2026-06-23 23:57:56
This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a collection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months.
A British man named Tommy McHugh was on the toilet pooping when apparently he strained too hard, had a stroke, and woke up in the hospital. McHugh was construction worker and ex-con who had never been in an art gallery “except maybe to steal something”, but as he recovered, he was possessed by an intense desire to make art:
I’ll paint three or six or nine pictures at a time. […] Canvases became too costly, so I started painting the ceilings and the wallpaper and the floor.
Here’s what it looked like:
As he said in an interview, “The most wonderful thing that happened to Tommy McHugh [was] having a stroke while doing a poo.”
The blogger claims that Pope Leo’s first encyclical, which is about AI, was substantially written by AI. I believe that it’s a mortal sin to pass off computer-generated text as your own, so if this is true, I hope the pontiff confesses and repents.
According to the blogger Jenn, Canada lost its measles elimination status because they don’t have enough nurses who speak Low German. Basically, measles outbreaks in Canada are concentrated among Mennonites, who do seem to be hesitant about vaccines, but much less so when medical professionals can speak to them in their native language. For instance, here’s the kind of miscommunication that can happen between doctors and Mennonites, as told by a Low German-speaking support worker in Ontario:
The following morning, the mother called me: her child was coughing so violently she was vomiting. I told her to go to the hospital. Later, she called me again, upset. She said that when she got to the ER, they’d told her to go home.
I couldn’t help but think something was off. The hospital doesn’t turn people away, I told her, but she insisted that they had. So I called them directly to figure out what had happened. It turned out there had been a miscommunication. Hospital staff had told her not to come in, using a “stop” hand gesture to communicate, and she had become so flustered that she failed to catch the second part of the message: that she should wait in the car while they prepared a negative-pressure room.
In 1830s Massachusetts, beards were so uncommon and strange that a man named Joseph Palmer was mocked and shunned for wearing one. Assailants tried to forcibly shave him, but he fought them off with a knife, and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his fine or court fees, and so he remained in prison for over a year. This at least gave him the excuse to create this all-time classic tombstone:
The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary supposedly grew out of the ground, grazed all the grass it could reach with its stem-like umbilical cord, and then died. European scholars considered it a plausible organism well into the 1700s, but doubts started to creep in after various expeditions failed to turn up any specimens.1
TV shows and movies often depict uranium as a glowing green ore, even though it doesn’t actually glow. claims this trope did not come from uranium glass, a novelty product from 100 years ago that does glow green (but because of fluorescence, not radioactivity). Instead the image of green, glowing uranium came, as so many things do, from The Simpsons.
Uri Bram has a cool new tool that tells you how weird you are. For instance, if you have a bachelor’s degree or higher, you don’t have a gun in your home, and both of your parents were born in the United States, congratulations—only 14% of Americans match you on all three. (This is based on the US General Social Survey so it only works for Americans, but it should be easy to recreate for any country with a similar dataset.)
Here’s another number that surprised me. If you asked me how many artists make more than $100k in royalties on Spotify, I’d probably guess, I dunno, 5,000? The actual number is 13,800.
I happened to be reading Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai when I saw her post about her troubles with the Windham Campbell Prize. The prize is meant to “provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns” by cutting them a check for $175,000. However, they also require you to spend eight hours filming a promotional video and three days participating in a workshop at Yale.
This might not seem like a lot, but as the biologist puts it, Weird Nerds come with tradeoffs. If you’re the kind of person who can write an extremely inventive (and good!) novel, you might also have a hard time doing things that are easy for other people, like, say, finding Wi-Fi, or putting your writing on hold to fly to Yale. DeWitt says she hasn’t had proper time to write for years, between taking care of her dying mother, fending off a stalker, and dealing with dilatory editors, and so she’d rather be strapped for cash if it means she’s free to write uninterrupted. And so she turns down the prize and the check that comes with it. That’s what seriousness looks like.
Fortunately, then this happened2:
Another writing prize controversy: one of the Commonwealth Short Story Prizes appears to have been awarded to an obviously AI-generated story. The prize-winning stories all appear in Granta magazine, and the editor’s response was basically a shrug:
We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was AI-generated. The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human’.
A computer scientist named claims that the empty metaphors that plague the prize-winning story—and that plague all AI writing—often come from human-written fanfiction. For instance, the rare phrase “the patience of a reptile”, which appears in the allegedly AI-generated story, also occurs in this fanfiction based on the Japanese anime/manga Naruto. There’s no way to be sure that an LLM sucked it up and spat it back out, but it’s worth remembering that a meaningful amount of the text inside these machines was written by people who were playing pretend with anime characters.
Apparently some estimates of microplastics in the environment might be way too high because the samples got contaminated by lab gloves. As this tweet puts it:
has a great article on the controversies around eLife, one of the few scientific journals willing to actually try new things. In 2018, the journal ran a trial where it did away with accept/reject decisions altogether for a small sample of papers—it just posted the manuscripts and their peer reviews as “Reviewed Preprints”. Authors were then able to try publishing their papers elsewhere, or revise and repost them on eLife.
In 2023, the journal was about to make this the policy for all papers, and some of the editors and the governing board staged a revolt. They got the editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, fired. Clarivate, a for-profit company that collects publishing metrics, yanked the journal’s “Impact Factor”, which is a number that people use to judge a journal’s prestige. Fortunately, eLife’s experiment continues, for now.
It is dismaying to discover that, if you try to do something even mildly different with a scientific journal, people will freak out and try to self-immolate to stop you. Clearly, this isn’t a system that can be reformed from the inside, and it needs a controlled burn instead. (See: The one science reform we can all agree on, but we’re too cowardly to do.)
According to China-watcher Tanner Greer, the Chinese Communist Party has decided that the future belongs to the nation with the best science and technology, and naturally, they want that country to be China. As a result, China has
the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector [...and] the world’s largest primate medical research center.
China now graduates twice as many STEM PhDs as the US does, and it dominates citation metrics in all sorts of applied physics and chemistry fields. It is easy to waste your science funding and it’s easy to game citation metrics with junk papers—as we Americans know all too well. And it is hard to pull off a paradigm shift without a lot of intellectual freedom. But a decade or two from now, it’s going to be obvious which countries were pumping money into their scientific ecosystems, and which ones were cancelling grants by using CTRL-F on the word “diversity”.
