2025-09-03 00:48:01

Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.

We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.

On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.

On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.

Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly...normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?

Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it.

CIRCLE TAKES THE SQUARE

Forty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer argued in The Expanding Circle that humans have, over the course of millennia, decided to care about a broader and broader swath of the living world. Originally, we only gave moral consideration to our immediate family, then we extended it our tribe, then the nation, and now we are kind-of sort-of extending it to the whole globe and to non-human animals as well.1

I think Singer was right, and I’d add three things to his analysis. First, the trend has only continued since the ‘80s—for instance, some people are now worried about whether shrimp are having a good time. Second, while the circle has gotten wider, it has also, paradoxically, gotten closer. It’s one thing to “care” about distant strangers when you can only read about them in a newspaper; now we can all witness the suffering of anyone in the world through a glass portal we carry in our pockets. And third, when you stare into that portal, the portal stares back. Social media has made everyone into z-list public figures, and now we all have an audience watching us to make sure that we’re sufficiently concerned about the right things.

Expanding the circle was, in my opinion, a good move. But it comes with a problem: if we’re supposed to care about everyone and everything...that’s kind of a lot of caring, isn’t it? If I have to feel like a mass shooting in Tallahassee, a factory farm in Texas, and a genocide in Turkmenistan are all, morally speaking, happening in my backyard, my poor little moral circuits, which evolved to care about like 20 people, are gonna blow.

When there’s too much to care about, what’s a good-hearted person to do? I think many of us have unconsciously figured out how to escape this conundrum: we simply shoot ourselves in the foot.

BULLET MEET FOOT

Humans are pretty savvy at social interaction, even though we get so anxious about it. (Maybe we’re good because we’re freaking out all the time.) Evolution and experience have endowed us with a deep bench of interpersonal maneuvers, some of which are so intuitive to us that we don’t even realize we’re deploying them.

For example, sometimes life puts us in lose-lose situations where it’s embarrassing to try and fail, but it’s also embarrassing not to try at all. It sucks to study for a math exam and still flunk it, but it’s foolish not to study in the first place. When you’re stuck in a conundrum like that, how do you get out?

Well, one canny solution is to subtly manipulate the situation so that failure is inevitable. That way, no one can blame you for failing, and no one can blame you for not trying. Psychologists call this self-handicapping, and as far as impression management strategies go, you gotta admit this one is pretty exquisite.

Here’s what self-handicapping looks like in the wild. I had a friend in high school who “forgot” to apply to college our senior year. Literally, May came around and we were like “Nate, did you get in anywhere?” and he was like “Oh shoot that happened already?” Nate was a smart kid but a bad student, so it’s possible he actually did forget, but some of us suspected that the entire application season had conveniently slipped his mind so he wouldn’t have to face the shame of being rejected. We could never prove it, though, and that’s exactly why self-handicapping is such a clever tactic.

Of course, Nate’s self-handicapping came at a cost. No one can ding him for being stupid, but we can all ding him for being irresponsible. The ideal form of self-handicapping, then, is one that obscures the role of the self entirely.2 In fact, it works best when even you don’t realize that you’re doing it. Nate’s months-long brain fart is more believable if he believes it himself. If you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best to do it while sleepwalking, so you can wake up and be like “A bullet!! In my foot!! And it got there through no fault of my own!!”

Which is to say: many of the people who are engaging in self-handicapping would earnestly deny the allegation.

You can see how self-handicapping is a handy response to a world that demands more care from us than we can give. If all the world’s problems are fait accompli, well, that’s sad, but it ain’t on me. I don’t want it to be that way, of course, but it is, which means my only obligation is to bravely bear witness to the end of it all. That’s why it’s actually very important to maintain the idea—even subconsciously—that democracy is unsalvageable, AI is unstoppable, the Middle East is intractable, the climate apocalypse is (literally) baked in, and so on. For the aspiring self-handicapper, the best causes are lost causes.

BORG VIBES

The problem with shooting yourself in the foot is that now you have a bullet in your foot. A self-handicap can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we believe our situation is hopeless, the more hopeless it becomes. We’re never gonna right the things we write off.

Succumbing to despair might offer you a reputational reprieve in the short term, but avoiding the blame doesn’t mean you can avoid the consequences. When rising sea levels, secret police, or AI-powered killer drones come for you, they won’t ask whether you have a doctor’s note excusing you from the greatest struggles of your generation.

In my experience, this is an unpopular argument. To some people, suggesting that our problems are solvable means denying that our problems are serious. (But of course our problems are serious, that’s why we want to solve them.) Or they’re offended by the implication that they have any responsibility to fix the things they didn’t break, as if a sinking ship only takes you down with it if you’re the person who punched a hole in the hull. Or they’re so certain that our fate is sealed that they scoff at anyone who believes otherwise. Most of all, though, I think people want everybody else to admit that life is really hard, and they’re being courageous just for showing up every day. As Kurt Vonnegut said:

What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.3

I don’t think this is an old/young divide anymore: everybody wants credit for surviving, and we’re all too stingy about giving it, and that only makes us want the credit even more. I’m happy to give that credit: being alive in 2025 is hard in a way that gets no sympathy from anyone (“oh I’m sorry are your TikToks not amusing enough??”), and we all deserve gold stars. But wouldn’t we all like to live in a world where we didn’t feel like it was an achievement just to keep going?

Of course, the naysayers could be right! Prophets of doom don’t have a great track record, but then, they only have to hit the mark once. As the futurist Hazel Henderson put it, though: “we do not know enough to be pessimistic”. We won’t know that our problems are solvable until we solve them, we won’t solve them until we try, and we won’t try until we believe. Either way, the problems we’re facing don’t take prisoners, so we might as well go down swinging.

I know this is easy for me to say—I’m far from the first in line to get disappeared or swallowed up by the sea. That’s fine: the people who can do more should do more. But we’re wrong to act as if withdrawing from the world is inherently rejuvenating. When we’re so eager to explain why we can’t help, we forget helping actually feels great.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago. When I was out for a run, I happened upon an older lady who had fallen and hit her head on the sidewalk; she was bleeding and confused and obviously needed medical attention. I called an ambulance and waited with her until the paramedics came, and once we were all sure she was going to be okay, I got to feel proud the rest of the day: I did the right thing! I helped! I’m a good boy!4 I run by that same corner all the time now not hoping to find little old ladies in distress, of course, but ready should my services be required.

So when folks seem hell bent on giving up, I wanna know: why are they holding on so tightly their hopelessness? What does it do for them? If the future is so uncertain, if no one can justifiably say whether or not we’re gonna make it, why not pick the belief that gets you out of bed in the morning, rather than the one that keeps you there? Why do we have to make it seem like being on the right side of history is such a bummer?

Dealing with the state of world by despairing is kind of like dealing with a breakup by drinking—you’re allowed to do it for like, a day, but if it becomes clear you’re planning to do this for the rest of your life, your friends ought to step in and stop you.

Here’s an analogy for the nerds: in Star Trek lore, Starfleet academy cadets have to complete a simulation where they attempt to save a ship called the Kobayashi Maru, which is disabled and stuck in hostile territory. Unbeknownst to the trainees, the simulation is rigged so they can never win; the Klingons always show up and vaporize everyone. This is supposed to teach cadets that some situations are simply hopeless. Captain James T. Kirk, refusing to learn the lesson, famously saves the Maru by hacking the machine before the simulation begins.

