2026-07-09 00:10:54

In The Decline of Deviance, I argued that:

1. Many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s.

2. This is both good (less crime) and bad (less innovation).

3. Deviance is declining because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.

Since I put it out last October, this has become my most-read post of all time. Lots of folks have chimed in with hypotheses, critiques, and good old-fashioned internet dunks, so let’s see if we can take this idea one level deeper, and weave something out of all these loose threads.

That’s right: we’re doing a sequel to the post about how there are too many sequels.

THE KIDS STOPPED SMOKING AND NOBODY CARED

The most common response I got was: “how awful!”

(The trends, not the post itself, although that too sometimes.)

To most folks, the decline of deviance is a turn for the worst. Previous generations got to live through artistic golden ages, while we have to suffer through an era where there are four different movies that are all, technically, Spider-Man 2.

But this response misses half the post, and the most important point.

In 1995, half of high school students drank, 35% smoked, and 40% had at least tried weed. 10% of them had brought a weapon to school at some point. About 6% of girls aged 15-19 were pregnant. Crime rates were about as high as they had been since we started keeping track of them.

Over the next 30 years, all of these problems shrank and some of them nearly disappeared. And not because of anything we did on purpose! We have no idea how to get kids to stop smoking—when we try to persuade them, we sometimes cause them to smoke more. No, these improvements happened basically by magic, for free, and—I think—as a byproduct of our increasing prosperity. This is like waking up one day to find that you’ve been left a large fortune by a long-lost aunt.

How does this great, unearned victory make us feel? Apparently, it doesn’t make us feel anything. We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s—no doubt we were spending considerable sums of money on anti-drug programs and public service announcements, wasting almost all of it—and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.

Now we’re on to worrying about whether the kids are too sad, whether they play outside enough, etc. Which is all reasonable and fine, but also, can we take a win? Can we at least try to reverse-engineer how some of these trendlines ended up going in our preferred directions, so we can make more of them do that?

I, too, would like to see a movie that is not Spider-Man 2. But I also appreciate that I can watch it safely in my home without fear of being attacked by pregnant teenage criminals.

THE INTERNET DIDN’T DO IT

Many people looked at the trends I presented and said, “Oh, the internet did this”. Maybe the internet killed the vibe by enabling mass surveillance—everyone’s afraid to be weird inside the digital panopticon, where all of your behaviors are recorded, uploaded, and permanently preserved. Or maybe the internet flattened culture by subjecting it to algorithmic curation. We can’t have nice things anymore because the computers won’t show them to us.

Both of these hypotheses are probably wrong, because the internet—at least, the internet as we know it today—simply showed up too late to be a plausible suspect. A majority of Americans didn’t get broadband until 2007. Instagram only launched in 2010, which was also the year that iPhones got a front-facing camera. So the transition from the 1990s to the 2000s, where we see many forms of deviance declining, is not really the transition from “pre-internet” to “post-internet”. That transition happened somewhere around 2012 when a majority of people got a smartphone, and long after most of these trends were already in motion.

So I don’t think the internet is the killer, but I do think it’s an accessory after the fact. In particular, I think the internet accelerated three trends that don’t get much attention. I’m going to call them cultural carcinization, de-frictioning, and the flat-Earth problem.

1. CULTURAL CARCINIZATION

In nature, apparently, being a crab is a good way to be. Several independent evolutionary lineages have ended up with crab-like body plans, a process called carcinization.

Culture can carcinize too, not in the sense that we all turn into crabs, but in the sense that we converge on a small set of strategies. If you’ve ever played a “social deduction” or “hidden role” game like Werewolf, Mafia, The Resistance, Avalon, or Secret Hitler, you’ve seen this happen in real time. Things start out wild and unpredictable as people get a feel for the rules. But everyone’s tactics have to evolve because each gambit can only work once (“If you’re the Secret Hitler, raise your hand right now!”). If you play long enough with the same group, eventually you’ll end up with a handful of maneuvers that continue to be viable even after they’re known, often because they’re difficult to pull off. At this point, the game becomes both extremely competitive and extremely repetitive. This is what cultural carcinization looks like.

The faster we can communicate, the faster we culturally carcinize. When information only travels as fast as humans can walk or horses can run, it takes a long time for any given strategy to play itself out. As we acquire steamships, railroads, telephones, and airplanes, the pace of the game picks up, and tactics have to turn over faster and faster. By the time we get the internet, it’s like every human on Earth is playing Secret Hitler a million times a day. (Except some people are not-so-secretly Hitlers.) Strategies appear and go out of date almost instantaneously until we all end up in a Nash equilibrium, where there’s no way for anyone to get the upper hand anymore.

