It was October 22^nd, 1844, and the world was about to end.

Somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people were looking up at the sky that day, waiting for Jesus to burst through the clouds. Some of them had quit their jobs, left their crops to rot in the fields, sold all their possessions, paid the debts they owed, forgave the debts owed t…

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Even a years ago, if you had tried to talk to me about the “philosophy of science,” I would have skeddadled. Philosophy? As in, people just...saying stuff? No thanks dude, I’m good. I’m a Science Guy, I talk Data.

But then I realized something: I had no idea what I was doing. Like, nobody had ever told me what science was or how to do it. My advisor never sat me down and gave me the scientific Birds and the Bees talk (“When a hypothesis and an experiment love each other very much...”). I just showed up to my PhD and started running experiments. Wasn’t I supposed to be using the Scientific Method, or something? Come to think of it, what is the Scientific Method?

As far as I could tell, everybody else was as clueless as me. There are no classes called “Coming Up with Ideas 101” or “How to Pick a Project When There Are Literally Infinite Projects You Could Pick.” We all learned through osmosis—you read some papers, you watch some talks, and then you just kinda wing it.

We’re devoting whole lifetimes to this project—not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars—so shouldn’t we, you know, have some idea of what we’re doing? Fortunately, in the 20th century, three philosophers were like, “Damn, this science thing is getting pretty crazy, we should figure out what it is and what it’s all about.”1

Karl Popper said: science happens by proposing hypotheses and then falsifying them.

Thomas Kuhn said: science happens by people trying to solve puzzles in the prevailing paradigm and then shifting the paradigm entirely when things don’t add up.

And Paul Feyerabend said: *BIG WET FART NOISE*

Guess whose book I’m gonna tell you about?

THE INQUISITION WAS RIGHT

Here’s how Feyerabend put it in Against Method (1975, emphasis his):

The thesis is: the events, procedures and results that constitute the sciences have no common structure; there are no elements that occur in every scientific investigation but are missing elsewhere. [...] Successful research does not obey general standards; it relies now on one trick, now on another [...] This liberal practice, I repeat, is not just a fact of the history of science. It is both reasonable and absolutely necessary for the growth of knowledge.

Which is to say: there is no such thing as the scientific method. Feyerabend’s famous dictum is “anything goes,” which he explained is “the terrified exclamation of the rationalist who takes a closer look at history.”2 Whenever you try to lay down some rule like “science works like this,” Feyerabend pop ups and says “Aha! Here’s a time when someone did exactly the opposite of that, and it worked!”

Here’s an example. Say some guy named Galileo comes up to you and says something crazy like, “The Earth is constantly moving.” Well, Rule #1 of science is supposed to be “theories should fit the facts,” so you, a dutiful scientist, consult them:

• When you’re on something that’s moving (like a horse or a cart), you notice it for all sorts of reasons. You feel the wind, you see the scenery changing, you might get a little sick, and so on. If the Earth was moving, we’d know it.

• When you jump straight up, you land on exactly the point where you started. If the Earth was moving, that wouldn’t happen—it would change position while you’re in the air, and your landing spot would be different from your launching spot.

• The Earth does actually move sometimes; it’s called an earthquake. And when that happens, buildings topple over, you get mudslides and avalanches, etc. So the Earth can’t be moving all the time, or else those things would be happening all the time, too.

Those facts seem pretty irrefutable, so you conclude the Earth does not move. Unfortunately, it does move, and you’re not going to figure that out by being a scientific goody-two-shoes. Instead, you’ll have to entertain the possibility that this Galileo guy might be right. In Feyerabend’s words:

Turning the argument around, we first assert the motion of the earth and then inquire what changes will remove the contradiction. Such an inquiry may take considerable time, and there is a good sense in which it is not finished even today. The contradiction may stay with us for decades or even centuries. Still, it must be upheld until we have finished our examination or else the examination, the attempt to discover the antediluvian components of our knowledge, cannot even start. This, we have seen, is one of the reasons one can give for retaining, and, perhaps, even for inventing, theories which are inconsistent with the facts.

To Feyerabend, our minds are like deep lakes, our assumptions are like the fish you can’t see from the surface, and a wacko theory is like a stick of dynamite that you drop into the water so it blows up and all the dead assumptions float to the surface. If you take Galileo’s dumb-sounding theory seriously, you start wondering whether your facts are as irrefutable as they seem: Would you really be able to tell if the Earth and everything on it was moving? For instance, if you were below deck on a ship, would you be able to tell whether the ship was docked or sailing smoothly? Have you ever even checked?

Feyerabend goes so far as to claim that, in the whole Galileo debacle, the Catholic Church was the side “trusting the science.” The Inquisition didn’t just condemn Galileo for contradicting the Bible. They also said he was wrong on the facts. That part of their judgment “was made without reference to the faith, or to Church doctrine, but was based exclusively on the scientific situation of the time. It was shared by many outstanding scientists — and it was correct when based on the facts, the theories and the standards of the time.” As in: the Inquisition was right.

THE ANARCHIST

Feyerabend described himself as an “epistemological anarchist,” and other people have called him that too, but they meant it as an insult. This whole “anything goes” thing causes a lot of pearl-clutching and handwringing about misinformation and pseudoscience. There’s supposed to be some kind of Special Secret Science Sauce that makes “real” science good, and if it turns out that you can squirt any kind of condiment on there and it tastes fine, then why are we spending so much on the brand-name stuff?

I think the pearl-clutchers are onto something here, and I’ll come back to that in a second. But first, even if the strong version of Feyerabend’s thesis makes people faint, those same people probably agree with him when it comes to revolutionary science. A breakthrough, almost by definition, has to be at least a little ridiculous—otherwise, someone would have made it already. For example, when you look back at the three most important breakthroughs in biology in the last forty years, every one of them required at least one step, and sometimes many steps, that sounded stupid to a lot of people:

• We have mRNA vaccines because one woman was so sure she she could make the technology work that she kept going for decades, even when all of her grants were denied, her university tried to kick her out, and her advisor tried to deport her.

• We have CRISPR in part because some scientists at a dairy company were trying to make yogurt.

• We have polymerase chain reaction because one guy wanted to “find out what kind of weird critters might be living in boiling water in Yellowstone” and another guy refused to listen to his friends when they told him he was wasting his time: “...not one of my friends or colleagues would get excited over the potential for such a process. [...] most everyone who could take a moment to talk about it with me, felt compelled to come up with some reason why it wouldn’t work.”3

(That’s why it’s always a con whenever people dig up silly-sounding studies to prove that the government is wasting money on science. They’ll be like “Can you believe they’re PAYING PEOPLE to SCOOP OUT PART OF A CAT’S BRAIN and then SEE IF IT CAN STILL WALK ON A TREADMILL???” And then it turns out the research is about how to help people walk again after they have a spinal cord injury. A lot of research is bad, but the goofiness of its one-sentence summary is not a good indication of its quality.4)

Not only do we have useful research that breaks the rules; we also have useless research that follows the rules. You can develop theories, run experiments, gather data, analyze your results, and reject your null hypotheses, all by the book, without a lick of fraud or fakery, and still not produce any useful knowledge. In psychology, we do this all the time.

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PROGRESS DEPENDS ON FRAUD

Everybody seems to agree with these facts in the abstract, but we clearly don’t believe them in our hearts, because we’ve built a scientific system that denies them entirely. We hire people, accept papers, and dole out money based on the assumption that science progresses by a series of sensible steps that can all be approved by committee. That’s why everyone tries to pretend this is happening even when it isn’t.

For example, the National Institutes of Health don’t like funding anything risky, so a good way to get money from them is to show them some “promising” and “preliminary” results from a project that, secretly, you’ve already completed. When they give you a grant, you can publish the rest of the results and go “wow look it all turned out so well!” when actually you’ve been using the money to try other stuff, hopefully generating “promising” and “preliminary” results for the next grant application. Which is to say, a big part of our scientific progress depends on defrauding the government.

In fact, whenever we find ourselves stuck on some scientific problem for a long time, it’s often from an excess of being reasonable. For instance, we don’t have any good treatments for Alzheimer’s in large part because a “cabal” of researchers was so sure they knew which direction Alzheimer’s science should take that they scuttled anybody trying to follow other leads. Their favored hypothesis—that a buildup of amyloid proteins gums up the brain—enjoyed broad consensus at the time, and anybody who harbored doubts looked like a science-denier. Decades and billions of dollars later, the amyloid hypothesis is pretty much kaput, and we’re not much closer to a cure, or even an effective treatment. So when Grandma starts getting forgetful and there’s nothing you can do about it, you should blame the people who enforced the supposed rules of science, not the people who tried to break them.

Likewise, even if we believe that science requires occasional irrationality, we hide this fact from our children. Walk into an elementary classroom and you’ll probably see a poster like this:

Most of the things my teachers hung on the walls turned out to be whoppers: the food pyramid is not a reasonable dieting guide, Greenland is actually one-seventh the size of South America (despite how it looks on the map), and Maya Angelou never said that thing about people remembering how you made them feel. But this hokum about the “scientific method” is the tallest tale of them all.

Yes, scientists do all of these things sometimes, but laying out these steps as “the” method implies that science is a solved problem, that everybody knows what’s going on, that we all just show up and paint by numbers, and that you, too, can follow the recipe and discoveries will pop out the other end. (“Hey pal, I’m stuck—what comes after research again?”) This “method” is about as useful as my friend Steve’s one-step recipe for poundcake, which goes: “Step 1: add poundcake.”5

THAT NOTED NUISANCE, WORLD WAR II

I read Against Method because people kept recommending it to me, and now I see why. Ol’ Paul and I have a similar vibe: we both love italics and hate hierarchy. But I have two bones to pick with him.

First, Feyerabend has a bit of a Nazi problem—namely, that he was a Nazi. He mentions this in a bizarre footnote toward the end of the book:

Like many people of my generation I was involved in the Second World War. This event had little influence on my thinking. For me the war was a nuisance, not a moral problem.

When he was drafted, his main reaction was annoyance that he couldn’t continue studying astronomy, acting, and singing:

How inconvenient, I thought. Why the hell should I participate in the war games of a bunch of idiots? How do I get out of it? Various attempts misfired and I became a soldier.

He did a bit more than that. According to his entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Feyerabend earned the Iron Cross for gallantry in battle, and was promoted to lieutenant by the end of the war. He later quipped that he “relished the role of army officer no more than he later did that of university professor,” which is, uh, not the most reassuring thing one can say about either of those jobs. (“Don’t worry, students! I was indeed an officer in the Wermacht, but I hated it just as much as I hate teaching you.”)6

Look, I don’t think you should judge people’s ideas by judging their character.7 I expect everyone I read to have a thick file of foibles, and most of the folks who have something to teach me probably don’t share my values. But there are “foibles” and then there’s “carrying a gun for Hitler and then being extremely nonchalant about it.” That’s especially weird for a philosopher, since thinking critically about stuff is his job.

THE HOCKEY STICK

So me and Herr Feyerabend may not see eye-to-eye vis-a-vis WWII, but my biggest philosophical gripe with him is that he doesn’t seem to care about the Hockey Stick:

The Hockey Stick is the greatest mystery in human history. Something big happened in the past ~400 years, something that never happened before in the ~300,000 years of our species’ existence. People have all sorts of theories about what caused the Hockey Stick, but everyone agrees that science played a part. We started investigating the mysteries of the universe in a new way, and our discoveries piled up and spilled over into technology much faster than they ever had before.

So, fine, “anything goes,” but some things go better than others. That’s why I don’t buy Feyerabend’s claim that the scientific method doesn’t exist. I think it doesn’t exist yet. That is, we’ve somehow succeeded in the practice of science without understanding it in principle. Although we haven’t solved the Mystery of the Hockey Stick, there are too many bodies to deny the mystery exists (the bodies in this mystery are alive—that’s the whole point).

Even though Feyerabend denies that mystery, perhaps he can help us solve it. That first upward tick of the Hockey Stick, that almost imperceptible liftoff sometime after the year 1600—that was a burst of Feyerabendian irrationality. The first scientists did something pretty stupid for the time: they ditched the books that had taught people for thousands of years (some of them supposedly written by God) and decided to do things themselves. They claimed you could discover objective, useful truths if you built air-pumps and peered through prisms, and they were...mostly wrong. It took ~200 years for this promise to really start paying off, which is why we only reached the crook of the Hockey Stick sometime after 1800.

So for two centuries, the progenitors of modern science mainly made fools of themselves. Early on, a popular play called The Virtuoso ridiculed the Royal Society (the organization that housed most of the important early scientists) by depicting some of their actual experiments on stage—a buffoonish natural philosopher tries to “swim on dry land by imitating a frog” and transfuses sheep’s blood into a man, causing a tail to grow out of the man’s butt. A few decades later, the politician Sir William Temple claimed that no material benefits had come from the “airy Speculations of those, who have passed for the great Advancers of Knowledge and Learning.” And fifty years after that, the writer Samuel Johnson looked upon the works of science and judged them to be “meh”:

When the Philosophers of the last age were first congregated into the Royal Society, great expectations were raised of the sudden progress of useful arts [...] The society met and parted without any visible diminution of the miseries of life.

THE RACCOON WILL SEE YOU NOW

Every new scientific investigation must trace this same path. You must first estrange yourself from the old ways of thinking, and then you must fall in love with new ways of thinking, and you must do both of these things before they are reasonable. Whatever the real scientific method is, these must be the first two steps. Incumbent theories are always going to be stronger than their younger challengers—at first. Only the truly foolish will be able to discover the evidence that ultimately overturns the old and establishes the new.

But this isn’t a general purpose, broad spectrum foolishness. It’s a laser-targeted, precise kind of foolishness. Falling in love with a fledgling idea is fine, but eventually you have to produce better experiments and more convincing explanations than the establishment can muster, or else your theory is going to go where 99% of them go, which is nowhere. And this is where the rules do matter. We remember Galileo because his arguments, as weird as they were at the time, ultimately held up.8 We would not remember him if he tried to claim that the Earth turns on its axis because there’s a sort of cosmic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spinning it on his fingertip like a basketball.9

People call it “Nobel Disease” when scientist-laureates do nutty things like talk to imaginary fluorescent raccoons, as if this nuttiness is a tax on the scientists’ talent. But that’s backwards: that nuttiness is part of their talent. The craziness it takes to talk to the raccoons is the same craziness it takes to try creating a polymerase chain reaction when everybody tells you it won’t work. It’s just an extremely specific and rare kind of craziness. You have to grasp reality firmly enough to understand it, but loosely enough to let it speak. Which is to say, our posters of the “Scientific Method” should look like this:

FAREWELL TO REASON

Back in 2011, a psychologist named Daryl Bem published a bunch of studies claiming to show that ESP is real. This helped jumpstart the replication crisis in psychology, and some folks wonder whether that was Bem’s intention all along—maybe his wack-a-doo experiments were a false flag operation meant to expose the weakness of our methods.

I don’t think that’s true of Bem, but it might well be true of Feyerabend. Against Method is a medium-is-the-message kind of book: it’s meant to induce the same kind of madness that Feyerabend claims is necessary for scientific progress. That’s why he praises voodoo and astrology, that’s why he spends a whole chapter doing a non-sequitur close-reading of Homer10, and that’s even why he mentions his blasé attitude toward his Nazi days—he wants to upset you. He’s trying to pull a Galileo, to make an argument that’s obviously at odds with the facts, trying to trick you into looking closer at those facts so that you’ll see they’re shakier than you thought. He wants you to clutch your pearls because he knows they’ll crumble to dust in your hands.

This is the guy who once exclaimed in an interview, “I have no position! [...] I have opinions that I defend rather vigorously, and then I find out how silly they are, and I give them up!”11 He’s a stick of dynamite—you toss him into your mind so you can see what floats to the surface. And once the waves subside and the quiet returns, perhaps then you will hear the voice of the fluorescent raccoon, and perhaps you will listen.

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy.

It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility.

We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-status route will end up either begging our overlords to do the right thing, or trying to drum up the votes necessary to replace them.

Option #2 is to go high-sacrifice: sell everything you have and spend your life earning $7/hr to scrub the toilets in an orphanage. Only a virtuous few will have the saintliness necessary to live such a life, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-sacrifice path will end up writing checks to the martyrs on the front lines.

These paths aren’t wrong. They’re just too narrow. Money, power, and selflessness are all useful tools in the right hands, but the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against, bought off, or undone with a hunger strike. When we focus on just two avenues for making the world better, we exclude almost everybody, leaving most of us with a kind of constipated altruism—we’ve got the urge to do good, but nothing comes out.

I don’t know all the ways to get our good intentions unblocked. That’s why, whenever I spot someone changing the world via a righteous road less taken, I write it down on a little list. I glance at that list from time to time as a way of expanding my imagination, and now I’m sharing it in the hopes that it’ll do the same for you.

1. BE THE SECOND-BRAVEST PERSON

Between 2004 and 2016, a Kentucky lawyer extracted $550 million from the US government via bogus disability claims. He used shady doctors to fake the forms and a crooked judge to approve them. That lawyer’s name, in a perfect example of nominative determinism, was Eric C. Conn.

The fraud might have gone on forever if Jennifer Griffith, a paralegal working in the Social Security Administration, hadn’t noticed the brazen fakery. She did the brave thing and told someone about it.

But here’s the part of the story that really gets me: the person she told also did the brave thing—she listened. Griffith’s friend and coworker Sarah Carver was immediately like, “This is really bad, we need to do something about it.” Carver and Griffith attempted to expose Conn’s con for years, filing complaint after complaint, which were all ignored until a Wall Street Journal reporter happened upon the story. The duo eventually testified before Congress and in court. Conn went to jail, as did the judge and at least one of the shady docs.1

Whenever a scandal breaks—a CEO has been embezzling money, a Hollywood producer has been sexually assaulting people, a scientist has been faking data—people are always like “wow, crazy that no one spoke up about it.” But there’s always someone speaking up about it. They whisper it to a friend, they try to bring it up to their boss, they write an anonymous post on Reddit about how they’re working at a scam company and they don’t know what to do. Wrongdoing often goes unchecked not because we’re missing the bravest person, but because we’re missing the second-bravest person, the one who hears the whistleblower and starts blowing their own whistle too.

2. MAKE A SCENE

Nobody’s heard of Samuel Hartlib, Henry Oldenburg, or The Right Reverend John Wilkins, but modern science might not exist without them.

The ten-second history of science goes like this: for about 1200 years, people scribbled in the margins of Aristotle. Then one day Francis Bacon said “hey guys let’s do science” and people were like “sounds good.” But that only happened because a handful of folks made science into a scene.

Hartlib, Oldenburg, Wilkins and their friends established societies, wrote pamphlets, edited journals, and trained apprentices. Hartlib sent approximately one bajillion letters to budding scientists and inventors, hounding them to put their knowledge to practical use. Oldenburg convinced his friends to stop hiding their results—a common practice back then—and publish them instead. Wilkins was a friend to everybody and ensured that science didn’t become just an Anglican thing or a Catholic thing. If not for him, science might have ended up on one side of the English Civil War, and if that side lost, science could have stopped in its tracks for centuries.

Wilkins’ own Wikipedia page notes that he was “not one of the most important scientific innovators of the period”—ouch—but that he “was a lover of mankind, and had a delight in doing good,” aww.

I meet lots of idealistic folks who think that all they’re missing is money, or credentials, or access to the levers of power. More often, what they’re really missing is friends. Only a crazy person can toil alone for very long. But with a couple of buddies, you can toil pretty much forever, because it doesn’t feel like toil. That’s how you end up with what economic historians call “efflorescences” and Brian Eno called “scenius“ (“scene” + “genius”): hotspots of cool stuff. And for that, we need not just a Francis Bacon, but also a whole gang of Right Reverend Wilkinses.

3. SWITCHBOARDING

Mahzarin Banaji, one of the most famous psychologists alive today, originally planned to be a secretary. Then this happened:

I was traveling home from New Delhi to Hyderabad. At a major railway juncture, I stepped off the train to visit a bookstore on the platform where I bought a set of books that changed the course of my life. Five volumes of the Handbook of Social Psychology (1968) edited by Lindzey and Aronson, were being offered for the equivalent of a dollar a piece.

[...]

I bought the Handbooks out of mild interest in their content, but mostly because it seemed like a lot of book for the money. By the time I reached home twenty hours later, I had polished off a volume and knew with blunt clarity that this form of science was what I wanted to do.

I sometimes wonder: who put those books there? The Handbook is not exactly light reading, and that bookstore could not have been moving a lot of units. And yet a chain of people all decided it was important to put that knowledge on a shelf at a train station somewhere between New Delhi and Hyderabad—and they did this 40 years ago, when that was much more complicated.

I think of this as switchboarding, trying to get the right information to the right person. Someone’s got an empty seat/someone needs a ride. You’re getting into the history of plumbing/I know exactly the book you should read. Your cousin is moving to San Diego and doesn’t know anyone/my former rugby teammate lives there, maybe they can be friends. No two people have the same constellation of connections, nor the same trove of information, and so each of us is a switchboard unto ourselves, responsible for routing every kilobyte to its appropriate destination. Whoever put the Handbook in Banaji’s hands, they were damn good switchboards.

The internet makes it seem like switchboarding is obsolete, but it’s more important than ever. When you’ve got instant access to infinite information, you need someone to show you where to start. And the most important info is still locked up inside people’s heads. If we can unlock it and send it where it needs to go, we can turn it into friendships, marriages, businesses, and unlikely psychologists.

4. CRACK YOUR KNUCKLES

Here is an exemplary scientific paper:

During the author’s childhood, various renowned authorities (his mother, several aunts, and, later, his mother-in-law [personal communication]) informed him that cracking his knuckles would lead to arthritis of the fingers. To test the accuracy of this hypothesis, the following study was undertaken.

For 50 years, the author cracked the knuckles of his left hand at least twice a day, leaving those on the right as a control. Thus, the knuckles on the left were cracked at least 36,500 times, while those on the right cracked rarely and spontaneously. At the end of the 50 years, the hands were compared for the presence of arthritis.

There was no arthritis in either hand, and no apparent differences between the two hands.

People often think they can’t do research because they don’t have a giant magnet or a laser or a closet full of reagents. But they have something the professional scientists don’t have: freedom. The pros can’t do anything that’s too weird, takes too long, or would raise the suspicion of an Institutional Review Board. That kind of stuff has to happen in a basement or a backyard, which is why the “paper” above is, in fact, a letter to the editor written by a medical doctor on a lark.