Every once in a while, I reacquaint myself with Suzanne Triester’s fictional video game stills, made on an Amiga computer in the early 1990s:
ICE agents carry guns around, and so we think of them like police officers. But they’re not. They’re actually government bureaucrats, and they’re subject to the same laws that govern, say, the EPA. And since the Supreme Court has been so intent on neutering the administrative state, there are actually a lot of ways to rein in ICE that don’t rely on the police brutality playbook. So argues this very insightful article in The Atlantic that also happens to be written by my wife.
Crime rates in the US have been mostly decreasing since the 1990s. But most people feel like crime is increasing, even when it’s not:
Some of these people claim that A) the statistics are somehow made up or they’re misleading because people are reporting less crime, or B) homicides only appear to be down because medical care has improved. Scott Alexander reviews the evidence for these claims and finds them both wanting.
Okay, but even if people aren’t committing more major crimes, maybe they’re doing more petty crimes—litter, graffiti, shoplifting, etc. Here the evidence is less clear and more mixed, but we can at least rule out a large and obvious increase in social disorder.
As you can tell from the comments sections on these posts, people find Alexander’s claims very annoying. Deep in their hearts, humans feel like they can precisely estimate crime rates by walking around and comparing the world that they see to the one that they remember. I often get the same reaction when talking about the Illusion of Moral Decline—once, someone came up to me and was like, “Well, my neighbor just put up a fence to spite me, so clearly morality is declining”.
Also in the Illusion of Moral Decline, we asked people to estimate how cooperation rates in lab-based economic games—i.e., the Prisoner’s Dilemma—had changed over the past 70 years. We paid them a bonus if they got the answer right. On average, people thought cooperation had gone down, when actually those rates have gone up. A new paper replicates this effect in both America and China:
A new study claims that an eight-minute conversation with ChatGPT can reduce belief in conspiracy theories by about 20%, and that these effects last at least two months. I am always wary of tiny interventions that purport to have large and long-lasting effects, but I don’t see anything immediately fishy about this study, and the mechanism is plausible. I bet most 9/11 truthers have never spoken to a skeptic who both took them seriously and who knew a lot about 9/11.
This is, I think, an underrated and positive aspect of AI. People are worried about hallucinations and AI psychosis, and rightfully so. But keep in mind that many people do not know basic, uncontroversial truths about their world. 37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.
My good friend Jake Robertson has a PhD in history from Oxford, and he’s one of the most creative fellas I know. (Not a lot of people are both experts on the Gulag and have also played Hamlet in the nude in Central Park). His greatest love is taking stories from the past and bringing them to life, which he’s done for decades with his own family history, and now you can hire him to do the same for yours. This is a great gift for the grandparent who has everything, for the mom who wants more than just a family tree and a stack of census records, and for settling family feuds about whether Uncle Harry actually had a secret second family back in Warsaw.
Kirk Smith is building a homemade, open-source, low-cost battery to capture renewable energy; check it out here.
From : Join the Independent Science Society. Especially relevant if you live in London, but they also have a Discord.
is working on an AI-enabled replacement for peer-reviewed journals. I hear a lot of science reform ideas that are basically, “What if AI, you know, just made all the problems go away?” so what I like about this one is how specific it is, and that it has an actual theory of change.
Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2026 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! I’ll announce the winners later this summer.
did another replication of the Things Could Be Better effect and the results look pretty similar:
I’m planning a meetup in Chicago—go here for more info.
Infinite Loops (paradigms & progress)
Through Conversations (the scientific ecosystem)
Behind the Slides with Scott Matson (academia & publishing)
The Happiness Lab with Laurie Santos (the Illusion of Moral Decline)
And finally, a post from the archive: two years ago, I found a way to put my horrible master’s thesis to good use.
I swear I first learned about this through an Astral Codex Ten links post, but now I can’t find it, so maybe I hallucinated it.
Full disclosure, I am also the recipient of an Emergent Ventures grant. Apparently they’ll give ‘em to just anybody these days.
2026-06-10 00:58:56
Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today.
It’s 1992. Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten is selling well. But then MTV puts the music video for their song “Jeremy” in heavy rotation, and the band rockets into superstardom—shows suddenly sold out, fans smashing record store windows, the whole shebang.
That’s familiar enough, but what happens next is not. Pearl Jam responds to this hullabaloo by refusing to make music videos for the next five years. They decline photoshoots and interviews. When their producer tells them that their song “Better Man” is a surefire hit, they cut it from their second album.1 Nevertheless, that album sells nearly a million copies in its first week, setting a record. Then it sells six million more, staying at #1 on the Billboard chart for over a month.
They say that the past is a foreign country, and reading a Pearl Jam profile from the early 90s, it certainly feels that way. The writer takes for granted that fame is inherently bad. And not just because fans might, say, break into your backstage dressing room and steal your notebooks—which they did—but also because commercial success and artistic integrity are so obviously at odds with one another. Kurt Cobain had mocked the band for catering to the mainstream, and the criticism clearly stung. It was understood that being popular was somehow, paradoxically, uncool, and that Pearl Jam owed everyone assurances that they hadn’t gotten too big for their britches.
I am just barely old enough to remember this era, when “selling out” was a bad thing you did with your career, rather than a good thing you do with your stadium tour. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, the book where I first read this story about Pearl Jam, quotes the 90s chronicler Chuck Klosterman: “the concept of ‘selling out’ [...] is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties”. I gained consciousness at about the time that Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and the Spice Girls gained worldwide fame, and I understood that it was hip to hate them.2 This didn’t stop them from selling millions of records, of course. But there was a sizable sector of society that refused to join in, a clutch of (sometimes snobby) purists who were ready to turn on anyone who got too big or too rich. As the music writer points out, around this time, a rock band could lose permanently lose their street cred for appearing in a Miller commercial.
That feeling part of a larger anti-consumerist vibe percolating through culture at the time. This was the era of Super Size Me and the anti-World Trade Organization protests that came to be known as the Battle of Seattle. My parents furnished me with copies of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist manifesto No Logo.3 My English teacher made the whole class read anti-consumerist YA novels like Feed and The Gospel According to Larry. I got so caught up in the fervor that I almost showed up to a school dance with a handmade sign that said “I AM PROTESTING CONSUMERISM”. I chickened out at the last second, but clearly there was some potent zeitgeist going on if a 13-year-old was about to stake their reputation on, I guess, not buying stuff?
