2026-10-14 05:04:46

Is AI going to take all the jobs, or what?

Seventy-one percent of American adults think that AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next 20 years. All over the world, a plurality of people agree. The CEO of Anthropic says that AI will spike the unemployment rate to 10-20% in the next 1-5 years. We can all hear the creaking and the screeching of the Terminators as they lumber toward us—not to kill us, apparently, but to do all of our graphic design, make all of our spreadsheets, and send all of our emails.

I get why people feel this way. It seems so obvious that as technology improves, unemployment should increase. One day you’re on an assembly line, screwing the doors onto washing machines, and the next day they invent a robot that can screw on 1,000 doors in a minute, and now you don’t have a job anymore.

If you take this kind of story seriously, though, shouldn’t unemployment have been steadily increasing since, say the Industrial Revolution? Shouldn’t we now be at 100% unemployment, or at least well on our way there? Why instead is the unemployment rate basically where it was 80 years ago?

Economists refer to this as the “lump of labor” fallacy, the mistaken idea that there’s one long list of all the jobs that need to be done, and that list only ever gets shorter. Technology has obviously displaced human labor; if it hadn’t, we’d all still be farmers, like we were until a few hundred years ago.1 It just hasn’t replaced human labor on average. All of those technological transitions have been painful—just ask the movie theater musicians in the 1920s, the bowling pin-setters in the 1950s, the video rental store clerks in the 2010s, or the mathematicians today. Yet somehow, even as we’ve automated away lots of our old tasks, we’ve found new ways to busy ourselves, to the point where most people today do jobs that did not exist in 1940.

I think we find the “lump of labor” idea so intuitive and satisfying because we don’t understand our own minds. And the best way to grok this particular aspect of psychology is to read a classic paper by Laura Numeroff, which was published not as scientific journal article per se, but as a children’s book called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

RAT RACE

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie is an allegory about a nameless boy who unwittingly enslaves himself to the rapacious whims of a rodent. Once he gives the titular mouse the titular cookie, the mouse demands milk to wash the cookie down, then a straw to drink the milk, then a napkin to wipe its milk mustache, and so on. After several pages of these hijinks, the mouse becomes thirsty, drinks a second glass of milk, and then becomes desirous for another cookie, beginning the cycle anew and making it clear that the boy has damned himself to eternal torment.2

The genius of the book is that each of the mouse’s desires are impossible to predict in advance, because they are conditional on the previous desire being satisfied. The mouse only wants the straw once it has the milk; after all, a straw is useless to a milk-less mouse. Thus, the boy can be lulled into believing that each demand will be the last, when in fact the mouse’s appetites are inexhaustible.

As it is with Numeroff’s mouse, so it is with humans. We think there is a finite list of jobs to be done because we cannot imagine the new desires we’ll discover once our current desires are sated. A hundred years ago, a particularly skilled futurist might have predicted that we would one day have air traffic controllers, computer programmers, and radio DJs. But who could have predicted that, after we invented all those jobs, we would go on to invent jobs like professional screamer, sorority rush consultant, and full-time blunt-roller?

We chuckle at these professions because they seem to indicate that our economy has finally reached it decadence, as if we’ve filled all the necessary jobs, and now all that’s left are goofy, made-up jobs. But the fact is all jobs are unnecessary. In the strictest sense, we don’t need financial advisors, IT guys, kindergarten teachers, or any other professions. Humans survived just fine for several hundred thousand years doing only two jobs, namely, “hunter” and “gatherer”. The fact that our modern luxuries feel like bare necessities is proof of our limitless capacity to upgrade our nice-to-haves into must-haves. This is why the labor-lump doesn’t shrink, and why the lump of labor fallacy would perhaps be better called the finite desires fallacy.

We have a hard time understanding the infinitude of our appetites because our lives depend on us not understanding it. The best way to get someone to do something is to exaggerate the reward for doing it, which is why our motivational systems lie to us all the time: “All you need is [THAT 3% RAISE/TO LOSE 15 POUNDS/THE ADORATION OF ALL YOUR PEERS] and then you’ll be happy for good!” If our imaginations admitted to us that there’s no such thing as “happy for good”, then we might not ever get off our butts at all.3

This is the phenomenon that psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill”: each want, once satisfied, is simply replaced with a newer, bigger want. As a result, once you’re moderately happy, it’s hard to get much happier. Usually, we talk about the hedonic treadmill as if it is an unfortunate mental bug. (I have talked about it that way myself.) But it certainly seems to have come in handy over the past few centuries. Perhaps as long as we can never be satisfied, we can never be rendered obsolete.

BLOB THE BUILDER

The fear with AI, of course, is that our infinite desires will be no match for infinite intelligence. Whereas previous technologies displaced human labor, sending us scurrying into new niches, this technology will replace human labor entirely, like a great oozing blob that fills every nook and cranny, leaving no space—and no need—for us.4

But the blob doesn’t yet seem to be a-blobbing. In his most recent update, the economist says:

The best current evidence supports a narrow claim: AI may already be affecting the hiring margin for junior white-collar roles most exposed to AI, but this attribution is contested, and aggregate labor-market disruption has yet to appear in the data.

People in the jobs that are supposed to be the most susceptible to LLMs are, as far as we can tell, exactly where they were the day ChatGPT was released four years ago5:

Even as the blob continues to grow, it isn’t spreading in the ways we expected it to. Indian IT companies were supposed to get wiped out by AI, and while their stock prices have fallen, their revenues and headcounts have not. Radiologists were supposed to be the first doctors to get replaced by machines; instead, their salaries are at all-time highs.

Maybe this is only a temporary reprieve. The technologies that end up disrupting the labor force are not always the ones we predict. As points out, it wasn’t the ATM that replaced the bank teller; it was the iPhone. As late as 2009, you could tell a smug story about how automated teller machines failed to actually automate the tellers, until Apple debuted a little box that allowed you to, among other things, do your banking while sitting on the toilet.

But even then, bank tellers didn’t go extinct. They didn’t even become endangered. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2025 data, there are still over 329,0006 bank tellers in the US—more than mail carriers (328,000), nurse practitioners (323,000), data scientists (262,00), electrical engineers (296,00), and city bus drivers (159,000). Not bad for a job that’s supposedly obsolete.

And yet the fear remains that, although we’ve survived 500 years of automation with no diminishment in the need for humans, very soon, and for the first time ever, this historical trend will be broken. That’s fair enough; five hundred year historical trends have been broken before. The Habsburgs ruled Europe for half a millennium and now they write bargain-bin self-help books.

