2025-07-30 09:59:32
In case you missed it — we were on a podcast, spreading the good word about cybernetics! Check it out here: Two Psychologists Four Beers Episode 121: A New Paradigm for Psychology?
Also making waves this month in our piece for Asimov Press: What Makes a Mature Science
Relatedly, see this piece of video game journalism for more examples of good mechanical thinking.
New in self-experiments: Microdosing Willpower
Also new in self-experiments: My 9-week unprocessed food self-experiment
Stories of spontaneously-combusting scissors shared on on r/chemistry (h/t JasonKPargin)
From friend-of-the-blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Did journal articles survive the last ten years?
A PNG image of a bird can be reproduced by an adult Starling: I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)! Another one from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. Can’t resist quoting the main points in full:
Cards on the table, I find it very hard to believe that twenty-four people all made substantial contributions to this paper — substantial enough to be listed as authors.
So what are they all doing there? I can only surmise that the four or five legitimate authors all invited their friends along for the ride, on the basis that “he needs a Nature paper for his postdoc applications”.
And the tragedy of it is, they’re not wrong.
Many universities — most? Maybe even all? — do indeed recruit people to postdocs and permanent positions in part on whether they have a paper in Nature or Science. Even if their role is as seventeenth or eighteenth of twenty-four, and they actually did little or nothing towards the science. I have been told flatly by people in positions of influence that candidates without the Nature or Science stamp are likely to be filtered out of the recruitment process at Step Zero, and never even have their papers read, let alone make it to interview.
And for as long as that is true, it would be negligent of lab leaders not to slip their own grad-students, and any other students they know and like, into the authorship of such a paper if it happens to come their way.
What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.
Can we all agree that this is idiotic?
How did it all get this way? Part of the puzzle from Asterisk: The Origin of the Research University
James Heathers has finally gotten funding for his work on scientific error detection. See his Substack post about it or check out this piece in Nature.
You can link to any text on any page. (h/t dynomight)
ExFatLoss does an ex_kempner review: CICO and FO. Most interesting part to us:
Coming back to the rice diet was very easy for her. Despite only weighing 115lbs total to my ~230-240lbs, she lasted much longer on the diet than me. In fact, I spoke to her today and she is STILL on the diet (I’m 6 days into the next experiment.)
This is so bizarre to me. I have about 80lbs just of body fat on me, which is 70% of Coconut’s entire body weight. How come that I can’t seem to access this body fat and am getting starvation psychosis on day 6, when a skinny lady half my size can subsist on this extreme level of caloric restriction for weeks?
We also liked this one for its micronutrient skepticism, and for the discussion of hunger drives: Book review: The End of Craving
2025-06-30 04:52:32
Cartoons Hate Her tests the internet’s current favorite question: Do Women Have to Lie About Their Jobs to Get More Hinge Matches? Results are sadly paywalled but otherwise it’s a great effort, more of this please!
This blog post is ostensibly about AI, but it’s also one of the most lucid descriptions of academic incentives we’ve ever seen. Especially given how short it is. Highly recommended: Thoughts on the AI 2027 discourse
We know how to fix peer review (Part 2)
The things we are most afraid of are already happening, and will continue to get worse. It feels counter intuitive, but we’re holding tightly onto the feeling of control, and safety, and that is ITSELF what is putting us in danger & making things worse.
Tyler Ransom: Diet Trials of the first half of 2025 (Potato diet success; Honey riff failure)
John Lawrence Aspden tries a sort of potato diet: Ex150ish-fruit-and-chips
So on the 31st of May I ate a load of chips (steak fries US readers), two potatoes cut into thick oblongs and shallow-fried in butter.
And since then I’ve been eating such things pretty regularly, to the point where I’ve got a bit sick of them, which wasn’t a mental state I knew existed. Sometimes I have made them with yams instead.
