This is a lightly edited version of a post I published right after attending the Cognitive Development Society a couple of years ago. The next CDS meeting is in a week, so I feel this is a good time to send it out again.

This is written for my colleagues in developmental psychology, and so it’s not directly relevant to 99+% of my subscribers. But the argument I make doesn’t require any expertise to follow, and might be relevant more broadly. (When I first posted this, I heard from social psychologists who said it applied to their field as well.) So even if you’re part of the 99+%, you might want to give it a peek.

“This paper fills a much-needed gap in the literature.”1
—comment by a critical reviewer, first observed in 1950.

I attended the Cognitive Development Society conference in Pasadena, CA, earlier this year. CDS is my favorite developmental conference, with the best speakers and talks, and this one was a blast. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

But I also noticed something. Many of the talks I attended had a certain structure, and I realized that I’ve been seeing this for a long time—including in colloquium talks, student presentations, and journal articles. They reported work that followed this recipe:

1. Start with an observation about adults—some ability, intuition, opinion, or understanding that adults in our society have.

2. Develop a task to test for the presence of this ability, intuition, etc., in children.

3. Test children of different age groups, usually looking at (a) an age where you don’t expect them to be adult-like and (b) an age where you do expect them to be adult-like.

4. If you find that neither age group is adult-like, test an older age group.

5. If you find that both age groups are adult-like, test a younger age group.

6. Present your findings in a graph like the one below, showing that children become more adult-like over time. These days, you’ll probably go for a fancier graph from R, but I’m going old school here (thanks, Excel) and forsaking even the error bars.

   

7. State your conclusions. Here, you might say that 3-year-olds don’t get it all, 5-year-olds are better (But are they better than chance? Well, do the analysis), and 7-year-olds pretty much nail it.

8. If it’s a talk, graciously bask in applause. Be prepared for questions, but don’t worry; they’ll be easy to deal with. You might be asked if younger children would have succeeded if you made the task easier. (Answer: Great question! Yes, maybe so! We’re hoping to simplify our design for future studies.) Would you expect to get the same findings if you tested children in other societies? (Answer: Great question! We’re hoping to do cross-cultural work in the future!) Maybe someone will push back and say something like: “Why do you think so-and-so’s lab in Berkeley (say) finds that even 4-year-olds get this thing, and you only find it in older children?” A good answer is: “Well, they must have smarter kids in Berkeley!” That’ll usually get a laugh, and maybe it’s true.

I am going to argue that most of these studies are a waste of time. But I’m not saying that they are easy to do.

Step 1 is tough because you have to choose the right topic—the right sort of adult ability, intuition, etc. Nobody cares about the developmental trend of learning that Paris is the capital of France, or that Hamlet ends badly, or that when you stand up, your lap goes away.

Often, the right topics have to do with some subtle aspect of physical, numerical, and social understanding, such as, say, knowing that when you multiply two negative numbers, you get a positive number or that it’s harder to forgive a serious transgression than a minor one, or that people often get happy when something bad happens to their rivals.2 Often, investigators want to know what children think of politically charged issues, such as racial and sexual stereotypes, trans rights, immigration, and climate change. In the areas of developmental psychology I’m most interested in, topics are often drawn from philosophical examples or “experimental philosophy” studies with adults. One might want to know when children come to have adult-like judgments about trolley problems, say, or when they come to have the typical adult intuition that future human lives matter less than those in the present.

Step 2 is tough because it requires figuring out effective ways to test children, which requires considerable methodological skill. (Some of the newer methods that I learned about at CDS are ingenious.)

Steps 3-5 are tough because they involve testing children. These are not the survey studies that our lazybones social psychology colleagues run online. The difficulty of testing babies and children is one reason why developmental psychologists struggle to get out a couple of empirical papers a year, while some of our colleagues down the hall can generate triple-digit h-indexes without ever leaving their comfy offices.

There are good reasons to do some of these studies.

Sometimes, the findings have practical importance. Teachers, therapists, parents, and judges might be interested in what children know at certain ages. Now, in reality, the studies almost never have the practical importance that the investigators boast about in their grant applications. It’s often hard to take data from a developmental lab and apply it to a classroom or a courtroom. But, still, this is a respectable reason to do a study.