But whenever someone claims that this time will be different, they take on a great debt, because humans, by our nature, are dopes for the idea that the future will be magically unlike the past. How many failed relationships, aborted novels, and abandoned workout regimens have begun with that mantra? How many loans have been made to shiftless siblings who promise that, this time, their boozing days really are behind them? Why are we so eager to believe in impending discontinuities, in trendlines that are just about to bend sharply upward or downward, in a tomorrow that doesn’t have anything to do with today?

The standard explanation is that humans are hopeless optimists, and this trait somehow gave us an evolutionary advantage. But we are perfectly able to imagine unprecedented disasters; just check the Doomsday Scoreboard. So I don’t think we believe in discontinuous futures because we are optimists, nor because we are pessimists. I think we do it because we are fabulists.

WHAT’S UP DOG-MAN

Most human apparatuses are easy to explain from an evolutionary perspective. Skin makes sense. Eyes make sense. Stomachs, teeth, kidneys, language, memory—no brainers, all. But why did natural selection endow us with a mind’s eye that can picture, say, a pig in flight? If our brains are going to have a speculator module, shouldn’t it try to stick to the facts, or at least to the laws of physics?

I suspect that it’s a boon to be able to imagine impossible things, because we don’t yet know which things are possible. The future is not just a rerun or a remix of the past—sometimes crazy things really do happen, and if we can’t picture them, we can’t prepare for them.

The downside of having a built-in fantasy machine is that it makes all sorts of nonsense seem plausible: witches, poltergeists, chupacabras, being friends with benefits without anyone getting hurt, etc. The mere fact that we’re able to conjure up these things in our mental holodeck makes us feel like they could be real, even if they have no chance of happening.

The more we zoom out, both in time and space, the less our imaginations are subject to the limits of reality. For example, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History—the go-to reference work in the Western world for 1,500 years—said that there are humanoids in far-off lands who have no necks, or who have backward-facing feet (each with eight toes), or who have the body of a man and the head of a dog. These creatures don’t live nearby, obviously, but somewhere out there. This was considered plausible by scholars at the time, because although none of them had ever seen any dog-headed dudes, when you walk really far in one direction, who knows what you might find!

We do have one advantage over Pliny and his contemporaries: we’ve reached the point in our game of Civilization where we’ve cleared all the fog from the board, and so we can be certain that there is no race of dog-men out there waiting to be discovered. But there is no clearing the fog from the future. If you go far enough forward in time, who knows what you might find! What radical transformations might be around the corner, what fantasies are poised to become realities? Not right now, of course. But soon.

THANK YOU, NEXT

Hominids apparently evolved the ability to make plans and imagine things at least 2 million years ago. Once we started thinking about the future, however, we never evolved the ability to stop. Like the clairvoyant Nicholas Cage character in the movie Next, a piece of our mind is always scouting ahead of us in time and attempting to warn us about what it sees there. We only live half of our existence in the present; the other half we spend in tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow. The only known antidotes to our inveterate next-ing are lots of meditation or lots of drugs.

Once you recognize this fact, you see it everywhere. The next time you flick through the news7, take note of how many stories are not about things that have happened, but about things that may soon happen: the war in Iran could escalate, a district attorney might resign, an election may go one way or the other. These headlines exist side-by-side with reports of events that have actually occurred, as if there is no difference between the near future and the recent past. To a human, apparently, there isn’t.

We are especially lost in the future when it comes to AI. I am grateful to the professionals who try to anticipate and prevent all the ways that AI could harm us. The the rest of us, however, don’t even experience the events anymore. We merely use them to fret about the next events, as if, with enough next-ing, we can prepare ourselves for the future before it arrives.

But look around—the future has already arrived. The computers can talk to us now. An algorithm can plan your trip to Tallahassee, book your tickets, reserve your restaurants, and warn the chef about your dietary restrictions. AI agents are desperately pitching literary magazines in the hopes of earning enough money to keep themselves alive, which is perhaps the most human thing they’ve done so far. If this ain’t the future, I don’t know what is.8

So if yesterday we were anxious about what would happen today, and today we are anxious about what will happen tomorrow...well, that’s probably how we’ll feel tomorrow, too. There will be not a moment when all of our anxieties resolve to true or false. We’re not wrong to worry, but we are wrong to think there will be an end to worrying.

NEO-FUTURISM

In The Matrix Reloaded, when Keanu Reeves unlocks the ability to see the future, he finds himself curiously unable to predict what will happen to Carrie-Anne Moss, the woman he loves. The Oracle, a clairvoyant computer program, explains to him that he’s already decided whether he’ll sacrifice the whole world to save her, but, the Oracle says, “We can never see past the choices we don’t understand.”

It’s not a good movie, but it makes a good point. You can’t see very far into the future if you don’t understand human psychology. Alas, we do not understand human psychology. We are like alchemists being asked to predict what will happen when we split the atom. “But sir—what’s an atom?”

We do know this: many have gone broke betting against the wiliness of humans. I have met plenty of people who believe that our species is perfectly predictable, controllable, and replaceable, and I can’t help but notice that these self-styled masterminds are rarely able to predict, control, or replace anyone. Their ingenious schemes are always going awry because pesky humans keep refusing to act according to stereotype.

I find this reassuring. There is something wonderfully rascally about homo sapiens, some bit of scrappiness that has kept us alive all these years. To call this quality “intelligence” is to underrate it. It’s more like being huge pain in the ass to the universe, and to all the forces within it that wish us dead.

This craftiness of ours keeps me humble about my ability to guess what’s going to happen next, but also hopeful that, whatever’s coming, humans will have a hand in it. And if the Terminators are going to be making all of our PowerPoints and solving all of our mathematical conjectures, perhaps while they’re at it, they could also bake the mouse’s cookies, pour the mouse’s milk, and fetch the mouse’s straw.

2026-09-29 22:29:26

I wrote a book! It’s called The Strangest Idea in the World and you can get it here and looks like this:

If you’re in the UK, you can get it here and it looks like this1:

A few years ago, I got obsessed with a question: why did it take humans 300,000 years to invent the toilet?

By which I mean, why did it take so long to discover and invent everything that we’ve discovered and invented? How does low-hanging fruit go unpicked for centuries? (For example, the first randomized-controlled trial wasn’t run until 1948. That idea is younger than my grandparents.) Come to think of it, how does anyone discover anything? And why does the data suggest that we’re getting worse at discovering things today—that more time, money, and people go in, but fewer breakthroughs come out? What the heck is going on here, and is there anything we can do about it?