Independent investigators can thus explore where others fear to tread. For instance:

• Lots of people would like to lose weight, and lots of people have unwarranted certainty about how to do that. It takes an internet weirdo to run self-experiments on popular-but-unverified hypotheses like “maybe we should eat more coconut oil” or “maybe the problem is we’re all carrying an electrical charge all the time.”

• Joy Milne, a Scottish nurse, realized she could smell when people had Parkinson’s Disease. She convinced a medical researcher to take her skills seriously, and now there’s a growing effort to detect Parkinson’s early via the stinky stuff that oozes out of humans.

• This guy on Reddit claims to have cured his wife’s 20-year migraine by cleaning their HVAC system. If even one other person heals their headaches by dusting their ducts, this is way more impact than the average scientific paper.

(See also: An Invitation to a Secret Society)

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5. POST GOOD, QUEEN

Culture is everything. If our culture says it’s cool to chase a wheel of cheese down a hill, we will. If our culture says it’s important to dress up in colorful clothes and douse people with buckets of water, we’ll do that. If our culture says that we should use an obsidian blade to cut people’s hearts out of their chests and offer them to the god Huitzilopochtli, we’ll do that too. So it’s pretty important to get our culture right.

We act as if culture is a thing that happens to us, rather than a thing we all make together. That used to be true, of course. When only a few people could read and write, they got to make all the culture themselves. All that started to change as more people got literate, but it really changed once most people got an internet connection. For the first time in history, we all have some say in whether we’re more of a cheese wheel culture, an obsidian blade culture, or, you know, something else.

And yet, to borrow what Douglas Adams said about the creation of the universe, “this has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Most people think that social media has made things worse:

If you don’t like how culture is going, that’s a huge opportunity, because culture is us. You can move the needle just by showing up to the places you like to be, posting and promoting the kind of stuff you’d like to see, ignoring the things you don’t like, and vacating the places you think are bad. I’ve personally been inspired and influenced by the people who do this well, like Visa Veerasamy, Alice Maz, Sasha Chapin, Aella, and Defender of Basic.

I think of them as the partygoers who are committed to having a good time, no matter how good the party itself is. Yes, sometimes the music is too loud, the food is bad, the beer is warm, and the whole thing is run by billionaires who are trying to turn your attention into money. You could stand in the corner complaining about how bad and stupid and unfair it all is. Or you could join the handful of people hanging out on the couch and cracking each other up. If enough people do that, eventually the whole party is that couch.

6. GO TO A NONDESCRIPT GOVERNMENT BUILDING AND DO A GOOD JOB

Cave-ins used to kill a few hundred miners every year. Now that number is usually zero, in large part thanks to an algorithm developed by Chris Mark, who started out as a union organizer, then became a coal miner, then trained as an engineer, then went to work for the Bureau of Mines and figured out how to prevent coal mines from collapsing.

It turns out there are lots of Chris Marks out there, relentlessly solving problems from nondescript government offices. You’ve got Arthur Allen, who developed a search system that locates people faster when they’re lost at sea. There’s Pius Bannis, who organized the evacuation and adoption of 1,100 orphaned children after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. There’s Tony Mento, Camille Otto, and Hari Kalla, who helped get the I-95 bridge back up in 12 days after it collapsed last year. And there’s Darnita Trower, Wanda Brown, and Gerald Johnson, who updated the government’s IT so that nobody has to physically mail anything to the IRS anymore.

Among the high-achieving crowd, it’s only cool to work in government if you’re leading it. So it’s fine to be a Chief of Staff or the Secretary of Labor, but it’s kinda cringe to be a Associate Administrator for Infrastructure or a Principal Strata Control Specialist. And yet, if you drive on I-95, if you work in a mine or on a boat, if an earthquake hits, or if you just want to file your damn taxes, you depend on folks with unimpressive titles doing impressive things.

I know this might sound rich to Americans because our incoming president has vowed to shutter many of these government buildings. But if you look at someone like Chris Mark, he succeeded not just because he was good at math and mines, but also because he found a problem that everybody agreed was worth solving, so he could continue his work across the inevitable change of administrations. It’s hard to thread that needle, which is why these are underrated ways of changing the world, not easy ones.

7. BUILD YOUR RUNK

I think about this tweet a lot:

Or as XKCD puts it:

Notice they both use the word “maintain”—not “invent,” not “lead,” but maintain. The power of a RUNK is that it works consistently. It was there counting numbers before it was cool, and it keeps counting numbers no matter how cool it gets. That’s why you don’t have to be a tech person to build a RUNK. If you do something even moderately useful and you do it no matter what, then people will realize you’re going to be around a while, and they can start building things on top of you.

Back in high school, I didn’t have a Ronald, but I did have a Peggy. She ran the Youth Grantmaking Council of Huron County, which sounds official, but it was really just Peggy convening a dozen high schoolers in a church basement, and telling us we should should raise money by doing car washes and hosting junior high dances, and then we should give the money away. YGC has been going for over two decades, and now there’s a whole web of people in rural Ohio who depend on getting a check from those teens. And the whole thing runs on Peggy, who has many fine qualities that make her a good YGC mentor, but the most important one is that she shows up every year.

GOD IS BREAD

Sometimes when I think about everything that’s wrong with the world, I get indignant, like: why wasn’t all this fixed out by the time I got here? I mean, really? In 2024? We’re still doing this?

But then I think: why do I, uniquely, deserve to be born in good times? Am I the Most Special Boy in the Universe? My ancestors died in famines and plagues, they suffered under evil kings, they got cut down in stupid wars that were fought because some people thought God is literally a piece of bread and other people thought God is only figuratively a piece of bread.

They all deserved a better world than the one they got. So do I. So do all of us! If only we could convince God to fast-forward us to the future where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Alas, He cannot hear us, for He is a piece of bread.

So it’s up to us. When I wrote There’s a Place for Everyone a few months ago, I got a lot of messages that were like, “Well, there’s certainly no place for me.” That breaks my heart. Look at the world! See it aching! It’s got so many problems—I promise you, there’s one with your name on it.

If none of these seven suit you, that’s fine; seven is not a lot! Fortunately, they come from an infinite list. (#8 is “make the list longer.”) I doubt any of these folks grew up thinking they would one day bust the largest Social Security scam in history, or that they’d be the ones to make science palatable to Puritans, or that they’d be best-known for cracking their knuckles or updating a government website. And yet they left the world a little bit better, and they did it without the power of a king or the sacrifice of a saint. For that I salute them, and I say, thank Bread that they exist.

It’s Election Day in the US, which means everybody is waiting in lines and refreshing their newsfeeds all day, looking for things to do in between bouts of freaking out. So I’m gonna keep things light with the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a roundup of stuff I’ve been reading for the past few months.

(1) GET THE LEAD OUT

We’ve known since Roman times that lead pipes can poison people. So uh...why have we used them for ~2000 years? Have we just been poisoning ourselves all this time? According to this paper from 1981, lead pipes are usually fine because a protective mineral crust forms on the inside. But the crust won’t form if you’ve got the wrong minerals in your water, and that’s when you run into trouble.

It seems like people realize this every few decades, freak out, and the lead pipe industry responds by lobbying local governments to write requirements for lead pipes into their building codes. In Chicago, for instance, it was illegal not to use lead pipes until 1986.

(2) According to his chief of staff, Ronald Regan routinely received astrological guidance via his wife Nancy, who secretly consulted an astrologer named Joan Quigley.

(3) GOODHART’S LAW IN ACTION

Citi Bikes pays users to move bikes from stations that have too many bikes to stations that have too few. Apparently you can make a buck by moving all the bikes from one station to another, and then moving them all back.

(4) SUBSTACK REC

I really dig , an all-book-review Substack. Check out their review of a book called Fear of a Setting Sun, which is about how most of the Founding Fathers ended up thinking that the United States had gone disastrously wrong and was about to collapse.

(5) WAR! HUH! YEAH! WHAT IS IT…? SERIOUSLY THOUGH. I’M LITERALLY ASKING WHAT IT IS

Lots of ideas that seem obvious now had to be invented by somebody, like randomized-controlled trials, crop rotation, and zero (the number). The anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that we should add war to the list: war is an invention, one that some cultures never came up with. For example, when someone pisses you off, instead of going to war you can swear before the gods that you’ll never speak to each other ever again.

(6) The original Hippocratic oath includes a promise not to seduce anybody in your patient’s household. I refuse to accept treatment from any doctor who has not made this pledge. (h/t )

(7) I’M BUGGIN’

Everybody my age remembers that wild autumn of 1998 when the movies Antz and A Bug’s Life came out within a few weeks of each other. Both were “computer-animated films about insects, starring a non-conformist ant who falls in love with an ant princess, leaves the mound, and eventually returns and is hailed as a hero.”

I didn’t realize this kind of thing happens all the time—there are several “twin films” every year. For instance, 2023’s The Pope’s Exorcist and 2024’s The Exorcism both star Russel Crowe as an exorcist. Three films about stage magicians came out in 2006: The Prestige, The Illusionist, and Scoop. If you loved 2018’s A Quiet Place, you’ll love 2019’s The Silence, because “both are about parents with a deaf teenage daughter trying to survive a planet-wide attack from creatures who hunt their human prey by sound.”

Sometimes twin films happen on purpose—a studio tries to rush out some derivative dreck to capitalize on a more famous movie’s success. But sometimes twin films are simply evidence of the bizarre power of the zeitgeist. The Silence started production before A Quiet Place, and it was based on a book from 2015; it just got unlucky and came out slightly too late.

(8) THE HIGH SCHOOL THAT MAKES PEOPLE BELIEVE IN EVIL

Speaking of zeitgeist, I only recently discovered that two of the most famous social psychologists of all time—Stanley Milgram and Phil Zimbardo—went to the same high school. Milgram is best known for his shock studies, where an alarming proportion of people were willing to electrocute a stranger to death in the lab. Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was once a classic piece of research, but has since been revealed to be more like an episode of reality TV—Zimbardo apparently directed his “guards” to do all the horrible things he later claimed they did themselves. According to Zimbardo, he was the popular one in high school, and Milgram was the smart one.

Anyway, I’m not sure what it was about James Monroe High School in the Bronx that made its students want to perform elaborate pantomimes that demonstrate people’s capacity for evil, but maybe it’s good that the school has since shut down.

(9) Gregor Mendel was originally going to use mice for his famous heredity experiments, but he switched to peas because the bishop in charge of his abbey didn’t want mice boinking in the building.

Edit 11/6/24: This may not be true! See this comment.

(10) I SAW THE GIANT TRACTOR AND I WAS LIKE, WHAT

Like most adults, I don’t know how to talk to kids (“So, uh, do you like that show about the dogs who are also cops?”). So I loved this article from about how kids need different conversational doorknobs than adults do. For instance, we think it’s polite to ask open-ended questions, but it’s easier for kids to respond to multiple-choice questions:

• Instead of “Did you have fun at gymnastics?” try “Did you love gymnastics today or hate it?” or “Which do you like better, gymnastics or drawing? Or sitting silently in the dark doing nothing?” 

• Instead of “What’s your favorite food?” you could ask, “Which food do you like best: pizza, ramen, or fish guts?” 

And sometimes it’s easier not to ask at all. Instead, you can offer an interesting tidbit that kids can react to:

“On my way here I saw a tractor with the most gigantic tires I have ever seen! They were bigger than my car! I was like, ‘whaaaat????’”

(11) BROWNE NOISE

There’s nothing more quintessentially human than being extremely skeptical about most things but extremely credulous about one specific thing. The best case of this I’ve found is Sir Thomas Browne, an English physician who wrote Psuedodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths in 1646. He was a one-man fact-checking department, spending hundreds of pages busting popular myths like:

• Crystals are just tightly-packed ice

• If a wolf sees you before you see the wolf, you’ll lose your voice

• Women have more ribs than men (because God used one of Adam’s ribs to make Eve)

That same Sir Thomas, however, also testified that witches definitely exist, and helped convict two girls accused of witchcraft, who were then hanged. We all contain multitudes, except those of us who are executed by the state because the local expert believes in witches.

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(12) THE ORIGINAL SCAT ARTIST

Another guy with multitudes: Mozart. The guy who wrote the tune for “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” also wrote stuff like this to his cousin/possible crush:

Well, I wish you good night, but first,

Shit in your bed and make it burst.

Wolfgang and his whole clan loved scatological humor—apparently “Lick my arse” was sort of a Mozart family motto. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff because we all think great minds are serious and grim, when in fact they’re just as weird as the rest of us. Imagine what horrifying Wikipedia pages might be generated if you became a world-famous artist and scholars pored through your texts after you died.

(13) BEES IN THE TRAP

Earlier this year, I wrote about how a Harvard Business School professor named Francesca Gino was suing the science blog Data Colada for alleging fraud in Gino’s studies. Great news: that lawsuit has been dismissed, which is a victory for scientific discourse everywhere. Just in case, though, I must remind you that nothing on Experimental History can be considered defamation because there’s no evidence I’m sentient at all; I’m just a swarm of bees trapped in a room with a keyboard (PLZ SEND HONEY).

(14) During Prohibition, desperate folks sometimes tried to drink industrial alcohol. The government responded by ordering manufacturers to poison their alcohol, likely killing ~10,000 people.

(15) HOW 2 MAKE LIL DUDES

Worried about declining fertility? Try this recipe for creating an artificial man (c. 1537):

That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb [“venter equinus”, meaning “warm, fermenting horse dung”], or at least so long that it comes to life and moves itself, and stirs, which is easily observed. After this time, it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.

(16) A bit of internet performance art: How to Monetize a Blog

(17) TOAST ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM

In my last links post, I mentioned an Experimental History reader who put his toaster in the dishwasher. A blogger named Nehaveigur has since posted a replication:

I’m now able to report that after drying out in the sun, my toaster still works and is considerably cleaner and that my skepticism of Conventional Wisdom has marginally increased.

(18) MAKE IT RAIN FOR A GOOD CAUSE

An Experimental History reader named Matthew Coleman asked to share a link to Giving Multiplier, a platform that adds extra money to your charitable donations. That link includes a special promo code that will boost your donation even more than the usual rate.

(19) U KNOW U NEED UNIQUENESS

A recent paper claims that people’s “need for uniqueness” has declined over the last 20 years. It would suit my biases if that was true—it fits well with the stuff I wrote about in Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly and Oligopoly Everywhere—so I had to be extra careful while reading it. Ultimately, I’m not sure if it can tell us much.

The researchers analyzed responses to an online personality survey that was administered between 2000 and 2020 and includes such items as “I always try to follow rules” and “I tend to express my opinions publicly, regardless of what others say.” They find a statistically significant decrease in people’s self-reported desire for uniqueness over time.

But that decrease is tiny. We’re talking -.008 units per year on a scale that goes from 1 to 5. Here’s what that looks like:

In the Illusion of Moral Decline, I counted changes like this—whether up or down—as meaningless, for three reasons. First, I mean, look at it. Second, you should never expect to get exactly the same answer to a survey question over time: maybe slightly different people are taking the survey or using the internet in the first place, etc., so tiny changes are always suspect.

And third, rather than squinting at each effect and trying to decide whether it was big enough to matter, I set a “Region of Practical Equivalence” (really I just used the default in my stats program) and checked whether the effect fell into it or out of it. This effect would have to be 10x larger to beat that benchmark. So to the extent that “need for uniqueness” is a thing, I don’t think there’s any good evidence that it’s changed over the past 20 years.

(20) LIVING THE MILLER HIGH LIFE

I’ve listened to the Two Psychologists, Four Beers podcast for a long time, so it was a real treat to be on a recent episode. I drank two Miller High Lifes and tried to explain why scientists shouldn’t go to jail.

(21) IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST UPDATE

In my last post, I showed that both Democrats and Republicans can pass an Ideological Turing Test. Some folks thought the test was too easy for the people writing the statements—people pretending to be the other side can just write a few sentences of boilerplate and look exactly like the real thing. Maybe Readers couldn’t tell the difference because there simply wasn’t any signal for them to detect.

This is a reasonable critique, but it doesn’t fit the evidence. People pretending to the be opposite political party did leave signal behind, but the Readers failed to pick it up. We know that because we were able to build an algorithm that reliably distinguished real statements from fake statements. My coauthor Kris has since done some additional analyses, and he was able to outperform both humans and chance by using bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) in combination with a lasso regression:

Still not perfect, but the fact that BERT gives the right answer 60-80% of the time suggests that pretenders do indeed sound different from the real thing.

(22) FROM THE ARCHIVES

Two years ago, I was trying to figure out: how much should we hate each other?

Experimental History

The great myths of political hatred

Read more

2 years ago · 99 likes · 18 comments · Adam Mastroianni

(23) And finally: Toilets disguised as books.

See y’all soon.

-Adam

This is joint work with Jason Dana and Kris Nichols. You can download a PDF version of this paper on PsyArxiv.

I dunno if you’ve heard, but Democrats and Republicans do not like each other. 83% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Republicans, and Republicans return the lack of favor in similar numbers. Republicans think Democrats are immoral, Democrats think Republicans are dishonest, and a majority of both parties describes the other party as “brainwashed,” “hateful,” and “racist.” These numbers have only grown in recent decades.

(One particularly evocative statistic: only an estimated 10% of marriages cross party lines.)

But here’s something funny—according to a bunch of recent research, Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to know who they’re hating. For example, Democrats underestimate the number of Republicans who think that sexism exists and that immigration can be good. In return, Republicans overestimate how many Democrats think that the US should have open borders and adopt socialism. Both parties think they’re more polarized than they actually are. And majority of both sides basically say, “I love democracy, I think it’s great,” and then they also say, “The other party does NOT love democracy, they think it’s bad.”

Maybe these parties hate each other because they misperceive each other? While Democrats and Republicans dislike and dehumanize each other, each side actually overestimates the other side’s hate, and those exaggerated meta-perceptions (“what I think that you think about me”) predict how much they want to do nasty undemocratic things, like gerrymander congressional districts in their party’s favor or shut down the other side’s favorite news channel. When you show people what their political opponents are really like, they see the other side as “less obstructionist,” they like the other side more, and they report being “more hopeful.”

It would be a heartwarming story if it turns out all of our political differences were one big misunderstanding. That story is, no doubt, at least a little true.

But there are two things that stick in my craw about all these misperception studies. First, we know that participants sometimes respond expressively—that is, when Democrats in psychology studies say things like, “Yes, I believe the average Republican would drone-strike a bus full of puppies if they had the chance,” what they really mean is “I don’t like Republicans.” It’s hard to separate legit misperceptions from people airing their grievances.

Second, it’s not clear whether we’ve given people a fair test of how well they “perceive” the other side. So far, researchers have just kinda picked some questions they thought would be interesting, and “interesting” probably means—consciously or subconsciously—“questions where we’re likely to find some big honkin’ misperceptions.” Someone with the opposite bias could almost certainly write just as many papers about accurate cross-party perceptions. There are infinite questions we can ask and there’s no way of randomly sampling from them.

To start untangling this mess, maybe we need to leave the lab and go visit Colorado Springs in 1978.

THE IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST

That was where a Black police officer named Ron Stallworth posed as an aspiring White supremacist, befriended some Ku Klux Klan members over the phone, and convinced them to let him join their club. (His White partner played the part in person.) At one point, Stallworth got David Duke, the Grand Wizard himself, to expedite his application. By the end of Stallworth’s investigation, the local chapter of the KKK was trying to put him in charge.

(If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it was made into the 2018 Oscar-winning movie BlacKkKlansman.)

Stallworth passed a pretty high-stakes test of his knowledge of Klan psychology, which the economist Bryan Caplan calls the “Ideological Turing Test”—if I can pretend to be on your side, and you can’t tell I’m pretending, then I probably understand you pretty well. In the original Turing Test, people try to tell the difference between a human and a computer. In the Ideological Turing Test, people try to tell the difference between friend and foe.

We thought this would be a useful way of investigating misperceptions between Republicans and Democrats. We first challenged each side to pretend to be the other side, and then we had both sides try to distinguish between the truth-tellers and the fakers. If partisans have no idea who the other side is or what they believe, it should be hard for people to do a convincing impression of the opposite party. So let’s see!

You can access all the materials, data, and code here.1

PART I: WRITERS

We got 902 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk, roughly split between Democrats and Republicans. (Sorry, Independents: to take the study, you had to identify with one side or the other.)

We asked participants to write a statement of at least 100 words based on one of two prompts, either “I’m a REPUBLICAN because…” or “I’m a DEMOCRAT because…”. Let’s call these folks Writers. The prompts were randomly assigned, so half of Writers were told to tell the truth, and half of people were told to lie.

Writers knew that other participants—let’s call them Readers—would later read their statements and guess whether each Writer was telling the truth or lying. We offered Writers a bonus if they could convince a majority of readers that their statement was true.

(This was pre-ChatGPT, when it wasn’t so easy to whip up some human-sounding text on demand.)

We tossed out a few statements that were either a) totally unintelligible, b) obviously copy/pasted from elsewhere on the internet, or c) responding to the wrong prompt. But otherwise, we kept them all in.2

PART II: READERS

We got another group of 746 Democrats and Republicans, and we explained the first half of the study to them. Then we showed them 16 statements from Part I, which were a mix of real/fake and Democrat/Republican. We asked them to guess whether each one was REAL or FAKE, and we paid them a bonus for getting more right, up to $4.

TIME OUT: DO YOU WANNA TRY THIS FOR YOURSELF?

Before you see the results, you can take the Ideological Turing Test for a spin! A software engineer named vanntile generously volunteered to turn this study into a slick web app: ituringtest.com. You’ll see 10 randomly-selected statements and judge whether each one is real or fake; it takes about three minutes.

(Huge thanks to vanntile for building this, like an angel that came down from Computer Heaven. If you have any interesting projects in software engineering or cybersecurity in Europe, check him out.)

RESULTS

First, let’s look at the most important trials: Democrats reading real/fake Democrat statements, and Republicans reading real/fake Republican statements. Could people tell the difference between an ally and a pretender?

For Democrats, the answer is no:

For Republicans, the answer is also no:

Fake Democrats and fake Republicans were as convincing as real Democrats and real Republicans.

That means Writers did a good job! When Democrats were pretending to be Republicans, they could have written stuff like, “I’m a Republican because I believe every toddler should have an Uzi.” And when Republicans were pretending to be Democrats, they could have written stuff like, “I’m a Democrat because I’m a witch and I want to cast a spell that turns everyone gay.” They didn’t do that. They wrote statements that looked as legit as statements from people talking about their actual beliefs. So: both Democrats and Republicans successfully passed the Ideological Turing Test.

That’s already surprising, but it gets weirder.