Most often, the studies bear on theoretical issues. Suppose you believe that some ability emerges prior to an understanding of language. Then it becomes really interesting to discover that 6-month-olds can do it—or that 3-year-olds can’t do it. Some of the great discoveries in our field have been that babies have astonishing capacities (pro-nativist—think of the work of Elizabeth Spelke and others) and that older children show surprising limitations (anti-nativist—think of the work of Jean Piaget and others). Sometimes, theories make more nuanced predictions about age. Some psychologists might believe that some mature ability will crop up just at the point when children are able to walk, for instance, and so a study that tells us that children can do it much earlier (2 months, say) or only much later (9 years, say) is a real kick in the pants to such a view. Interesting work!

In the above cases, the motivation for the work is clear, and the speaker will usually explain it in the first minutes of the talk:

• “We want to know whether 9-year-olds know blah blah because it will help us question them properly in domestic abuse cases.”

• “It’s often said that blab blah is innate. We challenge this view by showing that 2-year-olds struggle to understand this basic notion.”

• “So-and-so claims that 4-year-olds lack the cognitive capacity for blah blah, but here we find that even 12-month-olds succeed when the task is made easy enough.”

But some of these talks don’t begin with a justification. Sometimes, they start with something like:

“Adults do blah blah ...”

and then:

• “… But nobody has yet tested what children do.”

• “… It is important to provide a developmental perspective.”

• “… there is a gap in the literature.”

Often, there isn’t even this. The speaker talks briefly about something that adults know or do. “Studies show that adults believe that, on average, men have deeper voices than women.” And then, without missing a beat, the speaker goes on to say: “We tested a group of 3-year-olds and a group of 5-year-olds to explore the developmental period at which this belief emerges.”

The talks don’t have justifications because there aren’t any. Suppose someone were to stand up during the question period—not me!—and ask:

Sorry, I must have missed this, but why does it matter? Who cares whether this nugget of knowledge shows up at age 3 or 5 or whatever? Obviously it has to come in sometime between babyhood and adulthood. Who cares precisely when? What theory would your data support? Who would be surprised by if the answer is one thing or another? Who would be pleased? Why is this experiment worth doing?

I have asked gentler versions of these questions when I’m discussing ideas with students. Sometimes they find it strange to be asked why they did their studies. One student laughed nervously and said, “I heard you like to ask philosophical questions.”

I never blame the students. I blame their advisors. Many developmental psychologists have deep theoretical motivations for their work. But some of them apparently run labs where the only motivation for running studies that anybody discusses is to get papers accepted by conferences and published in journals—or to get future grant support to write papers that are accepted by conferences and published in journals.

Doing experiments where the findings don’t matter is not a valuable activity. If you can’t answer the question “Why are you doing the study?” with something better than “Nobody has done it before,” you shouldn’t be doing the study. Journals shouldn’t send out such papers for review, and conferences shouldn’t accept them. Of course, researchers can make discoveries by accident, and sometimes a finding can be the catalyst for interesting future work. And there are worse sins than wasting everyone’s time. But publications and presentations are zero-sum, and if we encouraged higher standards, there would be more room for the good stuff.

Confession here: I’ll admit that this theoryless way of proceeding is, right now, a pretty good way to get papers published. One can imagine a first-year student coming into an advisor’s office and struggling to find a project to work on, and the advisor says:

Look through the last few issues of top journals like Psych Science, PNAS, and Cognition, and find a good adult result of the sort that can be run with children. Then we’ll run the same experiment with 4- to 6-year-olds and see what we find.

Bigger confession now—this way of doing developmental research has earned me and my students many publications.3 But I no longer think of it as a way to do good science.4

We’ve been in a similar situation before.

When neuroimaging came onto the scene, there was great excitement over demonstrations that specific parts of the brain were active when people thought about different things. You couldn’t open up an issue of Science or Nature without seeing colorful pictures of brain activation. Look at what happens in the brain when people do math problems! Or listen to music! Or feel envy!

Here is what I said about this in 2016.