I’ve have to raw-dawg a plain can of sardines in water as my only breakfast item daily to keep my brain from oozing out of my eye sockets (h/t @E_III_R) — post seems to have been deleted but here’s an archive.
Thrilled to see this, and kudos to Astera for having the guts to do what everyone else in their heart knows they should: Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough
The headline is so catchy that it seems like it can’t possibly replicate, and yet: Glass bottles found to contain more microplastics than plastic bottles
Optimizing tea: An N=4 experiment
« Untold Stories » are Sherlock Holmes investigations mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories but never published. For example:
When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894 I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin- an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of them unite so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes, not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.
— Dr. Watson.
2025-06-19 04:14:35
In the beginning, scientific articles were just letters. Eventually Henry Oldenburg started pulling some of these letters together and printing them as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first scientific journal. In continuance of this hallowed tradition, here at SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD we occasionally publish our own correspondence as a new generation of philosophical transactions.
Today’s correspondence is from a husband and wife who wish to remain anonymous. This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it.
The potato diet has mostly been used for weight loss, but it’s also notable for involving mostly one food and being close to nutritionally complete, which means you can use it as an elimination diet to study things like food triggers. We’ve been interested in this idea for a long time, and we find this case study particularly compelling because it’s a rare example of someone doing just that!
Since around 2018, K had been suffering from stomach pain, bloating, gas, and chronic constipation. Chronic constipation worsened after two pregnancies, so K sought medical intervention again in Feb 2025. K was prescribed medication (Linzess) to treat the constipation, which initially improved symptoms but was unreliable and had unpleasant side effects. She had been on that medication for 1 month before starting the potato diet.
Family and friends were bewildered to hear our plan, warning us of muscle loss and blood sugar problems since potatoes are ‘bad’.
Her initial goal was to lose 5-10 pounds from a starting BMI of 23.4 and test out the claims we read online about the diet. K actually joked, “wouldn’t it be funny if this diet fixes my stomach problems?”
We started the diet on 21MAR2025. The first two and a half days were 100% potato for both of us. Morale was suffering by the afternoon of day 3, so we caved and had a potato-heavy dinner with our kids. Afterwards, we agreed to eat only potatoes until dinner so we could still have a normal family meal time. We did make sure potatoes featured heavily in the weekly meal plan.
Within a week, K noticed improved symptoms and regularity without any medication. Initially, she thought she might have a lactose intolerance, so she switched to lactose-free milk and quit the potato diet once we reached the end of our planned testing window.
Back on a regular diet (but still avoiding lactose), K’s symptoms came back worse, with constant stomach aches and bloating. K realized that she had unintentionally been on a low-FODMAP diet while on the potato diet and decided to do intolerance testing.
Her methodology for intolerance testing follows:
Incorporating lots of potatoes allowed K to test out food groups while still eating a well-balanced diet. The culprit for K is fructans from wheat, which is why cutting out daily servings of wheat has made her symptoms disappear.
K is finishing FODMAP testing (still a couple more groups to go), but has had reliable relief from all symptoms without any meds. Potatoes are a regular addition to meals these days.
Below is the blank version of the log she used.
2025-05-30 21:00:31
Finding the Best Sleep Tracker
Environmental allergies are curable? (Sublingual immunotherapy)
Is Australian Sunscreen ACTUALLY stronger than Asian Sunscreen? I put them to the test!
Join the Big Taping Truth Trial / Let’s Find Out If Mouth Taping Actually Works
Dynomight: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
Oh my dear f*cking gawd it worked. The damn coke and French fries worked – Annals of Reddit Migraine Cures (more study needed)
“8 months later and we now have HUMAN GRADE horseade bucket”
China Might Have Moved Too Fast on Lithium Production
The Church FAQ — “A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!”
Flipping the switch on far-UVC (h/t Matt)
Serious Music — “A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.”