The internet gives every social trend a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, speeding it toward its crablike final form. On Twitter, for instance, memes go from punchy to passé in a matter of days rather than decades. But if we could play culture on 1x speed rather than 10x speed, if we had time to screw around with different strategies before the game reached its cutthroat stage, we might have discovered different paths entirely. Maybe some folks would end up as crabs, while others became lobsters or kangaroos. Instead, in a hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, we end up with the same few memes, all done to death.1

2. DE-FRICTIONING

We’ve forgotten how much time people in the past spent consuming content that they didn’t actually want to consume: the unskippable clunker of a song that came in the middle of an album, the late-night infomercial that you sat through because there was nothing else on, the magazine you read cover-to-cover in the waiting room because your doctor was 45 minutes late.2

Each new media technology reduces this friction. CDs, TiVo, satellite radio, streaming—they all allow us to spend more time with the content that we supposedly desire. And what happens when this friction goes away? Well, in the mid-1990s, a pair of Russian artists named Komar and Melamid surveyed people around the world about their artistic preferences, and then they painted the “most wanted” scene from each country. The results looked like this:

The lesson here is that when people can articulate exactly what they want, and when the marketplace can give it to them, most folks end up sucking down slop. But I don’t think this is because humans yearn for crap and kitsch. I think it’s because no one knows actually what they like until they’re confronted by it. If you cater to people’s raw, undeveloped preferences, sure, you’re going to take them to Sloptown. But people are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes, if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us—it stretches our desires, rather than merely satisfying them.3

Komar and Melamid also asked people about their least favorite paintings, and then the duo painted those, too. The results looked like this:

I doubt I’m alone in thinking that a few of these least-wanted paintings are better than every single most-wanted painting. They have a little tang to them, that smidgen of rizz it takes to raise the eyebrow and tickle the fancy.

This is Komar and Melamid’s second lesson: if you want to see something interesting, you have to see things that you might dislike. And I don’t mean things that merely bore you, like an AI-written Netflix series that’s only meant to be half-watched while you also shop for shoes on your phone. I mean things that grab your attention, only to slap it around. Acquiring new tastes means, from time to time, spitting things out.

In a frictionless environment, however, this never has to happen. The internet excels at identifying what people already seem to want, and giving it to them good and hard. Oh, you liked that video where a monkey eats a piece of cantaloupe? How about 30 million more of those? How about an anteater licking a watermelon? Will that keep your attention for another three seconds? Wait, don’t go yet!! We’ve got a baby hedgehog nibbling on a pineapple!!

3. THE FLAT-EARTH PROBLEM

People once theorized that globalization would cause niche culture to thrive because small-timers could make their living by selling to a tiny proportion of the populace spread all over the globe—the so-called “long tail”. That did become possible, but it didn’t become desirable. Everybody came to the same realization: once you can reach anyone, why not try to reach everyone? Why sell to one thousand people in every single country, when you could sell to every single person in every single country?

Here’s the rub: the more customers you want, the more you have to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want your film to play in every theater on earth, then it has to appeal to eight billion different sensibilities, which also means it’s going to suck. This is the flat-Earth problem.

It’s easy to see these effects if you know where to look. Because Hollywood wants to sell movies in every market, they’re willing to do everything from editing out laundry clotheslines that make a country look “too backward” to pretending that Freddie Mercury wasn’t gay. Here’s how the Chinese version of Fight Club ends4:

If this is what’s happening in post-production, what do we think is happening in pre-production? What projects aren’t getting greenlit because they won’t play in Guangzhou?

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AM I JUST UNCOOL?

While some folks blamed the internet for the decline of deviance, other people denied the decline entirely.

One common retort to my argument was that I’m just an old fuddy-duddy. For example, a blogger named Jenn claims that I am too uncool and out of touch to understand the cultural innovation happening in new forms of media like YouTube and Roblox. “Before I take a ‘culture is stagnating’ take seriously,” Jenn writes, “I want to see proof of work by the critics.” She concludes: “The culture is fine. Go play Return of the Obra Dinn.” (Return of the Obra Dinn is a video game.)