Nowadays, many people only seriously consider claims about our mental lives if you can show them pretty pictures from a brain scanner. Even among psychologists who should know better, images derived from PET or fMRI scans are seen as reflecting something more scientific—more real—than anything else a psychologist could discover. There is a particular obsession with localization, as if knowing where something is in the brain is the key to explaining it.

I see this when I give popular talks. The question I dread most is “Where does it happen in the brain?” Often, whoever asks this question knows nothing about neuroscience. I could make up a funny-sounding brain part—“It’s in the flurbus murbus”—and my questioner would be satisfied. What’s really wanted is some reassurance that there is true science going on and that the phenomenon I’m discussing actually exists. To some, this means that I have to say something specific about the brain.

This assumption reflects a serious confusion about the mind and how to study it. After all, unless one is a neuroanatomist, the brute facts about specific location—that the posterior cingulate gyrus is active during certain sorts of moral deliberation, say—are, in and of themselves, boring. Moral deliberation has to be somewhere in the brain, after all. It’s not going to be in the foot or the stomach, and it’s certainly not going to reside in some mysterious immaterial realm. So who cares about precisely where?

Many years earlier, the philosopher Jerry Fodor put this in a pithier way:

If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck. What exactly turns on knowing how far north?

Fortunately, neuroscience has outgrown this interest in localization for localization’s sake. There is still a lot of research focusing on what part of the brain some psychological process corresponds to, but this is almost always in the service of answering theoretical questions that bear on competing psychological theories. (For examples, see the first chapter of my Psych).

I hope developmental psychology advances in a similar way.

I hesitated before publishing this post. Why piss people off? But I spoke about my concern with a friend in the field—a developmental psychologist whose work is much cooler than mine—and he said that (1) everyone knows that the kind of unmotivated research I’m complaining about has little value, and (2) everyone thinks everyone else does this unmotivated work—their own work is deep and theoretically grounded—and so nobody will think I’m talking about them. And, most of all, (3) it’s a good thing to get these concerns out there, especially for early-career researchers. So here it is.

There were many good things about this first month that weren’t really surprises. The doctors and nurses at Saint Michael’s Hospital in Toronto were very competent and very kind during a difficult first few days. Friends and family have been warm and supportive, sending gifts, bringing over food, and providing help and good vibes in countless ways. It’s been a delight watching my wife become a mother and seeing our relationship transform.

And the baby? Zoe sleeps, cries, eats, pees, farts, poops, burps, spits up, and sometimes stares at her parents with a skeptical expression. She howls when she has gas pain, grunts during “tummy time”, and dozes when rocked. Newborn 101, straight out of the User’s Manual.

Three things were unexpected, though.

1. How little else I’ve gotten done

My wife and I split the babywatching, and since newborns sleep most of the time, I figured that this would leave me many hours each day to work. And I do have things to do: I’m not on leave until the fall, and I’m teaching a seminar, editing an academic journal, and working on several research projects. And, of course, there’s this Substack.

But I’m barely keeping my head above water. Most of it is the lack of sleep. I knew it was coming, of course, but hadn’t fully realized how stupid it would make me, how hard it would be to focus. About a week in, I decided to roll with it and let the work slide a bit. My non-Zoe activities include regular Zoom calls with friends, keeping up with the Lindy West discourse, and reading novels. (I’m on a big David Szalay binge.)

2. How little I mind the sleep deprivation

This is a weird one. I’ve long been an insomniac, and a bad night often leaves me angry and bitter the next day. So I expected newborn sleep deprivation to make me miserable. But it hasn’t. I’m tired—and, yes, stupid—but still pretty cheerful.

I think the difference is that my usual insomnia feels like failure: I’ve ruined the next day, and it’s my own fault. But being awake because you have to keep your tiny baby alive feels purposeful, even virtuous—like your legs burning after a long run.

3. How much I love Zoe

I had my two boys a few decades ago, and being their father has been—and continues to be—one of the great joys of my life. But as best I can remember, the affection kicked in once they started smiling, cooing, and giggling; once there was peek-a-boo, tickling, and airplane rides.

With Zoe, by contrast, I’ve been smitten from the start.