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well
The hardest working font in Manhattan
The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing
Brighter: The World’s Brightest Floor Lamp
In Which I Declare War On Beloved Entertainer Bo Burnham
“boiled eggs suck because yolk and white are best cooked at diff. temperatures”:
> Nature paper figures out how to cook eggs evenly by duty-cycling the temperature of water between 30°C and 100°C every 2 mins, derived from a model of heat transfer between yolk and white
> @sdamico implements the paper using his stoves that can hold water steady at 30°C and 100°C
2025-05-16 01:12:38
Previous Philosophical Transactions:
This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it.
Hi Slimes,
I’ve recently wrapped up a year-long weight loss self-experiment. During this time I lost 50 lbs, most of it on a Potatoes + Dairy version of the potato diet.
This corroborates your recent case studies where Potatoes + Dairy caused just about as much weight loss as the standard potato diet. It certainly worked well for me. I found the diet really enjoyable, my meals were always delicious. I didn’t get tired of the potatoes, they remain one of my favorite foods. And there were a few other interesting findings as well, all described below.
I’m a longtime reader of the blog so this is me sending you my report, which you can publish if you like. Please list me as “Cole” (not my real name). I hope you find it helpful.
First, my demographics. I’m a white male American in my early-mid 30s. I’m about 5 feet 11 inches tall, but I have a large frame. While you should feel free to calculate my BMI at any point, I don’t think it’s a very accurate measure of adiposity in my case.
My first baseline is in mid 2022, when I weighed about 220 lbs. I know this because I tried a version of the potato diet at the time and lost about 10 lbs over about 40 days. I wasn’t seriously concerned with my weight at the time, I was mostly just curious about the potato diet and what it feels like “from the inside”. But this turned out to be relevant later on because it let me know that I’m a potato diet responder.
In mid 2022 I was about to start a new job, one that involved a lot of hard work, stress, and late nights, and also a longer commute / a lot more driving than I am used to (I mention this because I’m sympathetic to the hypothesis that obesity is linked to motor vehicle exposure in some way).
I didn’t notice at first, but after starting this new job, I started to gain weight. Around April 2024, I realized that I weighed almost 250 lbs. This was heavier than I had ever been before, and also quite uncomfortable. For anyone who’s never gained 10+ lbs before, let me tell you, it makes everything in your life just a little more difficult, including things like sleeping, and that sucks.
But this crisis turned into an opportunity: I was about to change jobs again, this time to a job with much more reasonable hours and that required almost no driving. I wanted to lose the weight anyways, so I decided to take this opportunity to run a series of diet experiments and investigate some of the findings you’ve presented on the blog.
I began the study on May 12, 2024, with a starting weight of 247.6 lbs. Per previous potato diet experiments, I weighed myself in my underwear every morning for consistency.
To track my weight and my progress, I used a google sheet based on the one you shared from Krinn’s self-experiment with drinking high doses of potassium. I found her columns tracking 7-day average, personal best, and “ratchet” to be pretty helpful. Would recommend for anyone else trying a weight loss self-experiment.
I didn’t start any new exercise habit, though as I mentioned, I did start a new job and was driving less, I no longer had a weekly commute. So it’s possible that some of the weight loss is from “lifestyle changes” but I don’t think it could be much. According to my phone I’ve averaged about 7,000 steps per day the entire time, while gaining the weight and then while losing it.
The self-experiment can be broken into three main phases: the high-potassium brine phase, the Potatoes + Dairy phase, and a short run-out phase at the end.
I had already lost some weight on the potato diet in the past, so from the perspective of pure science, starting with the potato diet didn’t seem very interesting. Instead, I figured I would investigate the hypothesis that high doses of potassium are part of the reason the potato diet causes weight loss.
For the first 147 days of the experiment, I tried different high-potassium brines, and lost about 12 lbs.
All brines started with a base of two 591 ml blue Gatorades, mixed in a liter bottle with whatever dry electrolytes or other ingredients I was trying. Potassium was always added as KCl in the form of Nu-Salt.
