Revenge of the Blockheads
Links 'n' updates for Summer 2025
This is the quarterly links and updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.
(1) REVENGE OF THE BLOCKHEADS
Tetris was invented in 1985, it came out on the NES in 1989, but the best way to play was only discovered in 2021.1 Previously, players would just try to tap the buttons really fast (“hypertapping”), until a 15-year-old named Christopher “CheeZ” Martinez realized that you could actually press the buttons faster if you roll your fingers across the back of the controller (“rolling”). CheeZ went on to set world records using his technique, but he wasn’t on top for long. Other players soon perfected their rolls, and CheeZ lost in a first-round upset at the 2022 Classic Tetris World Championship to another “roller”, a 48th-seed named BirbWizard.
I love this because it shows how low-hanging discoveries can just sit there for decades without anyone seeing them, even when thousands of dollars are on the line. (Seriously—the first place finisher in the 2024 championships won $10k.) People spent 40 years trying to tap buttons faster without ever realizing they should be tapping the other side of the controller instead.
But I also hate this, because:
(2) MY DREAM JOB IS “ROOMBA”
Speaking of video games, I’ve always been mystified by “simulator” games built around mundane tasks, like Woodcutter Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, PC Building Simulator, and Liquor Store Simulator (the promotional video promises that you get to “verify documents”). Then there’s Viscera Cleanup Detail, where you clean up after other people’s gunfights, PowerWash Simulator, where you powerwash things, and Robot Vacuum Simulator, where you play as a Roomba. And if all of that sounds too stimulating, you can try Rock Simulator, where you watch a rock on your screen as time passes. (Reviews are “very positive”.)2
It’s easy to deride or pathologize these games, so I was taken aback when I saw this defense from the video game streamer Northernlion3:
This is not brain rot, this is zen. You don’t get it.
Something being boring doesn’t make it brain rot. Something being exciting but having no actual quality to it is brain rot. This is boring. This is brain exercise. This is brain genesis.
[...] This content has you guys typing like real motherfuckers in chat. You’re typing with emotion. You’re typing “good luck.” You’re typing “I can’t watch this shit.” You’re typing “I can’t bear to be a part of this experience anymore.”
You’re feeling something. You’re feeling something human, man!
(3) BALLSY
Maia Adar of Cosimo Research investigates whether straight men and women are attracted to the, uh, intimate smells of the opposite sex: “The results suggest that females stand closer to males who have fresh ball sweat applied to their neck.”
Cosimo’s next project: some people swear that taping your mouth shut overnight improves your sleep quality and reduces snoring. Does it? You can sign up for their study here.
(4) LESS PERISHING, MORE PUBLISHING
Some cool developments in scientific publishing:
The new edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology is now available online and for free. I mentioned before that Mahzarin Banaji, one of the most famous social psychologists working today, became a psychologist because she found a copy of the Handbook at a train station. Now, thanks to the internet, you can become a psychologist without even taking the train!
Open Philanthropy and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are running a “pop-up journal” aimed at answering one question: what are the social returns to investments in research and development?4
- , the chair of the Navigation Fund, announces that they’ll no longer use their billions of dollars to support publications in traditional scientific journals:
We began this as an experiment at Arcadia a few years ago. At the time, I expected some eventual efficiency gains. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it would reshape all of our science. 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.
(5) SPRAY AND PRAY
People often wonder: what do we find normal these days that our descendants will find outrageous? I submit: our grandchildren will be baffled by our resistance to toilets with built-in bidets.
(6) ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT CC
of has a great seven-part series about the most consequential email list in history, a single listserv that birthed Effective Altruism, rationalism, the AI Risk movement, Bitcoin, several cults, several research institutes that may also have been cults, a few murders, and some very good blogs.(7) YOU GOTTA BE KIDNEY ME
Here’s a thing I didn’t know: in 1972, the United States started giving Medicare coverage to anyone with end-stage renal disease, regardless of age, effectively doing “socialized medicine for an organ”. Today, 550,000 Americans receive dialysis through this plan, which costs “over one percent of the federal budget, or more than six times NASA’s budget”. I bring this up not because I think that’s too much (I’m glad that people don’t die), but because it’s hilarious how little I understand about what things the federal government pays for. Maybe I’m not the only one!
(8) According to the podcast hosting company Buzzsprout, if your podcast gets more than 454 downloads in the first seven days, it’s in the top 10% of all podcasts.
(9) THE D&B ANOMALY
If you send a voice note via iMessage and mention “Chuck E. Cheese”, it goes through normally. If instead you mention “Dave & Busters”, your message will never arrive. It just disappears. Why? The answer is in this perfect podcast episode.
(10) ONE TWO TREE
The coolest part of Civilization games is the Tech Tree, where you get to choose the discoveries that your citizens work on, from animal husbandry to giant death robots. That tree was apparently made up on the fly, but now
has made an actual tech tree for humanity, which includes 1,550 technologies and 1,700 links between them. Here’s my favorite connection:
(11) A PLANT IN THE AUDIENCE
on Why Psychology Hasn’t Had a New Big Idea in Decades. My favorite line:To my mind, the question isn’t whether we decide to expand the scope of psychology to plants. The question is whether there’s any prospect at all of keeping plants out!