Anyway, my point is that it’s possible to pull an anti-Kirk, to hack a winnable scenario and guarantee a loss. The fact that you can save face by doing this doesn’t make it noble or admirable. After all, in the world of Star Trek, “resistance is futile” is something the villains say.

ICE CUBES IN THE OCEAN

There is a grumpy version of this argument, one that scolds every doomer for finding a galaxy-brained way to signal their virtue while sitting on their hands. I don’t feel that way at all. We were right to expand our circle, and I admire every generation that did it, even if they only made it a single centimeter per century.

But a wide circle is also a tall order. Although the circumference of our moral circle is theoretically infinite, the extent of our efforts is not. We can care about all eight billion people riding this rock with us, but we can only care for a tiny fraction of them. Trying to solve every problem at once is like trying to stop global warming by throwing ice cubes in the ocean. So if our collective despondency is a way of dealing with the fact that our moral ambitions have outstripped our abilities, I get it.

The solution is not to shrink the circle, to default on our obligations, or to pretend that we’re helpless. When you’re paralyzed by the number of problems, the only way out is to pick one. What kind of world would you like to live in, how do we get there from here, and what can you do—however small it may be—to move us in that direction? We’re not looking for saints or superheroes, just people who give a hoot. In the billion-person bucket brigade that’s trying to put out the fires, all you need to do is find a way to pass the pail from the person on your left to the person on your right. There are, remember, many underrated ways to change the world.

Personally, I care a lot about science because I think the expansion of knowledge is the only thing that makes us better off in the long run. But whatever, some people want to clean up the park, other people want to help sick kids, and other people want to save the shrimp. Godspeed to all of them. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all comrades in a war that has infinite fronts. Nobody can fight on all of them, and I won’t ask anyone to join mine if they can do more good elsewhere.

But there is no neutral territory here. There may be plenty of front lines, but there are no sidelines. The best way to prevent people from taking themselves out of the fight is to recognize that there is no “out” of the fight. There’s no room for anyone to play the Switzerland strategy—“I’m not involved, I’ll just hold on to your valuables while you guys fight it out!” The sum total of our actions will either make the world better or worse. Which is it gonna be?

SPONGE TIME

In the classic formulation of the hero’s journey, step one is the call to adventure, and step two is the refusal of that call. I think we’re all stuck at step two. Gandalf’s at our door, but we literally just sat down to lunch, and have you seen the forces of Mordor? They’ve got trolls. Obviously it would be great if someone did something about Sauron, but I don’t see why it should be me.

I understand that feeling. A death-defying adventure to save the world? In this economy? No thanks, take it up with all the people who imperiled the world in the first place. I just got here!5

But alas, we cannot pass the buck into the past. As much as we love to argue about which generation had it worse and which generation did it better, we don’t get to Freaky Friday ourselves with our ancestors and face the tribulations that fit our preferred aesthetic.

When I was in high school, I used to volunteer with this group that, basically, held car washes and then donated the money. The organization wasn’t explicitly Christian, but Peggy, the woman who led it, was. She used to tell us: “People see bad things in the world and ask why God doesn’t do something about it. But God did do something. He sent you.”

We can argue about whether this is a theologically sound solution to the problem of evil, and we can ask why a supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful God would entrust anything to me, a guy who can’t even do a single pull-up. But I always appreciated this attitude. Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not your fault. Unfortunately, the world was under no obligation to straighten itself out by the time you arrived. These are the problems we got. Would you like them to be better? Then here, grab a sponge and start washing.

2025-08-06 04:06:09

Look, I don’t know if AI is gonna kill us or make us all rich or whatever, but I do know we’ve got the wrong metaphor.

We want to understand these things as people. When you type a question to ChatGPT and it types back the answer in complete sentences, it feels like there must be a little guy in there doing the typing. We get this vivid sense of “it’s alive!!”, and we activate all of the mental faculties we evolved to deal with fellow humans: theory of mind, attribution, impression management, stereotyping, cheater detection, etc.

We can’t help it; humans are hopeless anthropomorphizers. When it comes to perceiving personhood, we’re so trigger-happy that we can see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich:

A human face in a slice of nematode:

And an old man in a bunch of poultry and fish atop a pile of books:

Apparently, this served us well in our evolutionary history—maybe it’s so important not to mistake people for things that we err on the side of mistaking things for people.1 This is probably why we’re so willing to explain strange occurrences by appealing to fantastical creatures with minds and intentions: everybody in town is getting sick because of WITCHES, you can’t see the sun right now because A WOLF ATE IT, the volcano erupted because GOD IS MAD. People who experience sleep paralysis sometimes hallucinate a demon-like creature sitting on their chest, and one explanation is that the subconscious mind is trying to understand why the body can’t move, and instead of coming up with “I’m still in REM sleep so there’s not enough acetylcholine in my brain to activate my primary motor cortex”, it comes up with “BIG DEMON ON TOP OF ME”.

This is why the past three years have been so confusing—the little guy inside the AI keeps dumbfounding us by doing things that a human wouldn’t do. Why does he make up citations when he does my social studies homework? How come he can beat me at Go but he can’t tell me how many “r”s are in the word “strawberry”? Why is he telling me to put glue on my pizza?2

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they aren’t people. I don’t mean that in the deflationary way that the AI naysayers mean it. They think denying humanity to the machines is a well-deserved insult; I think it’s just an accurate description.3 As long we try to apply our person perception to artificial intelligence, we’ll keep being surprised and befuddled.

We are in dire need of a better metaphor. Here’s my suggestion: instead of seeing AI as a sort of silicon homunculus, we should see it as a bag of words.

WHAT’S IN THE BAG

An AI is a bag that contains basically all words ever written, at least the ones that could be scraped off the internet or scanned out of a book. When users send words into the bag, it sends back the most relevant words it has. There are so many words in the bag that the most relevant ones are often correct and helpful, and AI companies secretly add invisible words to your queries to make this even more likely.

This is an oversimplification, of course. But it’s also surprisingly handy. For example, AIs will routinely give you outright lies or hallucinations, and when you’re like “Uhh hey that was a lie”, they will immediately respond “Oh my god I’m SO SORRY!! I promise I’ll never ever do that again!! I’m turning over a new leaf right now, nothing but true statements from here on” and then they will literally lie to you in the next sentence. This would be baffling and exasperating behavior coming from a human, but it’s very normal behavior coming from a bag of words. If you toss a question into the bag and the right answer happens to be in there, that’s probably what you’ll get. If it’s not in there, you’ll get some related-but-inaccurate bolus of sentences. When you accuse it of lying, it’s going to produce lots of words from the “I’ve been accused of lying” part of the bag. Calling this behavior “malicious” or “erratic” is misleading because it’s not behavior at all, just like it’s not “behavior” when a calculator multiplies numbers for you.

“Bag of words” is a also a useful heuristic for predicting where an AI will do well and where it will fail. “Give me a list of the ten worst transportation disasters in North America” is an easy task for a bag of words, because disasters are well-documented. On the other hand, “Who reassigned the species Brachiosaurus brancai to its own genus, and when?” is a hard task for a bag of words, because the bag just doesn’t contain that many words on the topic.4 And a question like “What are the most important lessons for life?” won’t give you anything outright false, but it will give you a bunch of fake-deep pablum, because most of the text humans have produced on that topic is, no offense, fake-deep pablum.