Fast forward to today, and that zeitgeist is long gone. Meghan Thee Stallion is a Popeyes franchisee, Drake would like you to try online gambling, and Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai.4 Shortly after she charted her first hit, the rapper Ice Spice was partnering with Ben Affleck and Dunkin’ Donuts on an Ice Spice Munchkins Drink.5 We’ve got punk icon Iggy Pop selling insurance and Bob Dylan appearing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial.6 Lollapalooza once featured alt rock and heavy metal; these days, you can catch a set by DJ D-Sol, better known as David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And if you love Lady Gaga’s album Chromatica and the associated HBO special Gaga Chromatica Ball, then don’t miss these limited edition Lady Gaga Chromatica-themed Oreos!
Hyper-commercialism is nothing new, in music or anywhere else. (See, for instance, the band KISS’ officially licensed Kiss Kasket). People who bemoan our era of “late capitalism” rarely realize that phrase is 100 years old. The only thing that’s unprecedented about these craven cash-ins is how well they seem to be working. Selling out no longer carries a stigma—if anything, fans are excited for tie-ins between their favorite bands and their favorite brands, no matter how shameless. The Chromatica Oreos reportedly flew off the shelves, earning a thumbs-up even from the Washington Post’s food critic. Some people complained about the texture and the color, or how it was simply a re-release of the much-hated “golden” Oreo, but they did not complain that it is cringe, perhaps even depraved, for a musician to collaborate with an international food conglomerate to stick her name on a million mass-produced sandwich cookies.
And if that doesn’t send Kurt Cobain spinning in his grave, wait until he finds out that Gen Z thinks Nirvana is a clothing brand.
How did the punk ethos die?
W. David Marx, the author of Blank Space, has a theory that I think is correct, but incomplete. He blames an ideology called poptimism: the idea that popular art (and especially pop music) is just as meritorious as any other kind of art. Poptimism was meant to be a reaction to rockism7, a strain of cultural snobbery that insisted rock ‘n’ roll was the only authentic form of art—if it ain’t a white guy with a guitar, it ain’t real music! Both sides of that debate might sound stupid now, but the poptimist critique made sense back when people were flocking to baseball stadiums to blow up piles of disco records:
Unfortunately, Marx says, the critics took poptimism too far, and they brought the discourse with them. They embraced pop music not only because they had suddenly discovered the musical genius of Britney Spears, but also because they realized the political winds had changed. In the words of one music writer, poptimism was “a kind of penance, atoning for past rockist misdeeds”. Saying that some art is better than other art started sounding too much like saying that some people are better than other people. And once you’re unwilling to judge art for its artistry, you’re stuck judging it by its popularity.
I don’t doubt Marx’s thesis that culture writers abandoned their posts, but I do doubt that this was enough to kill the anti-consumerist vibe on its own. Something even bigger was happening at the same time: while the critics were changing their tune, they were also getting tuned out. The internet decapitated art criticism, elevating the YouTube commenter to the same level as the Pitchfork editor. And although there are plenty of problems with professional tastemakers—they can be condescending and exclusionary, they can have their heads up their butts, etc.—they are at least, in theory, concerned with separating art from schlock.
Casual consumers have no such hangups. They don’t care whether every pop song they listen to is written by the same middle-aged Swedish guy; they just want their eardrums vibrated, their retinas tickled, and their pleasure centers stimulated. And so, the more you cater to the consumer over the connoisseur, the more you’re going to be serving up slop. The internet makes this possible; competition makes it irresistible.
Together, the decline of art criticism and the ascent of art populism can explain how corny, lowest-common-denominator kitsch went from being a guilty pleasure to simply being a pleasure. The line separating art and entertainment went undefended, and then it was washed away by a tsunami of swill.
However, that doesn’t explain why we became so tolerant of shameless greed and self-promotion. As we lost the ability to distinguish between Joni Mitchell and Celine Dion, why did we also lose the ability to distinguish between a single and a jingle? Listening to Lady Gaga is one thing, but where did we acquire our appetite for her Oreos?
The answer to that is, I think, the Great Switcheroo.
In every country on Earth, poor people outnumber rich people. Many of those countries are ostensibly democratic. This leaves us with a puzzle: why don’t the poor people vote to take all the money away from the rich people and redistribute it amongst themselves?
John Steinbeck’s famous explanation was that, in the United States at least, poor people see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.8 You don’t want to outlaw affluence if you might have some for yourself one day. That wasn’t a crazy thing to think when Steinbeck was writing in the 1930s, as some of the richest men in America had come from modest means—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Edison, Hershey, and Chrysler. If fortunes are popping into existence all the time, it may seem like the wealthy are a group to be joined rather than beaten.
The average American is not feeling so upwardly mobile these days, and so people aren’t as sanguine about the super-rich as they might have once been. When YouGov surveyed Americans about their opinions of 40 different rich people, not a single one of them was liked by more than 50% of the population. (For instance, 90% of respondents know who Jeff Bezos is, but only 19% approve of him). An increasing number of people—and especially young people—say that billionaires are a bad thing for the country:
As the public has soured on the rich, however, they seem to have sweetened on the famous. In similar YouGov polls, celebrities do extraordinarily well compared to billionaires. Lady Gaga, for instance, has 97% recognition and 61% approval. Samuel L. Jackson: 96% recognition, 81% approval. Even Paris Hilton’s 40% approval rate is better than every single rich person except Warren Buffet (he’s at 41%).9 Not bad for someone who once described her life’s mission as, “I want to be famous. [...] And I want to monetize that, like a lot.”10
This Great Switcheroo happened, I think, because as it got harder to become rich, it got easier to become famous. It’s hard to remember now, but going viral on the internet was once a bad thing. Back in 2002, when Star Wars Kid got famous for pretending to be Darth Maul in a home video, he got death threats, not brand deals. His classmates bullied him so badly that his family sued them; meanwhile, his school asked him not to come back. The “Numa Numa” Kid was originally “distraught” and “embarrassed” by his fame (he later tried to capitalize on it, mostly unsuccessfully). Afro Ninja, a Black stunt performer whose disastrous audition tape went viral, said of his unexpected notoriety, “If I had a choice to do it all over again [...] I would pass”.