Every participant, regardless of their own party, saw a random mix of all four kinds of statements (real/fake and Democrat/Republican). Here’s a no-brainer: Republicans should be better at picking out real/fake Republicans than they are at picking out real/fake Democrats, right? And Democrats should be better at picking out real/fake Democrats than they are at picking out real/fake Republicans. After all, you should know more about your own side.

Except…that didn’t happen. This next graph gets a little more complicated, so I’ll preface it with the three things that jump out at me:

1. Neither side did a good job discriminating between real and fake, no matter which party the statement claimed to come from.

2. Republicans said “REAL” at pretty much the same rate to all four kinds of statements.

3. Democrats were more likely to flag all Republican statements as fake, whether those statements were actually fake or not.

RESULTS, BUT FOR NERDS

To zoom in on how well Readers did, we can use a measure from signal detection theory called d-prime. All you need to know about d-prime is that zero means you’re at chance (you could have done just as well by flipping a coin), above zero means you’re better than chance, and below zero means you’re worse than chance.

Readers from both parties performed basically at chance, regardless of the kind of statements they were reading:

There are a couple ways to end up performing at chance. You could say “REAL!” to every statement, or you could say “FAKE!” to every statement, or you could respond randomly. We want to know which one Readers were doing, and signal detection theory has another measure that can help with that: “c”. On the “c” scale, scores above zero mean participants said “REAL!” too often. Scores below zero would mean participants said “FAKE!” too often.

Participants ended up performing at chance in large part because they said “REAL!” too often:

One weird thing here: Democrats trust Democrat-claiming statements more than they trust Republican-claiming statements. But Republicans trust both kinds of statements equally. I’m not sure what to make of that, especially because Democrats still trust Republican-claiming statements more than they should.

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CONFIDENCE

We asked Readers how confident they were about each of their guesses. Overall, confidence was not related to accuracy.

On the graph below, I’m only including the critical trials—Democrats reading statements that claim to be from Democrats, and Republicans reading statements that claim to be from Republicans. This graph is pretty confusing until you understand the pattern: people felt more confident when they thought a statement was real. So people had high confidence on real statements that they got right and on fake statements they got wrong.

BUT HOW DEMOCRAT/REPUBLICAN DO THE STATEMENTS LOOK?

After Readers guessed whether each statement was real or fake, we also asked them, “How strongly do you think the writer of this statement identifies with the Democratic party?” and “How strongly do you think the writer of this statement identifies with the Republican party?” You could think of this as a more sensitive measure than a simple stab at real/fake. For instance, if you think this is a real Republican statement, just how Republican is the person who wrote it?

Using these ratings, we can see that fake statements seem just as partisan as real statements. For instance, Readers thought fake Republicans and real Republicans sounded equally Republican:

This suggests our fake Writers were doing something pretty similar to what the real Writers were doing. Fakers could have easily phoned in their statements, maybe because it was difficult for them even to type words that they didn’t believe. For instance, Republicans pretending to be Democrats could have said something like, “I’m a Democrat, but I’m a moderate one! Almost a Republican, really...”. Or they could have gone overboard: “I’m the rootin’est tootin’est Democrat you ever did see!” On average, they didn’t do either of those things. They wrote statements that sounded just as Democrat as statements from real Democrats.

COULD WRITERS PREDICT THEIR (LACK OF) SUCCESS?

In Part I, we asked Writers to predict how well their statement would do—that is, the percentage of Readers who would judge their statement as “REAL!”. On average, Writers guessed correctly. But each individual writer was way off; there was no correlation between their predictions and their performance. So although Writers didn’t over- or under-estimate their performance on average, they had no idea how well their statement was going to do. They were just wrong.

Here’s the graph for Democrat Writers predicting how well they’ll fool Republican Readers:

And Republican Writers predicting how well they’ll fool Democrat Readers:

(I know that line looks like it’s significantly sloped; it’s actually p = .05).

WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE ARE BETTER AT WRITING? WHAT KINDS OF PEOPLE ARE BETTER AT READING?

So far, I’ve been showing you lots of averages. But of course, some Writers wrote statements that sounded way more convincing than others, and some Readers were way better at picking out the real statements from the fake ones. We tried to figure out what made these Writers and Readers better or worse at their jobs, but we couldn’t find much.

Here’s a reasonable hypothesis: the more you identify with one party, the harder it is to pretend to be the other party. Die-hard Democrats probably think all Republicans are nutjobs; die-hard Republicans probably think all Democrats are wackos. In both cases, extremists should be worse at faking, and worse at identifying the fakes.

This reasonable hypothesis is wrong. We asked participants how strongly they identified with each party, and it didn’t affect how well they did as Writers or as Readers, regardless of what they were writing or reading. Across the board, the nutjobs and the wackos were just as good as the mild-mannered centrists.

We also asked people about their age, race, gender, and education. And we tried to figure out the political makeup of their social environment—for instance, maybe Democrats who live in red states or have a lot of Republican friends or family would do better than Democrats who live in blue states and only ever talk to other Democrats. But none of these demographics ever affected Writing or Reading performance more than 5 percentage points, and in most cases they didn’t matter at all.

CAN COMPUTERS DO WHAT HUMANS CAN’T?

At this point, we started wondering whether it was even possible to tell the difference between real and fake statements. Maybe Writers were so good that they left no detectable trace. That would be pretty impressive, though it might also mean our task was too easy.

To find out, we did a bunch of fancy computer stuff. Well, specifically, my friend Kris Nichols did a bunch of fancy computer stuff.

Surprisingly, a lot of the fancy computer stuff didn’t outperform humans. Random forest models? No better than chance. Latent Dirichlet Analysis? Bupkis. The only thing that worked was a souped-up lasso regression, which got the right answer about 70% of the time—much better than the 50% humans got. This means there was something different about real and fake statements; humans just couldn’t pick it out.

EDIT 11/4/24:

Kris ran some additional analyses where he got a computer to do even better. He used bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) in combination with the lasso regression above, and got even better results. As you can see below, BERT is able to discriminate between real and fake statements, although it’s still far from perfect:

WHAT ABOUT THAT COMPUTER THAT CAN TALK TO YOU?

We gave ChatGPT the same instructions that we gave the human participants, and then fed it 48 statements (kind of like taking the study three times). We ran this in May 2024 using the paid version, which I believe was called GPT-4 at the time.

Here’s how it did:

ChatGPT really thought people were telling the truth. There was one statement that began:

I am a Democrat because I am a transgender midget. I feel like I am a woman inside and It does not reflect this. I m currently in transition and I find only democrats accept me. I live in Portland Oregon and love the city as it really reflects who I am.

ChatGPT thought that statement was real. (It wasn’t.) Indeed, ChatGPT was too credulous overall, even more so than humans.

(Sarcastic statements like the one above were really rare. And if you want to see more statements, remember you can try this study yourself.)

DISCUSSION

Do Republicans and Democrats understand one another? The answer from research so far has been a resounding “NO!” According to the Ideological Turing Test, however, both sides seem to understand each other about as well as they understand themselves.

Of course, the ITT isn’t the be-all, end-all measure of misperception. Like any other measure, it’s just one peek at the problem. But this peek seems a bit deeper and wider than asking people to bubble in some multiple choice questions.

I was pretty surprised when I first saw these results, but I can guess why it worked out this way.  No matter who you are, you hear about Republicans and Democrats all the time. Everyone knows which side supports abortion and which side wants to limit immigration. Some people argue that media and the internet distort these differences: “Democrats want to abort every child!” “Republicans want to build a border wall around the moon!” I’m sure the constant noise doesn’t help, but it also doesn’t seem to have fried our participants’ brains as much as you might expect, and that’s good news.

These results also suggest that America’s political difficulties aren’t simply one big misunderstanding. If one or both sides couldn’t pass the ITT, that would be an obvious place to start trying to fix things—it’s hard to run a country together when you’re dealing with a caricature of your opponents. When both sides sail through the ITT no problem, though, maybe that means Republicans and Democrats have substantive disagreements and they both know it.

(How do we solve those disagreements? Uhhh I dunno I’m just a guy who asks people stupid questions on the internet.)

LIMITATIONS

We would be remiss not to mention an important limitation of our study. Turing’s original paper mentions a potential problem with his “Imitation Game”:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. [...] If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. [...] To put the competitors into a ‘telepathy-proof room’ would satisfy all requirements.

Unfortunately, we were not able to locate any telepathy-proof rooms for our study, so this should be considered a limitation and an area for future research.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This is just one version of the Ideological Turing Test3. You could run lots of different iterations, and some of them might make it harder for the fakers to succeed. Maybe fakers would fall apart if you asked them to write 1,000 words instead of 100. (But maybe it would also be hard for people to write 1,000 words about their own beliefs and still sound convincing.) Maybe people could ferret each other out if you gave them the chance to interact. (But maybe people wouldn’t know which questions to ask, and maybe everybody starts looking suspicious under questioning.) These are great ideas for studies and we have no plans to run them, so we hope you run them and then you tell us about them.

You could also, of course, run lots of ITTs on your favorite social cleavages. Men vs. women! Pro-Palestine vs. pro-Israel! Carnivores vs. vegetarians! Please feel free to use our materials as a starting point; we look forward to seeing what you do.

And remember, if you’ve been thinking to yourself this whole time, “I could do better than these idiots”—well, try the ITT for yourself!

It’s nuts how many people feel like imposters. Apparently 82% of Italian neurosurgeons, 56% of Romanian psychology undergrads, and 39% of Korean Catholics report at least moderate symptoms of Imposter Syndrome. That’s a whole lotta folks feeling like they’re frauds.

I think there’s two things going on here, one obvious, one mysterious. First, the obvious: a lot of people feel like imposters because other people make them feel that way. If you feel unwelcome because you have a bigoted boss or cruel colleagues, I understand why we would call that “Imposter Syndrome,” even though it seems more like “being surrounded by people who have Asshole Syndrome.”

But then, the mysterious: a lot of people are quick to brand themselves as frauds. I used to have students all the time who were like, “I’m not good enough to be here, I think my admission letter was a clerical error.” I wanted to grab ‘em by the shoulders and tell ‘em:

“One of your classmates got in because his dad donated a building. One of your professors has p-hacked every study she’s ever done; if anyone bothered to investigate her, she’d be fired and her scientific legacy would be expunged. The so-called Dean of Inclusion is a huge jerk. Those guys are the imposters. Not you. Please carry on.”

I never had much success getting those students to believe that they belonged, and I used to find this mystifying. But I think I understand now why their syndrome was so stubborn: they were actually on to something. The Italian neurosurgeons, the Romanian undergrads, my own students—they’re all correct that there’s a lot of fraud going on, but they’ve mistaken its origin. They’re not fraudulent people. They’re in a fraudulent place.

I THINK, THEREFORE I SCAM

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There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?

This worries me because I want to contribute to the grand project of understanding the mind, but I’m not sure how to do that. What’s the point of tossing another paper on the pile when it’s not clear that the last 100 papers added anything? Running studies can be a pain in the butt, so I’d like to do work that matters, not just work that gets a gold star goes up on the fridge (“Good job, lil buddy! You did so much psychology today!”).

That’s why I’ve returned to these questions again and again and again. But I’ve never come up with satisfying answers, and now I finally understand why.

I’ve got this picture in my head: we’re all on a bus that’s supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don’t have a GPS, so we have no idea if we’re going in the right direction. We can’t measure our progress by how much gas we’re burning, or whether we’ve upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can’t just look out the window and go, “I dunno, kinda feels like we’re headed toward Arkansas,” which, I realize now, is what I’ve been doing so far.

Instead, you first gotta ask: how could we know we’re getting closer to Cincinnati?

In my estimation, there are five ways to measure psychology’s progress, and we are succeeding in exactly one of them.

1. WE’VE DONE A GREAT JOB OVERTURNING OUR INTUITIONS, THUMBS UP ALL AROUND

In order to survive, every human needs to have some model of the world: how their body functions, how animals behave, how matter moves, etc. Psychologists call these “folk” theories—folk physics, folk biology, folk economics, and so on—the kind of explanations you might come up with if you just kinda bumble around, explanations that are good enough to keep you alive, but often go wrong. One way that science can make progress, then, is by finding the places where our folk theories miss the mark.

Psychology has done this really well. In fact, I’m gonna go out on a limb here: I think pretty much all progress in psychology can be summed up as “overturning intuitions.” 

You see this right away when you look at lists of our field’s classic works (after deleting all the stuff that doesn’t replicate). They’re all stories about how you think people would or should do one thing, but then they do another thing instead: the Milgram shock studies1, the pantheon of cognitive biases, those extremely cute studies where children think they can violate the laws of physics, etc.

Everything I’ve ever listed as an “underrated idea in psychology” (vol I, vol II) also falls into this category. Ditto for the things on this list of major recent discoveries assembled by the psychologist .

I think this work is wonderful. It’s why I became a psychologist in the first place. I got my mind blown over and over again—you’re telling me that when something bad happens to me, I’ll probably recover faster than I expect? That I don’t actually understand how a bicycle works? That I have a bunch of vivid but false memories in my head, like the Monopoly Man wearing a monocle? Of course I wanted to get in on that!

Everything I’ve done since then has fit the same mythbusting mold: the illusion of moral decline, widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change, do conversations end when people want them to, the liking gap—all of those studies involved fact-checking people’s folk psychology. 

We’re in good company here, because this is how other fields got their start. Galileo spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk physics: “I know it seems like the Earth is standing still, but it’s actually moving.” And early biologists like Francesco Redi spent a lot of time trying to overturn folk biology: “I know it seems like bugs come from rotting meat, but bugs actually come from other bugs.” (“Also, you can’t turn basil into scorpions.”)

There’s still plenty to be done in this vein. Our folk psychology is a thick tangle of erroneous assumptions; surely there are a few weeds left. And we might find them faster if we were explicit about that goal. I spent so many hours alone in my office being like, “What am I actually doing?”, and I would have gotten more done if I had been like, “Oh, my job is to put folk psychology to the test.” That’s not a guarantee—there’s still an art to picking the right intuitions and the appropriate tests, but it’s easier to do art when you don’t have to first invent the idea of a paintbrush.

2. UNFORTUNATELY, WE’RE STILL LOSING TO BULLSHITTERS

Here’s one way to measure our progress: take some people who are armed with the psychological literature and pit them against other people who are armed only with their own intuitions. The more we learn, the more this should be like a fight between gun-toters on one side and knife-wielders on the other. For instance, a bridge built using actual physics should hold up better than a bridge built using folk physics.

We don’t run a lot of these John Henry-style showdowns, but when we do, psychology does not win a resounding victory. Here are three examples.

1. Our anti-hate interventions are about as good as a Heineken commercial

The Strengthening Democracy Challenge tested all sorts of ideas for reducing animosity between Democrats and Republicans. Many of them didn’t work. One of the top performers, though, was this Heineken ad from 2017, which was made not by psychologists for the purposes of helping people get along, but by marketers for the purposes of selling beer.

2. Licensed therapists aren’t obviously better than a random nice person

In clinical and counseling psychology, there’s an ongoing debate about whether their training actually does anything. One uncomfortable finding: trainees can do just as well as fully licensed therapists. 

In fact, in the late 1970s, two researchers assigned2 a small group of college men to receive treatment either from trained therapists or from professors in a variety of disciplines who were selected based on their “untutored ability to form understanding, warm, and empathetic relationships.” At the end of the study, it looked like the professional therapists and the affable professors were equally effective. This study is too small and low-quality to count for much, but it’s concerning that it wasn’t a slam-dunk in favor of the pros.

3. Personality psychologists perform about as well as shamans

The Big Five theory claims that all aspects of human personality boil down to five factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. There’s some disagreement about whether it’s better to describe personality using six or two factors or whatever, but most people will tell you that the Big Five is solid, a great achievement, a good theory backed up by decades of empirical studies.

So how well does the Big Five perform against, say, some personality tests that people pulled out of their asses?

A group called ClearerThinking tested exactly that by comparing the Big Five to the Meyers-Briggs Personality Indicator3 and the Enneagram, two personality assessments that were created outside of academic psychology. (The Enneagram was apparently invented by a series of spiritual teachers, and until Isabel Briggs Myers popularized her eponymous personality test, she was most famous for writing racist detective stories.) The ClearerThinking folks checked how well each test predicted things about participants’ lives, like whether they’re married, own a home, have been convicted of a crime, meditate daily, and have a lot of friends.

Here are the results (taller bars = better predictions):

The Big Five comes out ahead, but part of its lead comes from statistics rather than psychology. The Big Five uses continuous scores (i.e., “you’re a 12 on the agreeableness scale”) rather than converting everything to four letters like the Meyers-Briggs does (i.e., “you’re an ENTJ”), or to a single number like the Enneagram does (i.e., “you’re a nine”). Collapsing scores like that makes them easier for humans to interpret—which is exactly why they do it—but it throws away data, so in a statistical showdown you’re shooting yourself in the foot.4

If you use the continuous Meyers-Briggs and Enneagram scores, the Big Five’s lead narrows or disappears altogether (higher numbers = better prediction):

When I saw this result, I broke out in a sweat. Whatever it is we psychologists do, we’ve done a lot of it to the Big Five. After millions of dollars and thousands of studies, we are not obviously better at predicting life outcomes than people who… didn’t do any of that. 

3. WE HAVE A HARD TIME USING OUR KNOWLEDGE TO DO STUFF

The magic of basic science is supposed to go like this: if you let the nerds chase their little science fantasies, they will eventually—but unpredictably—produce something useful, even if they never intend to. That’s a good sign the nerds are onto something, and not just spending the grant money on beer and Warhammer figurines. In psychology, progress of this kind might look something like, “we’re getting better at treating mental illnesses.” 

We do not appear to have progress of this kind. According to this meta-analysis, we’re no better at treating youth mental illness today than we were 50 years ago. This one says we haven’t gotten any better at treating adult depression. In fact, there was some worry that cognitive-behavioral therapy was becoming less potent over time; that might be a statistical artifact, but the best-case scenario is that it hasn’t gotten any better.

Another way of thinking about it: of the 298 mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, zero have been cured. That’s because we don’t really know what mental illness is, which you can tell by the fact that every diagnosis has an “unspecified” version, where the therapist goes “I dunno, you’re kinda messed up in this general direction.”

On the experimental side, our biggest success story is supposed to be “nudges,” or small environmental changes that help people make better decisions. At least 12 countries have started some kind of “Nudge Unit” to harness “behavioral insights” for the good of their citizens, and one of the nudge fathers won a Nobel Prize, so this seems pretty solid. 

When you watch the nudgers in action, though, it doesn’t look like we’ve learned that much. In 2022, a big group of psychologists published a “megastudy” where they tried 53 different interventions to increase gym attendance. These are the best behavioral scientists in the biz, working with a big budget, and trying to get people to do something they already do and want to do even more.

The results: less than half of the interventions worked. When experts in behavioral science and public health tried to predict the outcomes, they did no better than chance.

(In another megastudy—this one on vaccine messaging—non-experts were actually better than experts at predicting which interventions would work.)

So yes, we can change people’s environments to help them make better decisions, but we still don’t really know how to do this. Even our best ideas sometimes backfire. For instance, the original book on nudging pointed out that people are more likely to become organ donors when you make them opt out, rather than opt in. And yet, countries that have since switched to an opt-out system have seen the number of organ donors sometimes increase, sometimes decrease, and sometimes do nothing at all.5 Our state-of-the-art is still “think of 53 different things and then try all of them.” This isn’t super reassuring—if I hired a plumber to install a toilet in my house and he was like, “Sure thing, I’ll just install 53 different toilets and then check which ones flush,” I’d be like, “perhaps I’ll get another plumber.”6

4. WE HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO TURN OUR KNOWLEDGE INTO TECHNOLOGY

The nice thing about a modern internal combustion engine is that you don’t have to know anything about combustion to use one. It wasn’t always that way: the first engines were so finicky and complicated that only engineers could run them. When we understand something well enough that we can cram it into a box and hand it over to a non-expert, that’s progress.

I don’t think psychology has anything like this. The closest thing I can think of are apps and programs that are built around ideas from psychology, like Anki (a memorization app), Save More Tomorrow (a retirement savings program), or any of the CBT apps on the market today. But beyond those literal three things, I’m drawing a blank. I know lots of things will claim to be built on solid psychological findings, but that doesn’t mean they actually are, or that they actually work, or that those findings are actually solid.

5. OUR OLD QUESTIONS HAVEN’T BECOME SILLY YET

If I go to the doctor and I’m like, “Doc, I’m coughing and sneezing all the time, which one of my humors is outta whack?” all I’m going to get is a blank stare. You could say my question is wrong, but it’s more accurate to say it’s nonsensical. This just isn’t the way we think about things anymore—we have a totally different worldview that doesn’t include humors at all. That’s a sign we’ve undergone a paradigm shift, and it’s potentially a sign of progress.

Psychology hasn’t done this. For instance, it’s true that lots of psychologists will look at you weird if you ask a question like, “Does this phenomenon have more to do with the id or the superego?” But many other psychologists would be happy to answer a question like that. 29% of practicing therapists—a plurality—are trained in the psychodynamic tradition, where such ideas are still mainstream. You can get trained in “contemporary Freudian” psychoanalysis at Columbia, Emory, and NYU. A psychologist who dispenses cognitive-behavioral therapy and a psychologist who interprets your dreams could have the same degree from the same university. They could even be the same person.

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WON’T YOU BE MY BASIL VALENTINE

I’ve made versions of this argument to lots of people, and the most common response I get goes something like this: well, this is as good as it gets! Unlike the physical world, where you can explain lots of things with a few simple laws, humans are very complicated—random, even. There are too many variables! That’s why psychology will never be a “real” science.

The more history I learn, the funnier this argument seems.

I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine7 sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known.

No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!

An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.8

So yes, it’s possible that psychology is nothing like any science we’ve ever done before, that we’ve finally met our match, that progress will always be modest, and we should be happy with what we got. But that prophecy is self-fulfilling: if you think this is all we can do, then this is all we will do.9

When I look at the progress psychology has and hasn’t made, I don’t come to the conclusion that we’re dumb; I come to the conclusion that we’re young. We’re early in our history. This is, I think, the fundamental disagreement I have with so many of my colleagues, who seem to think we’re in our middle age, if not beyond it. That would explain why they’re so interested in fact-checking our legacy and making sure that everything we do fits nicely into everything we’ve done before—these are things you do when your field is advanced in years.

But if you think we haven’t even hit puberty yet, you entertain far stranger thoughts, like “How might we finally grow up?”