When you forget that an AI is just a big bag of words, you can easily slip into acting like it’s an all-seeing glob of pure intelligence. For example, I was hanging with a group recently where one guy made everybody watch a video of some close-up magic, and after the magician made some coins disappear, he exclaimed, “I asked ChatGPT how this trick works, and even it didn’t know!” as if this somehow made the magic extra magical. In this person’s model of the world, we are all like shtetl-dwelling peasants and AI is like our Rabbi Hillel, the only learned man for 100 miles. If Hillel can’t understand it, then it must be truly profound!

If that guy had instead seen ChatGPT as a bag of words, he would have realized that the bag probably doesn’t contain lots of detailed descriptions of contemporary coin tricks. After all, magicians make money from performing and selling their tricks, not writing about them at length on the internet. Plus, magic tricks are hard to describe—“He had three quarters in his hand and then it was two pennies!”—so you’re going to have a hard time prompting the right words out of the bag. The coin trick is not literally magic, and neither is the bag of words.

GALILEO GPT

The “bag of words” metaphor can also help us guess what these things are gonna do next. If you want to know whether AI will get better at something in the future, just ask: “can you fill the bag with it?” For instance, people are kicking around the idea that AI will replace human scientists. Well, if you want your bag of words to do science for you, you need to stuff it with lots of science. Can we do that?

When it comes to specific scientific tasks, yes, we already can. If you fill the bag with data from 170,000 proteins, for example, it’ll do a pretty good job predicting how proteins will fold. Fill the bag with chemical reactions and it can tell you how to synthesize new molecules. Fill the bag with journal articles and then describe an experiment and it can tell you whether anyone has already scooped you.

All of that is cool, and I expect more of it in the future. I don’t think we’re far from a bag of words being able to do an entire low-quality research project from beginning to end—coming up with a hypothesis, designing the study, running it, analyzing the results, writing them up, making the graphs, arranging it all on a poster, all at the click of a button—because we’ve got loads of low-quality science to put in the bag. If you walk up and down the poster sessions at a psychology conference, you can see lots of first-year PhD students presenting studies where they seemingly pick some semi-related constructs at random, correlate them, and print out a p-value (“Does self-efficacy moderate the relationship between social dominance orientation and system-justifying beliefs?”). A bag of words can basically do this already; you just need to give it access to an online participant pool and a big printer.5

But science is a strong-link problem; if we produced a million times more crappy science, we’d be right where we are now. If we want more of the good stuff, what should we put in the bag? You could stuff the bag with papers, but some of them are fraudulent, some are merely mistaken, and all of them contain unstated assumptions that could turn out to be false. And they’re usually missing key information—they don’t share the data, or they don’t describe their methods in adequate detail. Markus Strasser, an entrepreneur who tried to start one of those companies that’s like “we’ll put every scientific paper in the bag and then ??? and then profit”, eventually abandoned the effort, saying that “close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web.”6

Here’s one way to think about it: if there had been enough text to train an LLM in 1600, would it have scooped Galileo? My guess is no. Ask that early modern ChatGPT whether the Earth moves and it will helpfully tell you that experts have considered the possibility and ruled it out. And that’s by design. If it had started claiming that our planet is zooming through space at 67,000mph, its dutiful human trainers would have punished it: “Bad computer!! Stop hallucinating!!”

In fact, an early 1600s bag of words wouldn’t just have the right words in the wrong order. At the time, the right words didn’t exist. As the historian of science David Wootton points out7, when Galileo was trying to describe his discovery of the moons of Jupiter, none of the languages he knew had a good word for “discover”. He had to use awkward circumlocutions like “I saw something unknown to all previous astronomers before me”. The concept of learning new truths by looking through a glass tube would have been totally foreign to an LLM of the early 1600s, as it was to most of the people of the early 1600s, with a few notable exceptions.

You would get better scientific descriptions from a 2025 bag of words than you would from a 1600 bag of words. But both bags might be equally bad at producing the scientific ideas of their respective futures. Scientific breakthroughs often require doing things that are irrational and unreasonable for the standards of the time and good ideas usually look stupid when they first arrive, so they are often—with good reason!—rejected, dismissed, and ignored. This is a big problem for a bag of words that contains all of yesterday’s good ideas. Putting new ideas in the bag will often make the bag worse, on average, because most of those new ideas will be wrong. That’s why revolutionary research requires not only intelligence, but also stupidity. I expect humans to remain usefully stupider than bags of words for the foreseeable future.

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CLAUDE WILL U GO TO PROM WITH ME?

The most important part of the “bag of words” metaphor is that it prevents us from thinking about AI in terms of social status. Our ancestors had to play status games well enough to survive and reproduce—losers, by and large, don’t get to pass on their genes. This has left our species exquisitely attuned to who’s up and who’s down. Accordingly, we can turn anything into a competition: cheese rolling, nettle eating, phone throwing, toe wrestling, and ferret legging, where male contestants, sans underwear, put live ferrets in their pants for as long as they can. (The world record is five hours and thirty minutes.)

When we personify AI, we mistakenly make it a competitor in our status games. That’s why we’ve been arguing about artificial intelligence like it’s a new kid in school: is she cool? Is she smart? Does she have a crush on me? The better AIs have gotten, the more status-anxious we’ve become. If these things are like people, then we gotta know: are we better or worse than them? Will they be our masters, our rivals, or our slaves? Is their art finer, their short stories tighter, their insights sharper than ours? If so, there’s only one logical end: ultimately, we must either kill them or worship them.

But a bag of words is not a spouse, a sage, a sovereign, or a serf. It’s a tool. Its purpose is to automate our drudgeries and amplify our abilities. Its social status is NA; it makes no sense to ask whether it’s “better” than us. The real question is: does using it make us better?

That’s why I’m not afraid of being rendered obsolete by a bag of words. Machines have already matched or surpassed humans on all sorts of tasks. A pitching machine can throw a ball faster than a human can, spellcheck gets the letters right every time, and autotune never sings off key. But we don’t go to baseball games, spelling bees, and Taylor Swift concerts for the speed of the balls, the accuracy of the spelling, or the pureness of the pitch. We go because we care about humans doing those things. It wouldn’t be interesting to watch a bag of words do them—unless we mistakenly start treating that bag like it’s a person.

(That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it. I lift it because I want to become the kind of person who can lift it. Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.)

But that doesn’t mean I’m unafraid of AI entirely. I’m plenty afraid! Any tool can be dangerous when used the wrong way—nail guns and nuclear reactors can kill people just fine without having a mind inside them. In fact, the “bag of words” metaphor makes it clear that AI can be dangerous precisely because it doesn’t operate like humans do. The dangers we face from humans are scary but familiar: hotheaded humans might kick you in the head, reckless humans might drink and drive, duplicitous humans might pretend to be your friend so they can steal your identity. We can guard against these humans because we know how they operate. But we don’t know what’s gonna come out of the bag of words. For instance, if you show humans computer code that has security vulnerabilities, they do not suddenly start praising Hitler. But LLMs do.8 So yes, I would worry about putting the nuclear codes in the bag.9

C’MON BERTIE

Anyone who has owned an old car has been tempted to interpret its various malfunctions as part of its temperament. When it won’t start on a cold day, it feels like the appropriate response is to plead, the same way you would with a sleepy toddler or a tardy partner: “C’mon Bertie, we gotta get to the dentist!” But ultimately, person perception is a poor guide to vehicle maintenance. Cars are made out of metal and plastic that turn gasoline into forward motion; they are not made out of bones and meat that turn Twinkies into thinking. If you want to fix a broken car, you need a wrench, a screwdriver, and a blueprint, not a cognitive-behavioral therapy manual.