Once the attention economy built out its financial infrastructure, however, overnight fame suddenly went from painful to profitable. The YouTube Partner Program (2007), Stripe (2010), and Patreon (2013) all made it easier to turn eyeballs into dollars. The first wave of internet celebrities peaked too early to cash in, but subsequent waves became icons rather than pariahs. Just as the Americans who lived through the Gilded Age watched industrial moguls build business empires, we watched tweens become millionaires in their bedrooms. They got Andrew Carnegie; we got Mr. Beast.11
As a result, the attention economy is the one corner of the overall economy where people are still feeling upwardly mobile. 57% of Gen Z (and 41% of older adults!) say they would like to be influencers. And why not? You are not going to escape the underclass by driving an Uber or dusting the server racks at a data center, but you might be able to do it by posting mukbang videos.
I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.
(Of course, the celebrities we look up to are also millionaires, but their riches are incidental to their fame, rather than the other way around.)
It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually trying to become TikTok famous. The fact that there is a path between us and the stars—however tenuous, however unlikely to be trod—makes it feel like they are, somehow, just like us. You and I could never be Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Sam Altman, and so they seem distant and despicable. But some part of us believes that we could be Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, and so we exempt them from the noblesse oblige that we used to demand of the aristocracy.
In fact, while most of us feel like billionaires owe us something (see: the California Billionaire Tax, heading to ballots this fall), many people apparently feel like they owe something to their favored celebrities. Millions of people have joined the ranks of fan clubs like the Rihanna Navy, the BTS Army, Ariana Grande’s Arianators12, Justin Bieber’s Beliebers, Beyoncé’s Beyhive, and so on. The paramilitary-esque branding of these groups is not accidental. These are the folks writing guides on how to inflate BTS’s streaming statistics, issuing death threats to a music writer who dared to give Taylor Swift an 8.0/10, and enlisting themselves as copyright police when an Ariana Grande album leaked early, hunting down and flagging links to the pirated music so it wouldn’t hurt her advance sales. As the author of that BTS guide put it in an interview with The New York Times, promoting her favorite band feels like “we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world.”
This has got to be the greatest marketing coup in history: convincing fans that they are “promoting their own voices” while they are helping a record executive afford his second yacht.
I’m being harsh, but look around: are you pleased with the state of our culture? Are you excited by music videos that double as commercials for Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip?13 Do you enjoy jockeying with ten million other people for Taylor Swift tickets, nine million of whom are attempting to invest in them as speculative assets? Does it warm your cockles when The Rock brags on Twitter that Red One, his Christmas movie, has “a long shelf life and multiple verticals - kudos to our Amazon partners for their strategic win”? This is what decades of poptimism, populism, and celebrity worship have gotten us:
If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
I have no problem with artists making money—everybody has to pay their rent somehow. I don’t even have a problem with artists getting rich—if you can write a song that makes the whole world sing, then you deserve a big fat check.
I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached.
If we can revive the stigma of selling out, maybe we can also revive the rest of the punk ethos that we seem to have lost. To the extent that anti-consumerist sentiment survives at all today, it mainly exists in two diminished forms. One is the environmentalist variant, which says it’s naughty to buy stuff not because it’s bad for your soul, but because it’s bad for the Earth. That’s a fine way to feel, but there are plenty of ways to sell your soul without increasing your carbon footprint.
The other is the anti-capitalist variant, which says it’s bad for rich people to have so much more money than poor people do. That’s also a fair critique, but if you’re not careful, you can make it sound like it’s actually awesome to own tons of stuff, and the only problem with Birkin bags and Patek Philippes is that some people don’t get to have them.
We’re missing the most potent part of that 90s counterculture, the part that said there’s nothing noble about the act of consumption itself. I’d like to live in a world where a heavy metal musician who shills for margarine would become a laughingstock rather than a millionaire. Our world used to be a little more like that, and I think it could be again. We don’t need to revive rockism—it was always stupid to think that you can only make good art with a Fender Stratocaster. But we do need to revive our desire for seriousness among our cultural elite. If we’re going to let these people into our lives, they ought to stand for something more than themselves. They should to be willing to put their art ahead of their pocketbook and their follower count. And, ideally, they should not also be the CEO of Goldman Sachs. I have seen the future that awaits us if we fail to bring punk back, and it looks like this:
The producer was right: they later put it on their third album, and it spent eight weeks at #1 on the rock charts, despite not being released as a single.
I mean, c’mon, the founding members of NSYNC were former Mickey Mouse Club actors, and Backstreet Boys was assembled by a music producer in a blimp hangar in Orlando. The magazine ad that announced auditions for the group that would become the Spice Girls read like this:
WANTED: R.U. 18–23 with the ability to sing/dance? R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, and dedicated? Heart Management Ltd. are a widely successful music industry management consortium currently forming a choreographed, singing/dancing, all-female pop act for a recording deal.
If there is a less-cool origin story for a band, I’d love to hear it.
Always remember the Naomi Mnemonic:
if the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.
Maroon 5:
Bob Marley is one of the greatest artists in the history of music, he is truly a genius, so we were excited to be given the opportunity to cover ‘Three Little Birds” for Hyundai’s new campaign.
No relation to the Spice Girls nor to the dancehall artist Spice.
In the comments, Dylan fans claim this commercial is merely performance art. In 1965, a reporter asked Dylan, “If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose?” and Dylan replied, “Ladies’ garments”. That means his Victoria’s Secret collab is more like a prophecy fulfilled than a legacy shilled. In that case, I, uh, also hereby declare that I would only ever sell out for a company that hawks brassieres, and so if I ever appear in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, rest assured I am during it in a cool and ironic way.
Gosh these names are terrible.
The “millionaires” framing of this quote is probably a later paraphrase. The original quote says “temporarily embarrassed capitalist”.
Michael Jackson is currently at 67% approval, which is impressive considering Netflix just released a documentary about whether he sexually abused children.
Blank Space, p. 44.
If Star Wars Kid had debuted a decade later, he’d probably be a Disney brand ambassador right now. Instead, he is making documentaries about the dangers of the internet.
No offense to Ariana Grande, but I would have encouraged my fans to pick something that didn’t sound like a rejected name for the Hitler Youth.
2026-05-27 00:02:14
There’s a guy who sends me a nasty reply to every one of my posts. Within 24 hours of an email going out, he arrives in my inbox like:
2026-05-12 21:23:30
Say what you will about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its 1936 constitution was a banger.
It guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and protest. It extended equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race or gender. It shortened the working day to seven hours, affirmed “the right to rest and leisure”, and offered free education and free health care to all, including a “wide network of health resorts for the working people.” You gotta admit this is a lot better than certain other constitutions that, say, count slaves as three-fifths of a person.
In the two years after the constitution was adopted, however, Stalin purged something like a million people. Eighteen million Soviet citizens would be forced into gulag camps and colonies over the next three decades. This was all clearly in violation of Articles 103, 111, and 127, and many others besides. How could one of the greatest tragedies in human history happen when it was very explicitly not allowed?
The uncomfortable answer is that a critical mass of people found prisons and purges palatable. We say that “Stalin” did all these things as if held the gun himself1, but obviously you can’t run a gulag without guards, secretaries, accountants, engineers, architects, doctors, drivers, quartermasters, mid-level managers, kangaroo court judges, and all manner of flunkies, patsies, and stool pigeons. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of regular people were willing to commit their own personal portion of an atrocity.
The lesson here is obvious: rules don’t matter unless people act like they matter. Writing down laws does not endow them with physical force or psychic potency. We all know this. We all believe this.
So why don’t we act like it?
Ever since the replication crisis began over a decade ago, most folks have agreed that the problem is the laxness of our rules, and that the solution is to tighten them. We should mandate replication, preregistration, public data, bigger studies and tinier p-values. The more we can reduce researcher degrees of freedom, the thinking goes, the better our science will be.
Vindicating this theory, a big group of researchers published a paper in 2023 showing that it’s possible to achieve high rates of replicability as long as you follow a set of “rigor-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency.”
One year later, the paper was retracted because it...failed to follow those rigor-enhancing practices. The journal editors claim the authors were not transparent about their methods, did not abide by their own preregistration, and cherry-picked their results.2
Clearly, we’re not missing the right regulations. We’re missing the right motivations. If you want to discover true things about the world, you’ll be interested in the guidelines that help you do that, and you’ll be thankful to the people who develop them. That’s how the replication crisis could have played out: someone demonstrates that our sample sizes are too small, and we all go, “oh wow we should make our sample sizes bigger because want to know what’s real and what’s not”.
But if you’re not actually seeking the truth, no amount of “rigor-enhancing practices” will ever cause you to find it. That’s why our revolution in scientific regulation has mostly failed. We require researchers who conduct clinical trials to post the results on a public website, but only 45% of them do. We tell people to specify their primary outcomes beforehand, but if their studies don’t work as planned, they just sneak in different analyses—one study on anesthesiology experiments found that 92%(!) of them did this. We make researchers end their papers by saying “data available on request” and then only 17% of them actually make their data available on request.3
You can’t turn a cheat into a scientist by making a rule against cheating. The most important “rigor-enhancing practice” is caring about getting things right, and without that, nothing else matters.
Every couple will eventually have some version of the “Let’s Make a Rule” fight, where they try to solve some interpersonal issue through legislation. “You think I don’t take enough interest in your life, so let’s make a rule: I have to ask you three things about your day before I start telling you about mine.” The theory behind the Let’s Make a Rule fight is that we could live in harmony with one another if we could just compile all of our expectations into one big Google Doc.
The Let’s Make a Rule fight never leads to a satisfying conclusion because nobody actually wants their partner to follow the rules. They want their partner to care. Being asked “How was your day, dear?” through gritted teeth because that’s what our Relationship Handbook says to do is probably worse than not being asked at all.
You want your partner to realize that your preferences are not silly affectations that can be belittled, ignored, or disputed until they go away, that they are, in fact, load-bearing parts of your personality, and to reject them is to reject you. In return, you have to realize that some of your preferences are more malleable than you thought, that maybe they don’t all have to be foundational to your sense of self, and that some of them can be bent or jettisoned in the interests of coexistence.
This is the work of love, and it takes a lifetime. You can’t speedrun it by filling out a spreadsheet or signing a contract. The frictions of a lifelong relationship can be made intelligible—that is, understandable to the people involved, but they cannot be made legible—that is, understandable to everyone else.
The best couples I know have all sorts of arrangements and accommodations that make zero sense to me but perfect sense to them, and that’s exactly why they work well together. A successful relationship is nothing more than a package of haphazard remedies and rickety fixes that people would only ever devise and maintain when they really, really want to be together.
Sometimes police officers break the rules, and the solution is obvious: we just need to police the police.
If you strap a camera to every officer’s chest and record everything they do, then they won’t misbehave in the first place. And even if they do, we can discipline or fire them. This is the most foolproof plan of all time, supported by an unheard-of 89% of Americans. Police departments all over the country agreed—now every single large precinct has body cameras, and a majority of smaller precincts do too. The technology is out there and the data is in; how is our foolproof plan working out?
Not well. According to a 2022 Department of Justice report, body cams might not have any meaningful effect on police behavior. One meta-analysis found a moderate drop in citizen complaints, but didn’t find any difference on any other outcomes: use of force, assaults against police officers, number of incident reports, etc. Another meta-analysis finds no evidence of downstream outcomes like conviction rates. The DoJ warns that we need more research, but this is enough to rule out gigantic effects. If body cams do anything at all, they probably don’t do much.
Maybe our plan just didn’t go far enough. Bad cops can simply turn their cameras off or cause the footage to mysteriously go missing. Even if the video exists, it’s only one version of events, and it’s from the officer’s point of view. Maybe what we really need is a swarm of drones to follow every police officer, recording every action from every angle, and they never shut off and their footage automatically gets uploaded to a public database.
Or maybe we misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. We assumed that the justice system was eager to hold bad cops accountable and that all it was missing was the necessary evidence. It turns out the justice system is actually rather ambivalent about holding bad cops accountable, and so it handles additional evidence as halfheartedly as it handled all of the evidence it already had. A camera can allow you to see, but it can’t make you look.
Everywhere—from politics to science, from love to law—we are constantly asking: how can we get people to do the right thing?
And the answer comes to us so naturally: prod them, push them, shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!
But every time we try to do this, we run into the same paradox that the Roman poet Juvenal pointed out 2,000 years ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?4 If you try to police the bad actors, you will soon find that some of your police are bad actors as well. And if your solution to bad police is to police the police, then who will police the police that police the police?