I’m not sure what explains the difference. A friend, unkindly but maybe accurately, credits this to declining testosterone levels with age. Another suggests that there is a big difference between being the father of sons and the father of a daughter. My wife thinks it’s because my life is very different from how it was thirty years ago, and I’m just not the same person.

Whatever it is, I’m in love.

“Nobody can touch you without your consent” seems right. When I entered the phrase into Google, the AI stated that it was

fundamentally correct and a core principle of bodily autonomy, personal boundaries, and law.

Critically, it’s current consent that matters. Someone can agree ahead of time (even enthusiastically agree) to sex or surgery, but if they change their mind the moment the contact is about to happen, their choice must be respected.

This principle does not always apply, though. Exploring those cases where it doesn’t hold can tell us some interesting things about how we think about autonomy and morality.

For starters, this principle doesn’t apply to everyone. Parents manhandle their children all the time—sometimes for their own good, as when the kid is trying to stick his fingers into an electrical socket, but sometimes for the parents’ convenience, like when forcing a screaming toddler into a car seat because you have to take her home from the supermarket. Children do not have the autonomy rights that the principle assumes.

You can override this principle in emergencies. If you yank someone onto the sidewalk if they’re about to be creamed by an oncoming truck, that’s totally fine.

You can use force to keep your drug-tripping friend from jumping out a window or your drunk neighbor from getting into his car. (Maybe in some relevant sense, these individuals become like children.)

You’re allowed limited contact with strangers. You can gently tap someone on the elbow (but not the butt) to get them to move aside on the moving walkway.

The principle doesn’t apply to those who commit certain immoral/illegal acts. If someone is attacking you or another person, you are permitted to touch them. And law enforcement officers—and sometimes regular people—can touch someone against their will to keep them from committing a crime or escaping from the scene of a crime. In old movies, a man grabs a woman’s purse and runs away; there is a scream, someone shouts, “Stop, thief!”, and the man is chased and tackled to the ground, very much without his consent—but while the thief doesn’t like it, I bet he doesn’t feel morally wronged.

There are many questions that these exceptions and related ones raise. (When does a child get old enough to acquire autonomy rights? What sorts of crimes are tackle-worthy?) But I’m more interested in cases like this:

Someone is trying to touch me, and I really don’t want them to. I move away and try to hit the person to make them stop. They touch me anyway.

Have they done something wrong? Not necessarily. Have you ever boxed? In boxing, someone tries to punch you—often right in the kisser! When boxing, you don’t want to be punched, not even a little bit, and you try very hard to avoid it. It’s unwanted physical contact if anything is.

This isn’t a true counterexample to the principle, though. The main difference between a boxing match and a violent assault (other than the gloves) is that, for boxing, you agreed to enter a situation in which this unwanted touching happens. You don’t want to be hit, but you have consented to being hit. A less violent example of unwanted touching is tag, where the whole goal is not to be touched, and yet you agree to letting people try.

Boxing and tag fall within a broader category of sports and games in which participants consent to the possibility of experiencing unwanted events. I’ll be unhappy if you take my queen, sink my battleship, or call my bluff—and I’ll work hard to keep these events from happening—but such activities are only fun if these negative outcomes are possible, and so I consent to them.

Then there’s sex.

Read more

Last week, my daughter Zoe was born, and I couldn’t be happier.

I hesitated before announcing this on Small Potatoes. I’ve written here before about personal matters—how my parents met, say, or the time an online stalker threatened to murder me in Shanghai—but this feels different. It’s not in the service of some larger point. It’s just personal news.

Still, I decided to go ahead. Part of what nudged me in this direction is that some of my favorite writers on Substack have written beautifully about being new fathers—Scott Alexander (for instance, here), Freddie deBoer (for instance, here), and Derek Thompson (here). I’ve liked reading these pieces, and I’ve enjoyed the baby pictures too, so perhaps I can contribute something to that small genre.

This isn’t going to become a parenting Substack. But I do often write about child development—about the nature-nurture debate, parental love, and tantrums, for instance—and there may be something interesting in seeing how these ideas hold up when brought to bear on one very real child. I might even return, at some point, to the question I asked here and consider whether Zoe’s first year of life is, on balance, a happy one.