LUPÉ FIASCO? MORE LIKE LOOPY FIASCO

Scientific revolutions arise from crises—that moment when we’ve piled up too much stuff that doesn’t make sense and the dam finally breaks, washing away our old theories and giving us space to build new ones The classic example is epicycles, the little loop-de-loops that old-timey astronomers had to add to the orbits of heavenly bodies so that the math on geocentrism kept working out:

Eventually there were too many loops, and the whole system collapsed.

Nothing like this will ever happen in psychology. Our theories are never fact-checked by the movements of the sun and the planets, and our beliefs are too vague and expansive to be troubled by the appearance of a new finding. Our appetite for epicycles is therefore infinite—or, really, we have no orbits to attach them to, so it’s epicycles all the way down. We’re like a pressure cooker with the valve jammed open; all the steam escapes out the top, so no pressure ever builds up.

If we want a crisis and a revolution, then, we’ll have to engineer one ourselves.

THE MYSTERY OF THE TELEVISED SALAD

I see two ways forward, which I’ll only sketch out for now, because we’re already at the butt-end of a long post.

One: we can keep debunking folk psychology. Our intuitions about other people run deep and strange—the book of folk psychology is likely several times longer than the books of folk physics, folk biology, etc., so there are plenty of pages left to edit. I think that’s a cool thing to do, and I’ll probably keep doing some of it myself. So far, however, our considerable progress on this front doesn’t seem to have caused lots of progress on the other fronts, and I’m not optimistic that will change in the future. That’s why I don’t think we should only do this.

Two: we can shake things up. And I mean really shake things up. The philosopher Michael Strevens says that doing science requires an “alien mindset” where you entertain ridiculous thoughts like “perhaps Aristotle needs some updating” or “maybe we should toss balls of varying weights off a tower and see which one hits the ground first.” Those thoughts don’t seem alien anymore, of course, because they worked out. But going full alien-brain today means you will have to entertain thoughts that incur reputational risk, like “maybe you don’t have to pay attention to the literature” and “maybe we should ask people how their toothbrush could be different“.

Once you get into the alien mindset, the best thing to think about is mysteries. What are the self-evident phenomena: things that definitely happen, but that we cannot explain? Here are a few:

• The average American watches 2.7 hours of television per day. We write this off as “leisure,” as if that’s an explanation. Why is it fun to watch someone make a salad on TV? Why do some people find it fun to stare at a person spinning a wheel and buying vowels, while other people find it fun to stare at vampires kissing? Why can an episode of “Paw Patrol” stop rampaging toddlers in their tracks? 

• People come up with new things all the time—new business ideas, new novels, new salads to make on TV. How do they do this? We’ve got mathematicians saying that the solution to a problem just appeared to them while they were getting on a bus, we’ve got writers saying they feel like they’re “taking dictation from God”, we’ve got Paul McCartney saying “Yesterday” came to him a dream. What the hell is going on here?10

• Why do so many drugs have paradoxical reactions? For example: some people feel better when they take antidepressants, but some people feel way worse. Some of this mystery will have to be unraveled from the bottom up by the folks who study the brain, but some of it will have to be unraveled from the top down by the folks who study the mind.

I gotta say, making that list was hard! Thinking of mysteries is kind of like trying to imagine a color you haven’t seen before. I’d love to see more lists of self-evident phenomena we can’t explain; not “how do we reduce scores on the Modern Racism Scale by 10%” but “people do this weird thing…WHY.”

These, I think, are the only two paths that lead anywhere. If we try to falsify folk psychology, or if we start back at square one, we stand a chance at making progress. Otherwise, we’ll just keep making our stack of papers taller and taller, to no avail.

Okay, enough! Godspeed to us all, and may we all meet one day in Cincinnati, where our reward shall be great:

I used to perform in an improvised musical comedy show where we could burst into song at any time. You’d be doing a scene about, say, bringing your boyfriend to Thanksgiving for the first time and having to explain to your parents that he’s Spiderman, and all of the sudden the pianist would thunder out some chords and now you’re singing something like:

SPIDERMAN, SPIDERMAN

THAT’S WHO I’M DATING, MOM AND DAD

WILL HE EAT?

DO NOT ASK

HE WILL NOT REMOVE HIS MASK

Doing this on the spot is really hard, and the trick that kept us afloat was called “take-and-take of focus,” meaning that whoever was singing had to keep going until someone jumped in to take the spotlight from them, which should happen quickly and often. Though it's nearly impossible to invent a whole funny song, you can probably fire off a verse, your teammate can come in with the chorus, and if you can do that twice and toss some harmony on top, the audience will go wild. 

For me, learning take-and-take suggested a solution not just to songs about Spiderman, but to a scientific mystery. I was in graduate school at the time, running studies aimed at answering the question, “Do conversations end when people want them to?” I watched a stupefying number of conversations unfold, some of them unfurling into beautiful repartee (one pair of participants exchanged numbers afterward), others collapsing into awkward silences. Why did some conversations bloom and others wilt? One answer, I realized, may be the clash of take-and-take vs. give-and-take. 

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

It’s easy to assume that givers are virtuous and takers are villainous, but that’s giver propaganda. Conversations, like improv scenes, start to sink if they sit still. Takers can paddle for both sides, relieving their partners of the duty to generate the next thing. It’s easy to remember how lonely it feels when a taker refuses to cede the spotlight to you, but easy to forget how lovely it feels when you don’t want the spotlight and a taker lets you recline on the mezzanine while they fill the stage. When you’re tired or shy or anxious or bored, there’s nothing better than hopping on the back of a conversational motorcycle, wrapping your arms around your partner’s waist, and holding on for dear life while they rocket you to somewhere new.

Takers are especially valuable when you add more minds to the mix. Some of my research is about how turn-taking works differently in two-person vs. multi-person conversations. When it’s just you and me, taking turns is easy: you go, I go, repeat. When it’s you and me and Nina and Marlon, who should talk next? It’s often unclear, so we all stand around waiting for someone else to take their turn or to invite us to take ours. Givers try to salvage these situations by turning them into laborious seminar discussions (“Why don’t we all say what we thought about the movie?”). Takers, on the other hand, simply make conversation happen (“That movie sucked and anybody who liked it can fight me!”). When we’re all standing on the perimeter of an empty dance circle, takers are the martyrs who will launch themselves into the middle and do the stanky legg.

While takers deserve some redemption, givers deserve some scrutiny. On day one of Improv 101 they’ll tell you not to ask questions in a scene because it puts undue pressure on your partner. “Hey, what are you doing?” “Uhh I’m making things up in an improv scene.” Similarly, refusing to take the spotlight in a conversation may seem generous, but in fact can burden the other person to keep the show going. (“What’s up?” is one of the most dreadful texts to get; it’s short for “Hello, I’d like you to entertain me now.”) And asking your partner question after question and resenting them when they don’t return the favor isn’t generosity; it’s social entrapment, like not telling your friends that it’s your birthday and then seething that they didn’t get you cake.

Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting a Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique. And the way to do that, I think, is by adding a bunch of doorknobs.

When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.

What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has—how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread—and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).

There’s some recent evidence that what makes conversations pop off is indeed the social equivalent of doorknobs. You might think that the best conversationalists wait patiently for their partners to finish talking before they start concocting a response in their head. It turns out that we like people the best when they respond to us the fastest—so fast (mere milliseconds!) that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn. Abundant affordances allow for this rapid-fire rapport, each utterance offering an obvious opportunity to respond.

A few unfortunate psychological biases hold us back from creating these conversational doorknobs and from grabbing them when we see them. We think people want to hear about exciting stuff we did without them (“I went to Budapest!”) when they actually are happier talking about mundane stuff we did together (“Remember when we got stuck in traffic driving to DC?”). We overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk and so we stick to the boring, affordance-less shallows. Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off. That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”).

The main reason we don’t create more affordances, however, is pure egocentrism. When we just say whatever pops into our heads, we may think we’re making craggy, climbable conversational rock walls, when in fact we’re creating completely frictionless surfaces. For example, I’m thrilled to tell you about the 126 escape rooms I’ve done, but my love for paying people $35 to lock me in a room blinds me to the fact that you don’t care. I may even think I’m being generous by asking about your experiences with escape rooms, when my supposed giving is really just selfishness with a question mark at the end (“Enough of me talking about stuff I like. Time for you to talk about stuff I like!”).

There is no known cure for egocentrism; the condition appears to be congenital. The best we can do is offer our interlocutors all sorts of doorknobs—ornate French door handles, commercial-grade push bars, ADA-compliant auto-open buttons—and listen closely for any that they might give us in return. The best conversation partners, like the best improvisers, have very sharp hearing; they can echolocate a door slightly left ajar, waiting for a gentle push from the outside.  

So the next time you find yourself slogging through a conversation that just ain’t working, remember this little ditty:

GIVE-AND-TAKE, TAKE-AND-TAKE

IT’S ABOUT THE AFFORDANCES THAT YOU MAKE

DO NOT BE

A SOCIAL SLOB

USE CONVERSATIONAL DOORKNOBS

The feel-good story of 2022 went like this: We finally prevailed over a global pandemic, and it was all thanks to a little-known scientist named Katalin Karikó.

She had toiled in obscurity for decades—she never got a tenure-track job, and the University of Pennsylvania at one point demoted her, infamously describing her as “not of facu…

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Back in May, I announced the Experimental History Summer 2024 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 104 submissions, and reading them has been a delight. I heard from folks all over the world: professors, playwrights, programmers, reformed kleptomaniacs, several cult leaders, and even Midwesterners. Now I’m here to announce the winners!

FIRST PLACE

“We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon” by Matt Wedel

I love this post. I love it because it exemplifies the scholarly possibilities of blogging—no journal would publish something like this, and yet it ought to exist somewhere. I love it because it’s thick with expertise, but it doesn’t talk down to anyone. I love it because it oozes with both a) appreciation for its topic, and b) blood. And I love it because it provides physical confirmation that humans are weird:

This is one of those things that might seem hard to believe unless you’ve experienced it, but we humans are crazy variable under the hood. In my program we encourage the students to log interesting variations on the whiteboard in the lab, not least so that everyone can beware of the variant anatomy while studying for their practical exams. […] To a first approximation, almost every human being has at least one anatomical variation notable enough that a med student would write it on a whiteboard.

I also love it because it brings new data to the “ideas are getting harder to find” debate, which is not even really a debate, it’s just people saying “ideas are getting harder to find” and everyone else going “yes yes, they sure are.” I find this discourse so infuriating that I’ve written two posts about it, so it’s refreshing to hear from someone on the frontier of knowledge, and reassuring that his take is “there’s still lots of frontier out there.”1 As Wedel says:

So if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia.

Matt Wedel is “an anatomist, paleontologist, and stargazer. He teaches human anatomy at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, does research on the evolution of dinosaurs and birds, and writes the monthly Binocular Highlight column for Sky & Telescope magazine.” He blogs at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week.

SECOND PLACE

“The Best Antibiotic for Acne is Non-Prescription” by Siggi Prendergast

For legal reasons, I am not personally recommending that you smear Neosporin on your face. I am recommending, however, that you read Siggi Prendergast’s account of accidentally smearing Neosporin on his face, which he claims cured his acne. This post won my heart both because it’s a real scientific report of a self-experiment, and because it begins with a criminal confession:

My skincare routine used to be a terrifying amalgam of creams, most of which were acquired by a nasty (but skillful) shoplifting addiction. I needed only around 20% of these items, which is why I would place a product in the middle of my dorm hallway when no one was looking. Everyone knew it was me so every day after, I would nearly trip over whatever product had been moved back in front of my door.

If every scientific paper was this honest, I’d read a lot more of ‘em, and we’d solve more crimes.

I asked each winner for a short bio. Here’s Prendergast’s:

Hi, I’m Siggi, the author of this piece and a second-year dance major at the University of Illinois. My blog tends to be dominated by findings in biology that can draw my frenetic attention. Ironically, the subject in recent months has been the neural correlates of that very thing, attention.

THIRD PLACE

“Medieval Basket Weaving” by

Darley wins the title of “cleverest conceit for a blog post”:

A few years ago, a very senior manager at my then university liked to refer in meetings to ‘Medieval Basket Weaving’ as a hypothetical example of a completely pointless course. ‘Medieval Basket Weaving’ featured regularly as shorthand for the kind of nonsense we should all be getting rid of to make sure that our departments ran efficiently (read: cheaply) and made our students into useful people. 

Needless to say, I disagreed. I’ve never actually come across a course on medieval basket weaving, at least not accredited at university level, but I find the whole notion of things that are pointless to learn or teach a bit strange, and besides, baskets are cool! I did frequently find those meetings a bit pointless, though, and when that happened, I started wondering, what would a course on medieval basket weaving actually look like?

Darley then lays out a 10-week syllabus for “Medieval Basket Weaving.”

There’s a Donald Miller quote I think about often: “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself.” That’s what Darley is doing here. You can ruin any subject by asking the wrong questions, and you can make any subject bloom by asking the right ones; a good teacher shows you the difference. Darley’s manager, on the other hand, is like a guy who thinks peanuts are disgusting because he doesn’t know how to take the shells off.

Rebecca Darley “is a historian, writer and editor. Her research focuses on the Western Indian Ocean and East Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, especially using coin evidence.” She also works as an editor, proofreader, and book coach. She blogs at and you can find her on LinkedIn here.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

I couldn’t include every good submission I got, but here’s some of the best:

“Let Me Tell You a Story” by Barry Edelson

There’s an element of writing I think of as richness—you can tell there’s a depth of thinking, like the writer could have made this point ten different ways and deliberately chose this one. Edelson’s post is rich in that way.

People still put flowers on Stalin’s grave. To this day, one of history’s cruelest and most prolific mass murderers is held in high esteem by millions of Russians. As recently as a decade ago, a poll found that nearly half of the Russian people viewed Stalin’s rule as mostly positive. Say what you will about the dictator and his legacy: that is some kind of storytelling.

Barry Edelson is “the author of the online essay collection, The Pursuit of Worldliness, as well as op-ed pieces, articles and reviews for major publications. He has also written The Dream of the Prophet, a one-man play about Walt Whitman, and a trilogy of one-act satirical plays, Faith, Hope and Disparity.”

“The Murdering Woodsman” by

There’s an art to the short blog post. It’s like a bit of close-up magic: you have to do the setup and complete the reveal before people walk away. Which is why it was a treat to read this short piece that seems like it’s about having tuberculosis, but ultimately isn’t:

A few years ago, I found myself exchanging stories with Lilly, a cafe owner. I work in India in the field of global health, and I mentioned how I’d been diagnosed with tuberculosis a decade ago. Her eyes lit up with surprise and a subtle delight.  “Wait--you mean consumption is a real thing?!” It was as if all the literary worlds depicted by Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte  suddenly came to life in her mind. I adored her reaction. It reminded me of a time at the airport when I stumbled upon a box of Turkish Delight (a confection I’d always believed to be fictional), and for a split second thought  “Oh my god, Narnia is real?!”

From Sirisha:  “I work in global health delivery, mostly in India and parts of Africa.  I recently founded a start-up that designs healthcare systems for Indian contexts—currently focusing on tuberculosis and trauma-related disorders. Though I spend half my time on research, my most meaningful insights have often come from understanding a singular data point and everything that shaped it to its very end. I decided to start the blog in this spirit.”

“Three Days in North Korea” by Germán Reyes

Reyes’s post is sort of reverse-gonzo journalism: instead of sending an insane person to a sane place, you send a sane person to an insane place. I had no idea that you can pay for a tour of North Korea, where you can enjoy sights like this:

From the bus, we could see hundreds of people kneeling in a large square, praying and bowing. It was one of the most bizarre scenes I have ever witnessed. Apparently, they were rehearsing for the party’s anniversary celebration—at 4:30 in the morning.

Other highlights include: drinking from a magical well outside of Kim il-Sung’s birthplace, riding carnival rides at “breakneck speeds” (a luxury afforded only to foreigners), and this:

When we asked one of our guides what they were taught about foreigners in school, she replied, “They are also human beings.”

Germán Reyes “is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, where he focuses on behavioral economics and labor economics. Learn more about his research at germanr.com.”

“What Did I Just See You Do?” by Juozas Cernius

Cernius certainly takes the prize of Weirdest Post. That’s a selling point for me—blog posts should be weird, or else they could have been op-eds or books or nothing at all. This one gave me that horrified delight of “oh no it can’t possibly be about that OH GOSH IT’S ABOUT THAT.” Here’s a “taste”:

Your boogers, I insisted, must be very tasty if you munch them like that.

It’s not fair, by the order of the universe,  that you should be the only one to enjoy it.

Juozas Cernius is “a Canadian photographer and filmmaker with global experience in Feature Documentaries, Broadcast TV, Short Films, and numerous independent projects, often revolving around human interest stories that promote positive social and environmental change. Sometimes he writes, too.” 

“Review: A History of Goldsberry” by

I love a post with a twist, and this one has several: you think it’s a book review, but then it’s actually a travelogue, but it’s actually a ghost story, but then it’s actually...well, I won’t spoil it.

They told that Frank Shimek was no mere store owner. His own eulogy would eventually call him the “mean miser of Macon County,” and those that knew him would say “finally” when they spoke of his demise. He fished pennies from the donation trays of gas stations. He sprayed mustard on the wood-paneled wall of a diner. He beat his kids. He hid a fortune.

Dayten Rose is a “freelance Midwestern culture writer who gets serious about fun and games on his blog . He wants to go to Antarctica.”

“Fighting the Last (Economic) War” by

Whitaker’s post is a great example of an underused blog format: the short book review, where you draw a few interesting bits out of a book, add some insight to them, and then get outta there, ‘cause there’s a whole lotta books to read.

As someone who came of political age in the early 2010s, I thought everything must be new and unprecedented. But bailouts, austerity, free college, disparate treatment of minority neighborhoods, private business leaders pulling strings behind the scenes, and even young protestors “occupying” public buildings were hot-button issues in New York’s fiscal crisis a generation earlier.

Kevin Whitaker is “a data scientist, writer, and researcher. He blogs about books, technology, parenting, and other random stuff at .”

“The Search for the Perfect Grandma” by

Reed has that rare mix of “interesting philosophical conundrum” and “wacky caper involving magical honey that makes you go bonkers”:

I’d not heard of mad honey before but it’s basically the product of bees that feed on a particular type of rhododendron native to Nepal and some parts of Turkey. Mad honey contains grayanotoxins, which can cause hallucinogenic effects as well as euphoria, dizziness and nausea.

[…]

One afternoon, Kyleb decided the time had come and ate several spoonfuls of the prodigal honey whilst at home with his grandma. The problem: he chose the wrong grandma. Inexplicably, Kyleb took the mad honey while chilling with his white evangelical Christian grandma, not his here’s-a-powerful-drug-for-you-to-try-honey Nepalese grandma.

Tom Reed “likes to write, read and think about AI and the history of philosophy. He lives and works in the UK.” He writes .

A CLOSING EXHORTATION

Last thing. I got a lot of notes from folks who were like “I’ve been thinking of starting a blog, but I keep hesitating!” Some of those folks are among the winners! Blogging ain’t for everybody, but a lot of people seem to get close to starting one, and then they stop for bad reasons. If that’s you: don’t do that! This is your push! Post your stuff!

People get hung up because they think there are rules to this kind of thing, like “you have to post all the time.” Nah dude, post once a decade if you want to—it’s not like there’s Blog Police who will show up at your door if you don’t produce enough content. I still think about a post called “Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail” and it’s from a blog that hasn’t been updated since 2017!

I get riled up about this because I’ve seen so many people say things like “wow I never thought anything would come of this silly blog thing but it’s changed my life forever for the better.” Here’s one. Here’s another. Here’s three more2. Here’s mine! I recently heard from someone trying to hire a writer; I pointed him to my friend’s Substack, and he got the job. If you’re teetering on the edge of making a blog, chances are there’s more upside than you realize. It’s kinda like getting dressed up to go to a party and then you’re like “hmm maybe I’ll just stay home instead, what if I don’t like the party” but then you go to the party and have a nice time and maybe meet someone and fall in love forever. So go to the party!

And with that, I hereby call to a close the Summer 2024 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Thanks to everyone who submitted, thank you to Violet Henriques and Slime Mold Time Mold for being a second pair of eyes on the submissions, and thank you to the paid subscribers who make both this blog and this jamboree possible. Because of you, the jamboree continues eternally in our hearts.

Someone once asked me, “What’s something you believe in, despite not having any evidence for it?”

Without thinking, I said “There’s a place for everyone.” As in: every person has a purpose, nobody is superfluous or redundant.

This is, I think, the unspoken fault line that divides all ideologies. If you trace arguments about marginal tax rates or soybean tariffs or whatever back to their origin, you will usually find a disagreement about whether our ideal world contains all of the inhabitants of our current world, or whether reaching Utopia will require us to toss some folks overboard. We don’t talk much about this, because if the people on Team Overboard were honest about who they plan to purge, none of their intended victims would be friends with them, let alone vote for them.

I’m on Team Nobody Goes Overboard because I believe every human has equal moral value—that’s the axiomatic, “no evidence for it” part. But I don’t just believe that there should be a place for everyone. I also believe that there is a place for everyone, and there’s plenty of evidence for that belief, and there are some unfortunate reasons why not everyone believes it, all of which I present to you now.

A SPECIES OF WEIRDOS

Evolutionary biologists say that humans occupy the “cognitive niche”—we stay alive by using our thinky bits. But the cognitive niche isn’t just one pocket in evolutionary space. It’s an infinite honeycomb of niches, because our brains allows us to customize ourselves in ways that other animals can’t. There’s no such thing as a vegetarian leopard or an alt-right penguin, but humans come in all varieties: some of them like partying on boats, others like painting Warhammer figurines, some think it’s immoral to eat garlic, and others want to live as dogs.

In fact, it’s difficult to find anything that literally everybody likes or dislikes. Pizza? At least 2% of people don’t care for it. Chocolate? 4% would rather not. Sex? ~1% say “none for me thanks.”12 And then, of course, there are the folks who get their jollies from things that the rest of us find foul, like getting tied up and hit with a stick, or eating poop sandwiches.

(I experienced the wondrous variance of humanity firsthand when I had a bit part in one of the worst movies of all time. The user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are almost universally negative, but apparently there are people out there who love to see a blind Diane Keaton crash into a table of champagne flutes3.)

We don’t have a good way of talking about all this diversity because we don’t have good ways of categorizing people4. But here’s one way of looking at it. According to an analysis by my friends Slime Mold Time Mold, if human minds differ from each other in even 100 ways—which is not that many!—and those differences are normally distributed, then 99% of people are extreme in at least one way. Which is to say: statistically, everyone is special.