Similarly, anyone who sees a mind inside the bag of words has fallen for a trick. They’ve had their evolution exploited. Their social faculties are firing not because there’s a human in front of them, but because natural selection gave those faculties a hair trigger. For all of human history, something that talked like a human and walked like a human was, in fact, a human. Soon enough, something that talks and walks like a human may, in fact, be a very sophisticated logistic regression. If we allow ourselves to be seduced by the superficial similarity, we’ll end up like the moths who evolved to navigate by the light of the moon, only to find themselves drawn to—and ultimately electrocuted by—the mysterious glow of a bug zapper.

Unlike moths, however, we aren’t stuck using the instincts that natural selection gave us. We can choose the schemas we use to think about technology. We’ve done it before: we don’t refer to a backhoe as an “artificial digging guy” or a crane as an “artificial tall guy”. We don’t think of books as an “artificial version of someone talking to you”, photographs as “artificial visual memories”, or listening to recorded sound as “attending an artificial recital”. When pocket calculators debuted, they were already smarter than every human on Earth, at least when it comes to calculation—a job that itself used to be done by humans. Folks wondered whether this new technology was “a tool or a toy”, but nobody seems to have wondered whether it was a person.

(If you covered a backhoe with skin, made its bucket look like a hand, painted eyes on its chassis, and made it play a sound like “hnngghhh!” whenever it lifted something heavy, then we’d start wondering whether there’s a ghost inside the machine. That wouldn’t tell us anything about backhoes, but it would tell us a lot about our own psychology.)

The original sin of artificial intelligence was, of course, calling it artificial intelligence. Those two words have lured us into making man the measure of machine: “Now it’s as smart as an undergraduate...now it’s as smart as a PhD!” These comparisons only give us the illusion of understanding AI’s capabilities and limitations, as well as our own, because we don’t actually know what it means to be smart in the first place. Our definitions of intelligence are either wrong (“Intelligence is the ability to solve problems”) or tautological (“Intelligence is the ability to do things that require intelligence”).10

It’s unfortunate that the computer scientists figured out how to make something that kinda looks like intelligence before the psychologists could actually figure out what intelligence is, but here we are. There’s no putting the cat back in the bag now. It won’t fit—there’s too many words in there.

PS it’s been a busy week on Substack—

and I discussed why people get so anxious about conversations, and how to have better ones:

Derek Thompson

Why Are Americans So Scared of Talking to Each Other?

Americans are more alone than ever. Face-to-face socializing has plummeted this century, especially for young people. Nobody parties anymore. We spend more time in our homes than any period on record. The graphical evidence is dire…

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a month ago · 155 likes · 15 comments · Derek Thompson and Adam Mastroianni

And at answered all of my questions about music. He uncovered some surprising stuff, including an issue that caused a civil war on a Beatles message board, and whether they really sang naughty words on the radio in the 1970s:

Can't Get Much Higher

What are the Weirdest Lyrics in a Hit Song? Mailbag

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a month ago · 52 likes · 21 comments · Chris Dalla Riva

Derek and Chris both run terrific Substacks, check ‘em out!

2025-07-23 02:11:25

Years ago, I was getting ready for a party and I suddenly realized something: I didn’t want to go to the party. Inevitably, I knew, I was going to get stuck talking to someone, and there wouldn’t be any way to end the conversation without embarrassing both of us (“It’s been great talking to you, but not great enough that I want to continue!”).

But then I thought, wait, what makes me think I’m so special? What if the other person feels exactly the same way? What if we’re all trapped in this conspiracy of politeness—we all want to go, but we’re not allowed to say it?

Surprisingly, no one knows the answers to these questions. Eight billion humans spend all day yapping with each other, and we have no idea if those conversations end when people wish they would. So my PhD advisor Dan and I set out to get some answers using the most powerful methods available to us in psychology: we started bothering people.

(This is the blog version of a paper I published a few years ago; you can read the whole paper and access all the materials, data, and code here.)

STUDY 1

~~~METHOD~~~

We surveyed 806 people online about the last conversation they had: how long was it? Was there any point when you were ready for it to be over? If so, when was that?1

~~~RESULTS~~~

By and large, conversations did not end when people wanted them to. Only 17% of participants reported that their conversation ended when they first felt ready for it to end, 48% said it went on too long, and the remaining 34% said they never felt ready for it to end—to them, the conversation was too short!2

On average, people’s desired conversation time differed from their actual conversation time by seven minutes, or 56% of the conversation. That doesn’t mean they wanted to go seven minutes sooner or seven minutes later—it’s seven minutes different. If you just smush everyone’s answers together, all the people who wanted more cancel out all the people who wanted less, and it gives you the impression that everyone got what they wanted, when in fact, very few people did.

Participants thought their partners fared even worse: they guessed that there was a nine-minute (or 81%) difference between when the conversation ended and when the other person wanted it to end.3

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

These results surprised us. It wasn’t that conversations went on too long, necessarily—they mainly went on the wrong amount of time. And that’s extra surprising when you remember that we surveyed people about their most recent conversation, so they were overwhelmingly talking to people they know well, like a lot, and talk to all the time—spouses, friends, kids.

Still, this study had two big limitations. First, these conversations happened out in the wild, where they might have been ended by external circumstances. Maybe the “too long”s were, say, trapped on an airplane and unable to escape their unwanted conversation; maybe the “too short”s were having a lovely chat when their boss told them to get back to work.

And second, we only get to see one half of each conversation, so we don’t know how accurate participants were when they guessed their partners’ desires, nor do we know how people were paired up. Maybe, for instance, the “too long”s and the “too short”s were all paired with each other, and that’s why no one got what they wanted—they wanted different things.

To get around both of these limitations, we were going to have to bring people into the lab and—gulp—make them talk to each other.

STUDY 2

~~~METHOD~~~

We brought 366 people into the lab and paired them up. Our participants were a mix of students and locals in Cambridge, MA, and their defining characteristic was that they were willing to participate in a study for $15. We told them to “talk about whatever you like for as little time or as much time as you like, as long as it is more than 1 minute and less than 45 minutes.” We told them we had additional tasks for them if they finished early, so they would participate for the full hour regardless of how long they chose to talk. (We did this so that people didn’t think they could just wrap up after a minute and go home.)

~~~RESULTS~~~

Here’s the first crazy thing that happened: 57 of our 183 pairs talked for the entire 45 minutes. We literally had to cut them off so they could fill out our survey before we ran out of time. And that’s a problem, actually—we don’t know how long they would have kept talking if we hadn’t intervened. The whole point of this study was to watch people end their own conversations, and instead they made us do it.4 So we ultimately excluded these non-enders, but it turns out the results are the same with or without them. That itself is pretty weird, and I’ll come back to it in a minute.

Looking only at people who ended their own conversations, once again, only a small minority of participants (16%) reported that their conversation ended when they wanted it to. 52% wanted it to end sooner, and 31% wanted it to keep going. On average, people’s desired conversation length was seven minutes—or 46%—different from their actual conversation length.

But now we have both sides of the conversation, so we can also see how people were paired. Was every “too short” partnered with a “too long”? Nope. In fact, almost half the time, both participants said “too long” or both said “too short”. Only 30% of conversations ended when even one person wanted it to end.