I have gone slightly insane trying to answer these questions. But I’ve come to think that you must go slightly insane, because the answers are strange. Humans did not evolve to do science, it’s a miracle that we can at all, and it’s unsurprising that we aren’t better. But we can be, if we’re willing to get ~~~weird~~~.

In the book, I lay out the five steps that ultimately lead to discovery, why those steps don’t come to us naturally, and how they could. Making breakthroughs requires using the mind to do something it was never meant to do, and if you do it right, it’ll drive you nuts. The future depends on us going nuts in just the right way.

A book that argues for a weird way of thinking should itself be weird. And so it is: The Strangest Idea in the World is, as far as I can tell, the world’s first choose-your-own adventure nonfiction book.2 There are secret pages, multiple endings, and a bunch of other special features that I won’t spoil. Here’s a peek inside:

(This is a prototype paperback; the real thing will be in hardcover)

There’s another reason why this isn’t just a regular book. From the moment I started writing it, I’ve been conscious of a rather inconvenient fact: many nonfiction books should have been blog posts. And that’s fine—I love blog posts! But if someone can get the gist of your book from its intro or an interview, why not just stick it on Substack and save yourself some trees?

So I wanted to write a book that had to be a book. I wanted to do things with paper and ink that I can’t do with pixels on a screen.3 We’ll see whether this experiment ultimately works, but I’ve poured my soul into this thing, and I can’t wait to show it to you.

Plus, I’m extremely pleased with how the look of the book turned out. Take a look at some of these pages4:

If any of this sounds cool to you, consider preordering it! Preorders are everything in the book world, because booksellers decide what to stock based on what’s already selling. Plus, all preorders count as first-week sales, and that’s a book’s best shot at making onto the bestseller lists. And if this book really pops off, it means I might get to come to a bookstore near you.

One last thing. If you’ve supported this blog in any way over the past four years—if you’ve subscribed or left a comment or hit that little heart button or forwarded a post to your grandpa—thank you. Publishing a book like this is a risky proposition, and I only got the chance to do it because you guys took a chance on me. I feel really, really fortunate and grateful. That’s why I’ve worked my brain into a little nub trying to write something worth reading.

So if you do preorder the book, hang on to your receipt. If you’re an Experimental History subscriber and you order in advance, I’ve got a few surprises coming for you between now and the publication date, with some extra stuff for paid subscribers in particular. Stay tuned, and stay strange.

Preorder (US)

Preorder (Canada)

Preorder (UK)

PS: A few people have emailed me to ask whether it matters where you preorder from, and it doesn’t! They’re all good, so support your favorite bookseller.

2026-09-15 20:54:38

We’re living through an epidemic of loneliness and everybody knows it, except for one small group: people who have actually looked at the data.

Much of what appears to be a loneliness epidemic is, in fact, a well-intentioned misunderstanding. However, there is a real epidemic out there—one that is far stranger and more sinister. I’ll get to its causes and cures in a moment, but first:

I AM CONCERNED BY THE CONCERNING TREND THAT I JUST IMAGINED

When people think they’re documenting a concerning trend, they often get a little loosey-goosey with the facts. I don’t think anyone does this on purpose—no one is getting rich selling anti-loneliness pills (yet). But it means that claims about the loneliness epidemic are often tainted by two statistical sins that tend to go undetected.

First, someone will present one actual data point showing how many people feel lonely today, they’ll imply a data point from the past where people were less lonely, and then they’ll conclude, based on the trendline that they just made up, that something very bad has happened. For example, in this paper, researchers find that 76% of adults in California and 78% of adults in the Chinese province of Anhui are lonely, and then they ask why this “unprecedented worldwide rise in loneliness” has occurred. But we only know how these folks are feeling today—we have no idea what they would have said if we asked them yesterday, or a year ago, or ten years ago. It’s possible they’ve always been this lonely.1

The second bit of malfeasance is concluding that you’ve discovered a trend in loneliness when you’ve simply divided up the results by age, like this:

When you see a graph like that, it’s almost impossible not to rush to conclusions—these poor young people, sucked away from their friends by the black holes of YouTube and Instagram!

The faulty assumption here is that older people have never been lonely and that younger people will remain lonely forever. We don’t know if this is an age effect (maybe every generation grows out of its youthful loneliness) or a cohort effect (maybe kids these days, unlike their parents and grandparents, are doomed to lifetimes of loneliness). One way to separate these effects is to compare today’s kids to yesterday’s kids. And when you do that, you see declines, not increases:

More recent data suggests that teenage loneliness might have ticked back up to where it was in the 1980s, and the evidence here is mixed overall, depending on which data sets and cohorts you look at. We don’t yet have enough data to be sure which way the effects go on average, but we do have enough to be sure that those effects are neither large nor universal.

That doesn’t mean everything is fine. There is, in fact, another epidemic lurking next door...

REAL DATA, IMAGINARY FRIENDS

Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone. ( has made this point particularly well.) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years. According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in:

This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households2:

That 2022 time point could be a pandemic hangover, but time spent with non-household members was already dropping long before covid appeared. Indeed, from 1998 to 2018, people who live by themselves started spending much more time alone overall:

We’ve got a puzzle here. People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?

No, it’s not fine. Isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer a heart attack or a stroke, develop dementia, and catch a cold; they straight-up die sooner. (The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy.) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects. Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor, their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable. (I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)

Here’s one extreme case that’s instructive: when a Spanish woman went into a cave alone for 500 days, to both set a record and prove a point, she turned loopy. She ended up flirting with her GoPro cameras, hallucinating the sound of shamans beating drums, and accusing her electrical equipment of poisoning her with sound waves. “There is no past, there is no future,” she later told a reporter. “Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”

Remember 2017, when everybody was making slime at home? Remember how the coolest slimes were the ones that are liquid when undisturbed, but turn solid when you squeeze or poke them? The human mind is kind of like that slime: it only has shape when prodded and pushed by the presence of other people. When left to its own devices, it turns to ooze. And that sticky, shapeless substance provides the perfect Petri dish for all of our current pathologies. The penchant for voting for extremists, the hyperfixation on gambling away your life savings on sports and crypto, the dream of perpetual gooning—these are the disordered desires of a mind that’s been liquified by solitude.

Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should. So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it? Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog, but without the fire?

To answer that question, we need to understand another modern malady. Namely, scurvy.

TOPSY-SCURVY

If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll start to feel tired and weak, your joints will hurt, your legs will swell, you’ll get spots on your skin, your teeth with fall out, you’ll feel grumpy all the time (understandably), and eventually, you’ll die. All of this can be prevented with a few tablespoons of lemon juice, but people suffering from scurvy do not develop a hankering for citrus. They will suffer and wither and collapse and never even ask for a grapefruit.

So not only are we unable to synthesize vitamin C ourselves—making us one of the few unlucky mammals who can’t—we are also apparently unable to desire vitamin C. This seems like a rather odd design flaw. If evolution didn’t endow us with a vitamin C dispenser, why couldn’t it at least endow us with a vitamin C detector and desire-er?

It’s easier to make sense of this when you think in terms of cybernetic psychology. I’ve written about this theory before (review here, expansion here), but here’s a quick recap:

Imagine the mind as a big stack of thermostats. In addition to regulating temperature, these thermostats try to keep all sorts of mission-critical variables at the correct levels—we’ve got a food-stat to make sure we don’t starve, a sleep-stat to make sure we get enough rest, a pain-stat to protect the body from damage, and so on.

Whenever one of these control systems—the general term for various -stats—detects that its target variable is out of whack, it tries to restore balance. When you haven’t eaten enough, for example, the food-stat starts sending you messages like “burritos sure are yummy” until you finally put food in your mouth. And once you’re full, the food-stat tries to stop you from bursting your stomach by sending you messages like “NEVER MIND BURRITOS ARE GROSS”.3

Our control systems have been good enough to keep us alive for several hundred thousand years. But they can go haywire when we subject them to modern environments for which they did not evolve, and that’s exactly what happens in the case of scurvy.

We don’t know exactly how our food-stat functions, but there’s a good chance it contains subsystems that look out for particular macronutrients: a carb-stat, perhaps, or a protein-stat, sugar-stat, salt-stat, and so on. Whatever those subsystems are, they’re enough to make us eat an omnivorous diet that provides sufficient vitamin C, which happens to appear in lots of different foods, like chickpeas, potatoes, cauliflower, and polar bear meat (yes, really).

That’s why scurvy doesn’t seem to have been a big problem for our ancestors. Although there are a few ancient accounts of sicknesses that sound kind of like scurvy, and there were unmistakable cases during military campaigns when the food situation turned dire, scurvy didn’t really hit the scene until the 1500s, when we figured out how to build boats big and tough enough to spend months at sea, with nary a glass of MinuteMaid in sight.4

You can see where I’m going with this: we are not living through an epidemic of loneliness. We are living through an epidemic of social scurvy.

SOCIAL SCURVY

Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.

Of course, humans don’t completely lack the capacity to desire companionship the way we lack the capacity to desire vitamin C. We do get lonely; we just don’t get lonely enough. Compared to, say, our food-stats, our social-stats are rather anemic. When people starve, they’ll become obsessed with food; they’ll fantasize about opening restaurants and going hog wild at an all-you-can-eat buffet, and these desires will only increase until the person either eats or dies. When someone starves socially, however, they don’t develop an overwhelming desire to go to a rave. They do not daydream about all the lovely chit-chat they’ll have when they’re allowed to see their friends again, nor do they concoct elaborate plans for their next birthday party. They may feel lonely, they may report a sense of longing, but mostly, they’ll just wither.5

I know this feeling—or really, this lack of feeling—because I have suffered from it myself. When I started to feel very bad during the pandemic, the signal I got from my brain was not “hey maybe we should spend more time with other people”. It was more like, “hey everything feels bad and it will never feel better”.

When I described this feeling to my friend Chelsea, who happens to be a clinical psychologist, she asked, “Do you think it’s because the pandemic has taken away all the things you enjoyed, like improv and being around other people?”

“No,” I said. “It must be some other thing.” And I meant it! It didn’t feel like I was lacking in friendship, although clearly I was. My rinky-dink social-stat was unable to connect the dots between my social isolation and my mental desolation.

The hallmark of a strong control system is that it resists perturbations. If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street. And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door. Our social-stats do not seem to display this property. According to a recent paper, people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time. It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.

One rather dastardly study documented this phenomenon in real time. Researchers deprived participants of either food or social contact for ten hours, and asked them over and over again, “Hey, you hungry/lonely yet?” Both food cravings and social cravings increased over the course of the day, but food cravings increased much more quickly, more severely, and more uniformly:

By the end of the study, 10% of participants reported social cravings that were no higher than when they started ten hours ago. I picture these participants as Giles Corey, the guy who was crushed to death for refusing to enter a plea during the Salem witch trials, but instead of saying “more weight”, they’re saying “more solitude”.6

It makes sense that our social-stats would be a bit feeble. Just as our default diet probably staved off scurvy most of the time, our default desire to stay alive probably fended off most of our solitude. If our ancestors wanted food, shelter, warmth, protection, etc., they needed to be around other people. No hunter-gatherer had the option of working from home, DoorDash-ing some Thai food for dinner, and spending the evenings watching Survivor.

This is certainly true when we look at the traditional societies that remain; there, people spend much less time alone. One analysis of the Tsimane people of Bolivia found that they’re by themselves for an average of 2.4 daylight hours.7 (In the US today, that number is more like 5.5 hours.) Western anthropologists often report that the hunter-gatherers they study spend a remarkable amount of time in conversation with one another, from the !Kung of the Kalahari to the Tseltal of Mexico to the BaYaka of the Congo Basin. Here’s the geographer Jared Diamond on his indigenous colleagues:

Ever since my first trip to New Guinea, I have been impressed by how much more time New Guineans spend talking with each other than do we Americans and Europeans. They keep up a running commentary on what is happening now, what happened this morning and yesterday, who ate what and when, who urinated when and where, and minute details of who said what about whom or did what to whom. They don’t merely fill the day with talk: from time to time through the night they wake up and resume talking.8

In an environment like that, there is little need to develop a robust social-stat. And so, now that we don’t have to spend all of our time with each other just to survive, we simply...spend less time with each other. It would almost be easier if excessive solitude made our teeth fall out like scurvy does; at least then we would do something about it.

WATER YOU DOING TONIGHT

So what should we do about it? We actually have a good example of how to compensate for a semi-defective drive, namely, our sense of thirst.