This is a petty thing to do, but can I be a little petty, as a treat? My deviance post includes research from an earlier post I wrote called Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly, where I found that more and more of the cultural landscape is dominated by fewer and fewer players. Toward the end of that post, which I published in 2022, I say this:

While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. [...] Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster.

That insurance claims adjuster game is Return of the Obra Dinn, which I played that year. (And enjoyed!) I hope anticipating this critique four years ago counts as my proof of work.

Pettiness aside, I think Jenn’s claim is plausible: the older you get, the less access you have to the most interesting parts of culture. If you think things are stagnating, you’re just admitting that you aren’t getting invited to the cool parties anymore. Plus, old folks can’t stop themselves from seeing the past through rose-colored glasses—in survey after survey, people think pretty much everything in culture just happened to peak when they were between four and twelve years old:

But things get a little more complicated when you separate people’s responses by age. When you first glance at this YouGov survey, it seems like every generation strongly prefers the music from their own childhood:

But look a little closer. The responses from Gen X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation all have a clear peak flanked by much smaller hills. Millennials’ preferences, on the other hand, are more spread out. And Gen Z’s preferences are basically a plateau—they’re almost equally likely to nominate the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

We can’t know whether this is an age effect that they’ll grow out of—maybe every generation was culturally omnivorous when they were younger, and their tastes only calcified when they got older. But I doubt it. For all you Gen X’ers out there, did you spend your teenage years spinning your parents’ Perry Como records until you suddenly switched to Led Zeppelin in adulthood?

Besides, Jenn’s age argument cuts both ways. Old folks are biased by nostalgia, but young folks are biased by inexperience. When you’re young, everything seems new because it’s new to you. You don’t know that your favorite anime is a rehash of a movie from the 1980s, because you weren’t alive in the 1980s. You’re not tired of the tropes yet because you’ve only seem them a few dozen times. You can’t pine for what you lost because you never had it in the first place.5

It’s reasonable to be skeptical of any narrative of decline—I did my PhD on why people perceive declines that haven’t actually happened. But (a), unlike most of those spurious nostalgic fantasies, the decline of deviance has both pros and cons. And (b), there are so many weird phenomena here and they need explaining, not just waving away.

For instance—

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING STONERS

Here are three facts.

1. It’s easier than ever to get weed—in 24 US states, you can buy and consume it purely for fun. The only thing standing between a 15-year-old and a four-pack of JBAD Jellies Blue Razz THC Pucks is one unscrupulous older sibling who is willing to pick them up for you.

2. Today’s teens see weed as less risky than previous generations of teens did. My generation got abstinence-only drug education (i.e., “if you smoke weed you’re gonna end up living in van down by the river”). But the Reefer Madness routine doesn’t work in a world where you can buy CBD gummies at the gas station.

3. And yet, despite all that, kids today still smoke less weed than kids did in the 1990s!

Mysteries like this ought to send us scrambling for explanations, and the strength of the “rising prosperity” hypothesis is that it has answers for these weird phenomena. As life gets safer and more prosperous, it makes less and less sense to take risks. So even if kids rightly believe that a single joint won’t kill them, and even if that joint is easier than ever to get, it still doesn’t seem like a good idea to light up. You’ve got infinite entertainment on demand, you’ve got another ~70 healthy years ahead of you that are—in most places on Earth, at least—unlikely to be cut short by murder, war, accidents, or untimely disease. If you can get into a decent school and keep your nose clean, you’ve got a good shot at a decent life, so why take a chance on the devil’s grass?

NO MORE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

Another theory that readers put forward: the deviance got scarce because life got hard. Nobody can do cool art anymore because everything is too expensive: housing, college, supplies, etc.

I think this is probably wrong. I suspect that it’s always been hard to be an artist, and previous generations were simply more willing to starve for it—not because they were braver, but because the difference between starving and not-starving used to be much smaller.

Read an old book that isn’t about princes and princesses, and you’ll quickly see how normal poverty used to be. Not Dickensian, “please sir may I have some more”-type poverty, but regular, everyday poverty, where the things we consider necessities today are treated as unimaginable luxuries. For example, early on in Moby-Dick, Ishmael has to stay at a crummy, packed inn where his choice is either to sleep on some benches in the dining room, or to share a bed with a stranger. (He chooses the latter, which leads to a thinly-veiled homoerotic encounter with a Polynesian sailor named Queequeg.) Everyone involved thinks it’s annoying to bunk in with a rando, but nobody thinks it’s strange—that’s just what you gotta do sometimes. This is the level of comfort you could expect in the 1850s even if you were gainfully employed full-time.