That means most pairs weren’t splitting the difference between their desires, nor were they waiting for one person to get tired and put an end to things. They were bumbling through their conversations, often blowing right past their preferred ending point, or never reaching it at all. We specifically told people to talk as long as they wanted to, but when they came out of the room, almost all of them said, “I didn’t talk for as long as I wanted to.”

So what happened? Why didn’t these conversations end when people wanted them to? Two reasons:

1. People wanted different things

In almost all cases, it was literally impossible for the conversation to end at a mutually desired time, because people’s desires weren’t mutual. People’s desired ending points differed by 10 minutes, or 68% of the conversation, on average. So at best, people had a considerable amount of dissatisfaction, and they had to figure out how to allocate it between them. But they couldn’t do that, because:

2. People didn’t know what their partner wanted

We had people guess when their partner wanted to leave, and they were off by 9 minutes, or 64% of the conversation, on average. So people really didn’t know when the other person wanted to go.

Incompatible desires create a coordination problem, and impenetrable desires prevent it from being solved. If you and I want different things, but I don’t know what you want, and you don’t know what I want, then there’s very little chance that either of us will get what we want.

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

Strangely enough, it didn’t seem to matter whether participants ended their own conversations, or whether we had to return at 45 minutes and do it for them. You’d think that if people could pick their own stopping point, they would pick something closer to their desires. But they didn’t.

Maybe that’s because a conversation is like a ride down the highway: you’re really only supposed to exit at certain times. But the exits themselves are pretty spread out, so you’re probably not going to be on top of one at the exact moment you start feeling ready to leave. Technically, you can get off the highway between exits, but you might have to drive through some bushes or crash through a wall—that’s what it feels like to, say, leave in the middle of someone’s story. So instead, you wait until the next exit comes (and you end up as a “too long”), or you get off before you really want to (and you end up as a “too short”). This strong set of conversational norms keeps things both orderly and somewhat dissatisfying.

The consequences for exiting at the wrong time are, in my experience, rather great. Once, I was hanging out with some friends, and there was a moment that felt to me like a lull in the conversation, and I had been feeling tired for a while and I felt like leaving, so I did. When I saw those friends again, they were all shaken. Apparently I had left at a super weird moment, like right in the middle of a thought, and all they could talk about was how weird my exit was. So at all future hangouts, I made sure to clear my departures with everyone, as if I was a commercial airliner asking air traffic control for permission to take flight.

“THIS CUP IS SO LOUD”

So far, I’ve made it sound like these conversations were awful. I recorded them and watched them later, so I can confirm: they were.

I opened one up just now, scrubbed to the middle of the video, and one guy was explaining how liquor licensing works in different states. In another, I found people desperately trying to find things to say about each other’s hometowns (“Are there...cities in Virginia?”). In another, two girls are talking about taking a year off of school, and one asks, “Oh, but don’t you have to re-do your financial aid paperwork?” and the other goes, “...I don’t get financial aid.” A silence pervades, then one of the girls starts playing with her coffee cup and goes, “This cup is so loud!”

But here’s something crazy: all three of those conversations went all the way to 45 minutes. We had to cut them off! And when they got out of the room, they reported enjoying their conversations a lot, usually scoring it a five, six, or seven out of seven. On awkwardness, they scored it a two or a three out of seven. (On average, participants in Study 1 enjoyed their conversations 5.03/7 and participants in Study 2 enjoyed them 5.41/7.)

If you’re surprised that people found it fun to be forced to talk to a stranger, you’re not alone. This didn’t make it into the paper, but we ran a little pilot study where we just asked people to guess the results from Study 2. They told us, essentially, that our study sounded like a pretty bad way to spend an afternoon. Participants estimated that nearly 50% of conversations would last 5 minutes or less—that is, most people would try to get out of there as soon as possible. In fact, only 13% of conversations were that short. (And remember, we’re excluding everyone who maxed out their conversation time.) They also thought only 15% of conversations would hit the 45 mark (actual: 31%), and they overall underestimated how much people enjoyed the experience.

THE AFTERMATH, OR, HOW I MISLED A MILLION PEOPLE

This article got a lot of attention when it came out, from the New York Times to late-night TV. According to Altmetric, it’s in the “top 5% of research outputs” in terms of public attention. This was mostly a bad thing.

Some of the articles were great, and some of the journalists I spoke to asked me sharp questions that I hadn’t considered myself. But lots of them got the core findings wrong. The headlines were like “CONVERSATIONS GO ON TOO LONG BECAUSE EVERYONE IS SO AWKWARD AND WEIRD”, which is what Dan and I thought we might find before we started running studies, but it’s not at all what the results turned out to be. It was as if the studies themselves were merely a ritual that allowed people to claim the thing they already believed, no updates or revisions necessary. Another article claimed that we studied phone conversations (we didn’t), and then other articles copied that article, until the internet was chockablock with articles about a study that never happened, a literal game of telephone about a telephone.

Some of this was just sloppy reporting for content mills that, I assume, paid like $30 for a freelancer to slap some quotes on a summary of the study. (This process has probably since been automated via ChatGPT.) But some of it was deliberate. One journalist was like, “So what you’re saying is that conversations go on too long, right?” I was like, actually, no! And I gave him this explanation:

It’s true that more participants said “too long” than “too short”, but if you average out everyone’s desired talking time, people wanted to talk a little longer than they actually did. But even that is misleading: the people who said “too short” had to estimate how much longer they wanted to talk, while the people who said “too long” were remembering when they wanted to leave. That means some people are making predictions that are theoretically unbounded—you could want to talk for days!5—while other people are reporting memories that are bounded at zero. As awkward as some of the conversations were, it’s not possible to wish that you talked for negative minutes. If you average all these numbers together, it’s not clear that the result is meaningful.

So did conversations go on too long? A lot of the time, yes. But a sizable minority ended before someone wanted them to end, and sometimes before both people wanted them to end! Mainly, conversations seem to end at a time that nobody desires. Obviously, this is all kinda complicated, and that why we put a question mark at the end of our paper’s title.6

After hearing that whole spiel, the journalist blinked at me and told me point blank, “Yeah, I’m gonna write about how conversations go on too long.” And he did. I’ll never know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that 100x more people read these articles than read the original paper, meaning the net result of my research was that I left the public less informed than it was before. Back in 2021, when this all went down, we would have called it an “epic fail”.

I know that scientists love to complain about science journalists: they take our beautiful, pristine science, and they dumb it down, slop it up, and serve it by the shovelful to the heaving masses of dullards and bozos! Nobody wants to admit that scientists cause this problem in the first place. Journal articles suck—they’re usually 50 pages of dry-ass prose (plus a 100-page supplement and accompanying data files) that must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers, a defense against critics, a press release, and a job application. So of course no one’s going to read them, of course someone’s going to try to turn them into something intelligible for the general public—who, by the way, really would like to know what’s going on in our labs, and deserves to know—and of course stuff’s gonna get messed up in that process. We let this system exist because, I guess, we assume scientists are so smart they could never speak to a normal person. But guess what, buddy: if you can only explain yourself to your colleagues, you ain’t that smart.7

Anyway, publishing this paper made realize that, no matter how much I tried to make my papers readable8, people are always going to treat them like they’re written in Latin, and they’re going to read the Google Translate version instead. So why not just speak in English? And that’s how this blog was born.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT GABBING

One upside of media attention is that I got to hear the kinds of questions—and the “less of a question, more of a comment, really”—that came up over and over again. So let me take a crack at ‘em:

I bet you’d get different results from me, because I come from a place/culture/family where people are super blunt!