I tried a wide variety of different brine mixtures, using different amounts of KCl as well as NaCl, sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), magnesium malate, iodine (as Lugol’s 2% solution), and glycine powder. But I don’t think these mixtures are worth reporting individually, because I wasn’t able to seriously distinguish between them. Regardless of the mix, I mostly kept losing weight at a very slow pace.
My impression is that magnesium is important, and that brines with added sodium work better than brines without, but I’m the first to admit that the data isn’t strong enough to back this intuition up. The most I can say is that I seemed to lose weight in kind of a sine-wave pattern, which you can see on the graph. These ups and downs roughly lined up with the 14-day cycles where I tried different brine recipes (i.e. I tried most recipes for 2 weeks), but I might have imagined a pattern where in reality there were just natural fluctuations.
While I originally hoped to get around 10,000 mg a day of potassium from my brine, like Krinn did, this wasn’t possible. I found doses above 6,600 mg/day K hard to drink, so I settled at that dosage, reasoning that Krinn lost weight even at lower doses.
In general, the brines made me feel weird. I sometimes became anxious, sometimes fatigued, sometimes got headaches, and sometimes it did weird things to my sense of smell. I did sometimes feel very energetic, and sometimes it seriously reduced my appetite. Some days I ate almost nothing and had almost no appetite. But even with a clear reduction in my appetite, even when I was eating very little, I didn’t lose much weight. (This itself was kind of striking.)
In terms of results, 12 lbs isn’t nothing. But over 147 days, it’s only about 0.08 lbs lost per day. That’s not very much.
I take this as evidence in favor of the hypothesis that high doses of potassium are part of why the potato diet causes weight loss. Even on only 6,600 mg/day K, I experienced many of the effects of the potato diet (reduced appetite, weird anxiety) and I did lose some weight, though not much.
But I also think my results suggest that potassium may not be enough, and that the “potato weight loss effect” really comes from something like high doses of potassium plus something else in potatoes / with potatoes—maybe high doses of magnesium, maybe sufficient sodium to balance the potassium, etc.
The brine seemed to work, but my rate of weight loss was really slow. It seemed like it was time to try the potato diet. In addition to hopefully losing more weight, I saw two benefits.
First, I could compare the effect of the brine directly to the effect of the potato diet, to see if I was already losing weight as fast as I could, or if there was something missing from the formula.
Second, I could test out the success of Potatoes + Dairy. The original potato diet was very strict, but by this point you had already reported a few case studies where people had lost a lot of weight on versions of the potato diet where they also ate various kinds of dairy.
My version of Potatoes + Dairy was decadent. Every meal was potatoes, but I always added as much butter, cheese, and sour cream as I wanted, which was usually a lot. For a while I made a lot of scalloped potatoes, but eventually I got lazy and from that point on I mostly ate baked potatoes or turned old baked potatoes into homefries. I didn’t get tired of this because butter is great.
When I didn’t have time to prepare potatoes, I would have cheese, milk, or ice cream as a snack. Yes, I ate as much ice cream as I wanted, and still lost weight (which is in line with the literature).
In case anyone wants to replicate my approach, my mainstays were:
Despite this decadence, I lost about 40 lbs more over 187 days.
Looking closer, the weight loss really happened over two spans, one before the 2024 December holidays, and one after. I first lost about 16 lbs over 75 days, gained about 8 of that back during late December and January, then lost about 28 lbs over the next 86 days. At the point of greatest descent (early March 2025), I lost 10 lbs in two weeks.
I wasn’t very strict and I did cheat pretty often. My notes mention times and places that I had pizza, candy, or sometimes burritos. Sometimes I had cheat meals where I would go out to lunch or get hot pot with friends. Sometimes I went on dates, where I ate normal food. This mostly didn’t make a difference as long as I also kept up with the potatoes.
You might think that potatoes are a neutral food, and they just help you survive while your body returns to normal, or something. But my sense is that potatoes actively cause the weight loss. On days where I didn’t prepare potatoes, and mostly just snacked on ice cream and cheese, I didn’t seem to gain much weight back, but I didn’t lose it, either.