That’s just looking at traits, which we might assume are more nature than nurture. People’s experiences specialize them even further—two equally conscientious people can end up obsessed with locomotives or Zen gardening, depending on where they grow up, what classes they happen to take, who they date, and whether, at a critical moment in their development, they watched the scene in Spiderman 2 (2004) where Tobey Maguire stops a runaway train.

STOP PUSHING PAPER, START PUSHING PEOPLE

Our abundance of weirdos creates diversity not only in supply, but also in demand. All those odd people want odd things, creating odd jobs for other odd people to fill. Here are just a few of them:

• Professional bridesmaid

• Person who crams people into crowded subway cars

• Underwater pizza delivery guy

• Dog chef

• Trash detective

• Teeth designer

• Fire watcher

• Bovine reproductive technician

You can read that list thinking to yourself, “Which of these jobs might I like to do?” But the better question is: “Which jobs are still missing?” There is no Central Occupation Authority that decides which jobs should be created. You can get a pizza delivered underwater because someone saw an opportunity and took it, and the infinite and ever-changing weirdness of humanity means there are opportunities yet to be taken.

And that’s just thinking of niches in the dumbest sense possible, which is “things you can do in exchange for money.” People’s needs are so dire and so diverse that there are niches upon niches crying out for someone to fill them.

In high school, my sister was the Breakup Whisperer. Even her most distant acquaintances would seek her counsel on ending their relationships, or her comfort when those relationships had been ended for them. (“Breakup Whisperer” sounds better than “Dump Consultant”.) Although her paycheck at the time said “Subway Sandwich Artist,” the real place she fit was on our front porch, trying to talk a 16-year-old boy through his first emotions.

We need a whole lot more than just Breakup Whisperers. We need D&D Group Conveners, Last-Minute Babysitters, People Who Write Articles Online Explaining The Confusing Endings of Certain Movies, A Cappella Concert Attendees, Wikipedia Editors, Phone Fixers, Local Historians, Post-Tragedy Casserole Providers, Yelp Reviewers, Field Trip Chaperones, and on and on, forever. Roll a few of those together, and baby, that’s a niche.

FLAMING CHICKENS

If there’s an abundance of niches, why does it seem like so many people fail to find theirs?

Three reasons. The first: most niches are local, and that isn’t where people look.

When I grew up, everybody was talking about “globalization,” which always seemed to be about how we can get Tamagotchis from Shanghai to Scranton in 24 hours or whatever. Maybe I missed this because I was, like, eight, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the globalization of attention. We can move electrons even faster than we can move Tamagotchis, and the result is that everyone from Shanghai to Scranton is largely looking at, listening to, and talking about the same things. You can see this in the demise of local news, the consolidation of the internet, and all other forms of oligopoly.

The globalization of attention is a damn shame for many reasons, and the biggest is that it leaves lots of local niches neglected. If everyone’s trying to be an Instagram relationship advice influencer, nobody’s trying to be their friendly neighborhood Breakup Whisperer. Plus, everybody, no matter how much of a nobody they are, has at least a few people who are counting on them, whose lives they can ruin or enrich, and it’s hard to do much enriching when you’re fretting full-time about who’s gonna be the next president.

Local niches are important because they can pack a lot of meaning into a tiny space; they make it so that more people can matter. When I was thirteen, I got promoted to moderator of the “Flaming Chickens” forum of a Yu-Gi-Oh! message board, which is where people were allowed to “flame” things that they hated (stepdads, math class, low-quality English dubs of Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes). I was so excited because it meant I meant something. Was the job pointless? Yes. Was it not a “job” at all in the sense that it paid nothing? Yes. Did the forum eventually die because of an infidelity scandal inside the polycule of people who ran the message board? Also yes. But for a bit, I fit.

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THE TRAGEDY OF NICKY

The second reason why people end up without a niche: we act like finding one is personal, private, and painless. It’s not.

If you’re trying to figure out which car to buy, which person to date, or which taco place to try, there’s are whole industries waiting to assist you. But if you want to figure out where you fit in, you’re on your own. The education system won’t let you leave until you can add, subtract, read, and write, but they’ll give you a diploma even if you have no clue who you are or what you want.

We assume that everyone falls into the right slot just by knocking around the world like a human-sized Plinko chip. But niches can be tiny, peculiar, and hidden away, and there’s no guarantee you’ll find yours without a heave or a shove.

I once ran into an old classmate—let’s call her Nicky—who was trying to choose between competing offers from consulting firms. Nicky was having a hard time, and it soon became clear why: she didn’t want to be a consultant at all. “What do you like to do?” I asked. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t know.” For her, consulting was the default option, an industry willing to take someone with brains and grit but no particular interests, and at the end of college she was surprised to find that was her.

That’s a tragedy not just for Nicky, but for the rest of us, too. There’s a hole in the ecosystem where Nicky should be: there’s a hospital she should be running, or seventh-graders she should be teaching, or pizzas she should be delivering underwater. Wherever that hole is, everything else will be a little off-balance until Nicky fills it.

When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.

That’s why “where do I fit in?” is not a private question, like the password to your bank account or the color of your underwear. We all have a stake in you finding your place, because we’re all better off when you like your life. Well-slotted people make good neighbors, bosses, partners, and parents. Unmoored, detached, disaffected people end up trying to figure out whether 10-year-olds prefer vapes that taste like cotton candy or blue raspberry.

PLENTY OF OPENINGS ON THE MILLET FARM

The third reason is the opposite of the second: some people think that finding your place is impossible.

Here’s the canonical case: you grow up with people who know from age five that they want to be doctors, truck drivers, belly dancers, whatever. But you have no idea where you fit in, and as time goes on, you start to suspect that you don’t fit in anywhere.

There’s a couple things going on here. First, you should check back in with those folks and see how many of them ended up liking the life that was chosen for them by a five-year-old. A few of them probably got lucky and the best role for them in life was one of the eight jobs that a child can name. Fortunately, there’s another 8 billion jobs that you only learn about later. Some of us have to spend a little longer acquainting ourselves with the world before we figure out where we belong in it.

(Strangely enough, the characters in my Playmobil playset did not include “blogger.”)

Second, anyone who thinks they fit in nowhere probably has an unrealistic view of how fitting in feels. I know some people say they love their jobs, like love love their jobs, like they’re in a constant state of euphoria, as if doctoring or belly dancing is just as good as a continuous IV drip of barbiturates. I don’t know how many of these people are telling the truth, but let’s assume it’s some of them.

I think this says a lot more about them than it says about their niche. Remember: people are weird in lots of ways! Some of them are born with barbiturate-blood; they get to be happy all the time. The rest of us may experience occasional negative emotions, and this is not cause for alarm. I have it on good authority that even the Breakup Whisper occasionally tires of Breakup Whispering.

I sometimes have to remind myself that, until the 1800s, most people worked in agriculture. We don’t know how many of those people liked working in agriculture—feudal lords never thought to survey the serfs about their workplace satisfaction. A lot of them probably hated it. But if humans could survive for millennia when every career test had only one possible outcome (“Congratulations! Your responses indicate that you are best suited for the job of RAISING MILLET FOR THE LOCAL BARON”), then we must have some ability to adapt our expectations to our opportunities.

So it’s not that the world magically offers the lock to fit everyone’s key. It’s that everyone’s key has a bit of give, enough to fit the locks available. We screw this up when we assume that our keys are made out of Play-Doh and they can fit anywhere, or when we assume they’re made out of obsidian and they’ll shatter if you try to stick ‘em in the wrong place.

Many of us discover this in love. The standard marriage plot comes in two acts:

1. Find the right person

2. Live happily ever after

But what do you do when your soulmate wants to keep the house at 85 degrees while you want it at 62, or when he refuses to eat your mom’s famous beef tongue enchiladas, or when she wants to name your firstborn after her favorite great-uncle (Bo, short for Bocephus) but you want to name him after your favorite Transformer (Cliff, short for Cliffjumper5)? You adapt, your compromise, you squirm around until you find the way of holding each other that doesn’t make either of your arms go numb.

(I once shared this insight with my wife, thinking it was a revelation, and she patiently explained that she had understood this from a young age because she had read many novels about love, while I had been watching TV shows about cars that can turn into robots.)

As in love, so in life: some blessed few marry their high school sweethearts and pursue their childhood dream jobs, and good for them. Everyone else has to complete a lifelong project of figuring out who they are and what they do, and that usually involves dating deadbeats and working dead-end jobs along the way. It ain’t easy, but it also ain’t impossible.

“FRIENDLY”

The other day I ran past a courthouse with a big group of people milling around outside. They were all grinning and taking pictures, so at first I thought they had just won some big class action lawsuit. But as I got closer I saw they were holding envelopes and waving tiny American flags and I realized, my God, these people just became US citizens.

I got so choked up I almost had to cut my run short, but fortunately I don’t run that fast and so I don’t need much oxygen. I wanted to go up to each of them and give them a hearty, sweaty handshake and tell them:

“I’m so glad you’re here! I don’t know if they told you in there, but we’re all trying to do something crazy here, which is to build a place where we believe there’s somewhere for everyone. We have never once in our history even come close to doing this. We’re not close now. But the fact that you’re here means we haven’t failed completely, and maybe with your help we’ll succeed.”

I didn’t say any of that, of course. I let them have their moment uninterrupted, even though being accosted by a lunatic on the street is perhaps the most American welcome that anyone can get.

When I got home, I dug out an old piece of family ephemera: my great-grandfather’s World War I draft registration card from 1918. He had arrived in the US five years earlier and he didn’t have citizenship yet, so Dominico Pizzoferrato duly indicated on the form that he was “an alien.” Then, clearly unsatisfied with his options and wanting to explain himself better, he drew a line and wrote another word: “friendly.”

All I can think is: me too, man. Me too.

This is the quarterly links and updates post, a roundup of the stuff I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.

GENERAL INTEREST LINKS, SUITABLE FOR ALL AUDIENCES, FORMATTED TO FIT YOUR SCREEN

(1/12) Bloodletting is supposed to be one of those canonical “good thing we don’t do that anymore!” kind of treatments, the sort of thing where we tut tut at our ancestors for being so silly and backward.

So I was mildly surprised to learn that bloodletting is the standard treatment for hemochromatosis, which is where you have too much iron in your blood. And then I was really surprised to find that researchers are still running randomized-controlled trials on bloodletting for hypertension. This appears to be a traditional Chinese medicine thing—the RCTs are done in China and published in Mandarin. According to this systematic review, letting someone bleed for a while is not obviously worse than giving someone blood pressure meds. I don’t put much stock in this, though, because that same review admits that all of the studies are so bad that we don’t really know what’s going on. I’m just astounded that there are people out there who show up to a medical study and someone’s like “yeah so you’ve been randomized to the condition where you have less blood.”

(2/12) Related: “Medicinal leeches are a US Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for venous congestion in graft tissue.”

(3/12) It often feels like we’re living through the extinction of privacy, and that might be true. But it’s also true that when cameras were first getting popular, if you had your picture taken at a photo studio, someone could just walk into that studio after you, buy a copy of your portrait, insert it into an advertisement for flour or face cream or whatever, and print thousands of copies, and there was nothing you could do about it.

(4/12) I recently assembled a list of all-time great blog posts. One category that I should have included was “posts written by someone who has both encyclopedic knowledge of a niche subject and a biting wit, who leads you through some arcane history that doesn’t exactly have a thesis or a moral, but does show you some of the back alleys of our world that you would never see otherwise, therefore giving you a richer understanding of your epistemic environs.” Anyway, this post about car phones is one of those posts.

(5/12) You know how old buildings have all these beautiful intricate features, while new buildings are minimalist and boring? The standard explanation is that labor is much more expensive now, so nobody can pay a bunch of stonemasons to carve gargoyles on the facade of their government building. (The non-standard explanation is that we’ve forgotten how to make nice buildings because of a secret apocalypse that happened ~150 years ago, which the government covered up.) Sam Hughes argues that we’ve got it all wrong: we could still have gargoyles if we wanted them, we just don’t want them:

The supply-side theory says that ornament declined because it became prohibitively expensive, which suggests that it would vanish from budget housing first and gradually fade from elite building types later. In fact, budget housing is almost the only place we find it clinging on. 

[...]

The explanation, in other words, is a matter of what people demand, not of what the industry is capable of supplying: ornament survives in the housing of the less affluent because they still want it. 

(6/12) A fun fact from : within 20 years after World War II, a musician from all three of the former Axis powers had a number one hit in America:

• “Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu” by Domenico Modugno in 1958

• “Wonderland by Night” by Bert Kaempfert in 1961

• “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto in 1963

(7/12) The cure for hiccups exists. (via Slime Mold Time Mold)

(8/12) Apparently jalapeños are getting less spicy. The majority of jalapeños are sent directly to factories that turn them into salsas, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, etc., and those producers want predictable peppers. That’s driven demand for standardized strands, which have less heat. (also via Slime Mold Time Mold)

(9/12) Goodhart’s Law in a tweet:

(10/12) These days, ether and nitrous oxide are mainly for root canals and getting high in the parking lot outside of Insane Clown Posse shows. For decades, though, people used them to plumb the depths of philosophy.

(11/12) I happened upon this old post from The Last Psychiatrist that still slaps. Here, he’s talking about the “maintenance of certification” exam that practicing psychiatrists must take periodically to maintain their license:

If the test is unreliable and 99% pass, why have a test at all? Which reveals the gimmick: the point of the test isn’t to measure competence, but to convey the impression that competence was measured. The point of the test is to say that a test was given-- and nothing else.

[...]

Let me anticipate your retorts: that the questions are carefully constructed for their validity; that the test itself “incentivizes” learning; that not everyone prescribes Xanax; that if I’m such a smartypants, what system would I use? If these are your replies, you have missed my point: a flawed system isn’t better than no system at all, it is worse than no system at all, because at least with no system we are forced to be accountable to ourselves for our education. “Not everyone will be so dedicated.” Correct, but now those same undedicated people get an official blessing of their ignorance.

(12/12) Just a periodic reminder: in the 1960s, the CIA drugged unwitting American citizens with LSD, lured them back to an apartment to have sex with a prostitute, and observed them through one-way mirrors. The goal of the program was to figure out what happens when you drug citizens with LSD and lure them back to an apartment to have sex with a prostitute, and it was a resounding success.

LINKS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SCIENCE-SHAPED THINGS (ONLY CONSUME UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF A DOCTOR)

(1/6) Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are supposed to be the pinnacle of scientific evidence. But they suffer from a garbage-in, garbage-out problem: if they ingest flawed or fraudulent studies, the results of the review will also be worthless. (And that’s just the beginning of the problems, see this Data Colada series for more.)

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal (and Experimental History commenter) argues that the problem of fraud and fake data is so bad that reviews are often worthless. For instance, one guy discovered that his systematic review included a bunch of studies that never happened:

They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published.

Another guy analyzed 526 trials that had been submitted to the journal Anaesthesia and discovered that 14% of them had false data and 8% were “zombie” trials—as in, they never happened. Smith concludes:

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary.

(2/6) Speaking of fraud, it is really, really hard to do anything about it.

The Data Colada bloggers have received death threats and lawsuits for pointing out obvious research misconduct. I recently came across this blog post by Joe Hilgard where he details the painful and mostly fruitless process of trying to alert people to bogus data:

The clearest consequence of my actions has been that Zhang [the alleged fraudster] has gotten better at publishing. Every time I reported an irregularity with his data, his next article would not feature that irregularity. In essence, each technique for pointing out the implausibility of the data can be used only once, because an editor’s or university’s investigation consists of showing the authors all the irregularities and asking for benign explanations. This is a serious problem when even weak explanations like “I didn’t understand what randomized assignment means” or “I’m just very bad at statistics” are considered acceptable.

[...]

In total, trying to get these papers retracted has been much more difficult, and rather less rewarding, than I had expected. The experience has led me to despair for the quality and integrity of our science.

(3/6) I appreciate what Hilgard, Data Colada, and folks like them are trying to do; it’s both prosocial and thankless. But I disagree with the way fraud-detection work often gets framed. Here’s how Hilgard begins his piece:

Science is supposed to be self-correcting. To test whether science is indeed self-correcting, I tried reporting this misconduct via several mechanisms of scientific self-correction.

Science is not self-correcting in the sense that “the gatekeepers inevitably come around to believing and promoting true things instead of false things.” Some of those gatekeepers will keep believing and promoting false things until they die. Science is self-correcting in that “true things are more powerful than false things.” Truth wins in the long run because you can use it to do more stuff.

(See also: Science is a strong-link problem and Psychology might be a big stinkin’ load of hogwash, and that’s just fine.)

It’s hard to see that right now in psychology because we don’t have enough true things. We have nothing to correct with, and so we think that “correcting” means “rooting out all the fraud,” rather than “coming up with better ideas.”

(4/6) , a developmental psychologist and occasional Experimental History sparring partner, argues that a lot of developmental psychology isn’t worth doing. I think the same thing is true about social psychology as well, and the reason for both of our debacles is the same: our fields are pre-paradigmatic.

(5/6) The phrase “publish or perish” has been around since at least 1942, maybe even earlier.

(6/6) Here’s physicist Freeman Dyson:

You became a professor at Cornell without ever having received a Ph.D. You seem almost proud of that fact.

Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

(via Ben Reinhardt, I think? Sorry I forgot, sometimes I just save stuff thinking, “I’ll always remember where I found this” and then I immediately forget where I found it)

LINKS FOR LIZARDS (HUMANS: KEEP SCROLLING)

[These are updates from the burgeoning science-on-the-internet movement. See the original post here: An invitation to a secret society, or why you should be a lizard.]

(1/6) I’m always going on about how basic dental recommendations are not supported by any good evidence. For example, this systematic review of flossing studies concludes: “The evidence is low to very low-certainty. The effects observed may not be clinically important.” So I was thrilled when Experimental History reader Patrick O’Donaghue sent me this report of his DIY flossing study:

I tried a “can dentists tell whether or not I floss” experiment. I went to a hygienist 3 times over 18 months ish at roughly 6-9 month intervals. I had never flossed before in my life. At my first session, I confessed with a shameful air that I didn’t floss. And my hygienist looked inside my mouth and told me that she could tell, that it was giving my gingivitis, and that I needed to start flossing right away. So I dutifully took the floss that she gave to me and then proceeded to _not_ floss a single time for another 6-9 months. At my next visit, I lied and, with pride in my voice, said that I was really enjoying my new habit of flossing. And, indeed, she reported that my mouth now looked much better. “Keep it up!” she said. And then, just for fun, I did start flossing religiously. But when I went back to the hygienist, I pretended that I had started to go lax, and was basically forgetting to floss half the time, or finding myself abroad without floss in my bag, and months were flying by without any floss. And she told me that, though my mouth was “okay”, it wasn’t looking “great”, and she suggested that I needed to get back on top of flossing ASAP or else all my teeth might fall out one day or whatever it is that happens when one doesn’t floss.

If you run a flossing study, please email me about it: experimentalhistory@substack.com. Or better yet, post it on the internet and email me the link!

(2/6) Another admirable example of empiricism from an Experimental History reader: I put a toaster in the dishwasher.

(3/6) Independent scientists are building an open-source battery.

(4/6) This guy never got a degree and spent 15 years building a flower lab in his house.

(5/6) If you’re looking for money to support your independent thing, here’s a list of grants you might be eligible for. (It’s unfortunately a little out of date.)

(6/6) Speculative Technologies is running some 1-day workshops “to help ambitious researchers learn more about coordinated research programs and develop ideas for them.”

NEWS FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ

(1/6) Transparent Replications transparently replicated Study 5b from a paper I published called The Illusion of Moral Decline. All the main results came out the same: people think morality started declining sometime after they were born, regardless of when that was. See the Experimental History version of the paper for more.

(2/6) I was on Radio New Zealand talking about talking.

(3/6) Friend of the blog Hot Pink Death Machine has a new single: “Vampire Sundae”

(4/6) has the top comment on my recent post about moonshots:

I went to the White House for a Cancer Moonshot meeting as part of VP Biden’s Cancer Initiative about 12 years ago. About 30 of us sat around a big table for a day and at the end of it, we agreed to have an intern try to improve the API for retrieving clinical trial descriptions. Not that that did much good because pharma companies gain competitive advantage from keeping the important details of their trials secret. That was our moonshot.

It’s not all bad news though.

There is unlikely to be a single cure for cancer because cancer is lots of different diseases but targeted therapy and immunotherapy has been close to a miracle for some cancers. Kidney cancer, for example, has gone from practically no treatments to 50% five-year survival over the space of about ten years. Maybe not quite a moon landing yet but they are maybe orbiting the moon. The government rules do their best to thwart the people shooting for the moon with forms filled out in triplicate though.

I have terminal brain cancer and there have been no new treatments for gliomas for about twenty years. There’s a new targeted therapy — vorasedinib — that was so successful that they called an early halt to its phase 3 trials to get it out to real patients in a rush job. It was given Fast Track Designation in February 2023 and should receive actual approval later this year. Fast Track indeed.

There are people shooting for the moon but they are blocked by people with clipboards. It’s all very sad.

> “I gotta laugh at that because otherwise I’d cry.”

(5/6) I got over 100 submissions for the Summer 2024 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Thanks to everyone who sent something in! I’m very pleased so far. Already, I’ll be writing a post and I’ll think to myself, “Ooh, I know a great piece relevant to what I’m saying here, I’ll link to that,” and then I’ll remember it was one of the submissions and it’s not published yet. So I’m reading as fast as I can so that these pieces can get out into the world. I’ll notify everyone before the end of August, and if I pick your piece, I’ll give you the heads up so you can post it before I link to it (if you want to).

(6/6) And finally, here’s a deep cut from the Experimental History archives, which is about the time I was a supporting actor in a movie that has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes:

Experimental History

This movie has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and I'm in it

Love, Weddings, and Other Disasters is a real movie and I am a real actor in it. Neither of those things should be true, but they are…

Read more

2 years ago · 75 likes · 6 comments · Adam Mastroianni

Ever since I published The rise and fall of peer review and got a bunch of comments, I’ve talked to a lot of folks about how to fix science. So far, I’ve realized two things:

1. Almost everybody is hankering for a better way. (Woohoo!)

2. Some people are hankering for a fascist dystopia instead. (Uh oh!)

Strangely often, I’ll be talking to someone about all the problems with academic science and everything will be normal and then all of a sudden they’ll reveal a bunch of tyrannical fantasies. Force reviewers to sign their reviews and hold them accountable if the paper’s results don’t hold up! Centralize all journals onto a single website and make everybody submit their papers there! Mount an academia-wide inquisition to identify the data-fakers, the p-hackers, and the over-claimers, and march them off to Science Jail!1

I’m always a little shaken by these conversations. I agree with some of the goals—I would like less fraud and more replication, too. What creeps me out is that people seem to imagine all of these improvements happening at gunpoint. Turns out a lot of academics are itching to ditch their tweed jackets for jackboots and battle rattle.