I’ll add that I’m not merely a dad; I’m an Old Dad. I won’t trouble you with my exact age (if you’re curious, look it up, you nosy perv), but I had my two sons when I was much younger. I loved being a father then, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to love it now, but this is plainly going to be different. Thinking about those differences—and what they tell us about aging, mortality, memory, and love—may make for a post or two down the line.

There’s another reason to share this here: I feel close to my readers. I like the comments my posts get (well, most of them), and I’ve enjoyed meeting many of you in the Zoom sessions for paid subscribers. So it seems right to share some good news.

Also, my wife surprised me with a “new dad” gift: a onesie for Zoe that doubles as a present for me. And so here she is—my heart outside of my body.

Several years ago, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a critical review of my book Just Babies.1 One of the things that bothered me was that Wax plainly hadn’t read the whole book. She got to the chapter on sex and stopped, with two chapters left to go.

But then I checked and realized that the positive reviewers also didn’t seem to make it to the end. Their reviews focused on the first chapters; at best, they skimmed the rest. Actually, by making it to chapter 5 and reading it closely, Wax was unusually persistent.

It’s not just me. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once complained that reviewers of her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions focused on the preliminary outline of her theory in the first chapter and ignored all the nuances and qualifications in the many chapters that followed. They apparently didn’t read most of her book.

This bothered me. I’m a fan of Nussbaum and feel she deserves better. Actually, I own this book of hers and read it with pleasure. Well, not the whole book. Just the first chapter. Have you seen how big it is?

How often do people make it to the end of books? The mathematician Jordan Ellenberg did some number crunching, analyzing passages marked by Amazon Kindle readers and estimating the percentage who finished. This percentage is what he calls the Hawking Index, named after Stephen Hawking’s notoriously unread book A Brief History of Time. Here is the Hawking Index for some popular books:

This is a crude measure. It might underestimate the proportion of people who finish books—maybe they keep reading but stop highlighting. Or maybe it’s an overestimate; readers who mark up a book might be unusually persistent.

But I believe in the general finding—people don’t tend to finish books, particularly when it comes to certain sorts of non-fiction books. Certainly, I don’t tend to finish books. The picture on top of this post is from my office at work. I’ve opened just about every one of these books and read the first page. I haven’t finished more than a dozen.

Why not? Well, I’m not going to finish any of these books in one sitting. I will start to read, and then I will put the book down. Finishing it requires that I pick it up, over and over again. And the odds of me picking it up after I put it down are not 100%.

From there, it’s just math. Suppose there is a 1% chance that at the end of any page, I will put a book down forever. This means that once I read the first page, there is a 99% chance I’ll start page 2. To get to page 3, the odds are 99% times 99% = 98%. The odds I will get to page 100 are 36%. The odds of getting to page 300 are 5%—and most of these books are over 300 pages.

Maybe this is a strange way of looking at it. After all, often the odds are much better than 99%. Some books are so gripping that when I put them down, I can’t wait to get started again. (Maybe I’m reading The Goldfinch, with its 98.5% Hawking Index.) I once stayed at a vacation house with some friends, and after everyone went to sleep, I picked up Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, just checking it out to see if I wanted to take it to the beach the next day, and then I stayed up all night reading it. If you look closely, you’ll notice a novel on my shelf—Destiny by Tim Parks. I finished it with pleasure. There is also an academic book published by a university press—Evil Men by James Dawes—that I wouldn’t have dreamt of giving up on.

But for most of the other books, I read the beginnings, maybe leafed through the rest, and never picked them up again.

Some qualifications: As I mentioned, there are plenty of books that people do finish reading. Good novels, obviously. Even some bad novels—I’m a fan of Stephen King, and I’ve never given up on one of his books, not even his stinkers. I’ve read biographies of Derek Parfit, Elon Musk, and Sam Bankman-Fried and finished them all. Good biographies have a story-like flow that carries you to the end.

My focus here is more specific—on academic books and non-fiction books for the general audience—such as Capital in the Twenty-first Century, A Brief History of Time, Thinking Fast and Slow (from the Hawking list above), and the (substantially less well-known) books that I write myself.