He got some good comments and responded to them here.
(12) ODD-LOOKIN DUDES
One of my favorite genres of art is “things that look way more modern than they are”, so I was very excited to run into Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Oddities of Various Figures (1624):
(13) Alex Rinehart finally answers the question we’ve all been asking: when people see a Toyota TRD 4x4 truck, do they read “TRD” as “turd”?
(14) THE BACK BAY GOLDEN GOOSE OSTRICH
In 1915, a doctor named Earnest Codman was like “hey guys, shouldn’t we keep track of patient outcomes so we know whether our treatments actually work?” and everyone else was like “no that’s a terrible idea”. So he did what anyone would do: he commissioned an extremely petty political cartoon and debuted it at a meeting of the local medical society. Apparently he didn’t pay that much for the commission, because it looks like it was drawn by a high schooler, not to mention the unhinged captions, the mixed metaphors (the golden goose is...also an ostrich?), and the bug helpfully labeled “humbug”. Anyway, this got him fired from his job at Harvard Medical School.
Codman’s ideas won in the end, and he was eventually hired back. To answer the Teddy Roosevelt-looking guy in the middle, apparently you can make a living as a clinical professor without humbug!
(15) 4!CHAN
There’s an anime called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that’s about time travel and, appropriately, you can watch the episodes in any order. In 2011, someone posted on 4Chan asking: “If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch?” An anonymous commenter replied with a proof demonstrating a lower bound. Mathematicians eventually realized that the proof was a breakthrough in a tricky permutation problem and published a paper verifying it. The first author of that paper is “Anonymous 4Chan Poster”.
(16) THE ROBOT SINGS OF LOVE
Silent films used to be accompanied by live musicians, but then synchronized sound came along. The American Federation of Musicians tried to fight back with a huge ad campaign opposing prerecorded music in movie theaters. They lost, but they did a great job:
Source: Paleofuture
These ads are a reminder: when a profession gets automated away, it’s the first generation, the one who has to live through the transition, that feels the pain. And then people forget it was any other way.
(17) Finally, another lost job: the sluggard waker, a guy who would patrol the church pews and whack you on the head with a stick if you fell asleep during the service. This job was automated by caffeine.
NEWS FROM FRIENDS OF THE BLOG
Uri Bram (Atoms vs. Bits) is releasing a physical version of his hit online party game called Person Do Thing, which is kinda like Taboo but better.
- writes a great blog about music and data. A while back, he started listening to every Billboard #1 hit song, in order, from the 1950s to today, and as he listened his spreadsheets grew and grew and eventually turned into his new book: Uncharted Territory.
In much sadder news, my friend
was denied entry to the US based on some Substack posts he wrote covering the protests at Columbia when he was a journalism student there. You can read his account here.
TRANSMISSIONS FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ
Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2025 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! I’m reading all the submissions now, and I plan to announce the winners in September.
I was on Spencer Greenberg’s Clearer Thinking podcast with the appropriately-titled episode “How F***ed Is Psychology?”
I recently wrote about how to unpack when deciding on a career (“The Coffee Beans Procedure”);
wrote a detailed prompt that will help an AI do this with you.A certain “Adam Mastroiannii Sub Stack” has appeared in my comments hawking some kind of WhatsApp scam. I’ve banned him and deleted the comments. Thanks to the folks who let me know—please give me a holler if he pops up again. The actual author of a Substack post always has a little tag that says “author” next to their name when they reply to comments, so if you ever see someone who looks like me but doesn’t have that tag, please execute a citizen’s arrest.
And finally, a post from the archive. All the promises in this post are still active5:
An invitation to a secret society
I hereby invite every curious human to do science and post it on the internet.
That’s all for now! Gotta get back to playing Blog Simulator 4.
-Adam
The scientist-bloggers Slime Mold Time Mold speculate that humans may have several “hygiene” emotions that drive us to keep our living environments spic-and-span, which might explain the odd number of cleaning simulators, at least.
If you emailed me about a research project and I haven’t gotten back to you, I’m sorry and please email me again!
Seeing Northernlion referenced in an EH article was a delightful surprise - two edges of my media sphere I did not expect to crossover!
Simulator games, to me, have the same basic effect as Old School RuneScape. Basically, it turns everything in the brain off the same way alcohol does (but with fewer though nonzero lingering side effects).
I'm not playing Supermarket Simulator because it's *fun*, I'm playing it because it has an easy action -> reward loop, where you know exactly what to do and the action will always be rewarded in predictable ways. There's zero brainpower involved, which in many cases is a "bonus". Even though I actively enjoy approximately zero seconds of playing the game, it numbs everything else out.
I suspect doomscrolling Reddit or whatever hits psychologically the same effect, but pulls on a different hook to do it (social media pulls the social hook that is designed to motivate people to build relationships; simulator games / RuneScape hit the achievement hook that is designed to motivate people to do basic life / community upkeep tasks like routine foraging or whatever)