This leads to another counterintuitive recommendation: the potato diet can really reduce your appetite, sometimes to the point where you don’t want to eat. But I think that you actually lose more weight on days where you eat potatoes than on days where you don’t eat at all. So if your goal is to lose weight, don’t assume that not eating is a good strategy—eat your taters.
I’m pretty confident that the potato diet was causing the weight loss, in part because I started losing weight right when I switched from brine to potatoes. Also, when I cheated for more than just a meal or two, it was obvious on the graph. Halloween, Thanksgiving week, and the December Holidays stand out in particular. Here’s version of the graph with those days singled out:
My holiday weight re-gain continued well into January because I was travelling and helping to organize some professional conferences, and I wasn’t able to keep up with the potatoes very well. As soon as I got back on potatoes around Jan 20, my weight started dropping again, this time faster than before.
I was pretty surprised when I blew past not only 220 lbs, but 210 lbs. I had thought that 220-210 might be the healthy range for me, and expected the diet to stall out there. But instead I blew past those milestones. Turns out that 220 lbs is at least 20 lbs overweight for me. I had no idea, because I felt pretty healthy at 220, but I guess I had forgotten what it was like to be a normal weight.
I first dropped below 200 lbs on March 20, 2025. Soon after that, my weight started to plateau, never falling much below 200 lbs but showing no signs of increasing.
I also noticed that I suddently started craving foods that weren’t potatoes, something that I hadn’t experienced on the previous 170 days. First I started craving fruit, and the next day, I started seriously craving Mexican food. Soon I was craving broccoli and chocolate.
This made me think that I might have reached a plateau, possibly my “natural” weight. According to BMI I am still “overweight” at < 200 lbs, and I am definitely not “lean”. But I do feel trim, and the girl I’ve been dating keeps putting her hands on my chest and talking about how good I look, so I’ll take this as some evidence that “just under 200 lbs” is a reasonable weight for me.
Because I already seemed to have hit a plateau, I decided to spend the last 31 days on a run-out period to see what would happen as I eased off the diet. During this time I still ate potatoes pretty often, but I started bringing in other foods, and I went whole days without eating any potatoes at all. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t gain back the weight as I relaxed the diet.
I do kind of wonder if my weight would have fallen even further if I had remained on Potatoes + Dairy, but the fact that I was developing cravings for other food suggests to me that I had encountered a real state change. It might have been possible to force my weight lower, but the magic of the potato diet is that the weight loss happens without any force. If you start forcing things, you’re back in the territory of restriction diets.
I officially ended the experiment on May 12, 2025, 365 days after I started, weighing 198.8 lbs. This was down from an original high of 247.6 lbs, and my all-time low was 194.4 lbs on April 22nd.
I’ll probably keep eating a diet high in potatoes, since even after several months, I still love them very much (and you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve saved in groceries). But I seem to have reached a plateau and a healthy weight, and also, while potatoes are powerful, they come at a terrible cost (mostly joking but read on).
When you lose a lot of weight very quickly, you often lose some hair. I’d never heard of this before but apparently it’s common knowledge among women. Who knew? It’s called “telogen effluvium” and it definitely happened to me. In early January, after my first period of intense Potato + Dairy weight loss, I noticed my hair was seriously thinning on top and in the back.
The good news is that hair lost in this way usually grows back on its own, though it can take a couple of months. That seems to be happening for me too. My hair is clearly thicker now than it was in January. And it’s pretty weird: looking at my scalp, I can see short hairs and even some very short hairs mixed in among the long ones. While my head hasn’t returned to normal yet, the hair is clearly growing back.
So in the end this doesn’t seem to be a serious concern. And it’s not specific to the potato diet, this just happens when you lose weight really fast. Even so, anyone who wants to copy my results should be aware that this might happen, but also that it’s usually temporary.