You don’t have to go that far into the past to find a kind of poverty that feels foreign today. I read an article a while back about punk musicians living in New York in the 1970s, and they’re sleeping in roach-infested flophouses, they’re making music in abandoned buildings, they’re getting evicted and mugged and addicted to drugs.6 They’re truly broke, not “I can’t contribute to my retirement fund this month” broke, but “I might have to spend the night on this bench because I can’t afford a bus ticket back home” broke. I know plenty of aspiring musicians are out there slumming it right now, but this is a level of deprivation that most folks in developed countries would find unacceptable, if not downright dangerous. Once you’re sleeping rough, it’s time to hawk the guitar and call the temp agency.

That’s not because dire poverty became less glamorous—it was never glamorous!—but because it became uncommon. When five musicians spend the night in a bus station, that’s called being punk. When one musician spends the night in a bus station, that’s called being homeless.

The richer the world gets, the higher the opportunity cost that starving artists have to pay. If you’ve got the chops to write a great novel, then you might also have the chops to make $95k working as a product manager for some mid-sized fintech firm. If your alternative was tilling turnips or spending six months at sea hunting sperm whales, you might say, screw it, I’d rather go hungry for my art than go somewhat less hungry for anything else. But that manuscript in your desk drawer is less enticing when you can have PTO and dental and an annual international vacation where you get to sleep in a bed that doesn’t have any strangers in it.

Here’s an example. When I was in college, I went with my improv group to see one of our alums perform at a theater in Chicago. I remember sitting there mesmerized, thinking, this guy’s so funny, why is he working some soulless corporate job during the day and only doing his art on Tuesday nights? I cornered him afterward, and he told me he had, in fact, spent years trying to make a comedic career work. “But then I got tired of not being able to afford to fly to my friends’ weddings,” he said, “so I went to law school instead.” Now he can fly to as many weddings as he wants.

I don’t blame him. When nobody can afford a plane ticket, being broke isn’t embarrassing. But when everybody else is jetting off for the wedding, you’re not just poor; you’re also a loser. Unfortunately, when every interesting person chooses comfort over creativity, we end up with four different Spider-Man 2s.

As William James wrote 100 years ago:

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. [...] We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly,—the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

The difference is that today we don’t despise people who elect to be poor, I think, because we don’t know any of them.

THE DECLINE OF DEVIANCE, THE RISE OF TOLERANCE

Many people asked some version of, “Is the decline of deviance actually an increase in tolerance?” After all, even if you wanted to be deviant today, how would you do it?

I don’t think this explanation covers everything—murder is still deviant, for instance, and it’s rarer than ever. But there is something to it. Crack open the General Social Survey, and you’ll see that Americans have given up many of their hangups. Same-sex and interracial marriage, recreational drug use, premarital sex, working mothers—these things used to be scandalous, and now they’re unremarkable.7 People used to get their undies in a bunch about Bermuda shorts:

So no doubt part of the decline of deviance is an increase in tolerance. But I think it, too, can be explained by the rise of mass prosperity.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that nations get rich when they build inclusive economic and political institutions. Oligarchs and aristocrats fear any growth or reform that they can’t control, which in practice means basically all growth and reform. (“We do not desire at all that the great masses shall become well off and independent,” once remarked Frederick Gantz, an imperial flunky of Francis I of Austria. “How could we otherwise rule over them?”) If the plebs and the serfs can get a bit of money and power, however, it kicks off a virtuous cycle. Once people have some cash and influence, it becomes bad business and bad politics to shut them out—if you won’t engage with them, someone else will, and your more open-minded rivals will eventually out-compete you.

This process takes a long time, it’s uneven, and it’s not close to being completed. However, a few generations of semi-inclusive institutions have created a much wider spectrum of acceptable lifestyles. If you want to live in a polyamorous, genderless vegan witch commune, you can order your nutritional yeast on Amazon, trade memes with your friends on Tumblr, and vote for Democrats who think your choices are a-ok. If you want to live in a neoreactionary monarchist compound where you stockpile weapons and hunt bears, you can buy your guns at Wal-Mart, read posts on TruthSocial, and vote for Republicans who are on board with all of it. As long as you have money to spend and ballots to cast, someone can get ahead by catering to you.