At some point, there has to be an Unwatched Watchman, someone who will do the right thing not because they are forced to, but because they want to. Instead of asking, “How we can get people to do the right thing,” we should ask, “How can we get people to want the right thing?”
I think there are only two ways that people’s desires change: they either get put in a crock pot, or they get hit with a lightning bolt. That is, people either change so slowly that they never notice it, or they change so suddenly that they never forget it. There is no in between.
Here’s what a lighting bolt looks like.
One day in seventh grade, my teacher—let’s call him Mr. L—told me and two other kids to put up the American flag outside the school. While another boy undid the knot on the flag pole, I absent-mindedly draped the flag over my shoulders like a cape, as I had seen Olympic athletes do on TV.
Mr. L, who was a Vietnam War veteran, apparently saw me do this, and when we came back, he gave me a dressing down in front of the whole class. I had disrespected the flag of our country by using it as a costume, he said. My behavior was shameful and inexcusable, and I must sit at my desk silently and meditate on the wrongness of my action.
That might sound like nothing, but I was a Good Kid. I never got in real trouble in school before, and so this experience was new and humiliating. In that moment, I silently vowed to never, ever be like Mr. L. As far as I was concerned, the Stars and Stripes were a symbol of unconscionable cruelty against the most innocent and well-meaning of people, namely, me.
Mr. L got me to do the right thing (at least the thing he thought was right)—I never draped myself in the flag again. But he didn’t get me to want the right thing. Before Mr. L, I told people I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. After Mr. L, I told people I wanted to be a writer. One cruel remark undid a lifetime of saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
Here’s what a crock pot looks like.
Most scientists learn their trade from scratch in young adulthood. They do it not so much by sitting through lectures, but by hanging around in labs, watching what other people do, and doing rinky-dink versions of their own experiments that get critiqued by people with more experience. Therefore, the kind of scientist you become depends a lot on the crock pot you steep in.
Many of those crock pots, it turns out, are filled with rancid juices. If your professor hands you a dataset and tells you to “Go on a fishing expedition for something—anything—interesting” and then praises you when you return with significant p-values, of course you’re going to internalize the wrong lessons. If you hang around people who bury their inconvenient findings, or who stuff their reference lists with self-citations, or who take other people’s work without crediting them, you’re going to grow into that kind of person yourself. You won’t feel like you’re becoming a villain; you’ll feel like you’re becoming an adult.
Once you’ve spent a few years in the wrong crock pot, you’re cooked, both literally and figuratively. No amount of legislation can turn you raw again or re-cook you the right way. You are immune to any “rigor-enhancing practices” because you never learned to care about rigor. When you encounter a rule like “No excessive self-citations!”, it barely even registers, because of course you don’t think your self-citations are excessive. You think they’re normal!
As Richard Feynman once put it:
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.
I think Feynman was right. The most important lessons—in science, or in anything—are not learned. They are absorbed. And if you’re steeping in dirty water, you’ll absorb the wrong lessons, and then it’s almost impossible to get them back out again.
When you think in terms of crock pots and lightning bolts, you may or may not come up with the right theory of change. But you’ll at least realize that you need a theory of change.
We don’t seem to do this by default. Instead, we assume that other humans are lumps of Silly Putty that can be stretched or compressed to fit whatever container is convenient. Change is easy—who needs a theory?
As long as that’s your model of human nature, you’ll believe that winning hearts and minds is just a matter of updating the bylaws, and you’ll keep wondering why it never seems to work.
I understand why people are obsessed with rules: it’s fun to pretend that we can control the future. It’s pleasing to think all this messiness is temporary, and that once we articulate what each person should and shouldn’t do, then finally we can live in peace with each other.
And yet, when the future arrives, the people in it always end up doing whatever they want. The only way to have some influence over the future, then, is to have some influence over those wants.
It’s hard to build the right crock pots; it’s hard to fire the right lightning bolts. It’s much easier to edit Google Docs full of rules, to install more security cameras, and to enumerate ever-longer lists of rigor-enhancing practices. And as long as we do that, we can expect more broken hearts, bad cops, and retracted papers. You can outlaw war and you can mandate love, you can ban falsehood and demand truth, but you won’t get anything you want unless you can convince other people to want it, too.
Anyway, that’s how my day was, dear! How was yours?
Lenin could have done it single-handedly, of course, because according to Soviet TV he was a magic mushroom.
The authors and the critics/editors disagree on what happened, exactly. The former say their paper was retracted because they included one misleading sentence, and the latter say it was because the entire paper was based on ad hoc analyses that were implied to be preregistered but really weren’t.
Regardless, the authors eventually explained that the project wasn’t originally about enhancing rigor per se—it was conceived ten years ago to investigate the “decline effect”, where previously robust findings mysteriously shrink or disappear in subsequent investigations. Some people on the team apparently believed in the standard explanations for this phenomenon: sampling error, selective reporting, questionable research practices, etc. But others suspected voodoo was at play: maybe the mere act of observing a phenomenon causes it to wither, for spooky reasons beyond our understanding and perhaps beyond the laws of physics. Suffice it to say, this backstory didn’t make it into the manuscript.
By the way, that response rate was no different between journals with mandatory data-sharing statements and those without.
This comes from Juvenal’s Satire VI, which sounds a lot like a standup routine from the 1980s:
SatVI:25-59 You’re Mad To Marry!
SatVI:200-230 The Way They Lord It Over You!
SatVI:286-313 What Brought All This About?
SatVI:Ox1-34 and 346-379 And Those Eunuchs!
SatVI:592-661 It’s Tragic!
See also this synopsis of the introduction, via Wikipedia:
lines 6.25-37 – Are you preparing to get married, Postumus, in this day and age, when you could just commit suicide or sleep with a boy?
2026-04-29 01:48:50
It’s time for the annual Experimental History Blog Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! Send me your best unpublished blog post, and if I pick yours, I’ll send you real cash money and tell everybody how great you are.