Some people get really intense negative feelings of fear or anxiety while on the potato diet. This also happened to me.
I’m glad I read Birb’s account of her experience with the potato diet before trying it for myself, because it really prepared me for my own experience. Here’s what she said:
To anyone who wants to do this diet, or is considering it after the benefits I described above: I encourage you to do it, but please be extra cautious that your mental state might be altered and that you are not necessarily in your right mind. The feelings you experience during this diet may not be how you actually feel.
Like I said above, potato diet is fucking weird. I mention this and the above because towards the end of the third week, I found myself crying every day. I was having actual meltdowns… five days in a row.
I am not talking “oh I am so sad, let a single tear roll down my cheek while I stare out of a window on a rainy day” levels of gloom and general depression. I am talking “at one point I couldn’t fold some of my laundry in a way that was acceptable to me, and this made me think I should kill myself, so I started crying”.
Is this a really dark to drop in the middle of a sort of lighthearted post about potato diet? Yes. I am sorry if you are uncomfortable reading it. Personally, I think I have a responsibility to talk about it, because the mentally weird aspect of this diet cannot be stressed enough.
My experience was somewhat different from Birb’s, manifesting more as a sense of overwhelming dread or doom than as a feeling of depression. And unlike Birb, I didn’t start to seriously feel this way until several months into the diet. But I definitely recognize her description.
As far as I could tell, these feelings were somewhat related to how quickly I was losing weight, though maybe not in the way you expect. The faster I was losing weight, the more of an overwhelming sense of doom I felt. Hooray. That said, it wasn’t a very strong relationship. I still felt the doom during times when I was cheating on the diet, and even when I was losing a lot of weight, I sometimes felt ok.
I suspect that these feelings may have something to do with how the body uses epinephrine and norepinephrine to release energy from adipose tissue, which would explain why you feel so crazy anxious and such intense dread when actively losing the most weight, but I’m not a doctor
.
The feelings might also be the result of a vitamin or mineral deficiency. We know that the potato diet is deficient in Vitamin A, and while I wasn’t rigorous about testing this, I found that eating some sweet potatoes (high in vitamin A) often made me feel better. I also found during the run-out period that eating mushrooms (selenium?), broccoli, and spinach (iron?) maybe helped as well. So if you’re having a bad emotional time on the potato diet, think about trying sweet potatoes or one of these other foods.
It’s interesting to me that these feelings of doom got stronger the further along I got in my weight loss. Maybe this is just because I was losing weight faster over time. But another (kind of crazy) possibility is that something is stored in our fat reserves and as I dug deeper into them, I released more of it. Or in general that something is flushed out from somewhere? I don’t know if I believe this but I wanted to mention it.
That’s just my speculation. It could also have been ordinary anxiety from other causes that happened to line up with the weight loss. I’ve got some personal things going on in my life right now, maybe the anxiety is coming from those. Plus, a few friends have recently had similar feelings of dread, and they’re not losing extreme amounts of weight on a highly unusual diet.
My results make me very confident that Potatoes + Dairy works. The potato diet makes you lose weight, and that still works even if you add dairy, including butter and ice cream, no matter if you’re eating as much of it as you want.
While my data can’t speak to how well Potatoes + Dairy will work for anyone else, I hope this ends the idea that the potato diet works because it’s unpalatable. I lost 50 lbs and every meal was delicious. I also hope this finishes the idea that the potato diet works because it’s a “mono diet”. You can’t reasonably call something a mono diet when it includes potatoes, sour cream, and ice cream with tiny peanut butter cups.
I also think this is some evidence for the potassium hypothesis. I lost weight when I was taking high doses of potassium, though not nearly as much as on the potato diet. Maybe this was because I was taking too small of a dose, and a higher dose would have caused a similar amount of weight loss as what I eventually saw on the potato diet.