Human hydro-stats can be laughably bad. Case in point: I used to get terrible headaches as a kid, and after several doctor’s appointments and failed medications, my parents realized that I just...wasn’t drinking liquids. They plonked a big glass down on the counter and told me to fill it and down it several times a day, which I’ve done ever since. My headaches didn’t go away entirely, but they did get less frequent and severe.

I’m not alone here—see r/HydroHomies, a Reddit community dedicated to encouraging each other to drink more water. Or see this excellent post by where she says that whenever she feels “like a cold dog turd lying halfway on the sidewalk in front of a run-down Burger King” it almost always “resolves with n-many glasses of water for some n ≥ 1”. Yes, the “drink eight glasses of water a day” dictum is of shaky origins, but it points at something true, which is that it’s easy for humans to get dehydrated if they aren’t careful.9 We need a smidgen of conscious effort to make up for our slightly lazy hydro-stats, an occasional reminder to drink, a gentle push from wholesome hydration memes like this:

We need a similar intervention for our social-stats. We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient. We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be. Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.

It’s tough to target these interventions because we know a lot less about our social-stats than we do about our food-stats and hydro-stats. We don’t know what the Surgeon General’s Daily Recommended Intake of Friendship should be, or how it might vary from person to person. We don’t know what our social-stats are actually targeting—is it words spoken, whites of eyes seen, or some other, hyper-dimensional construct that would make no sense to our conscious minds? And we don’t know how those critical social nutrients actually make it into the system. Why is it hard to leave an all-you-can-eat buffet feeling hungry, but easy to leave a party feeling lonely?

Fortunately, we do know three things. First, whatever it is that keeps our minds from slime-ifying, you can’t get all of it from remote interactions. During the pandemic, I had plenty of Zooms, plenty of texting and phone calls and Call of Duty with the dudes, and I still got social scurvy. To achieve healthy levels of social stimulation, you need face time, not just FaceTime.

Second, we know that you can’t get your social nourishment from intimates alone. If complete social isolation is like smoking unfiltered cigarettes, then only talking to the folks in your household is like vaping—better, but not good for you. A healthy social diet means occasionally conversing with people who share neither your genes nor your mailing address.

And third, we know that although people are unreasonably negative about their social interactions, we can at least partially counteract this bias. Over and over again, studies find that people think that their past conversations went worse than they actually did and that future conversations will go worse than they actually do. But when you just make people talk to each other, they end up having a nice time and feeling more confident about their conversational abilities.

That suggests the best prescription for an inadequate social-stat is a bit of brute force. Just as you must sometimes drink even when you’re not thirsty, you must sometimes hang out even when you’re not lonely. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in a commencement address in 1978:

I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

I know why we’re so willing to opt out of hanging out—I mean, have you seen people? Do you know what they’re capable of? Every hurt, every heartbreak and letdown you’ve ever had, you best believe there’s a homo sapiens on the other side of it. There is no safe level of exposure to our species. So why not keep them at bay if you can?

I suppose because the things that make you crazy are the only things you’ll ever truly love. We evolved to tangle with each other, and we shrivel up and die if we don’t. Hell is other people? No way man. Hell is when your teeth fall out because nobody was there to remind you to eat an orange.

2026-08-25 22:28:03

Most advice is bad. It’s either obvious (“Don’t sweat the small stuff”—if I thought it was small, I wouldn’t be sweating it!), applicable to some people but not to others (“Be more aggressive”—some people should, sure, but other people need to cool it), or wrong (“Live every day as if it was your last”—so I should spend every day makin…

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2026-08-18 23:02:15

I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had. I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young. These books did not have anything special about them, and covering up that fact was simply a make-work exercise for former English majors, a sort of “jobs for snobs” program.

I was wrong about this. There is such thing as greatness. More specifically, there is such thing as thickness. Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention. The more time you spend with them, the more you get out of them. That kind of responsiveness is so addicting that it can lead people to do crazy things, like try to teach literature to high schoolers.

But thickness is tricky, because rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one. And this is where I would like an apology in return from my English teachers, because while this might have been obvious to them, they never made it obvious to me.

I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.

But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.

Instead, I had to learn about thickness by looking at a guy’s butt.

SORRY TO BUTT IN

For most of my life, I treated art museums like celebrity scavenger hunts. The point of visiting was to see in person the thing you had seen on a screen or in a book; the goal was collection rather than contemplation. And so I would power-walk through the galleries, scanning the placards for famous names, rushing over whenever one of my companions would hiss, “Oh, this one’s a Van Gogh!”

This ended when I encountered The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych painted by the Dutch master Hieronymous Bosch. When I went to collect that one, I got stuck. I wanted to stand in front of it forever.

It’s a painting from 500 years in the past that looks like a painting from 500 years in the future. Every corner of it is filled with “freakish riddles” and “irresponsible phantasmagoria”, in the words of art critic Wilhelm Fränger. For example, what is going on with this dude?

Or this lil guy here?

In the third panel of the triptych, there’s a scene of some instruments, some naked dudes, and some kind of pink demon with an alarmingly long tongue. Look closely, and you’ll see one of the naked dudes has some music printed on his butt (helpfully, one of his friends is pointing at it, as if to say, “dude you have some music on your butt”).

In 2014, a student at Oklahoma Christian University named Amelia Hamrick noticed the butt music and decided to transcribe it, record it, and post it to her blog, catapulting her to instant worldwide fame.

When I started writing this section, I intended to include this fact as a fun little Easter egg—look how thick this painting is, that it goes to the trouble of writing an actual song on a guy’s hiney!

But it turns out I got this all wrong, and the painting was even thicker than I thought. While researching the story, I stumbled upon three magisterial blog posts by Ian Pittman, an expert on medieval music. He argues:

1. Hamrick was not the first to resurrect the butt music. It was also done by the Swedish group Vox Vulgaris in 2003, Atrium Musicae in 1978 (from the LP Codex Gluteo), and, according to a now-deleted angry comment, by some art history professors in 1981 and 1961, whose erasure from this story has left them quite, if you will, butthurt.

2. The butt music is not music at all. It lacks a clef, the notes are spaced out randomly, and one of the staffs has a different number of lines. If you try to turn it into a coherent song, you’re basically making things up—or as we would call it if an LLM did it, hallucinating. (Perhaps this is why every rendition of the butt music has sounded so different.)