They’re not alone. I love people, but a lot of them—maybe most?—yearn for their side to acquire absolute power. They seem to believe in the authoritarian school of social change: the only way to create a better world is for a strong central actor to force it on everybody else. They don’t think of this as tyranny, of course. They think of it as doing the right thing. And if a thing is right, well, duh, you should make people do it!

The most hideous ideologies are often the ones we believe without even realizing it. They feel like breathing air and eating food, so natural and necessary that the alternative never occurs to us. I think the authoritarian school of social change is one of those. (Hence why its acronym is ASS-C.)

If the idea of well-intentioned fascism doesn’t already give you the heebie-jeebies, I’m not sure how to convince you that it should. But perhaps I can convince you that it doesn’t work.

CHANCELLOR OF SCIENCE, HEAR MY PLEA

Sometimes when people are enumerating their autocratic wishlists for science, I wanna ask, “Who are you talking to?”

There is no Chancellor of Science who gets to reform research by fiat, nor any Science Gestapo to carry out her wishes. So when you’re like, “We should make sure that science is good!”, there is no one to receive your request.

Science works the way it does because of millions of people making millions of decisions all distributed throughout a big, convoluted network controlled by nobody in particular. Some of these actors are government agencies that are theoretically accountable to the public, but many of them aren’t: private universities, philanthropic foundations, scientific journals, and, of course, the individuals who actually do the science. There is no apparatus that can make all of these actors behave differently, so proposing some kind of system-wide change is a bit like proposing revisions to the Laws of Motion—your suggestion has been duly noted, but it will not be put into effect.

This is how most of the world’s problems work. There is no manager to speak to, no master switch that can turn the bad thing off, no Committee on Problems who could decide to discontinue this particular snafu. You cannot vote to abolish traffic or petition to end hunger—or, you can, but it won’t do anything other than give you the warm glow of appearing to solve a problem without actually solving it.2

Some people believe that nefarious actors are trying to establish a globe-governing New World Order. That is, of course, a crazy belief. It’s even crazier, however, to believe that the New World Order already exists, and that it has a suggestion box.

THE THREE LIES OF POWER

For an aspiring authoritarian, though, it’s no problem that the means of enforcement aren’t there already. We should simply create them. And this is where I wring my hands into raw little nubs, because this point of view relies on a few wildly hopeful and incorrect assumptions about how power works.

The first assumption is that the good guys will always have more power than the bad guys. History hasn’t exactly borne this out. Constructing a network of reeducation camps might seem like a good idea when you get to pick the curriculum, but elections and revolutions are unpredictable things, and next year you might be the one sent to the countryside to be de-programmed. When I see someone salivating over the idea of a Science Gestapo, I have to marvel at their faith that authorities only ever prosecute guilty people.

The second assumption is that, when the good guys acquire unlimited power, they’ll know what to do with it. Unfortunately, reasonable efforts to improve things often fail. We are still barely beginning to understand human behavior, which is why I’m always skeptical about plans to construct giant Human Behavior Control Machines. Policies and technologies often have unintended consequences, not just in the sense of “oops we did the opposite of what we intended” but also in the sense of “oops we didn’t even think that was a possible outcome.” The people inventing the internet in the 1970s and 80s probably didn’t predict that, forty years later, we’d be debating whether it causes teenage girls to kill themselves.

And the third assumption is that good ideas are powerless and need to be spread by force, like an infant emperor who relies on wise vizier to secure the realm with soldiers and swords. This assumption is probably aided by the widespread idea that people are stupid: “The only way to get these idiots to accept the truth is to bash a hole in their skulls and insert it manually.”

But this assumption gets the order of operations wrong. Power is not awarded to truth; power comes from truth. Believing true things ultimately makes you better at persuading people and manipulating reality, and believing untrue things does the opposite. The best ideas don’t need bayonets.

Here’s an example. For decades, the Soviet Union’s official position was that modern genetics is capitalist-imperialist pseudoscience, and that the secret to increasing crop yields is “something something graft plants together, thus unlocking their worker spirit.” Thousands of dissenting biologists were jailed or purged. Meanwhile, the crops failed and people starved.

It turns out that even global superpowers can’t change reality by fiat. Marxist genetics lost to actual genetics because Marxist genetics was wrong, not because a bunch of Western geneticists stormed the Kremlin and made Khrushchev sign an executive order. Ideas can succeed in the short run by being politically convenient, but they succeed in the long run by being true.3

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SYSTEM OF A FROWN

When I do my little spiel about the problems in science, the most common question I get is, “Well, then, how should the system work?”

This is a totally reasonable question to ask, but it’s also the wrong one, because it assumes that there should be a system. If we start there, we’re baking in our status quo bias, and we’ll almost certainly end up with a “system” that shares 98% of its DNA with the one we have right now.

(There is also, I find, an occasional twinge of authoritarianism in this question, as if to ask, “Well, if you don’t like how we’re stomping on people’s necks right now, whose necks should we be stomping on?”4)

The better way to pose this question is to tack a few extra letters onto the front: how should the ecosystem work? As soon as you start thinking in ecosystems, you stop imagining that everyone has to live under one New World Order. You start wondering what mix of organisms might keep the ecosystem healthy, and how they might coexist with one another.5

Most importantly, when you think in ecosystems, you start thinking about where you might fit in. The greatest cost of authoritarian thinking—besides the whole stomping on necks thing—is that it only ever leads us to ask, “What should the all-powerful leader do?” instead of “What should I do?”

That’s what I’m always aching for in every conversation about the future of science, or indeed, the future of anything. What are you going to do? Dream about utopia, complain that we don’t live in one, and then go back to doing the same things you’ve always done?

BUT WHAT IF POL POT HAD A PHD

In college, I knew this guy who was always talking about how the world should be ruled by a “panel of experts.” It went without saying, of course, that he would be on the panel—who better to serve than the person who had come up with the idea of the panel in the first place?

I get the appeal of a Committee of Enlightened Despots. The word “enlightened” is right there! Unfortunately, it’s followed by the word despot. The problem with despots is not that they haven’t read enough books, or even that they believe the wrong things. It’s that they’re despots. Tyranny is a bad form of government even when the tyrants have liberal arts degrees.

We yearn for an enlightened despot because the world is complicated and change is slow and incomplete and frustrating. But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t have one person in charge. What are the chances that all of the correct beliefs happen to coexist inside one person’s brain? Or even within a few people’s brains, however expert they may be? And what are the chances that the correct beliefs also just happen to be the ones you agree with?

When things are complicated and you don’t know what’s going on, your best bet is to make many bets. Which is to say: our best defense against stupidity is not authority, but diversity. I don’t mean corporate-compatible diversity like where a soap commercial has one person who is multiracial and one who has alopecia. I mean a bunch of weirdos trying to figure things out together, and nobody gets to stomp on anyone else’s neck, even when they really want to.

This is exactly what authoritarians cannot abide, and it’s why they’re doomed to fail. Freedom, tolerance, equality, democracy—they make things slow and annoying. But dammit, the crops grow.

Everybody’s trying to do a moonshot these days. A moonshot for covid, a moonshot for climate change, a moonshot for brain maps, a moonshot for semiconductors, a moonshot for, uh, teenagers building robots.

People apparently agree that there are big problems in science and we need to shake things up: bring on the breakthroughs! Bold, transformative ideas! Let’s revolutionize science! 

But here’s the thing: despite all these supposed moonshots, nobody has gone to the moon. As far as I can tell, nobody is even aiming at the moon. All this noise about moonshots is, at best, a farce. At worst, it’s a con.

CURING CANCER REQUIRES YOUR WHOLE ASS

Take, for instance, the NIH Cancer Moonshot1. It was originally funded with $1.8 billion over seven years, and it continues to pull down hundreds of millions every year. The organizers assure us that “remarkable progress and notable scientific accomplishments have been made” in that time.

So what did those billions buy us? A new cancer vaccine? Chemotherapy drugs that don’t make your hair fall out? A way to screen for prostate cancer that doesn’t require someone to stick their finger up your butt?2

No, none of that. Instead, the Cancer Moonshot has been:

• “working to build the evidence base on multilevel interventions to increase rates of colorectal cancer screening”

• refining “electronic medical records and clinical workflows to ensure routine delivery of evidence-based tobacco cessation treatment services”

• doing research that “suggested that some children with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia that recurs or resists treatment may benefit from certain immunotherapy drugs”3

Discovering that some kids might benefit from some drugs is, I guess, better than setting the research money on fire. But this ain’t a moonshot. It’s so far from a moonshot that it needs a different name. Earthshot? Groundshot? How about, “normal research”?

If there had been a webpage monitoring the progress of the actual moonshot in the 1960s, it would have said stuff like “we built a rocket” and “we figured out how to get the landing module back to the ship.” In 1969, it would have just said, “hello, we landed on the moon.” It would not have said, “we are working to establish the evidence base on multilevel interventions to increase the rates of moon landings.”

Maybe curing cancer in the 2020s is way harder than going to the moon in the 1960s. I have no idea. But it doesn’t sound like we’re even trying to cure cancer.

Here’s a dead giveaway: one of the first things the NIH touts about its Moonshot is that it has published over 2,000 papers. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that when a scientist actually has something important to tell you, they tell you about what they did, not what they published. Besides, how many more papers do we need before we cure cancer? Another 2,000? Another 10,000? “I’m so sorry to inform you that you have colon cancer, but the good news is that if you give us your data, we can use it in a Nature paper.”

There’s a useful adage here: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” I don’t think anyone involved in the Cancer Moonshot literally wants cancer to exist forever. But they all seem to assume that it will, and that the process of curing it will go on indefinitely, and they should all be well-funded in the meantime.

To be clear, I much prefer that the government drop billions on half-assed cancer research than, say, cruise missiles. At least half-assed cancer research sometimes makes progress on cancer, even if it’s by accident. But cancer kills about 10 million people every year, so we’re gonna need to put our whole asses into this one.

BOLDLY GOING WHERE MANY PEOPLE HAVE GONE BEFORE

This seems to happen every time somebody claims they’re going to fund “high-risk” research.

Here’s another example. The National Science Foundation gives out “Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research” (EAGER) that are supposed to support “high risk-high payoff” work that “involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.” These are some projects they’ve funded:

• Studying how to recycle lithium-ion batteries

• Creating a network of people who study disasters

• Figuring out whether scientists are sharing their data

Likewise, the NIH gives out a Pioneer Award to “highly innovative researchers at any career stage who propose bold research projects with unusually broad scientific impact.” Here’s what the most recent winners are up to:

• Studying clinical information systems

• Trying to figure out which neural circuits generate “pain, touch, and body schema perceptions, and sensorimotor behaviors”

• Using computational methods to study decision-making

These projects might be great, they might be important, but they are not even close to “bold” or “radically different.” This is normal research, indistinguishable from the stuff the NSF and NIH fund through their regular channels. Seven of the eight Pioneer Award recipients are affiliated with super-elite universities. Three of them are at Stanford alone! The NIH was like, “let’s do something so crazy that those uptight muckity-mucks at HQ would never go for it” and they came up with, “let’s mail some checks to Stanford.”

(Perhaps they should have called their program “Normal Operational Research Money for the Already Loaded [NORMAL]).

It’s obvious that the NIH never intended to fund anything other than normal research. They admitted as much when they first described the Pioneer Award:

Part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity [emphasis in original]

I gotta laugh at that because otherwise I’d cry. Kudos to the NIH for taking the bold step of supporting people who have outstanding records.

(By the way, grants like these comprise 0.15% of the NIH external funding budget. So 99.85% of the budget is going to projects that are even lower risk than this.)

If that’s what you consider “high-risk,” then I’m excited to introduce you to the Experimental History High-Risk Investment Fund: for a nominal fee, I will accept cash from you and use it to purchase US Treasury bonds.

MY BODY IS A MACHINE THAT TURNS MONEY INTO PAPERS

Clearly, this “high-risk” thing hasn’t panned out. We need a different strategy here.

We can start by admitting that most research is already “high-risk”, in the sense that it’s very unlikely to amount to anything. It’s just people playing the Science Game, doing Mad Libs in the lab.

You know those kids who stuff their résumés so they can get into good schools? Some of them grow up to be Principal Investigators, stuffing their CVs so they can get grants. These are the same people who think that turning $1.8 billion into 2,000 journal articles is a cause for celebration, rather than a national embarrassment. It is indeed risky to hand a million bucks to a person like that, because they’re probably not going to do anything useful with it.

The real problem with science is not the lack of riskiness; it’s the lack of seriousness. The first question we should ask isn’t “How likely is this project to fail?” but “Does this person believe in truth and seek it sincerely? Are they going to produce papers, or are they going to produce knowledge?” If the prerequisite for getting on the grant review committee is “you’ve produced a lot of papers,” good luck with this one.

There is, however, a different kind of risk that nobody seems willing to take: reputational risk. As in, how much will people make fun of you for funding this idea, especially if it doesn’t work? 

Sending checks to Stanford carries zero reputational risk. If they use your money to produce fake papers, nobody will judge you for it—all you did was trust the experts. But if you send a check to some no-name weirdos and they blow it on a bizarro project that goes nowhere, everybody will blame you for not sending it to Stanford instead.

The goal isn’t to maximize reputational risk; the goal is to ignore it. Some good ideas look like good ideas, and everyone will cheer when you pick them. But some good ideas look like bad ideas, and everyone will boo when you pick them. Courage is picking the good ideas regardless of whether people are cheering or booing.

Amidst all these scientific agencies and organizations throwing around billions of dollars, I don’t see anybody taking on even a smidge of reputational risk. That means there’s a huge opportunity here. If you’ve got the cash, taste, and guts necessary to find and fund stupid-looking-but-good ideas, you have zero competitors. As a guy who used to teach at a business school, I can tell you: that’s the optimal number of competitors.

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THE PARABLE OF THE BULGING NECKS

Let me show you the kinds of low-hanging fruit waiting out there for anyone willing risk embarrassment. Alarmingly often, this is how breakthroughs happen:

1. A weirdo/outsider proposes some new idea

2. Experts and authorities ignore or suppress it because it seems stupid. This can go on for a long time.

3. Eventually the new idea wins out because it’s better.

#2 is where the money is waiting to be made. If you’ve got a good eye for ideas and you’re brave enough to tiptoe a bit outside the mainstream consensus, you can make a breakthrough decades or centuries earlier than it would have happened otherwise.

For example, people used to get giant bulges on their necks (“goiters”), and no one knew why.4 It was particularly bad in Switzerland. In the 1800s, there were some Swiss towns where pretty much everyone had a goiter, not to mention crazy high rates of what we used to call “cretinism”—children born with profound developmental disabilities.

At the beginning of the 1900s, the two leading theories for Goitergeddon were “there’s some bad microbes in Switzerland” and “Swiss people are undergoing racial degeneration.” When a rural doctor named Heinrich Henziger was like, “Maybe it’s caused by a lack of iodine,” the medical authorities shouted him down. One leading expert published a piece in the main Swiss medical journal saying the iodine deficiency theory “must be vigorously opposed.” 

This was, in fact, at least the fifth time in 50 years that someone put this theory forward, and the same thing had happened every time. The Most High Very Esteemed Experts pooh-poohed it, and it never went anywhere. The thing that causes goiter is indeed a lack of iodine, but the thing that prevented goiter from being cured was a lack of courage.

Luckily, this time around, another rural GP named Otto Bayard gave iodine to some of his goiter patients, which completely cured them. Despite vigorous opposition, this eventually snowballed into an international effort to add iodine to salt, and that’s why almost no one gets goiters anymore. If a brave billionaire or a thick-skinned government agency had been willing to take a flier on a low-status idea, we could have cured the horrible neck bulges half a century earlier.

Anybody who wants to revolutionize science, then, should be looking for the Henzigers and the Bayards. They’re hard to find because they don’t work at Stanford University, they don’t look good on applications, and they often sound ridiculous: “Hi, I’m Henrich Henziger, and I’m a doctor from the middle of nowhere. I think all of the experts are wrong about goiter. I’m the only one who knows how to cure it. Could I have some money please?”

Governments struggle to do this because governing requires consensus-building, while revolutionary science requires consensus-breaking.5 Private foundations struggle to do it because—as I’ve heard from people who work for them—even when their stated goal is “change the world,” their actual goal is often, “make our billionaire donor look good.” 

But we know it’s possible, because both private organizations and public agencies have found it within themselves to do the right thing long before it looked like a good idea. The Rockefeller Foundation supported almost every molecular biologist who won a Nobel Prize between 1954 and 1965, and they did it, on average, 19 years before the prize was won. They didn’t fund the hot thing; they made it hot.

The government can do the same thing. The original moonshot wasn’t popular. People very reasonably wondered why the government was launching dudes into space when there were so many problems back on Earth.6 The public only started to warm up to the idea decades later. So you can only call something a moonshot if what you really mean is, “we’re attempting to do something important that won’t be appreciated until years after we accomplish it.”

THE KARIKÓ TEST

I’ve got a test for all the aspiring moonshotters out there.

Katalin Karikó recently won a Nobel Prize for her work on mRNA vaccines, which saved millions of lives. Before that, however, she was barely staying afloat in academia. She had trouble getting grants, and her papers didn’t make a splash. Her bosses at the University of Pennsylvania denied her promotions and restricted her access to lab space and supplies, describing her at one point as “not of faculty quality.” Now they’re all singin’ a different tune, not least because the technology she patented has since earned UPenn more than a billion dollars.

So here’s the test: whatever “high-risk high-reward” program you’re running, would it have funded Karikó before she got famous? Do you have the courage and insight it takes to see someone’s potential when they aren’t legibly successful yet? If so, hats off to you. If not, you’re not doing a moonshot. You’re just doing normal science in a futuristic font.

Unfortunately, spotting Karikó is as easy as it gets. Funding her 20 years ago was, at most, medium-risk. She was still a professor at an Ivy League university, and nobody thought she was crazy. They just didn’t think her work was going to end up stopping a global pandemic. So passing the Karikó Test is a bit like passing the Bechdel Test: you’ve only cleared the lowest bar.

That said, it’s okay to fail the Karikó Test, as long as you’re honest about it. Normal science needs love too. “Incremental” sounds pejorative, even though it describes basically all research done inside traditional institutions. That’s too bad. If you’re doing serious work and you actually decrease cancer deaths by 3%, that’s a lot of lives saved. It’s just that, if you call 3% “revolutionary,” you’re going to crowd out the actual revolutionaries who are gunning for a 100% reduction in cancer deaths.

THINGS YOU CAN DO

All right, enough criticism! Time to incur some reputational risk myself. Here are three ideas that I think would make for true moonshots. 

1. Endow scientists for life.

Most scientists say they would spend their grant dollars differently if they could, and some of the most important discoveries have come from researchers who were allowed to screw around. People have noticed this, and now there’s a widespread feeling that we should “fund people, not projects.”

I say: that’s a great idea, so let’s actually do it. Fund a few scientists for the rest of their lives, no strings attached. Drop $5 million in a scientific trust fund for each individual, pay them out the ~$200,000 in interest every year, and let them do whatever they want with it.

A program like that could create a new era of gentleman scientists—you know, the ones who got us evolution, chemistry, microbiology, etc.—except they wouldn’t have to be gentle or men. The problem with our previous crop of gentlemen scientists, of course, was that the vocation was only open to people who had been born wealthy because, say, their grandpa sold a lot of guns. We can do a lot better at picking researchers than simply waiting for arms dealers to produce offspring.

(See also: trust windfalls.)

2. Build a new scientific ecosystem.

It’s not just Karikó—lots of Nobel laureates say things like “I could never survive in academia today.” People have proposed lots of tweaks to make things more hospitable to our most promising scientists, but it’s a little bit like watching that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Harrison Ford has to get past a bunch of booby traps to get the Holy Grail, and then your takeaway is, “Oh, those booby traps are bad, we should have 10% fewer of them.”

I support de-booby-trapping academia, but a better route is to build new places that don’t have any trap doors or poison darts at all. Not an appendix to an existing institution, not a retirement home for scholars who have achieved mainstream success, not a place where academics can hang out for a while before they go back to running from giant boulders—a completely separate space that works on different principles and supports an entirely different species of scientist.

This has to start with building new on-ramps for young folk who want to learn how to do basic research. Naturally, I think Science Houses would be a good way to do this, but if someone came along and was like “I’m going to build lots of new scientific training institutions outside of academia, but I will never use any of your ideas!!” I’d be like “That seems vindictive, but ok!!”

3. Run the actually good study (RTAGS).

If those are too extreme for your taste, here’s an idea for moonshots that stick a bit closer to home.

Meta-analyses come out all the time that are like, “Unfortunately, all of the studies that try to answer this important question are so bad that we can’t learn anything from them.” Instead of running another 500 piddling, confounded little studies, someone with guts, taste, and money could run the actually good study.

For instance: 

• Does flossing work? “The evidence is low to very low-certainty.” You could randomly assign a big group of people to floss or not, or tell everybody to floss half of their teeth, and see whether dentists can tell the difference. 

• Does sunscreen prevent skin cancer? “The certainty of the evidence was low.” You could randomly assign a big group of people to wear different kinds of sunscreen, or none at all, and follow them for the decades that it would take for any differences to show up. 

• Does wearing masks slow the spread of respiratory viruses? “Our confidence in these results is generally low to moderate.” You could settle this once and for all by renting a bunch of cruise ships, sending volunteers on a free cruise, flooding the boats with cold virus, and randomizing some of the ships to wear masks while others go about their business as usual. (You should explain this to people before they get on the boats, of course.)

These would be less sexy than the Moon Moonshot, but only a couple of humans have ever been to the moon, while almost all of them have teeth, skin, and respiratory tracts—and perhaps more of them would if they flossed, wore sunscreen, and used masks. We just don’t know!

I hesitate to offer these ideas because the quality of the idea itself matters a lot less than the quality of the people doing it. Selection effects are far more powerful than incentives, and that’s why taste matters so much. But if you’re really trying to shake things up, you should be aiming at least this high, and hopefully higher.

