic control for permission to take flight.

“THIS CUP IS SO LOUD”

So far, I’ve made it sound like these conversations were awful. I recorded them and watched them later, so I can confirm: they were.

I opened one up just now, scrubbed to the middle of the video, and one guy was explaining how liquor licensing works in different states. In another, I found people desperately trying to find things to say about each other’s hometowns (“Are there...cities in Virginia?”). In another, two girls are talking about taking a year off of school, and one asks, “Oh, but don’t you have to re-do your financial aid paperwork?” and the other goes, “...I don’t get financial aid.” A silence pervades, then one of the girls starts playing with her coffee cup and goes, “This cup is so loud!”

But here’s something crazy: all three of those conversations went all the way to 45 minutes. We had to cut them off! And when they got out of the room, they reported enjoying their conversations a lot, usually scoring it a five, six, or seven out of seven. On awkwardness, they scored it a two or a three out of seven. (On average, participants in Study 1 enjoyed their conversations 5.03/7 and participants in Study 2 enjoyed them 5.41/7.)

If you’re surprised that people found it fun to be forced to talk to a stranger, you’re not alone. This didn’t make it into the paper, but we ran a little pilot study where we just asked people to guess the results from Study 2. They told us, essentially, that our study sounded like a pretty bad way to spend an afternoon. Participants estimated that nearly 50% of conversations would last 5 minutes or less—that is, most people would try to get out of there as soon as possible. In fact, only 13% of conversations were that short. (And remember, we’re excluding everyone who maxed out their conversation time.) They also thought only 15% of conversations would hit the 45 mark (actual: 31%), and they overall underestimated how much people enjoyed the experience.

THE AFTERMATH, OR, HOW I MISLED A MILLION PEOPLE

This article got a lot of attention when it came out, from the New York Times to late-night TV. According to Altmetric, it’s in the “top 5% of research outputs” in terms of public attention. This was mostly a bad thing.

Some of the articles were great, and some of the journalists I spoke to asked me sharp questions that I hadn’t considered myself. But lots of them got the core findings wrong. The headlines were like “CONVERSATIONS GO ON TOO LONG BECAUSE EVERYONE IS SO AWKWARD AND WEIRD”, which is what Dan and I thought we might find before we started running studies, but it’s not at all what the results turned out to be. It was as if the studies themselves were merely a ritual that allowed people to claim the thing they already believed, no updates or revisions necessary. Another article claimed that we studied phone conversations (we didn’t), and then other articles copied that article, until the internet was chockablock with articles about a study that never happened, a literal game of telephone about a telephone.

Some of this was just sloppy reporting for content mills that, I assume, paid like $30 for a freelancer to slap some quotes on a summary of the study. (This process has probably since been automated via ChatGPT.) But some of it was deliberate. One journalist was like, “So what you’re saying is that conversations go on too long, right?” I was like, actually, no! And I gave him this explanation:

It’s true that more participants said “too long” than “too short”, but if you average out everyone’s desired talking time, people wanted to talk a little longer than they actually did. But even that is misleading: the people who said “too short” had to estimate how much longer they wanted to talk, while the people who said “too long” were remembering when they wanted to leave. That means some people are making predictions that are theoretically unbounded—you could want to talk for days!5—while other people are reporting memories that are bounded at zero. As awkward as some of the conversations were, it’s not possible to wish that you talked for negative minutes. If you average all these numbers together, it’s not clear that the result is meaningful.

So did conversations go on too long? A lot of the time, yes. But a sizable minority ended before someone wanted them to end, and sometimes before both people wanted them to end! Mainly, conversations seem to end at a time that nobody desires. Obviously, this is all kinda complicated, and that why we put a question mark at the end of our paper’s title.6

After hearing that whole spiel, the journalist blinked at me and told me point blank, “Yeah, I’m gonna write about how conversations go on too long.” And he did. I’ll never know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that 100x more people read these articles than read the original paper, meaning the net result of my research was that I left the public less informed than it was before. Back in 2021, when this all went down, we would have called it an “epic fail”.