(Case in point: one of the “platinum sponsors” of the New York City Pride Parade is Deutsche Bank.)

This is a good thing. Inclusive institutions make everybody better off, except for the few cleptocrats who used to live in palaces while everyone else lived in shacks.

The downside is that every corner of culture gets commercialized. Reading comic books, listening to death metal, piercing body parts other than your ears—these used to be legitimately countercultural acts that distanced you from polite society and bonded you to an alternative community. Now you can do all these things at the mall. The Hot Topic-ization of culture means that anything new and interesting gets co-opted and mass-produced, thus draining it of everything that made it cool in the first place.

WEIRDO HEROES

I ended the first Decline of Deviance post with the story of Arturo di Modica, the Italian sculptor who ran away from home to study art in Florence, moved to New York, dug a secret basement in his studio, and placed his giant sculptures illegally in public places, including the famous Charging Bull statue that sits on Wall Street.

It is natural to assume that the hero of Arturo di Modica’s story is Arturo di Modica. But I think his story has many heroes. The dean of his art school who let a runaway kid take sculpture classes. The policeman who let him off with a $25 fine when he dumped several multi-ton sculptures in Rockefeller Center. The mayor who shook his hand for doing the same, rather than carting him off to jail. The building inspector who retroactively approved his illegal basement. The parks department bureaucrat who rescued Charging Bull from the impound lot and put it back on the street.

These people were neither artists nor weirdos. They were normal folks who knew good deviance when they saw it, and they decided to let it live.

Few of us will have the courage to be an Arturo di Modica, especially because that takes more bravery than ever. (If you were staring down a dead-end life in postwar Sicily, you, too, might run away from home and hop a train to an art school in Florence.) But the rest of us will have the chance to be that dean, that cop, and that bureaucrat. We are all keepers of tiny gates, and by the sum total of our actions, we get to decide what kind of culture we live in. We can choose to let our times be interesting. Or we can just keep doing what we’re doing, and enjoy what’s coming up this fall:

5

Relevant:

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.

(1) THE MOST WONDERFUL THING THAT HAPPENED TO TOMMY MCHUGH

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.”

(2) POPE-PLEXITY

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.

(3) HIRE LOW GERMAN

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.

(4) CARELESS WHISKERS

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:

(5) The musician writes about the cutting edge of music promotion today: you hire a company that creates a bunch of fake accounts to post about how great you are.

(6) AND NOW FOR A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KIND OF LAMB

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

(7) PLEASED TO MEET U

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.

(8) : rogue waves—gigantic, unpredictable ocean waves that are distinct from tsunamis—were thought to be a myth until...1995.

(9) WEIRD SPECS BUT OK

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.)

(10) Sometimes I run into a statistic that recalibrates a whole chunk of my worldview: in 2025, fewer than half of Americans got on an airplane.

(11) BANDS FOR BANDS

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.

(12) EYES ON THE PRIZE

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:

(13) NAH-RUTO

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.

(14) Am I the last person on Earth to learn that football star Cristiano Ronaldo is named after Ronald Reagan?

(15) ALL’S FAIR IN GLOVE AND WAR

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:

(16) EXPERIMENTS? IN SCIENCE? NO THANKS

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.)

(17) SCIENCE IS GOLDEN

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”.

(18) MI AMIGA

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:

(19) ICE ‘EM OUT

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.

(20) A WRINKLE IN CRIME

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”.

(21) COOPERATION NATION

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:

(22) AS A LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL, I CANNOT SAY THAT 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB

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.

(23) HISTORY? MORE LIKE YOUR-STORY

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.

UPDATES FOR LIZARD SCIENTISTS

• 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.

UPDATES FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ

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.

Recent podcasts:

• 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.

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.

ONCE YOU POP, YOU CAN’T STOP

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.

DOWN WITH THE RICH, UP WITH THE FAMOUS

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.

TO BE OREO NOT TO BE

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:

13

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:

Read more

2026-05-12 21:23:30

1.

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?

2.

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.

3.

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.

4.

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.

5.

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?”

6.

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.

7.

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.

8.

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.

9.

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.

10.

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?

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)

HOW 2 APPLY

• Paste your post into a Google Doc.

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

• Submit it here.

PRIZES WOW

First place: $500

Second place: $250

Third place: $100

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

RULES 2 LIVE BY

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

• One entry per person.

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

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

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

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

Submissions are due June 15. Submit here.