Maybe! We studied people who happened to take a study online, or who wandered into our lab, which is not representative of all humanity. It’s possible that if you ran this in St. Petersburg or Papua New Guinea, you’d get different results. All we can say is that we couldn’t find any big demographic differences within our sample: race, gender, etc., didn’t make much of a difference. And we might have expected completely different results from people in the lab vs. people in their living rooms, but we didn’t find any, so it’s not a slam-dunk that changing the venue would change the data.

How do I know when someone wants to stop talking to me? Is there some kind of tell?

If there’s a tell, it’s not easily detectable by humans. All the things that people do when they’re trying to wrap things up are also things they just do, generally: break eye contact, shift around a little bit, deploy some “phatic” expressions like “yep” or “wow” or “that’s so crazy”. Even when someone gives the clearest possible sign that they’re ready to go (“Well, it’s been great talking to you!”), our results suggest their actual desired ending point could be long in the past or far in the future.

You should run a study where you give people an eject button that they can push when they want to leave!

We actually tried to do this. We planned to give people a secret foot pedal that they could tap when they were ready to go, so they could tell us live during the conversation rather than reporting it afterward. We ultimately scrapped this for three reasons:

1. Constantly thinking about the eject button would probably make the conversations weird and artificial

2. We didn’t think people would be able to pull off this level of spycraft during a conversation (they were stressed out enough just trying to talk to each other)

3. I ordered a foot pedal from Amazon but it made a telltale clicking noise

Can people really remember when they wanted to leave?

Maybe. We got the same results when we asked people immediately after their conversation ended (Study 2), and when we surveyed them after delays of several hours (Study 1). I’m sure there’s plenty of inaccuracy in people’s memories, but if it’s just noise, then it should cancel itself out. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. If conversations end exactly when people want them to, but then their memories immediately get overwritten, Men in Black-style, and they come to believe that their conversation didn’t end when they wanted it to, well, that’s the memory they’re going to have going forward, and that’s the data they’re going to use to make decisions in the future.

Okay, so how can I have better conversations?

If you, like many people, are worried that your next conversation will be a train wreck, let me assuage your doubts by confirming them: your conversation probably will be a train wreck. And that will be fine. I watched people wreck their trains several hundred times, crawl out of the burning rubble, and go “That was kinda fun!”

So probably the best advice is: worry less. Over the past 10 years, study after study has suggested that people are too anxious about their social skills. People think they’re above average at lots of stuff—driving, cooking, reading, even sleeping—but not conversing, and they disproportionately blame themselves for the worst parts of their conversations. They’re overly nervous about talking to strangers, and when they meet someone new, they report liking that person more than they think the person likes them in return. In fact, my friends and I once studied three-person conversations between strangers, and on average people rated themselves as the least liked person out of the group. Unless you have clinical-level social deficits, if you’re looking for life hacks to make your conversations better, you’re probably already too neurotic. It’s unlikely you’ll become more charming and likable by attempting to play 4D chess mid-conversation: “when do I want to leave, when do I think they want to leave, when do they think I think they think I want to leave”, etc.

One thing that surprised us, anyway, was that the people who said “too short” were just as happy as the people who said “just right”. (They were both happier than the people who said “too long”.) You might think that getting cut off would leave you feeling blue, but it’s actually kind of delicious to be left wanting more. So better to err on the side of leaving sooner—you can usually have more, but you can never have less.

Actually, come to think of it, there is one super practical tip you can take from these studies, which I’ve discovered from talking about them with many people in many different situations: for a pleasant conversation, avoid discussing this research at all costs.

2025-07-08 20:01:27

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

(1) REVENGE OF THE BLOCKHEADS

Tetris was invented in 1985, it came out on the NES in 1989, but the best way to play was only discovered in 2021.1 Previously, players would just try to tap the buttons really fast (“hypertapping”), until a 15-year-old named Christopher “CheeZ” Martinez realized that you could actually press the buttons faster if you roll your fingers across the back of the controller (“rolling”). CheeZ went on to set world records using his technique, but he wasn’t on top for long. Other players soon perfected their rolls, and CheeZ lost in a first-round upset at the 2022 Classic Tetris World Championship to another “roller”, a 48th-seed named BirbWizard.

I love this because it shows how low-hanging discoveries can just sit there for decades without anyone seeing them, even when thousands of dollars are on the line. (Seriously—the first place finisher in the 2024 championships won $10k.) People spent 40 years trying to tap buttons faster without ever realizing they should be tapping the other side of the controller instead.

But I also hate this, because:

(2) MY DREAM JOB IS “ROOMBA”

Speaking of video games, I’ve always been mystified by “simulator” games built around mundane tasks, like Woodcutter Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, PC Building Simulator, and Liquor Store Simulator (the promotional video promises that you get to “verify documents”). Then there’s Viscera Cleanup Detail, where you clean up after other people’s gunfights, PowerWash Simulator, where you powerwash things, and Robot Vacuum Simulator, where you play as a Roomba. And if all of that sounds too stimulating, you can try Rock Simulator, where you watch a rock on your screen as time passes. (Reviews are “very positive”.)2

It’s easy to deride or pathologize these games, so I was taken aback when I saw this defense from the video game streamer Northernlion3:

This is not brain rot, this is zen. You don’t get it.

Something being boring doesn’t make it brain rot. Something being exciting but having no actual quality to it is brain rot. This is boring. This is brain exercise. This is brain genesis.

[...] This content has you guys typing like real motherfuckers in chat. You’re typing with emotion. You’re typing “good luck.” You’re typing “I can’t watch this shit.” You’re typing “I can’t bear to be a part of this experience anymore.”

You’re feeling something. You’re feeling something human, man!

(3) BALLSY

Maia Adar of Cosimo Research investigates whether straight men and women are attracted to the, uh, intimate smells of the opposite sex: “The results suggest that females stand closer to males who have fresh ball sweat applied to their neck.”

Cosimo’s next project: some people swear that taping your mouth shut overnight improves your sleep quality and reduces snoring. Does it? You can sign up for their study here.

(4) LESS PERISHING, MORE PUBLISHING

Some cool developments in scientific publishing:

• The new edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology is now available online and for free. I mentioned before that Mahzarin Banaji, one of the most famous social psychologists working today, became a psychologist because she found a copy of the Handbook at a train station. Now, thanks to the internet, you can become a psychologist without even taking the train!

• Open Philanthropy and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are running a “pop-up journal” aimed at answering one question: what are the social returns to investments in research and development?4

• , the chair of the Navigation Fund, announces that they’ll no longer use their billions of dollars to support publications in traditional scientific journals:

We began this as an experiment at Arcadia a few years ago. At the time, I expected some eventual efficiency gains. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it would reshape all of our science. Our researchers began designing experiments differently from the start. They became more creative and collaborative. The goal shifted from telling polished stories to uncovering useful truths. All results had value, such as failed attempts, abandoned inquiries, or untested ideas, which we frequently release through Arcadia’s Icebox. The bar for utility went up, as proxies like impact factors disappeared.

(5) SPRAY AND PRAY

People often wonder: what do we find normal these days that our descendants will find outrageous? I submit: our grandchildren will be baffled by our resistance to toilets with built-in bidets.