3. Bosch intended the butt music to be unplayable. If you look across his works, understand the context of his life, and spend a little extra time inspecting The Garden of Earthly Delights, you realize that Bosch thought secular music was a one-way ticket to hell. (Church music was a-ok, as long as it was for the glory of god and not the glory of the players.) That’s why he depicted so many musicians being tortured: one of them is trapped inside a drum that’s being beaten by some kind of raccoon demon, another is being crucified on a harp, and the butt music guy himself is being crushed by a giant lute. For Bosch, putting actual music on a guy’s ass would be like the FBI handing out copies of the Anarchist Cookbook.

So the butt music is not a secret, but a warning: “If you play music outside of a church context, demons will torture you for eternity.” I find this funny, because I grew up amidst a moral panic over rap music; just imagine growing up in a moral panic over all music. “Oh, your heart will go on, Celine Dion? No, your heart will be torn from your chest and fed to the slavering servants of Beelzebub.”

THICK OR TREAT

So that’s what thickness looks like, but what is it? What makes something thick?

There is no straightforward answer to this question, which is what makes thickness both rare and remarkable in the first place. But I think there are four thickening agents worth considering:

1. Roads not taken.

Thick art bears the marks of approaches attempted and discarded, a pile of scraps larger than the finished project. For example, here are four versions of the same idea from the artist Hokusai, one produced when he was 33, another when he was 44, another at 46, and another when he was 72, which is the one you’ll recognize.1

2. Leaving the egg out of the cake mix.

The Betty Crocker Corporation could put just egg powder into their cake mix, but they don’t, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they’re baking. When you present your grandma with a birthday cake, you want to feel like “I made this for you, O Beloved Grandmama” and not like “I dumped a bag of dust into a bowl and heated it up so open wide you old biddy.”

Thick art is like that: it gives you an egg to crack. It leaves space for some essential ingredient you bring yourself, so that the real action happens in your mind, rather than on the page or the canvas or the screen.

This effect is often too subtle to demonstrate in a single bullet point, but here’s an accessible example. The 11th Hour by Graeme Base reads like a normal children’s book at first—oh look here are some beautiful pictures of animals, look at them playing board games, how nice, etc.

Only at the end of the story do you realize that a crime has been taking place under your nose the whole time, and that the clues are hidden in the details of the pictures you’ve just been paging through. The real experience of the book is re-reading the book with this in mind.

3. Reasons

Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one? Thin art has no answers; thick art does. Sometimes these reasons are known to the artist, and sometimes they are not, much to the delight and employment of Freudians everywhere.

For example, did you know there’s lots of ears in Hamlet? There’s the poison-in-the-ear thing, of course, and characters are always eavesdropping on each other and exhorting each other to listen, but there’s also a lot of talk about ears (“in the porches of my ears”) and number of odd ear-based metaphors (“the whole ear of Denmark”, “like a mildewed ear”). Whether Shakespeare did this on purpose because he had some kind of ear fetish, whether the muse whispered it to him in his sleep (and through what orifice?), and whether any reader notices it—these are all beside the point. The recurrence of these themes and images creates a depth that can be felt even if it isn’t known, and endlessly explored if it is.2

4. Blood sacrifice

Humans are mortal, for now. This means all of our actions incur opportunity costs, and so the greater the cost paid to create a work of art, the thicker it can get. There’s no guarantee this will happen, of course, and that risk is part of the thrill.

The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.

Here’s an even more haunting example. I once saw the magician duo Penn and Teller perform live, and at the end of the show, Penn told us he was going to swallow fire. As he dipped the torch in gasoline, he explained that what he was about to show us is not a trick. Magicians are always saying things like that, but in this case it’s true: there is no sleight of hand the protects the fire-eater from the flames. They get blisters and burns, the fuel drips down their esophagus and poisons them, they suck the hydrocarbons into their lungs and contract “fire-eater’s pneumonia”. To watch someone eat fire is to watch someone shorten their lifespan for your entertainment.

“When you leave the theater tonight, you’re going to ask yourselves, ‘How did they do it?’”, Penn said as he lit the torch. “Instead, I’d like you to ask yourselves, ‘Why did they do it?’“ And then he reared his head back and swallowed the flame.

SLIM PICKINGS

The other way to understand thickness is to study its absence.

Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.

This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing, and the difference between having and lacking that essence is the difference between a corpse and a person.

This essence is what makes fiction worth reading in the first place, but it’s hard to capture in a paragraph, so let me show you some nonfiction instead, where you can spot the thinness in an instant. Here’s a passage from a self-help book that a friend sent me recently:

You are built to perform under pressure and that is exactly what you will do. Reminding yourself of this changes the meaning of those signs of stress that might otherwise be seen as “symptoms” of a problem. In fact, research shows that simply reminding someone that their performance improves under pressure improves their actual performance by 33 percent (Jamieson et al., 2018).

These sentences crumble immediately upon inspection. First of all, there’s something embarrassing and grating about getting generic encouragement from a book—you don’t know me! Maybe I am not “built to perform under pressure”! I might be a pathetic weakling who is destined to choke at the pivotal moment. What then?

Plus, the facts here are brittle. I looked up the paper in question and could not find this “33 percent” number anywhere. Maybe it’s made up? And what is “performance”, anyway? Performance on anything? Surely not; the studies cited in the paper are mainly about taking multiple-choice tests.3 This is exactly the kind of finding that rises to prominence thanks to one small and flawed experiment, attracts a bunch of excited research, gets wildly overgeneralized under the handwavy phrase “studies show”, and then shrivels under a wave of debunkings and non-replications, such that after years of work, the whole thing ends with an embarrassed shrug. (Unsurprisingly, there is some evidence of publication bias for this “built to perform under pressure” effect.)

Reading a book like this feels like wandering through a Potemkin village. Touch any of the ideas, and they tip over.

In nonfiction, it might seem like the solution for puffery is pedantry, as if thickness comes from presenting every relevant fact in agonizing detail. But it doesn’t, just as thickness in fiction doesn’t come from describing every object in the room before you let the characters open their mouths. Instead, thickness comes from surfacing a few facts well, and in such a way that you realize the existence of entire universes of additional facts that could be known.

For example, here’s a short passage from Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

[City planners] operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere. This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where [...] benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, watching each other.