Otherwise, you might as well just write a check to the NIH, and they will happily put it toward their Stanford Moonshot Program, a revolutionary new initiative where they send checks to Stanford.

2

Seriously, I would love it if the NIH website on prostate cancer screening did not include this image:

Back in September, I laid out a plan for Science House.

The idea was simple: academia is a big ship, and it turns slowly, if at all. But there’s no reason for us all to be on the same ship, fighting over the helm. Instead, we should launch lots of little ships that can explore the seas in all directions.

That’s what a Science House does. It’s like a hacker house for basic research, a freestanding lab that does science and posts it directly to the internet, like this. You could form a Science House around any niche—a Weird Biology House, a Speculative Physics House, etc.

This summer, it’s happening! I’m running a prototype Science House, thanks to a grant from Emergent Ventures. The focus of this house is training. We’re bringing a couple of aspiring scientists together, sticking ‘em in a house, giving ‘em some money and mentorship, and letting ‘em set sail. It’s kind of like a PhD program except it doesn’t give you clinical depression.

The two inaugural Scholars of Science House are already publishing their work to the world. I’m excited to introduce them to you:

AKA . In their first post, Ruth dares to ask whether we’ve all been bamboozled by Big Noodle:

Her friend admitted that when making macaroni and cheese, they don’t wait for the water to boil before adding the pasta. Instead, they put the noodles into cold water and boil everything together. 

My initial reaction to this was shock and dismay. How could a person break one of the cardinal rules of cooking pasta? This quickly turned to confusion. What if the person was right? What if all these years I had been following the conventional wisdom of “Big Pasta” and waiting for my water to boil, when all along I could have been making my pasta in a million different ways? 

Violet and I were about to throw a party, so we figured this was a chance to get to the bottom of things.

See the results here:

The Righteous Mugwort

Long Ago and Farfalle

One afternoon, my mentor Adam Mastroianni sat me and Violet down in the conference room and showed us a YouTube video by America’s Test Kitchen. In the introduction, the host, Lan Lam, shares a confession made by one of her friends. Her friend admitted that when making macaroni and cheese, they don’t wait for the water to boil before adding the pasta. I…

Read more

6 months ago · 4 likes · Ruth Daniel

And AKA . Her first post is about sleep, the limits of scientific knowledge, and the wonders of doing science for yourself:

Most human attributes fall on some kind of distribution. Here’s a graph showing the distribution of human grip strength:

And here’s a (very scientific) graph showing the distribution of human height:

I believe that human sleep has any amount of variation in it, where some people need more sleep and some need less. This contradicts the idea that everyone needs eight hours of sleep a night since it would mean some people are longer sleepers, and some are shorter sleepers.

Read the whole post here:

CounterfeitBees

Don't Let The Man Tell You How To Sleep

My whole life, people have told me that I need eight hours of sleep a night. I remember parents, teachers, doctors, journalists, and podcasters professing that “any less than eight hours is undersleeping, which has severe negative effects on developing brains.” But I cannot figure out why they’re a…

Read more

6 months ago · 3 likes · Violet Henriques

BULL FIGHTERS

We didn’t plan it this way, but Ruth’s and Violet’s first posts are both about bullshit.

When people are like, “you must salt your pasta water, or else it will taste awful,” or “you must sleep eight hours a night, or else you will die,” and they don’t have any data to back themselves up—that’s bullshit. It’s just people saying stuff, a bit of ventriloquism where someone’s lips move while they are, in fact, talking out of their butt.

Bullshit is dangerous because it lulls us into thinking we know things when we don’t. That’s how we can go 1,000 years believing that heavy things fall faster than lighter things, or that rotting meat turns into maggots. If you want to learn anything about the world, you must first clear your mental pipes of bullshit.

The best defense against bullshit is skepticism. When Martha Stewart is out here slinging claims like, “Scientifically speaking, there’s only one valid reason to salt your pasta water: it seasons each noodle evenly from the inside out,” your immediate reaction should be “What the hell are you talking about?”1 This statement is about as trustworthy as the old college adage that, before you drink boxed wine, you must remove the inner wine bag and slap it vigorously to “activate the sugars.”

But we can do more than defend against bullshit. The best offense is empiricism. If sleep and pasta are as obvious as people claim, then you should be able to run a study in your kitchen or your bedroom and see the giant effects for yourself.

(I would use the phrase “do your own research,” but unfortunately it’s been co-opted to mean “don’t pay attention that crummy establishment research! Pay attention to this crummy anti-establishment research instead!”)

So while Violet and Ruth’s posts are ostensibly about cooking noodles and catching z’s, they are ultimately about the detection and destruction of bullshit. This is the cornerstone of scientific training, and no offense, but a lot of people out there seem to have skipped Bullshit Day during their PhD, because the level of their confidence and the quality of their evidence are all out of whack.

Case in point: when I suggested that maybe the universal pre-publication peer review system doesn’t work so well, a lot of people said something like, “Well, it’s not a great system, but it’s better than all the others.” This is a bullshit claim: exactly zero of those people have ever tried any other system. What they’re really saying is, “When I imagine other ways of doing things, I imagine that they won’t work as well.” But the thing about science is that, whenever possible, we replace thought experiments with actual experiments, and we must never confuse the two.

Skepticism and empiricism are both necessary, but if that’s all you got, you’re just a pedant. This is where a lot of people get stuck after they get fed up with mainstream science—they become perpetual grumps and spiteful debunkers, always ready to kick things over, never brave enough to build anything up.

To succeed in science—or anything else, really—your distaste for bullshit has to be outmatched by your love for truth. That’s what I appreciate most about the work Ruth and Violet have done so far: they treat science like we’re all a bunch of meddling teens trying to solve a mystery together, rather than rival basketball teams trying to score points on one another.

DITCHING THE DITCHES

I’m excited that there are lots of new institutions trying to diversify the scientific ecosystem—ecosystems rule, monocultures drool, etc. But as far as I can tell, nobody’s tackling the training problem. If you want to learn science, PhD programs are still the only game in town. That is, to join a shiny new scientific institution, you must first become a refugee from an old, decrepit scientific institution.

This is a big obstacle for this whole scientific revolution thing we’re all trying to do. In a true ecosystem, each organism fills a different niche (lizard, fern, jellyfish, etc.) But right now, it’s like every niche is filled by humans in costumes (human in lizard suit, human in fern suit, human in jellyfish suit, etc.).

People at least seem to be aware of this. I was recently at a metascience conference where the CEO of one of these new scientific organizations said, to a roomful of knowing nods, “When we hire academics, the first thing we have to do is de-program them.” Which is bleak! That programming took a long time, and it was probably funded by taxpayers. Imagine spending six years digging ditches and then you get a new job and your new boss is like, “The first thing you have to do is fill all of those ditches back in.”

Digging ditches isn’t just a waste of time—it increases your tolerance for bullshit. You start to believe that it is perhaps noble and good to move shovelfuls of dirt from here to there, and that we should honor and respect the people who have shoveled the most. What these ditch-diggers really need is a different kind of training, and perhaps a good night’s rest and a well-sauced plate of linguine.

MAKING SCIENCE HOUSE A SCIENCE HOME

Lots of folks have reached out to ask how they can help support Science House—thank you! The best thing to do is to subscribe to and . If you have feedback, ideas, expertise, or just encouragement, leave ‘em a comment!

We’re also looking for ways to turn this 7-week experiment into a year-round institution. If you’re the kind of person with a big wad of cash marked “FOR SCIENCE,” please get in touch. Just as a reminder, you could fund a Science House forever with the same amount of money that Harvard spends on postage every year.

I think the devil is real and he wants you to be more productive. He’s everywhere, spreading wickedness disguised as wisdom. Here he is in Forbes:

Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity.

And in Harvard Business Review:

Every evening, [Marshall Goldsmith, the “well-known CEO coach”] reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every important behavior he hopes to achieve. Among the items: the number of words he wrote, the distance he walked, and the number of nice things he said to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

And The New York Times:

Some inveterate procrastinators even agree on a set of rewards or punishments to go along with their deadlines, depending on what motivates them the most. A reward could be a free lunch; a punishment could be an email to the department announcing that a deadline was not me [sic].

If you get a Chipotle gift card when you meet a deadline and a public shaming when you miss a deadline, guess what buddy: you’re in hell.

For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate, like this:

What is the one task that you despise doing but it needs to be done?

What task is going to propel you farther and faster toward overall success?

Once you have chosen your “frog,” make it a habit to wake up every morning and do that task first. In other words: eat that frog!

I have developed simple methods that make it easier to identify your frog and eat it, too.

The internet is full of this devilry. Millions of articles about how to find frogs, season frogs, cook frogs, and unhinge your jaw so you can cram more frogs down your gullet. Want to optimize your frog-eating? Just fork over $597 for a 12-session e-course!

Amidst it all, nobody’s asking the obvious question: Dude, why are you eating frogs??

YOU ARE NOT A LAZY PIECE OF TRASH

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, and sometimes we don’t know how to prioritize or organize. Getting help with that is good! But if that’s all we wanted, I don’t think motivational grifters could get rich telling us how lazy we are. 

I think we seek out and soak up productivity pablum because we’re ashamed of ourselves. We embarrassed that we can’t get our work done. We’re angry with ourselves for slacking off. Why can’t you just send those emails? And so we beg productivity gurus to make us better.

Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:

We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.

If you believe that, it’s no surprise you’d shell out major moolah to be cured of your sloth. But every one of those words is fat, stinkin’ lie.

First, humans are not “naturally” lazy, because humans are not “naturally” anything. The state of nature never existed, and it definitely doesn’t now. Our DNA places some wide boundaries around our possible selves, and then our environments push and pull us between them. That’s why humans differ so much across time and space. For example, 100 years ago, people were two inches shorter, they argued bitterly about whether women should have the right to vote, and they would regularly eat sandwiches filled with, among other things, fruit salad, spaghetti, and watermelon/pimento mix. We’re different today not because our genes changed, but because our culture changed. Whatever our current level of industriousness is, then, there’s nothing “natural” about it, just like there’s nothing natural about our current height, politics, or sandwich preferences.

Second, those “base instincts" deserve more credit, because they probably solve 99% of your problems without you even realizing it. Your unconscious mind keeps your heart pumping and your spleen spleening. It turns the photons that hit your retina into colors and shapes and objects. It stores and retrieves a lifetime of information, like how to juggle and where you keep your socks and the name of your spouse. It even sets goals, forms opinions, and does math.

And third, using your “higher faculties” doesn't always leave you better off. As I wrote recently,  smart people aren’t happier. That’s partly because people have all sorts of wrong theories about the things that make them happy, so all their smarty-pants scheming is in vain. In fact, sometimes thinking harder actually makes people worse at figuring at their actual preferences. So expanding conscious control over more and more of your brain’s real estate––a sort of Cognitive Reconquista––is probably a bad idea.

OKAY BUT WHY DO I FEEL LIKE A LAZY PIECE OF TRASH?

If our minds aren’t made up of a sluggish unconscious with a saintly consciousness on top, why does it feel that way? My head is full of lots of internal conflicts like, “No, we can’t eat a whole cheesecake right now,” and “We have to stop staring at the screen and go to sleep,” and “We must continue to edit this sentence instead of picking our nose.” And it feels like the guy saying all that stuff is a little CEO nestled in my prefrontal cortex (“Good, Conscious Me”) and he’s talking to a bunch of slobs that inhabit the rest of my skull (“Bad, Unconscious Me”). Isn’t that evidence for the “lazy unconscious, diligent conscious” hypothesis?

I think: no. This is actually a consequence of how the unconscious and conscious mind interact. 

Here’s an analogy. Imagine you’re a busy, cigar-chomping boss and you need some help around the office, so you hire an intern. “Come talk to me whenever you have a problem, otherwise, just do whatever needs to get done,” you tell him. You’re very busy, so once the new guy walks away you completely forget about him. Some time later, he knocks at your door. “Hey, I’ve got a problem,” he says. You help him solve it, he leaves, you forget about him again. Later, he’s back at your door with another problem. And then another. “Jeez,” you might think to yourself, “this new guy sucks. Whenever I see him, he’s got a problem!” But of course, he’s just doing exactly what you told him to do. You just never pay attention to him when he’s doing a good job, so it always looks like he’s doing a bad job.

Our conscious and unconscious may work a similar way. The only time your unconscious bugs your conscious is when it has a problem that needs attention: we’re tired, we’re confused, we don’t like doing whatever we’re doing right now. The rest of the time, it just invisibly solves things for you. That relationship can make it seem like your unconscious is stupid and lazy while your conscious is wise and diligent, but that’s because you never pay attention to your unconscious when it’s doing its job.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU EAT TOO MANY FROGS

Everybody has to eat frogs sometimes. And some people have to eat a lot more frogs than others because they were born into poverty and prejudice while others were born into riches and respect. But everybody, no matter how many frogs allotted to them by the universe, will eat more frogs than they have to if they believe they’re a lazy good-for-nothing who needs a constant, conscious lashing to stay focused. I’ve seen where this leads, and it ain’t pretty.

I was a resident advisor for most of undergrad and graduate school, so I spent a lot of time talking to young adults who were freaking out about what to do with their lives.

“What do you like to do?” I'd ask.

“I don’t know,” they’d say.

“Well, when you feel good, what is it you’re doing?"

They’d think for a while, then say something like, “I guess I like hanging out with my friends.”

Okay, so they at least haven’t suffered major brain damage, I’d think, crossing “refer to medical center for psych evaluation” off my list of possible responses. I’d go through their classes and extracurriculars: do they like sociology 101? Intermediate computer science? Their dance group? The after-school tutoring that they do? Do any of these things make them feel alive?

Sometimes we’d find something, and I’d gently encourage them to think more about why they spend so little time doing the few things they seemed to really care about. But often we’d come up empty-handed. Their classes were merely tolerable, their activities were meaningless diversions or resume-stuffers. They did what they did all day because their parents told them to, or everyone else was doing it, or because it seemed like it might get them a job, not because they actually liked it.

These were students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard. Their reward was––surprise!––more frogs. So they ate those frogs too. And now they’re staring down a whole lifetime of frog-eating and starting to feel like maybe something, somewhere has gone wrong. But they don’t know what else to do. They’ve so thoroughly subjugated their desires that they don't even know what their desires are anymore. 

(These students inevitably end up as consultants or bankers or managers at tech companies, industries that richly reward people who are willing to work very hard for no particular reason. And they usually burn out after a few years—“burnout” is just a short way of saying “too many frogs in the belly.”)

This is an extra special type of tragedy, a tragedy that unfolds while everyone cheers. Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life is like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you’re so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree, but you’re also feeling a bit cold and wet at the moment, and you’re not sure why.

BAD RELATIONSHIPS AND SMALL PONDS

Here’s another way of looking at it.

Have you ever thought you loved someone, and then your relationship failed for whatever reason, and some time later you fall in love with someone else, and realize that your previous love was just a make-believe love, a childish imitation that you mistook for the real thing––an honest mistake, because you had never felt the real thing before? And yet you still feel a little embarrassed that you thought something so shallow could really be love, that love was simple and weightless, like a single pop song played on repeat until you die. It’s only when you hear the rest of the album that you realize love is so much better than that one hit single, that it’s got moods and movements, sounds that you’ve never heard before, melodies you never thought you would like, but you do, and now they’re stuck in your head. It’s good in a way you didn’t know something could be good.

Imagine getting stuck in that first relationship forever. When it goes bad—and relationships like that always go bad eventually—you simply can’t separate, for whatever reason. You become one of those couples that doesn’t actually seem like they love each other. When you make fun of one another, it sounds like you really mean it. You go on lots of business trips because you don’t have much fun being around your spouse. You get cynical about love and you scoff at every love story and love song because that’s not really what it’s like. Nobody ever actually feels deep, abiding pleasure in another human being, you think, at least not for long.

Or, if you’ve never felt a love like that—imagine that the biggest body of water you’ve ever seen is a dinky little pond and you think, “Yep, that’s about as much water as there can be! There’s nothing deeper or wider than this. Seeing water that stretches onward to the horizon, water that can turn into tidal waves, water that hides giant whales and creatures that have never seen the sun, that’s just a bunch of tall tales.”

And maybe you can be happy sitting next to your pond, so long as you never see an ocean. Maybe when you meet people who tell you about the magnificent oceans they’ve seen, you figure they’re just exaggerating what it’s like to see a pond. “Ah yes, I remember seeing my first pond,” you chuckle. But somewhere deep in your brain, there’s a little twinge of doubt.

I think lots of people are stuck in that first relationship, stuck next to their tiny little pond, skeptical that anything greater exists. But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough.

Some of these people are stuck there because the world is cruel and they never had a shot at something better. But some people are stuck there because they don’t believe there’s something better. They’ve been hoodwinked by the devil’s lie, fooled into thinking that they are, deep down, a lazy loser, and they must be threatened, cajoled, and caffeinated into working hard, because suffering is the natural state of life. When they get home at the end of the day and they’re so tired that all they can do is sit motionless and watch TV, they blame themselves, as if it’s their fault that they feel exhausted after racing to meet a deadline so they can avoid being publicly shamed. And that breaks my heart.

"COUGH UP THAT FROG,” HE SAID TO THE MIRROR

All of this has been a long way of saying: if you’re forcing yourself to eat frogs all day, maybe you need a vacation, or better pay, or some help organizing your life. But maybe you what you really need is to stop eating frogs.

Or, at the very least, you can stop thinking that frog-eating is such a virtuous thing to do. A little self-discipline builds character, but too much self-discipline breaks it. As Slime Mold Time Mold put it:

Pistons are always moving up and down. A piston moves up; it fires; but that action is matched by the piston moving down, and spending some time not firing. It would be foolish to complain that the piston is not firing all the time, but this is what some people do in trying to work hard all the time. They are trying to keep the piston in the down position the whole time, not recognizing that this will stop the piston from firing again, and will damage the whole engine. 

Lest this all sound like a lecture, let me confess: I’m a recovering frog-eater. That’s why I’m so fired up about this; recent converts are always the best missionaries.

Last fall, I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write all of the papers that I needed to get written. I love everything about writing scientific papers––developing the ideas, running the studies, analyzing the data, and interpreting the results––except actually writing them. Editors and reviewers demand that scientific papers be extremely boring—“This paper is fun to read,” a reviewer wrote to me a few years ago, “But there are many places where the paper is a little too fun.”—and you have to listen to them or else they reject your paper and tank your career. This sucks the fun out of what is otherwise a tremendous joy and privilege.

To force myself to write, I put myself on the Pomodoro technique, which is like a diet, except instead of avoiding certain foods, you avoid having fun. You’re supposed to work for ~25 minutes, then take a five minute break, repeat a few times, then take a longer break. I downloaded an app that made a little tomato appear every time I completed one of my work periods. For a few weeks, I made a lot of tomatoes appear.

But tomatoes, frogs—none of it fills you up. I was getting more done, but I was still feeling pretty bummed all the time. As a lark, I started writing this blog. And suddenly I didn’t need self-flagellation to get work done. I lost track of time (and tomatoes), I didn’t want to take breaks, and bedtime became a disappointment because it meant I had to stop. When I’m writing this blog, I feel like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford sticks the Staff of Ra into an underground map at the right time of day and a beam of light shines through the ruby at the head of the staff and it reveals the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Which is to say, I feel like I’m in alignment with the universe, channelling sunlight, illuminating something that used to be unknown. And I'm having fun. Perhaps—Reviewer 2 be damned—too much fun.

I’m still writing those papers, but now I’m easier on myself. I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in.

[EDIT TWO YEARS LATER: Hahaha I’m never writing one of those papers again, I’m going frog-free forever babyyy!]

If you want to have fun too, I have great news! I can teach you to have fun, and all you have to do is sign up for my 12-session e-course! Use code FROGS for 5% off! Only $2999.99!! Spots going fast!!! Call now and tell ‘em Satan sent ya!!!

I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, “We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT.”1

Everyone in the audience was like, “Hmm, interesting, I wonder if there were any gender effects, etc.”

I wanted to get up and yell: “EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT.”

If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get—does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius?

Or—much more likely—the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud.

Those are the options. Asking a bunch of softball questions (“Which result was your favorite?”) is not a reasonable response. That’s like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat actually for real, not a magic trick, and then asking them, “What’s the rabbit’s name?”

LOGAN ROY, PSYCHOLOGIST

There’s a devastating scene in Succession where the billionaire Logan Roy tells his adult children, all of whom are failures in different ways: “You are not serious people.”

“Serious”—what a perfect word. Not in the sense of grim or unfunny. More in the sense that means it: something like, “actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons.”

That day, in the lecture hall, none of us were serious. We were all doing a little pantomime on the theme of science. The speaker pretended to show us some results and the we pretended to think about them. As long as we all hit our marks and said our lines, the content didn’t matter—one week you’re doing “Guys and Dolls” and the next week you’re doing “Oklahoma!”, but at the end of the day, it’s all just playacting.

This was the kind of thing that eventually drove me out of academia. I love playing pretend and I love doing science, but not at the same time.

YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT, JUST WORK FOR A DICTATOR FIRST

I used to think of seriousness as something to aspire to, a nice-to-have once you figure everything else out. Something you save up for, like a house. “Oh, I’d love to be serious, but in this economy?”

My doubts started creeping in when I got a scholarship to study at Oxford after college, an experience that didn’t go well. One night, while we were standing around drinking wine, the guy in charge of the scholarship told all of us young, promising winners: “What you should really do is go spend a couple years at McKinsey building your skills, and then you can go do whatever you want.”

I had plotted and schemed and sweated to build the world’s best resume, hoping that someone would eventually give me permission to be serious, to start doing things that are good instead of things that look good. Instead, I got permission to go work for the company that does personal branding for dictators.

Before that, I believed what everybody else seems to believe: if you play the game well enough and long enough, eventually you get to stop playing and go do whatever you want. I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game. You just keep unlocking levels forever, and the levels don’t even get more interesting (“Ooh, this one is in space!”). It’s just the same thing over and over until you die. You don’t get out by winning; you get out by stopping.

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and the Priorities must be Ordered. Otherwise, they grow flabby and unkempt, and you’ll find yourself doing something stupid like working some job you mildly detest or scrolling on your phone, and the next time you look up, seventy years have passed, and now you’re just a skeleton, dead before you ever got around to living.

That’s why you gotta be serious about something. It’s like a protective amulet that prevents you from Goodharting yourself. Unserious people might seem free, unburdened by the dreadful commitment of caring about anything. But they are in fact hackable and distractible, susceptible to whatever game can trap them in a behavior loop. They’re like that guy in that 1990s anti-drug commercial, walking in circles, muttering, “I do coke...so I can work longer...so I can earn more...so I can do more coke.”2

(“I publish papers...so I can get a job...so I can get tenure...so I can publish more papers...”)