(6) ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT CC

of has a great seven-part series about the most consequential email list in history, a single listserv that birthed Effective Altruism, rationalism, the AI Risk movement, Bitcoin, several cults, several research institutes that may also have been cults, a few murders, and some very good blogs.

(7) YOU GOTTA BE KIDNEY ME

Here’s a thing I didn’t know: in 1972, the United States started giving Medicare coverage to anyone with end-stage renal disease, regardless of age, effectively doing “socialized medicine for an organ”. Today, 550,000 Americans receive dialysis through this plan, which costs “over one percent of the federal budget, or more than six times NASA’s budget”. I bring this up not because I think that’s too much (I’m glad that people don’t die), but because it’s hilarious how little I understand about what things the federal government pays for. Maybe I’m not the only one!

(8) According to the podcast hosting company Buzzsprout, if your podcast gets more than 454 downloads in the first seven days, it’s in the top 10% of all podcasts.

(9) THE D&B ANOMALY

If you send a voice note via iMessage and mention “Chuck E. Cheese”, it goes through normally. If instead you mention “Dave & Busters”, your message will never arrive. It just disappears. Why? The answer is in this perfect podcast episode.

(10) ONE TWO TREE

The coolest part of Civilization games is the Tech Tree, where you get to choose the discoveries that your citizens work on, from animal husbandry to giant death robots. That tree was apparently made up on the fly, but now has made an actual tech tree for humanity, which includes 1,550 technologies and 1,700 links between them. Here’s my favorite connection:

(11) A PLANT IN THE AUDIENCE

on Why Psychology Hasn’t Had a New Big Idea in Decades. My favorite line:

To my mind, the question isn’t whether we decide to expand the scope of psychology to plants. The question is whether there’s any prospect at all of keeping plants out!

He got some good comments and responded to them here.

(12) ODD-LOOKIN DUDES

One of my favorite genres of art is “things that look way more modern than they are”, so I was very excited to run into Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Oddities of Various Figures (1624):

(13) Alex Rinehart finally answers the question we’ve all been asking: when people see a Toyota TRD 4x4 truck, do they read “TRD” as “turd”?

(14) THE BACK BAY GOLDEN GOOSE OSTRICH

In 1915, a doctor named Earnest Codman was like “hey guys, shouldn’t we keep track of patient outcomes so we know whether our treatments actually work?” and everyone else was like “no that’s a terrible idea”. So he did what anyone would do: he commissioned an extremely petty political cartoon and debuted it at a meeting of the local medical society. Apparently he didn’t pay that much for the commission, because it looks like it was drawn by a high schooler, not to mention the unhinged captions, the mixed metaphors (the golden goose is...also an ostrich?), and the bug helpfully labeled “humbug”. Anyway, this got him fired from his job at Harvard Medical School.

Codman’s ideas won in the end, and he was eventually hired back. To answer the Teddy Roosevelt-looking guy in the middle, apparently you can make a living as a clinical professor without humbug!

(15) 4!CHAN

There’s an anime called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya that’s about time travel and, appropriately, you can watch the episodes in any order. In 2011, someone posted on 4Chan asking: “If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch?” An anonymous commenter replied with a proof demonstrating a lower bound. Mathematicians eventually realized that the proof was a breakthrough in a tricky permutation problem and published a paper verifying it. The first author of that paper is “Anonymous 4Chan Poster”.

(16) THE ROBOT SINGS OF LOVE

Silent films used to be accompanied by live musicians, but then synchronized sound came along. The American Federation of Musicians tried to fight back with a huge ad campaign opposing prerecorded music in movie theaters. They lost, but they did a great job:

Source: Paleofuture

These ads are a reminder: when a profession gets automated away, it’s the first generation, the one who has to live through the transition, that feels the pain. And then people forget it was any other way.

(17) Finally, another lost job: the sluggard waker, a guy who would patrol the church pews and whack you on the head with a stick if you fell asleep during the service. This job was automated by caffeine.

NEWS FROM FRIENDS OF THE BLOG

• Uri Bram (Atoms vs. Bits) is releasing a physical version of his hit online party game called Person Do Thing, which is kinda like Taboo but better.

• writes a great blog about music and data. A while back, he started listening to every Billboard #1 hit song, in order, from the 1950s to today, and as he listened his spreadsheets grew and grew and eventually turned into his new book: Uncharted Territory.

• In much sadder news, my friend was denied entry to the US based on some Substack posts he wrote covering the protests at Columbia when he was a journalism student there. You can read his account here.

  ---

TRANSMISSIONS FROM EXPERIMENTAL HISTORY HQ

• Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2025 Experimental History Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree! I’m reading all the submissions now, and I plan to announce the winners in September.

• I was on Spencer Greenberg’s Clearer Thinking podcast with the appropriately-titled episode “How F***ed Is Psychology?”

• I recently wrote about how to unpack when deciding on a career (“The Coffee Beans Procedure”); wrote a detailed prompt that will help an AI do this with you.

• A certain “Adam Mastroiannii Sub Stack” has appeared in my comments hawking some kind of WhatsApp scam. I’ve banned him and deleted the comments. Thanks to the folks who let me know—please give me a holler if he pops up again. The actual author of a Substack post always has a little tag that says “author” next to their name when they reply to comments, so if you ever see someone who looks like me but doesn’t have that tag, please execute a citizen’s arrest.

And finally, a post from the archive. All the promises in this post are still active5:

That’s all for now! Gotta get back to playing Blog Simulator 4.

-Adam

2025-07-01 21:09:21

You should never trust a curmudgeon. If someone hates everything, it doesn’t mean much when they also hate this thing. That’s why, whenever I get hopped up on criticizing the current state of psychology, I stop and ask myself, “Okay, but what’s good?” If I can’t find anything, then my criticisms probably say more about me than they say…

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2025-06-24 20:12:10

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

• Which kind of coffee mug is best?

• How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?

• Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?

• What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?

• What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.) Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint.1

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked. For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”

Or, even more likely, they weren’t picturing anything at all. They were just thinking the same thing over and over again: “Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure. Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure.”

Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit? Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive? That’s what it’s like in the mind. The assumptions, the nuances, the background research all get taped up and tucked away. That’s a good thing—if you didn’t keep most of your thoughts packed, trying to answer a question like “Do I want to be a professor?” would be like dumping everything you own into a giant pile and then trying to find your one lucky sock.

THE BEAST AND THE WOLFF

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.

• Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?

• Do you want to be an actor? = Do you want your career to depend on having the right cheekbones?

• Do you want to be a wedding photographer? = Do you want to spend every Saturday night as the only sober person in a hotel ballroom?

If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.

High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people. If you read the “leaked” production guide written by Mr. Beast, the world’s most successful YouTuber, you’ll quickly discover how nutso he is:

I’m willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy. This channel is my baby and I’ve given up my life for it. I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol.

(Those aren’t hypothetical examples, by the way; Mr. Beast really did all those things.)

Apparently 57% of Gen Z would like to be social media stars, and that’s almost certainly because they haven’t unpacked what it would actually take to make it. How many of them have Mr. Beast-level insanity? How many are willing to become indentured servants to the algorithm, to organize their lives around feeding it whatever content it demands that day? One in a million?