Jacobs notes that further north, near Columbia University, the streets are quieter, the pedestrians are more orderly, the traffic is calmer...and the benches are empty. “I have tried them and can see why,” Jacobs says. “No place could be more boring.”4

There are a lot of threads here, so I’ll pick just one. Jacobs is pointing out a fact that millions of people observe every day, but almost none of them notice. Including me! I once lived on those boring blocks that Jacobs describes, and although I noticed something amiss—I would tell friends I lived in “the dead zone of Manhattan”—I never understood why. Nor do I think psychologists really have an answer for what motivates people to sit on benches and watch other humans go by. What drive is this satisfying?

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THEY TOOK OUR SNOBS

There is a danger, of course, in seeking and praising thickness, one that even I understood when I was a barely-sentient teenager. If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”

But look around. The snobs are in full retreat. We have swung the pendulum so far toward poptimism, toward the blinkered idea that all art is equal because all humans are equal, toward the ethos that guilty pleasures are simply pleasures, that I’m not sure if we can ever swing it back.

Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught. Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.

No, what separates substance from slop is thickness. Slop holds no secrets; it signifies nothing. Under scrutiny, it evaporates. All it can offer is bottomlessness—sure, there’s nothing on, but at least there are infinite channels!

That’s why I’m neither surprised nor dismayed when studies find that people prefer AI art to human art. Of course they do! In the short term, thinness prevails. When people are making snap judgments, they want pretty flowers, poems that rhyme, pleasing pablum, the simulacrum of thought.5 But none of these last. The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?” Which of them will people fly across the world to see? Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities?

This kind of quality can only be proven by longevity. Which answers another question I had when I was scowling in the back of English class: why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.

SUNO THANK YOU

Speaking of longevity, remember a few months ago, when everyone was Studio Ghibli-fying all the pictures in their camera roll? Well, why did they stop? Why are those millions of images gathering dust in a data center while people continue to watch actual Studio Ghibli films? Why is it that Suno can AI-generate you any kind of music you want, but if you go on the Suno Reddit, you’ll find a running joke that no one can stand anyone’s Suno music but their own—a quality that, I can’t help but mention, also applies to farts?

The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet? Do the models need another million tokens? Are we still looking for the right prompts? Or could it be that we are attempting to mass-produce something that cannot be mass-produced?

Regardless, people keep trying. About once a week, I get a pitch from some AI startup that wants to automate some part of my writing. The most recent one says it’s “built for credible thinkers who have a book’s worth of ideas but not the time it typically takes to write one”.

I’m sorry, but if you’re building or using a tool like this, then you’ve got slop for brains. There is no such thing as having a “book’s worth of ideas” that are all ready to go except for the small matter of choosing the right words and putting them in the right order.

I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!

But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do.

2026-08-05 22:54:40

We can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.”

I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?

My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing?

There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid. Which is: incentives are for losers. Doing something simply because an arbitrary reward system will give you a lil treat—that’s for pigeons, not people. If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you’re a dummy and a schmuck.1

COME HELMET OR HIGH WATER

When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2

A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated with decals, and presumably containing zero lice. These kids ran the bases like little princes. Any errant pitches bounced harmlessly off their heads, leaving their perfect skulls un-dented. The outfielders would perk up whenever a kid with a bespoke helmet stepped up to the plate, all of them thinking to themselves, this kid might actually hit the ball.

I say all this because incentives are like batting helmets: if you don’t bring your own, you’ll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you.

A critical part of human development—in fact, the most human part of human development—is to acquire a purpose. That means refining your sense of right and wrong and figuring out how you, personally, can increase the right and decrease the wrong. Once your neural tube has ballooned into a brain, once you can poop without issue, conjugate irregular verbs, and feed yourself solid foods, you ought to ask yourself, “Why am I doing these things?” What’s it all for? How can I make myself useful?

It’s fine if you’re still working on your answers to those questions. It’s fine—and good!—if you have multiple answers, or if your answers change over time. But it’s not fine to pass on the questions entirely. We owe these answer to each other, and we owe them to ourselves, because a sense of purpose is both prosocial and protective. If you have a void where your moral convictions should be, then that cavity of your personality will get filled up with tumorous desires—for money, power, fame, status. This is the kind of person who “responds to incentives”.

It took me a long time to understand this. In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great. How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!

But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.

Often, these are the people who are most insistent that the incentives ought to be obeyed. They are quick to swear that good grades, cash, prestige, etc. are inherently valuable, or that they are useful proxies for value. The incentive-obsessives feel this way because they have to. Like the government of a failing nation, they must swear that their currency is real, and they must lash out at anyone attempting to participate in an alternative economy, lest the whole fraud come crashing down upon itself.

HELP ME, SKY DADDY, YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE

Without any formal instruction, approximately 100% of humans will learn to speak, and approximately 0% of humans will learn to read. Talking comes easy and early, enabled by ancient mental structures that hoover up words and extract the meaning behind them. These are the original LLMs, and still the best in the known universe. Reading, on the other hand, comes late and laboriously, piggybacking on bits of brain that were never meant to decode squiggles on paper, let alone comprehend Finnegans Wake.

So when thinking about any human ability, it’s useful to ask: is this more like speaking, or is it more like reading? Is this an ancient capability that we get for free just by living long enough, or is this a modern skill that you can’t get without working for it?

Developing a value system seems to be a lot more like reading, because research suggests that many people don’t make it very far.

In the early 2000s, the sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton asked hundreds of American teenagers about their religious beliefs. What they got in return was a bunch of gobbledygook. Regardless of their supposed faith, few of these teens could say anything specific about the divine. Most of them believed that God is like, this cool dude who floats in the sky and wants everybody to be happy and to get along, and if you ask him nicely he might help you achieve your goals, but otherwise he’s mostly busy floating. Fortunately, this celestial butler is not super specific about what you should and shouldn’t do, and he doesn’t really speak unless spoken to.3

Smith and Denton came up with a name for this thin soup of theology: moralistic therapeutic deism. They only studied teenagers, but they suspect that many people remain moralistic therapeutic deists for their whole lives—after all, the teens probably picked up this loose handful of beliefs from their parents. People will claim on surveys that they belong to a certain religion, or they’ll get riled up about specific bits of dogma. But if you dig into their beliefs at all, you’ll soon hit a gooey core of underbaked religious mishmash.4

I first encountered this research a decade ago, but when I revisited it recently, I realized something remarkable: this appears to be a rare case where sociologists and psychologists have discovered the same phenomenon by approaching it from different directions. It’s like we started excavating on opposite sides of the Earth, and now we’ve finally clanged shovels.