I know that scientists love to complain about science journalists: they take our beautiful, pristine science, and they dumb it down, slop it up, and serve it by the shovelful to the heaving masses of dullards and bozos! Nobody wants to admit that scientists cause this problem in the first place. Journal articles suck—they’re usually 50 pages of dry-ass prose (plus a 100-page supplement and accompanying data files) that must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers, a defense against critics, a press release, and a job application. So of course no one’s going to read them, of course someone’s going to try to turn them into something intelligible for the general public—who, by the way, really would like to know what’s going on in our labs, and deserves to know—and of course stuff’s gonna get messed up in that process. We let this system exist because, I guess, we assume scientists are so smart they could never speak to a normal person. But guess what, buddy: if you can only explain yourself to your colleagues, you ain’t that smart.7

Anyway, publishing this paper made realize that, no matter how much I tried to make my papers readable8, people are always going to treat them like they’re written in Latin, and they’re going to read the Google Translate version instead. So why not just speak in English? And that’s how this blog was born.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT GABBING

One upside of media attention is that I got to hear the kinds of questions—and the “less of a question, more of a comment, really”—that came up over and over again. So let me take a crack at ‘em:

I bet you’d get different results from me, because I come from a place/culture/family where people are super blunt!

Maybe! We studied people who happened to take a study online, or who wandered into our lab, which is not representative of all humanity. It’s possible that if you ran this in St. Petersburg or Papua New Guinea, you’d get different results. All we can say is that we couldn’t find any big demographic differences within our sample: race, gender, etc., didn’t make much of a difference. And we might have expected completely different results from people in the lab vs. people in their living rooms, but we didn’t find any, so it’s not a slam-dunk that changing the venue would change the data.

How do I know when someone wants to stop talking to me? Is there some kind of tell?

If there’s a tell, it’s not easily detectable by humans. All the things that people do when they’re trying to wrap things up are also things they just do, generally: break eye contact, shift around a little bit, deploy some “phatic” expressions like “yep” or “wow” or “that’s so crazy”. Even when someone gives the clearest possible sign that they’re ready to go (“Well, it’s been great talking to you!”), our results suggest their actual desired ending point could be long in the past or far in the future.

You should run a study where you give people an eject button that they can push when they want to leave!

We actually tried to do this. We planned to give people a secret foot pedal that they could tap when they were ready to go, so they could tell us live during the conversation rather than reporting it afterward. We ultimately scrapped this for three reasons:

1. Constantly thinking about the eject button would probably make the conversations weird and artificial

2. We didn’t think people would be able to pull off this level of spycraft during a conversation (they were stressed out enough just trying to talk to each other)

3. I ordered a foot pedal from Amazon but it made a telltale clicking noise

Can people really remember when they wanted to leave?

Maybe. We got the same results when we asked people immediately after their conversation ended (Study 2), and when we surveyed them after delays of several hours (Study 1). I’m sure there’s plenty of inaccuracy in people’s memories, but if it’s just noise, then it should cancel itself out. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. If conversations end exactly when people want them to, but then their memories immediately get overwritten, Men in Black-style, and they come to believe that their conversation didn’t end when they wanted it to, well, that’s the memory they’re going to have going forward, and that’s the data they’re going to use to make decisions in the future.

Okay, so how can I have better conversations?

If you, like many people, are worried that your next conversation will be a train wreck, let me assuage your doubts by confirming them: your conversation probably will be a train wreck. And that will be fine. I watched people wreck their trains several hundred times, crawl out of the burning rubble, and go “That was kinda fun!”

So probably the best advice is: worry less. Over the past 10 years, study after study has suggested that people are too anxious about their social skills. People think they’re above average at lots of stuff—driving, cooking, reading, even sleeping—but not conversing, and they disproportionately blame themselves for the worst parts of their conversations. They’re overly nervous about talking to strangers, and when they meet someone new, they report liking that person more than they think the person likes them in return. In fact, my friends and I once studied three-person conversations between strangers, and on average people rated themselves as the least liked person out of the group. Unless you have clinical-level social deficits, if you’re looking for life hacks to make your conversations better, you’re probably already too neurotic. It’s unlikely you’ll become more charming and likable by attempting to play 4D chess mid-conversation: “when do I want to leave, when do I think they want to leave, when do they think I think they think I want to leave”, etc.

One thing that surprised us, anyway, was that the people who said “too short” were just as happy as the people who said “just right”. (They were both happier than the people who said “too long”.) You might think that getting cut off would leave you feeling blue, but it’s actually kind of delicious to be left wanting more. So better to err on the side of leaving sooner—you can usually have more, but you can never have less.

Actually, come to think of it, there is one super practical tip you can take from these studies, which I’ve discovered from talking about them with many people in many different situations: for a pleasant conversation, avoid discussing this research at all costs.