But I suspect this is because the potato effect doesn’t come from potassium alone, but from an interaction between potassium and something else, possibly other electrolytes like sodium and magnesium.
If you could find the right mixture, maybe you could reproduce the potato effect in a brine. But if so, I wasn’t able to find it. For now, the state of the art is Potatoes + Dairy.
2025-05-08 23:11:00
[PROLOGUE – EVERYBODY WANTS A ROCK]
[PART I – THERMOSTAT]
[PART II – MOTIVATION]
[PART III – PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES]
[PART IV – LEARNING]
[PART V – DEPRESSION AND OTHER DIAGNOSES]
[PART VI – CONFLICT AND OSCILLATION]
[PART VII – NO REALLY, SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS GOING ON?]
[INTERLUDE – I LOVE YOU FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONS]
[PART VIII – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE]
[PART IX – ANIMAL WELFARE]
[PART X – DYNAMIC METHODS]
[PART XI – OTHER METHODS]
“Alright, gang, let’s split up and search for clues.”
— Fred Jones, Scooby-Doo
This has been our proposal for a new paradigm for psychology.
If the proposal is more or less right, then this is the start of a scientific revolution. And while we can’t make any guarantees, it’s always good to plan for success. So in case these ideas do turn out successful, then: welcome to psychology’s first paradigm, let’s discuss what we do from here.
In looking for a paradigm, we’re looking for new ways to describe the mysteries that pop up on the regular. When a good description arrives, some of those mysteries will become puzzles, problems that look like they can be solved with the tools at hand, that look like they will have a clear solution, the kind of solution we’ll recognize when we see it. Because a shared paradigm gives us a shared commitment to the same rules, standards, and assumptions, it can let us move very quickly.
All that is to say is that if this paradigm has any promise, then there should be a lot of normal science, a lot of puzzle-solving to do. A new paradigm is like an empty expert-level sudoku: there’s a kind of internal logic, but also a lot of tricky blanks that need filling in. So, we need your help. Here are some things you can do.
First, experimentalists can help us develop methods for figuring out how many cybernetic drives people have, what each drive controls, and different parameters of how they work. In the last two sections we did our best to speculate about what these methods might look like, but there are probably a lot of good ideas we missed.
Then, we need people to actually go out and use these methods. The first task is probably to discover all of the different drives that exist in human psychology, to fill out the “periodic table” of motivation as completely as we can. Finding all of the different drives will generate many new mysteries, which will lead to more lines of research and more discoveries.
We will also want to study other animals. There are a few reasons to study animals in addition to humans. First of all, most animals don’t have the complex social drives that humans do. The less social an animal is, the easier it will be to study its non-social drives in isolation. Second, it’s possible to have more control over an animal’s environment. We can raise an animal so that it never encounters certain things, or only encounters some things together. Finally, we can use somewhat more invasive techniques with animals than we can with humans.
Computational models will be especially important for developing a better understanding of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. With a model, we can test different changes to the design and parameters, and see which kinds of models and what parameter values lead to the behaviors and tendencies that we recognize as depression. This will ultimately help us determine how many different types of depression there are, come to an understanding of their etiology, and in time develop interventions and treatments.
Computational models should provide similar insight into tendencies like addiction and self-harm. The first step is to show that models of this kind can give rise to behavior that looks like addiction. Then, we see what other predictions the model makes about addictive behavior, and about behavior in general, and we test those predictions with studies and experiments.
If we discover more than one computational model that leads to addictive behavior, we can compare the different models to real-world cases of addiction, and see which is more accurate. Once we have models that provide a reasonably good fit, we can use them to develop new approaches for treatment and prevention.
Those of you who tend more towards biology or neuroscience can help figure out exactly how these concepts are implemented in our biology. Understanding the computational side of how the mind works is important, but the possible interventions we can take (like treating depression) will be limited if we don’t know how each part of the computation is carried out in an organism.