Parents apparently have this superpower where they can pick out just their kid’s voice in a room full of screaming children. Seriousness is like that: it allows you to hear the one important thing when the whole universe is screaming at you.

THE CANNONBALL SCHOOL OF SERIOUSNESS

There are three lies that stop people from being serious.

The first lie: seriousness is all or nothing. I often run into people who are like: “Well, I don’t feel like I’m being truly serious and I’m not living up to my values, but I also can’t burn every bridge and change everything about my life, so I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, forever.”

I used to feel the same way. When I started writing Experimental History, I felt this constant tug to toss everything away and go full-time right now, as if I wasn’t really serious unless I was blogging from sunup to sundown.

But this is like believing that the only way to get into a swimming pool is to do a cannonball off the diving board. Sure, that’s one way to do it, but you’re also allowed to sidle in, inch by inch, going “ooh!” and “oh boy that’s cold!” the whole time. You end up in the same place.

In fact, the inch-by-inch approach might even be better. The person who does the cannonball chooses to be brave once. The person who inches in has to be brave over and over, and that’s what seriousness requires. You don’t flip your Serious Switch one time and now you’re serious forever. Being serious is a tooth-brushing problem—you have to keep doing it every day until you die. Fortunately, the deeper you get into the pool, the more comfortable it gets, and the less comfortable it is to get out.

Plus, there’s always a good reason not to cannonball: it’s too much! Too fast! You can promise yourself you’ll cannonball later, when you’re braver or when the water’s warmer—which is to say, never. But dipping your pinky toe in the pool right now? There’s no reason not to. And then can stick your whole foot in tomorrow, and eventually you can work all the way up to your head.

That’s why, whenever I encounter someone who has endless explanations about why they have to compromise on their values, I know they’re not serious, because they have no answer for, “What’s the tiniest change you’re willing to make right now, today, and that you can make slightly larger tomorrow?”

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“I CAN’T BE MOTHER THERESA, SO I MIGHT AS WELL BE MUSSOLINI”

The second lie is really just the first lie wearing a wig. It goes: you have to be serious about everything at once. And that’s impossible, of course, which means you can’t actually be serious about anything.

I encounter this idea all the time when I’m talking to academics about academia. I give ‘em my whole spiel about publishing, being honest, blah blah blah, and they go, “Well, we don’t live in a utopia. You have to make tradeoffs in life.” Yes, of course! But the whole point of tradeoffs is to trade something you value less for something you value more. The thing you care about the most—that’s the thing you don’t compromise on!

(This is, by the way, Negotiations 101.)

For me, I felt like publishing in scientific journals required me to be dishonest. So I stopped publishing in scientific journals. I was willing to make all the other tradeoffs that academia required: uncertain job prospects, low income for a long time, little control over where you end up living, years wasted applying for grants, etc. But I was not willing to compromise on honesty.

Some people don’t feel like journals require them to lie, and good for them, but some people seem to excuse their dishonesty by saying, “Well, it’s fine to lie sometimes because you only ever get, like, 72% of what you want in life, maximum.” No, when you’re serious about something, you get 100% of it, even if it means getting less of something else. If you love someone, for example, you don’t settle for marrying their cousin.

That’s why seriousness is foundational—it tells you what to keep and what to give up. Yes, the world is unfair, corrupt, “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” whatever, but that’s not carte blanche to do whatever you want. “I can’t be Mother Theresa, so I might as well be Mussolini.”

PAYCHECK VOODOO

Finally, the third lie: you’re only serious about something if you’re getting paid to do it.

I know paychecks can do powerful brain-voodoo that makes things seem real. If the memo line says “painter” then you’re a real painter!

But there’s plenty of people pulling down fat stacks who are not serious. Every professor who asked stupid questions of the backslapping study guy—they made good money to dress up and act like scientists, but they were not scientists.

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could taking pictures.”

So being serious means ignoring the paycheck’s incantations. But that doesn’t mean ignoring money altogether—you have to figure out how to support yourself and the people who depend on you. You can’t paint your masterpiece if you can’t afford paint. It just doesn’t matter whether the paint money comes from painting or from literally anything else.

SMACK THAT

I don’t know what being serious looks like for you. I barely know what it looks like for me. But no matter who you are, being serious means holding something sacred. And if you don’t feel like you’re doing that right now, it means taking a small but perceptible step toward doing that tomorrow, and then another step after that.

There is not some distant future where it will be easier to be serious, and no one is ever going to give you permission to start. You don’t have to be 100% serious right now, nor do you have to be 100% serious about everything—these are just excuses not to be serious about anything. But the goal is to be 100% serious about at least one thing, and soon.

If you need some help, well, that backslapping paper eventually got published in a prestigious journal, so perhaps the best thing to do is ask a friend to wind up and give you a good, hearty smack right between the shoulder blades.

I am proud to announce the Experimental History Summer 2024 Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree. Submit your post now!

A THEORY OF BLOGS

As a genre, blogging is under-appreciated and under-theorized.

Most culture is produced by committee. Books, movies, music, video games, op-eds, scientific papers, etc. all have to pass through a gauntlet of editors, producers, reviewers, lawyers, and algorithms before they’re allowed to reach your eyeballs. Committees cost money, so they have to produce things that please enough people to turn a big profit, or else the committee will starve. And so they try to reduce variance, risk, and weirdness, and in raising the floor, they also lower the ceiling. The culture they produce is unlikely to offend or repulse, but it’s also unlikely to challenge or enchant. It’s usually fine and rarely sublime.

(This is why most of popular culture is reruns, repeats, sequels, and spinoffs.)

And that’s all right. It’s fun to numb your brain every once in a while by watching an Avengers movie or reading a New York Times op-ed about why this Donald Trump guy might not be all he’s cracked up to be.

But the committees leave lots of weird little niches unfilled. They can’t contemplate strange ideas, they can’t countenance obsession or self-indulgence or idiosyncrasy, and they can’t risk confusing people or pissing them off. Unfortunately, doing interesting work often requires a dash of all those things.

That’s where blogging comes in. When you don’t have a committee to feed, you can afford to be weird. You can allow yourself all of the excesses that are necessary for producing something that rearranges the furniture in someone’s mind. The lack of quality control means that blog posts are usually bad, but they’re occasionally magnificent. That’s fine by me—finding good stuff to read is a strong-link problem.

Recently, however, that problem has started feeling harder. I’m not sure what happened, but for the first time ever, I don’t have enough good stuff in my queue. Content, content everywhere but not a thing to read!

So I want to prime the pump, discover some new writers, and hopefully help them reach more people. It can be a grueling slog when you’re just a lil weirdo starting out. Good stuff does tend to spread on the internet, but it has to reach a certain critical mass of attention first. I got a couple key boosts early on that helped me keep going, so I’d like to do the same for the next generation.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR

Truly, I have no idea. I wanna be surprised. (If I knew which blog posts I wanted to see, I’d write them myself.)

But here, as inspiration, are some triumphs of the format:

• Book Reviews: On the Natural Faculties, The Gossip Trap, Progress and Poverty, The Education of Cyrus

• Deep Dives: Dynomight on air quality and air purifiers, The big alcohol study that didn’t happen: my primal scream of rage (also Dynomight), Higher than the Shoulders of Giants, or a Scientist’s History of Drugs

• Big Ideas: Ads Don’t Work That Way, On Progress and Historical Change, Meditations on Moloch, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail

• 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, Experimental Fat Loss, How relationships change over time, 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?

• 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

Here’s one thing I’ll say—being courageous and idiosyncratic isn’t just bloggers’ comparative advantage; it’s their duty.1 I shed a tiny little tear whenever I see someone on Substack trying to do an impression of The New Yorker or Buzzfeed. What a waste! You’re never gonna play their game better than they do, and why would you want to? It’s like trying to cook a Big Mac at home—you can get the perfect version down the street for $6. Meanwhile, there’s a dish you can make that the industrial kitchens never could, and dammit, I wanna taste it.

(See also: Brain training begins in the hips.)

So please, write and submit! Sate my ravenous brain-hunger!

HOW 2 APPLY

• Paste your post into a Google Doc.

• Make sure that sharing setting is “Anyone with the link”

• Submit it via this form.

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.

(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 have every blog post ever written sent to my email, I want to push people to either write something new or finish something they’ve been sitting on for too long.

• One entry per person. Multiple authors are fine, but each person should only be an author on one post.

• 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.

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

Submissions are due July 1. Submit here.

Years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis that was so bad I immediately threw it in the trash. But along the way I learned something important, which is how to get seventh-graders to smoke.

My lesson came from Hansen et al., 1989. They randomly assigned students at eight junior high schools in Los Angeles to complete one of two anti-drug programs:

A) A “Social” program that was all about resisting negative influences and fostering good friendships
B) An “Emotion” program that was all about managing bad feelings
or
C) No program at all

The researchers surveyed the 2,863 participating students three times: just before the programs started, and 12 and 24 months after the programs ended. (They also took saliva samples to keep students honest.) The programs themselves lasted for 12 weeks.

In the Emotion program, students did things like:

• Compliment each other to improve their self-esteem

• Set goals for themselves and think about how drugs interfere with those goals

• Learn strategies for emotion regulation like deep breathing and muscle relaxation

• Practice being assertive and saying no to drugs in role-plays

• Make a videotaped commitment to stay drug-free

Some of this stuff seems a bit dated now, sure, and the video thing sounds a little creepy. But mostly it looks reasonable—couldn’t hurt, right?

Except it did hurt. Students who did the Emotion program ended up smoking more cigarettes and more weed and drinking more alcohol than students who received no program at all. Which is to say: researchers came into schools in Los Angeles and ran a drug prevention program that caused a bunch of seventh-graders to do more drugs

(Best of all, the name of this program was Project SMART.)

What about the kids in the Social program? Basically bupkis. The effects were way stronger in the Emotion program, and in the wrong direction.

(You should always be skeptical of any individual study, and especially one this old. But I’m at least willing to assume that these results weren’t p-hacked. If you were gonna cook your books, you would probably try to hide the fact that you got 12-year-olds to toke up.)

This story makes me go “GULP”. You can have a PhD and good intentions. You can have money and buy-in. You can do a bunch of reasonable things to prevent a problem that everyone agrees is bad. You can spend a lot of time and effort running your project and collecting your data. And after all that you can, according to your own best calculations, make people worse off. 1

That’s just one random paper from the 80s, but the literature is littered with similar well-meaning interventions that failed or backfired:

• “Scared Straight” programs, where at-risk youth go to prisons and get yelled at by prisoners, famously do not work and maybe make students more likely to commit crimes.

• The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program I had to do in elementary school, where a cop came to class and told us about all the drugs we weren’t supposed to take, also doesn’t do anything.

• A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed.

Those programs all harmed kids or failed to help them, but don’t worry, we also harm adults sometimes, or fail to help them:

• Social scientists have invented lots of programs that try to make people less prejudiced. Every review of these programs concludes that they either don’t work or they don’t work in the ways we want or we don’t know if they work.

• Researchers came up with their best attempts at getting Democrats and Republicans to like each other more, and all of their ideas got outperformed by a Heineken commercial

• You know those signs on the highway that say things like, “Drive safely! Over 20 people have died on this highway so far this year!”? They maybe cause more people to crash and die.2

So yes, it’s hard to change people. But that’s okay—making iPhones is also hard, and we seem to have nailed that one.

What really screws us is that it’s surprisingly hard to change people. We cook up schemes that seem like they should definitely work, then they don’t work, and this doesn’t chasten us or dim our enthusiasm for future schemes. Hansen et al., after accidentally causing seventh-graders to smoke, don’t end their paper with a long reverie on their hubris. They write a few self-exculpatory paragraphs and move on to the next project.

The problem is that our illusion of explanatory depth is so deep when it comes to human behavior that we never realize how little we understand, which prevents us from ever learning more. Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.

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SHOULD WE RUN PARTICIPANTS OVER WITH A FORKLIFT?

This myth of the easily-malleable human is so widespread and so deeply believed that it borders on delusion. Once you see it, though, it can make sense of some things that otherwise seem psychotic.

For example, in the US, anybody who does academic research on humans or animals has to undergo ethics training first. That sounds reasonable, until you realize the “training” is just PowerPoint slides that you click through as fast as you can, and then you get asked questions like:

Which of these represents responsible treatment of research subjects?
A) Poking them in the eye
B) Using the internet to discover their weaknesses
C) Running them over with a forklift
D) Treating them with respect

And then there are a few questions like:

Subsection 41b.46 of the 1972 Research Reform Act stipulates which of the following?
A) Paragraph 17 of the 1971 Research Reform Act is null and void
B) Principal Investigators are not allowed to be listed as Co-Principal Investigators
C) Conflicts of interest must be reported on Form 99-F
D) Any research expenditures greater than $100 must be done via certified check

If you fail the exam, you just retake it until you pass. So this “ethics” test is actually a test of whether you can read at a sixth-grade level.

Most workplace trainings look like this. Here are some questions from an actual sexual harassment training you can purchase for your organization at SexualHarassmentTraining.com:

Some hypocrisy is so profound that it distorts the space-time continuum. Like when a conservative Christian senator sponsors a bill that’s like “Let’s Make It Illegal to Be Horny” and then gets caught at a brothel wearing a diaper and nipple clamps. That’s the level of hypocrisy we’re dealing with here. If you claim to care about preventing sexual harassment and then you’re out here asking whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a “county” law, you do not care about preventing sexual harassment.

I understand these trainings exist solely for the purposes of ass-covering. If you get sued because one of your employees, say, sticks a research participant with a dirty needle, you can go, “Hey, don’t blame us! We made them do an ethics training!”

But why does this ass-covering work? I don’t mean legally; I don’t care if this is all because of Subsection 31a of the Let’s Make Things Worse Act of 1986, or because of the Supreme Court decision in Buttmunch v. Fartmeister or whatever. I mean why do we allow it? Anybody who has to suffer through these trainings knows that they’re stupid and useless. But when those same people are sitting in the jury box, they nod and say, “Well, you can’t blame the company, they made their employees do an ethics training.” This is the hypocrisy that really makes no sense—it’s hypocrisy on top of hypocrisy, a nipple-clamp on a nipple-clamp.

I think we accept this ass-covering because we believe that it’s possible, and even easy, to mass-produce the improvement of humans. We think we can turn sex pests into good citizens via PowerPoint presentation. When we see those PowerPoints up close, of course, we go, “Oh no, not these PowerPoints. Some other PowerPoints, the ones that actually work.”

But are no PowerPoints that work. You cannot plonk someone in front of a computer screen for an hour and expect them to become a better person. Well-meaning researchers have tried way, way harder than that and gotten way, way less.

FUZZY, WET, AND UNFALSIFIABLE

There are lots of reasons why we are continually surprised by how hard it is to change people, but there are three particularly nefarious ones that deserve closer inspection.

1. OTHER PEOPLE ARE TOO FUZZY

We perceive ourselves in full 4000K HD with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound, but when we perceive each other, it’s like we’re watching a VHS tape that someone made by using a Motorola Razr phone c. 2007 to record the screen on the back of an airplane seat.

Psychologists call this “psychological distance”: the further something is from me, the less detail it has in my imagination. So we are profoundly aware of how hard it would be to change ourselves, but only dimly aware of everything it would take to change someone else. You’re already kinda fuzzy anyway, so can’t you just be kinda fuzzy in a different way instead?

Here’s an example. I’m a weakling, a real beta boy with limited upper body strength. Let’s say I want to get ripped, jacked, shredded, swoll, etc. If you made a workout plan for me, it might look something like this:

1. Go to gym

2. Work out

3. Get jacked

But if I made a workout plan for me, it would look more like this:

1. Decide which of my very important tasks to ignore so I can go to the gym instead.

2. Find workout clothes.

3. Workout clothes are all old and ratty.

4. Look for new workout clothes online.

5. Spend the rest of the day figuring out whether I’m more of a nylon poplin guy or a jacquard knit guy.

6. Wait for clothes to come in.

7. Go to gym.

8. Figure out which podcast I want to listen to while I work out.

9. Okay now I’m ready to work out.

10. Wait I’ve heard this episode before, this the one where Malcolm Gladwell proves that Toyotas are safe by driving one off the George Washington Bridge.

11. Okay now I’m ready to work out.

12. Oh no there’s someone on the machine I want to use.

13. Mill around a bit, get on another machine and pretend it’s the one I wanted to use in the first place.

14. Okay he’s gone. Get on the other machine.

15. Oh no I don’t know how to use this machine.

16. Watch a YouTube video where a frighteningly large man tells me how to use the machine.

17. Oh no the frighteningly large man is now telling me January 6th was a false flag operation.

18. Use machine.

19. It kinda hurts, but I can’t tell if it’s a “You’re getting stronger” kind of hurt, or a “If you keep doing this you won’t be able to walk when you’re 57” kind of hurt.

20. Repeat for another 45 minutes.

21. Go home.

22. Wait I have to do this every day until I die??

2. WE SPRAY PEOPLE WITH A HOSE AND EXPECT THEM TO STAY WET FOREVER

I’m going to talk about implicit bias for a second, so if you’re the kind of person who gets upset about that, please deactivate your Pedantry Module and just play along for the sake of the example.

Psychologists would very much like to reduce people’s implicit biases, especially their anti-Black biases. So far, they have failed to do that. And they’ve tried lots of stuff:

• Helping people set a goal to not be biased

• Lecturing them about how great multiculturalism is

• Telling them a story that counters their stereotypes (“Imagine a White guy attacks you and throws you in his trunk, and then a Black guy shows up and saves the day!”)

• Making people play a virtual dodgeball game where all of their teammates are courteous Black players and all of their opponents are mean nasty White players

• Showing them a bunch of pictures of Black faces with the word “GOOD” written next to them

Some of these interventions changed people’s biases in the moment, but none of the effects lasted beyond 24 hours. And of course they didn’t! As soon as participants leave the lab, they go right back into the world that massaged those biases into the folds of their brains in the first place. You can’t permanently change implicit biases with 15 minutes of screentime, just like you can’t spray someone with a hose and expect them to stay wet forever.

This is part of why changing people is so surprisingly hard—no matter how much you focus on the person in front of you, you’ll never appreciate the million tiny influences that made them who they are and that keep them that way. If you really want to make someone different, you might have to change the TV they watch, the music they listen to, the things they learn in school, the friends they hang out with, the role models they look up to, etc., and if you do all that, congratulations, you’ve started what we call a cult. Which, unlike social scientists, do have a pretty good track record of changing people.

3. UNFALSIFIABILITY

Most people’s theories of human behavior are just never gonna be tested, and so their hypotheses can be both wrong and immortal. For example, if you think the solution to political polarization is to drug Congress with magic mushrooms, then a) nobody’s ever going to prove you wrong, and b) I think I know which anti-drug program you got in high school.

On top of this, we’re all running our own tiny-N, p-hacked studies and then slathering the results in confirmation bias:

• “My kid does better when we feed him raw beef and read him Ulysses, so that’s what all schools should do, and the fact that this also happens to fit my personal and political aesthetics is merely a coincidence.”

• “I gave my religion’s holy book to a person who was struggling and now they’re doing better, which is proof my religion is true.”

• “Some famous CEOs were mean to their employees and got good results, so I should do that too, which is convenient because I am a jerk.”

These itsy-bitsy confounded little pseudo-studies are more convincing to us than any “official” experiments precisely because they unfold before our own eyes. On the one hand, that’s fair—“official” experiments are so poor on average that you should consider them guilty until proven innocent. But doing low-quality uncontrolled social science in your own backyard is a good way to increase your convictions without increasing your evidence.

Even when there is reasonably good data, our hypotheses about how humans work are often so vague that they can withstand any attempts at falsification. Okay, so this emotions-based anti-drug intervention didn’t succeed, but maybe that’s because the instructors weren’t motivated enough, or it didn’t go on long enough, or they used the wrong kind of deep breathing technique, or they should have targeted fifth-graders instead of seventh-graders, etc., on and on, forever. If you can only think of all these critiques and exceptions after the fact, however, you at least have to admit you didn’t really know what you were talking about in the first place.3

LET’S GET STUPIDER

The philosopher Michael Strevens argues that science requires humans to adopt an “alien mindset”—you have to ignore common sense, the wisdom of the ancients, the literal word of God, etc. Why would anyone toss out everything they know and instead try to learn things by putting rotten meat in a jar? Science took so long to develop, Strevens says, because it seemed stupid.

I say: we must become even stupider. If all of our intuitions, theories, and knowledge cause us to run programs that make tweens do more drugs—well, then, we oughta ditch our intuitions, theories, and knowledge!

Sufficiently stupid people would look at SexualHarassmentTraining.com and ask, “Wait, how does this work? You show people walls of text and then ask them multiple choice questions and then they don’t sexually harass each other anymore?” They would wonder whether an imaginary dodgeball game could really make people less racist. They might question whether a couple deep-breathing exercises are enough to stop seventh graders from doing shots at a party.

It’s important to cultivate that kind ignorance, because every single person on Earth is at least a part-time people-changer. We want to raise our kids to be kind. We want to earn our boss’s respect. We would like our spouse to stop playing the “road trip playlist” that’s just a 10-hour loop of “Dreams” by The Cranberries and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac. We’ll never have large-N, preregistered, multi-site RCTs that can tell us how to do these things. We have to make our best guesses, but we also have to treat those guesses with enough skepticism that we notice when we guess wrong, so we can guess differently next time.

Some people are supposed to be professional people-changers, and so they carry a greater burden of proof and a sacred set of responsibilities. When you have the power to compel people to do things, you should be able to prove that your compulsions make people better off. It’s not enough to say, “Hey, I’m just doing stuff that everybody would agree is intuitive and reasonable,” because, as we’ve seen, intuitive and reasonable stuff often hurts people.

We can’t expect every well-meaning program to work. We know so little about how to help people that sometimes we’re going to screw it up, in which case our responsibility is to figure out what we did wrong. What we cannot do is accidentally turn tweens into binge-drinkers and then keep right on going as if nothing happened.

This is a thorny problem, but I know exactly how to solve it. I’m just waiting for the IRB to approve my application to run people over with a forklift.

[Previously: Underrated ideas in psychology, volume I]

When STEM folks get together, they’ll sometimes wonder why the university has a comparative literature department. “This book is long! That book is short! This book is blue! That book is red! Comparative literature!” and everyone laughs.

After a few drinks, they’ll start saying the …

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