You can see last year’s winners and honorable mentions here. They included: a self-experiment on lactose intolerance, a story about working as a 10-year-old bartender, a takedown of randomized-controlled trials, and an economic explainer of college sports. The authors were software engineers, pseudonymous weirdos, academics, professional behavior-changers, freelancers, moms, and straight up randos and normies. That’s the whole point of blogging—you can be anyone, and you can write about anything.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some triumphs of the form:
Book Reviews: On the Natural Faculties, The Gossip Trap, Progress and Poverty, all of The Psmith’s Bookshelf
Deep Dives: Dynomight on air quality and air purifiers, Higher than the Shoulders of Giants, or a Scientist’s History of Drugs, How the Rockefeller Foundation Helped Bootstrap the Field of Molecular Biology, all of Age of Invention
Big Ideas: Ads Don’t Work That Way, On Progress and Historical Change, Meditations on Moloch, Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, 10 Technologies that Won’t Exist in 5 Years
Personal Stories/Gonzo Journalism: No Evidence of Disease, It-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, adventures with the homeless people outside my house, My Recent Divorce and/or Dior Homme Intense, The Potato People
Scientific Reports/Data Analysis: Lady Tasting Brine, Fahren-height, A Chemical Hunger, The Mind in the Wheel, all of Experimental Fat Loss, all of The Egg and the Rock
How-to and Exhortation: The Most Precious Resource Is Agency, How To Be More Agentic, Things You’re Allowed to Do, Are You Serious?, 50 Things I Know, On Befriending Kids, Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn’t you?
Good Posts Not Otherwise Categorized: The biggest little guy, Baldwin in Brahman, The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, Bay Area House Parties (1, 2, 3, etc.), Alchemy is ok, Ideas Are Alive and You Are Dead, If You’re So Smart Why Can’t You Die?, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
And of course:
Last year’s winners: 100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon (1st place), What Ethiopian runners taught me about reading scientific literature, Or, how to go from overeating Italian food to winning marathons, if you’re Ethiopian (2nd place), and Did Cheetos try to incite a rebellion in 2008? (3rd place)
Paste your post into a Google Doc.
VERY IMPORTANT STEP: Change the sharing setting to “Anyone with the link”. This is not the default setting, and if you don’t change it, I won’t be able to read your post.
First place: $500
Second place: $250
Third place: $100
I’ll also post an excerpt of your piece on Experimental History and heap praise upon it, and I’ll add your blog to my list of Substack recommendations for the next year. You’ll retain ownership of your writing, of course.
Only unpublished posts are eligible. As fun as it would be to read every blog post ever written, I want to push people to either write something new or finish something they’ve been sitting on for too long. You’re welcome to publish your post after you submit it. If you win, I’ll reach out beforehand and ask you for a direct link to your post so I can include it in mine.
One entry per person.
There’s technically no word limit, but if you send me a 100,000 word treatise I probably won’t finish it.
You don’t need to have a blog to submit, but if you win and you don’t have one, I will give you a rousing speech about why you should start one.
Previous top-three winners are not eligible to win again, but honorable mentions are.
Uhhh otherwise don’t break any laws I guess??
Submissions are due June 15. Submit here.
2026-04-15 00:16:42
Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing, ego depletion, growth mindset, stereotype threat, walking slower after reading the word “Florida”—all gone for good. Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead.
This isn’t true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026. People are even doing variations on the slow-walking study, but now in virtual reality.
This leads to some absurd situations. One psychologist who used to work on stereotype threat now disavows the theory entirely: “I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.” But another psychologist claims that “stereotype threat is real and virtually universal [...] there is a lot of evidence supporting [its] existence (and impact)”.
We’re not arguing about whether stereotype threat is powerful or weak, or whether it is pervasive or rare, but whether it is obviously alive or obviously dead. That’s literally the premise of a Monty Python sketch.
It might seem like the way to resolve these disputes is to weigh up all the evidence, meta-analyze all the data, deploy your p-curves, your moderator analyses, and your tests for heterogeneity, maybe even run a big, multi-lab, preregistered replication. Do all that and then we’ll finally know whether these effects are real or not!
This is a trap. We have spent the past decade doing exactly those things, and yet here we are. Clearly, no amount of data-collecting, number-crunching, or bias-correcting is going to lay these theories to rest, nor will it return them to the land of the living.
We need a different approach. And so we must turn, as we so often do, to the source of all truly important ideas in the philosophy of science: the sci-fi universe of Halo.
In Halo, Spartan super soldiers never officially die; they are only ever listed as “missing in action”. (This is meant to keep morale high among a hyper-militarized human culture that is on the verge of being exterminated by evil aliens.) I think we should adopt a similar scheme for scientific phenomena: they never die. They merely become embarrassing.
This isn’t how science is supposed to work, of course. The secret sauce of science is supposed to be falsifiability: it ain’t science unless you can kill it. If I claim that all swans are white, and you show up with a black swan, then I’m supposed to bid a tearful goodbye to my theory and send it to that big farm upstate where it can frolic and play with all the other failed hypotheses.
Falsification sounds straightforward until you actually try it. You show up with your black swan, and instead of admitting defeat, I go, “Hmm, well is it really black? Is it actually a swan? Seems more like a dusky-looking duck to me!” And we publish dueling papers until the end of our days.
Falsifiability depends not only on the qualities of the theory itself, but also on the whims and biases of the people who engage with it. And because there are so many people with so many different whims and biases, few theories are ever going to be left with zero adherents. For instance, there are still physics PhDs trying to prove that the sun orbits the Earth. That might be disturbing, but it’s also necessary—if no one was ever willing to entertain crazy ideas, we wouldn’t have any scientific progress at all. We have to keep some kooks around because occasionally, as the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “a crackpot hits the jackpot”.1
The persistence and necessity of kookiness means we’ll never be able to say that a theory is well and truly dead. We can, however, say when a theory is embarrassing. If I deny the possibility of a black swan, and you produce something that looks awfully like a black swan, it’s still possible that I will prevail—maybe we’ll discover your black swan is actually a white swan covered in soot, or DNA analysis will vindicate my “dusky duck” theory. But if I didn’t expect a black swan-looking thing to exist at all, my hypothesis is a lot less plausible than it was before, and it’s much more embarrassing to believe in it.
This is the situation we appear to be in with many theories in psychology. We can’t say whether they’re “real” or not. Somewhere out there, the Spartans may live on. But if we’ve been studying something for decades and people look at all the evidence and they still doubt whether it exists at all, we have to admit: that’s cringe.