For example: every governor tracks and controls some kind of signal. The fear governor tracks something like “danger”. This is a complicated neurological construct that probably doesn’t correspond to some specific part of biology. But other governors probably track biological signals that may be even as simple as the concentrations of specific minerals or hormones in the bloodstream.
For example, the hormone leptin seems to be involved in regulating hunger. Does one of the hunger governors act to control leptin levels in our blood? Or is leptin involved in some other part of the hunger-control process? What do the hunger, thirst, sleep, and other basic governors control, and what are their set points?
Biologists may be able to answer some of these questions. Some of these questions may even have already been answered in neuroscience, biology, or medicine, in which case the work will be in bundling them together under this new perspective.
Running studies and inventing better methods sounds very scientific and important, but we suspect the most important contributions might actually come from graphic design.
The first “affinity table” was developed in 1718 by Étienne François Geoffroy. Substances are identified by their alchemical symbol and grouped by “affinity”.
At the head of each column is a substance, and below it are listed all the substances that are known to combine with it. “The idea that some substances could unite more easily than others was not new,” reports French Wikipedia, “but the credit for bringing together all the available information into a large general table, later called the affinity table, goes to Geoffroy.”
Here is a later affinity table with one additional column, the Tabula Affinitatum, commissioned around 1766 for the apothecary’s shop of the Grand Duke of Florence, now to be found in the Museo Galileo:
These old attempts at classification are charming, and it’s tempting to blame this on the fact that they didn’t understand that elements fall into some fairly distinct categories. But chemical tables remained lacking even after the discovery of the periodic law.
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev is often credited with inventing the periodic table, but he did not immediately give us the periodic table as we know it today. His original 1869 table looked like this:
And his update in 1871 still looked like this:
It wasn’t until 1905 that we got something resembling the modern form, the first 32-column table developed by Alfred Werner:
They tried a lot of crazy things on the way to the periodic table we know and love, and not all of these ideas made it. We’ll share just one example here, Otto Theodor Benfey’s spiral periodic table from 1964:
When a new paradigm arrives, the first tools for thinking about it, whether tables, charts, diagrams, metaphors, or anything else, are not going to be very good. Instead we start with something that is both a little confused and a little confusing, but that half-works, and iterate from there.
The first affinity table by Étienne François Geoffroy in 1718 was not very good. It was missing dozens of elements. It contained bizarre entries like “absorbent earth” and “oily principle”. And it was a simple list of reactions, with no underlying theory to speak of.
But it was still good enough for Fourcroy, a later chemist, to write:
No discovery is more brilliant in this era of great works and continued research, none has done more honor to this century of renewed and perfected chemistry, none finally has led to more important results than that which is relative to the determination of affinities between bodies, and to the exposition of the degrees of this force between different natural substances. It is to Geoffroy the elder … that we owe this beautiful idea of the table of chemical ratios or affinities. … We must see in this incorrect and inexact work only an ingenious outline of one of the most beautiful and most useful discoveries which have been made. This luminous idea served as a torch to guide the steps of chemists, and it produced a large number of useful works. … chemists have constantly added to this first work; they have corrected the errors, repaired the omissions, and completed the gaps.
It took about two hundred years, and the efforts of many thousands of chemists, to get us from Geoffroy’s first affinity table to the periodic table we use today. So we should not worry if our first efforts are incomplete, or a little rough around the edges. We should expect this to take some effort, we should be patient.
Better tools do not happen by accident. We do not get them for free — someone has to make them. And if you want, that someone can be you.
That’s all, folks!
Thank you for reading to the end of the series! We hope you enjoyed.
We need your help, your questions, your disagreement. Consider reaching out to discuss collaborating, or to just toss around ideas, especially if they’re ideas that could lead to empirical tests. You can contact us by email or join the constant fray of public discussion on twitter.
If you find these ideas promising and want to see more of this research happen, consider donating. Our research is funded through Whylome, a a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that relies on independent donations for support. Donations will go towards further theoretical, modeling, and empirical work.