Now, of course, some people do read such books from cover to cover, and I’ve even heard from people who’ve finished my own books. (The title of this post is meant as hyperbole—comical exaggeration. If you tell me in the comments that you have, in fact, finished reading at least one book, this will show that some people don’t even read past the beginning of Substack posts.) I don’t trust the Hawking index, and perhaps I shouldn’t extrapolate too much from my own experience. I tend to buy more non-fiction books than most people, in part because, as a professor, I pretty much read for a living. Maybe I give up on more books too.

There are people who finish more books than I do, such as Rob Henderson—a superb writer who worked in my Psychology lab at Yale many years ago. In a post called How I Read, he writes

In a given year, I read about 40-50 books cover to cover, read excerpts and chapters of perhaps another 100 or so, and skim many more.

40-50 books a year is a lot of books to finish! (And I highly recommend his advice on how to establish a routine to get all that reading done.) But then there’s the other 100 or so other books he mentions. Even Henderson, then, finishes only about 1/3 of the books that he picks up.

Tyler Cowen, a brutally selective reader, finishes a smaller proportion.

The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down, usually throw them away, don’t give them away – if you give them away you could be doing harm to people …

Sometimes readers just go on and on with blather, or with personal detail that has no relevance to the argument. Or there are just pages of terminology and it’s like, well, you might still give the book a chance, but you start turning the pages more rapidly. And you’re just waiting for some bit of meat, you’re like out there desperate, giving the author still a chance, and then at some point you’re like “No, sorry. ” Zap – throw it in the trash, on to the next one.

What’s the real problem here?

I’m not complaining that people aren’t reading my books. (If I ever were to say that, feel free to quote Livia Soprano at me.) I’m actually really pleased with how many people read my books (or at least the beginnings of them).

I’m not complaining that too few people are reading long books of the type that I’m interested in. Given how good other sources of information and entertainment are, it’s impressive that people read these books at all.

I’m not complaining about a Cowen-like selectivity. There’s no need to keep reading books that aren’t working for you.

I’m not complaining about skipping or skimming parts of books. I like biographies, but I just skip past all the boring parts about grandparents that biographers feel compelled to put in. Even some of my favorite books have parts I’ve quickly leafed through.

Here’s what really bothers me. Books such as Upheavals of Thought are meant to be read from cover to cover. You can skip or skim a bit, but the argument is developed throughout the book, and if you give up after a chapter or two, you won’t fully appreciate the ideas that the author is trying to convey. There is a serious mismatch between what the author wants and what actually happens.

Consider a couple of analogies:

#1: Omakase dining refers to a multi-course Japanese meal prepared by a chef. It takes a long time to eat; it’s usually expensive; and it can be mind-blowing. If you’re in Toronto, I’ve heard nice things about Shizuku, which offers a 22-course meal for $270 Canadian dollars.

How many people stay until the end?

I bet you never thought to ask that question. Barring emergencies, everyone stays until the end, because they paid for the whole thing and the whole thing is pretty damn good. It would be strange to walk out halfway through just because you’re not in the mood for more Japanese food or have somewhere else to go. I bet the chef would be pissed. The experience is meant to be completed.

#2: A while ago, I saw Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by the great Martin Scorsese. It is 3 hours and 26 minutes long. It took about 200 million dollars to make and has an amazing cast. I thought it was terrific.

The movie theatre was less than half full. This isn’t a movie for everyone. And that’s fine—if Scorsese complained, he’d deserve the Livia Soprano response: Poor you! If his goal is to fill theatres, he should make movies set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But now imagine that once the movie started, people began to trickle out. An hour in, one out of every ten seats is occupied. When the movie ends, there are just a few people left. If this happened in every theatre, then, no matter how much money it made, Killers of the Flower Moon would be an artistic failure. Like Omakase dining, this Scorsese movie (like almost all movies except for pornographic ones) is meant to be experienced from beginning to end.

It’s fine if you don’t want to read Upheavals of Thought (or experience Omakase dining, or go to Killers of the Flower Moon). But if you do, you should expect to stay to the end.

If you don’t share my worry about the mismatch of purpose (what the creator intends) and use (how the book is read), think of it in terms of waste. Nussbaum spent years of her life (I’m guessing) writing the whole book, and she likely put equal time into the ending as she did into the beginning. Editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, and someone from the legal department carefully reviewed the entire book. Readers paid for the whole book, supporting all of this labor. If most people just read the first chapter, so much of that time, effort, and money was for nothing.