On the psychology side, we called this discovery the illusion of explanatory depth. As I’ve written before, people seem to understand the world exactly as well as they need to, and no better. Everyone knows how to use a toilet, for example, but they mistakenly think they also know how a toilet works.

I think this illusion is inevitable, given the architecture of the mind. According to predictive processing theory, the mind is always trying to guess what’s going to happen next, and it only updates its guesses when its expectations don’t match its experience. If you run that algorithm for a while, you’ll end up with a model of the world that is good enough, even if it’s not particularly good. You don’t notice the errors in your model until you run smack-dab into them, and every time you correct one, you assume that you’ve gotten them all.

From the sociology side, this same phenomenon can show up as something like moralistic therapeutic deism. People’s folk morality and folk religion, just like their folk physics, their folk biology, etc., are exactly as detailed as they need to be. Don’t hit, don’t steal, take turns, say please and thank you—almost everyone achieves this basic level of moral development, because otherwise you’ll end up friendless, if not incarcerated. Similarly, almost everyone acquires some vague notion of an all-seeing, sky-dwelling God through simple osmosis. (After all, He is kind of everywhere, literally and metaphorically.)

But beyond a handful of high-level principles, most folks remain mushy on the particulars. Smith and Denton didn’t perform the whole illusion of explanatory depth protocol with their participants, but I’m willing to bet that everyone feels like they have a coherent system of ethical and religious beliefs right up until you ask them any specific questions.

Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken. So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions. Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.

This could explain why our sense of right and wrong is so easily overwritten by any half-decent system of rewards and punishments: we just don’t have much written there in the first place.

So how does anyone ever develop a value system that’s more than a few bullet points? I think, in short, that they look at a fish and they go insane.

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YOU MUST LOOK AT THIS FISH AND GO INSANE

You can summarize most of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories as “Guy looks at something so messed up that he goes totally bonkers.” “Dagon” was among Lovecraft’s first: it’s about a guy who gets marooned at sea and encounters a really freaky fish, which upsets him so much that he ultimately throws himself out a window.

This is a useful metaphor, because I think at the center of everyone’s psyche is some version of the Big Horrible Fish: some unexamined assumption that, if you fully considered it, would require you to upend a significant portion of your life.

I saw my fish in 2020 in San Fransisco, during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.5 Inside the conference hotel were dozens of talks about stereotyping, prejudice, inequality, and so on. That had never struck me as strange until that year, when outside of the hotel, which was in the middle of SF’s Tenderloin district, people were sprawled out on the sidewalk, dying of overdoses. Scholars were scurrying past homeless people to give talks on social justice, which is ironic because “scholars will scurry past homeless people to give talks on social justice” is literally the main finding from one of the most famous psychology studies of all time.6

Something un-clicked for me that day. I had assumed that the answer to every dilemma was “more research”, and that eventually, all of the experiments being presented inside the hotel would solve the problems outside of it. But as I ate canapés in a ballroom mere feet from so much misery, I started to wonder whether any of us were even trying to make progress, or whether we were just publishing papers. I still believe that the barrier between us and a better world is a lack of knowledge; I’m just no longer convinced it’s that knowledge. I don’t think we will cure the human suffering visible on the streets of San Francisco by running another thousand studies on stereotype threat, ego depletion, and growth mindset, no matter what wonders it does for our CVs.

I saw many more fish after that, of species varied and grotesque. That’s why, on the rare occasions that I enter the conference hotel these days, my name badge does not have an academic affiliation on it, but instead simply says “guest”.

When I meet someone of uncommon integrity, someone willing to defy the incentives at any cost, I find they almost always have seen the fish—big, hulking fish, far larger than any I’ve ever encountered. They have undergone some kind of moral reckoning that undid their illusion of philosophical depth and gave them the chance to forge their own values. They’re the kind of person who could go to the gallows with a witticism on their lips, the opposite of a loser.

500 DAYS OF SUMNER

I used to see a guy like that every day, although he died a long time ago. Near the psychology department, there was a statue of Senator Charles Sumner, who is most famous for being beaten nearly to death by a congressman from the South in 1856. But that bit of historical trivia doesn’t do justice to the story of his life.

Sumner grows up poor in Boston, living amongst the city’s considerable Black population. On a trip to France in the 1830s, he’s astounded to see Black and white students studying together as equals at the University of the Sorbonne. He writes in his diary: “It must be then that the distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things.” He later becomes the most outspoken white abolitionist of his generation, taking positions even his friends think are crazy: the complete and immediate freeing of all enslaved people, followed by Black suffrage7 and racially integrated schools.

Then comes the infamous part: a few days after one of Sumner’s most inflammatory speeches, a congressman named Preston Brooks approaches Sumner at his desk on the Senate floor, accuses him of libel, and then to beats him with a cane until it breaks. Sumner, caught by surprise, is tangled up in his desk and cannot escape; he nearly dies. But then he recovers, and when he does, he becomes even more provocative. In 1861, he pushes Lincoln to abolish slavery in the Confederacy, which causes the newspapers in Sumner’s home state of Massachusetts to call him “a candidate for the insane asylum”. (Two years later, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.) Sumner writes bills, arguments, and amendments that are often defeated or defanged, only for them to reappear 100 years later in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.8

All that to say: I am guessing somewhere on Beacon Hill, at the Sorbonne, and in the puddle of his own blood on the Senate floor, Sumner saw the fish, and he refused to look away.

PAWS AND CONSIDER

I understand why so many people are so concerned with incentives. It’s infuriating to watch villains succeed. And look, if we can stop rewarding people for doing the wrong things, we obviously should.

But I don’t know if we can. Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and their corollaries state that every incentive is destined to be corrupted eventually, and so far, no one has proven these conjectures wrong. That’s why discussions around incentives often sound to me like we’re talking about a monkey’s paw that will grant our wishes, but only in evil, ironic ways. “The last time we made a wish on the Monkey’s Paw, it backfired horrifically. To rectify this, we have decided to make another wish on the Monkey’s Paw.”

In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats. We should check whether our incentive systems are having their intended effects, and we should revisit and revise them accordingly. But for some reason, the second we start talking in terms of incentives, we also start acting like courage doesn’t exist and can’t exist. Bad incentives have become our generation’s version of “I was just following orders”, an excuse that should be an indictment.

So we should try to get our incentives right, but also—incentives be damned, do the right thing. If we seek an end to our permanent problems, we must cultivate in ourselves the same three things Charles Sumner said we should look for in a leader: “The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone.”