Cringe doesn’t mean wrong! Continental drift was cringe.2 Germ theory was cringe.3 Smallpox vaccination was cringe.4 All of them went from mortifying to undeniable. Maybe truly revolutionary theories must follow that trajectory. If a scientific idea is young and it’s not cringe, it probably has no promise. But if it’s old and it’s still cringe, it probably has no merit. That’s why I am not optimistic about any big-name theory in psychology that has gone the wrong direction on the Cool-Cringe Continuum over the past ten years—it’s not impossible for them to make a comeback, but it’s not the way things usually go.
Still, no matter how ropey things get for these theories, it makes no sense to write them off as “not real”. If stereotype threat truly doesn’t exist, that means you could never, under any circumstances, run a study that produces results in line with the theory. That’s a crazy claim to make! We don’t have nearly enough evidence to support such a conclusion, and we never will.5
In fact, insisting that certain effects are “not real” merely provides an incentive for people to keep studying them, because it makes their results newsworthy: “Look, we’re proving the existence of a supposedly nonexistent effect!” But of course it’s rare for anyone to actually prove such a thing. Instead, they are almost always “proving” that, given infinitely flexible theories and infinite ways to test them, you can produce some small effect that kind-of sort-of accords with some version of the hypothesis, broadly construed. No one should claim that this is impossible, and no one should get credit for showing that it is possible.
If we appreciated how hard it is to kill a theory for good, maybe we’d stop wasting our time trying to do exactly that. For instance, ego depletion—the idea that willpower is a “muscle” that can get “fatigued” by overuse—has been the subject of at least three big replication attempts. This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2016 found no effect (N = 2,141). This preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 also found no effect (N = 3,531). But oops, this other preregistered multi-lab replication from 2022 did find an effect (N = 1,775). At this point, maybe we should cut it out with all the preregistered multi-lab replications and just admit this theory is never going to die, and to spend any more effort investigating it would be embarrassing for all involved.
Science snobs love to claim that this problem is unique to the social sciences, as if falsification is a breeze everywhere else. But it isn’t.
For example, when Arthur Eddington went out to test the theory of relativity by photographing an eclipse in 1919, he ended up throwing out several pictures that “didn’t work”. He reasoned that the sun had heated the glass of his telescope unevenly, throwing off the results. Was that fair? Was it right? Were those pictures legitimate and failed tests of the theory, or were they tainted by faulty equipment?
Now that other results have independently supported Einstein’s theory, Eddington’s choice to ditch the disconfirming data seems appropriate and wise. But in the moment, it sure looked like p-hacking (where the p in this case stands for “photograph”).6
When you omit the inconvenient details, Eddington’s adventure seems like a classic case of falsification. That’s probably why it partly inspired the philosopher of science Karl Popper to come up with the idea of falsification in the first place.7
The Eddington affair isn’t unique. Knock-down, drag-out disconfirmations are rarer than we would like to admit. Francesco Redi performed the first experiments “disproving” spontaneous generation in the 1660s, but Louis Pasteur was still “disproving” it in the 1860s! Remember during the pandemic, when people were arguing about whether respiratory viruses can spread via aerosols, whether masks work, and whether UV light can protect us from infection? It seemed like those arguments arose around the same time that a novel coronavirus jumped down someone’s windpipe, but in fact they had been going on for a hundred years.8
Here’s a fun one: in 1906, when Camillo Golgi won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, he used his acceptance speech to argue against the “neuron doctrine”, the idea that the brain is made up of functionally independent cells. This was surprising to the neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who happened to be the biggest proponent of the neuron doctrine, and who also happened to be in the audience, sharing the other half of the prize. Ramón y Cajal, for his part, would later retort that Golgi’s images were “artificially distorted and falsified”.9
These disputes didn’t end because someone recanted their beliefs or committed scientific seppuku. Max Planck famously quipped that science advances one funeral at a time10, but that’s not quite right, because nothing changes if everyone at the funeral vows to continue the legacy of the dead. It seems to me that science actually advances one young person’s decision at a time. Do they choose to keep carrying the banner for increasingly cringe hypotheses, do they enter into endless disputes over the aliveness or deadness of theories, or do they take a another page from the Monty Python playbook, and decide to do something completely different?
When the replication crisis kicked off a decade ago and “classic” psychological phenomena started looking shaky, we could have asked ourselves, Talking Heads-style, “Well, how did we get here?”11 When we run a study and get a result, what does that mean? Which studies should we be running in the first place? What the hell are we doing? What’s it all for?
We did not ask ourselves these questions. Instead, we checked “have a reckoning” off our our to-do lists and then we went back to business as usual, just with bigger sample sizes and occasional preregistration. I fear that we are concluding our come-to-Jesus moment without interrogating any of the mistakes that put us face-to-face with the Son of Man in the first place.
We seem to believe that tighter stats, more transparent methods, and time-stamped analysis plans will separate the true ideas from the false ideas, like Jesus separating the sheep from the goats on the Day of Judgment. Unfortunately, it turns out that some of the sheep and goats are hard to tell apart. And some of the goat-owners are absolutely insisting that their goats are sheep.12
We could spend the rest of time trying to get to the bottom of this. Or we could admit that, if we’ve argued about it this long and we’ve gotten nowhere, maybe we’ve crossed into cringe territory and it’s time to call it quits. We can’t say the Spartan is dead. But we can say he’s probably not coming back.
The Lever of Riches, p. 252.
Further discussion of it [continental drift] merely encumbers the literature and befogs the minds of fellow students. [It is] as antiquated as pre-Curie physics. It is a fairy tale.
There is no end to the absurdities connected with this doctrine. Suffice it to say, that in the ordinary sense of the word, there is no proof, such as would be admitted in any scientific inquiry, that there is any such thing as ‘contagion.’
Extermination [of smallpox] will be proved to be impossible, unless the vaccinators be mightier than the Almighty God himself
Imagine you read that some guy in your city was murdered. Then the next day you find out that, actually, the guy’s fine; he merely faked his death for tax reasons. You would not conclude, “Ah, turns out murders never happen, and could never happen!” Similarly, when a result fails to replicate, it doesn’t mean that every possible version of the theory is invalidated forever. It merely tightens the space of possibilities around the idea, which almost always leaves it less interesting and more embarrassing.
See The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevins, p. 41-46.
p. 38-39.
See Carl Zimmer’s Airborne.
See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity, p. 115-116.
As is usually the case with quotes like these, the canonical version was said by someone else.
Even if a theory is never truly dead, continuing to publish papers on it is like putting a lot of spam into the literature. A lot...of spam...spam...a lot...
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