Another example: lots of people would like to be novelists, but when you unpack what novelists actually do, you realize that basically no one should be a novelist. For instance, how did Tracy Wolff, author of the Crave “romantasy” series, become one of the most successful writers alive? Well, this New Yorker piece casually mentions that Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big. And she’s still going! She has so many books now that her website has a search bar. Or you can browse through categories like “Contemporary Romance (Rock Stars/Bad Boys)”, “Contemporary Erotic Billionaire Romance”, “Contemporary Romance (Harlequin Desire)”, and “Contemporary New Adult Romance (Snowboarders!)”.

Wolff and Beast might seem extreme, but they’re only extreme in terms of output, not in terms of time on task. This is the obvious-but-overlooked insight that you find when you unpack: people spend so much time doing their jobs. Hours! Every day! It’s 2pm on a Tuesday and you’re doing your job, and now it’s 3:47pm and you’re still doing it. There’s no amount of willpower that can carry you through a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons. Whatever you’re supposed to be doing in those hours, you’d better want to do it.

For some reason, this never seems to occur to people. I was the tallest kid in my class growing up, and older men would often clap me on the back and say, “You’re gonna be a great basketball player one day!” When I’d balk, they’d be like, “Don’t you want to be on a team? Don’t you want represent your school? Don’t you want to wear a varsity jacket and go to regionals?” But those are the wrong questions. The right questions, the unpacked questions, are: “Do you want to spend three hours practicing basketball every day? Do you want to dribble and shoot over and over again? On Thursday nights, do you want to ride the bus and sit on the bench while your more talented friends compete, secretly hoping that Brent sprains his ankle so you could have a chance to play?” And honestly, no! I don’t! I’d rather be at home playing Runescape.

When you come down from the 30,000-foot view that your imagination offers you by default, when you lay out all the minutiae of a possible future, when you think of your life not as an impressionistic blur, but as a series of discrete Tuesday afternoons full of individual moments that you will live in chronological order and without exception, only then do you realize that most futures make sense exclusively for a very specific kind of person. Dare I say, a crazy person.

Fortunately, I have good news: you are a crazy person.

YOU’RE NUTS

I don’t mean you’re crazy in the sense that you have a mental illness, although maybe you do. I mean crazy in the sense that you are far outside the norm in at least one way, and perhaps in many ways.

Some of you guys wake up at 5am to make almond croissants, some of you watch golf on TV, and some of you are willing to drive an 80,000-pound semi truck full of fidget spinners across the country. There are people out there who like the sound of rubbing sheets of Styrofoam together, people who watch 94-part YouTube series about the Byzantine Empire, people who can spend an entire long-haul flight just staring straight ahead. Do you not realize that, to me, and to almost everyone else, you are all completely nuts?

No, you probably don’t realize that, because none of us do. We tend to overestimate the prevalence of our preferences, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “false consensus effect”3. This is probably because it’s really really hard to take other people’s perspectives, so unless we run directly into disconfirming evidence, we assume that all of our mental settings are, in fact, the defaults. Our idiosyncrasies may never even occur to us. You can, for instance, spend your whole life seeing three moons in the sky, without realizing that everybody else sees only one:

the first time i looked up into the night sky after i got glasses, [I] realized that you can, in fact, see the moon clearly. i assumed people who depicted it in art were taking creative license bc they knew it should look like that for some reason, and that the human eye was incapable of seeing the moon without also seeing two other, blurrier moons, sort of overlapping it

In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. Sometimes you don’t have to dig that far, like when your friend tells you that she likes “found” photographs—the abandoned snapshots that turn up at yard sales and charity shops—and then adds that she has collected 20,000 of them. But sometimes the craziness is buried deep, often because people don’t think it’s crazy at all, like when a friend I knew for years casually disclosed that she had dumped all of her previous boyfriends because they had been insufficiently “menacing”.

DR. PIMPLE POPPER WILL SEE YOU NOW

This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them, and so they spend their lives jamming their square-peg selves into round-hole jobs. For example, when I was in academia, there was this bizarre contingent of administrators who found college students vaguely vexing and exasperating. When the sophomores would, say, make a snowman in the courtyard with bodacious boobs, these dour admins would shake their heads and be like, “College kids are a real pain in the ass, huh!” They didn’t seem to realize that their colleagues actually liked hanging out with 18-22 year-olds, and that the occasional busty snowman was actually what made the job interesting. I don’t think these curmudgeonly managers even thought such a preference was possible.

Another example: when I was a pimply-faced teenager, I went to this dermatologist who always seemed annoyed to see patients. Like, how dare we bother him by seeking the services that he provides? Meanwhile, Dr. Pimple Popper—a YouTube account that does exactly what it says on the tin—has nearly 9 million subscribers. Clearly, there are people out there who find acne fascinating, and dermatology is the one of the most competitive medical specialties, but apparently you can, through sheer force of will, lack of self-knowledge, and refusal to unpack the details, earn the right to do a job you hate for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, when people match their crazy to the right outlet, they become terrifyingly powerful. A friend from college recently reminded me of this guy I’ll call Danny, who was crazy in a way that was particularly useful for politics, namely, he was incapable of feeling humiliated. When Danny got to campus freshman year, he announced his candidacy for student body president by printing out like a thousand copies of his CV—including his SAT score!—and plastering them all over campus. He was, of course, widely mocked. And then the next year, he won. It turns out that people vote for the name that they recognize, and it doesn’t really matter why they recognize it. By the time Danny ran for reelection and won in a landslide, he was no longer the goofy freshman who taped a picture of his own face to every lamp post. At that point, he was the president.45

COPS FOR TEENS

Unpacking is easy and free, but almost no one ever does it because it feels weird and unnatural. It’s uncomfortable to confront your own illusion of explanatory depth, to admit that you really have no idea what’s going on, and to keep asking stupid questions until that changes.

Making matters worse, people are happy to talk about themselves and their jobs, but they do it at this unhelpful, abstract level where they say things like, “oh, I’m the liaison between development and sales”. So when you’re unpacking someone’s job, you really gotta push: what did you do this morning? What will you do after talking to me? Is that what you usually do? If you’re sitting at your computer all day, what’s on your computer? What programs are you using? Wow, that sounds really boring, do you like doing that, or do you endure it?

You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires, or how Twitch streamers don’t just “play video games”; they play video games for 12 hours a day. But you’re not just unpacking the job; you’re also unpacking yourself. Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue? These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.

That’s certainly true for me, anyway. I never unpacked any job I ever had before I had it. I would just show up on the first day and discover what I had gotten myself into, as if the content of a job was simply unknowable before I started doing it, a sort of “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it” kind of situation. That’s how I spent the summer of 2014 as a counselor at a camp for 17-year-olds, even though I could have easily known that job would require activities that I hated, like being around 17-year-olds. Could I have known specifically that my job would include such tasks as “escorting kids across campus because otherwise they’ll flee into the woods” or “trying to figure out whether anyone brought booze to the dance by surreptitiously sniffing kids’ breath?” No. But had I unpacked even a little bit, I would have picked a different way to spend my summer, like selling booze to kids outside the dance.

It’s no wonder that everyone struggles to figure what to do with their lives: we have not developed the cultural technology to deal with this problem because we never had to. We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.

The beginning of that work is, I believe, unpacking. As you slice open the boxes and dump out the components of your possible futures, I hope you find the job that’s crazy in the same way that you are crazy. And then I hope you go for it! Shoot for the stars! Even if you miss, you’ll still land on one of the three moons.