Whose fault is it? I don’t blame Nussbaum; she’s a strong writer, much better than most. I don’t blame the readers either. There is no moral obligation to finish a book that you’re tired of reading.

I blame … the system. Authors are expected to write non-fiction books that are about 70,000 to 100,000 words long. Maybe this was a reasonable length in the past, but now there are too many other distractions in the world, and few of us have the Sitzfleisch anymore for that kind of long book.

You might think the market would correct this. Suppose Omakase dinners were 61 courses. Suppose most movies were over five hours long. People would lose interest, and in response, restaurants and movie studios would ratchet things down, working to give people what they want.

It’s a mystery to me why this sort of correction hasn’t happened with books. One concern is that many academic books are purchased mostly by libraries, which don’t prioritize readability. An even gloomier thought is that many people don’t buy books to read; they buy them to own, and they like to own hefty books.

Forget about why this is the case; what’s an author to do?

Don’t worry about it

So many of the rewards of writing books have nothing to do with whether anyone reads them. There are advances and royalties. There are opportunities to go on podcasts, be interviewed by fancy people, and give lectures, sometimes for money. In some fields of academia, you need to publish a book to get tenure. Your parents might be proud of you; you will always have a cheap gift to give to family and friends. When you’re feeling blue, you can look at the book on your shelf and say I wrote that.

Write for those who stay

Suppose, though, that you have ideas and arguments that you want to convey, and this only works when your book is read from cover to cover. So be honest with yourself; acknowledge that there is a small audience that you’re targeting—small, but, despite the hyperbolic title of his post, it’s probably not zero—and write for them.

Focus on beginnings

You can compromise: Put all your energy into a good first chapter, ensuring that someone who gets this far will understand what you’re on about. For the rest of the book, just pad and recycle old material.

Write books where the order doesn’t matter

My most recent book Psych was an introduction to psychology, and it contains 15 chapters, each on a different topic. People can read the chapters in any order they want, and since some of the most interesting ones were the final ones—Chapter 14 on mental illness and Chapter 15 on happiness. This is the rare book where more people probably read the end than the beginning.

Write books for captive audiences

I assigned Psych for my Intro Psych course. (I gave them the book for free, by the way—the morality of professors profiting from students is a topic for another post.) If students didn’t read all the chapters, they wouldn’t do well in the course, so this motivated them to read the whole thing. Unless you are Chairman Mao, though, there aren’t many other contexts outside of a classroom where you can pull this off.

Write really short books.

Like On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt. 80 pages and a New York Times bestseller!

Give up on writing a certain sort of books

If you’re writing novels—I can’t wait for The Goldfinch II!—self-help books, biographies, books that can be read out of order, books that people are forced to read, and really short books, keep at it. But if you’re writing the sorts of long books that people don’t tend to finish, and you’re not doing it to get tenure or impress your parents, maybe you should stop. Communicate your ideas in other ways.

I wince to write this. I like writing long books, and I like buying them and starting them, even if I usually don’t finish. I do not want to find myself in the same company as Sam Bankman-Fried, who once said this in an interview:

I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Thomas Chatterton Williams just wrote a wonderful article called The People Who Don’t Read Books, and he picks out this quote of SBF’s for particular scorn. And then Williams makes a moving case for the power and value of the sort of books I am talking about here.

when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue.

Yes. I love this. Williams is writing here for true readers, capturing our sense of struggling with a long book—“those precious slow hours of deep focus”—and I’d like to see myself as part of this community, someone who not only appreciates these virtues but who embodies them.

But this wouldn’t be honest. I don’t really have the patience he praises, and I’m not sure how many of Williams’ other readers have it either. My worry is that most of us aren’t much better than SBF. We don’t read books either. We just read the beginnings.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein describes herself as fascinated by the life and work of the philosopher Iris Murdoch. So you’d think she’d be interested in what Murdoch’s husband, John Bailey, had to say about her in the three books he wrote about their marriage.

You would be wrong. Goldstein was appalled at Bailey’s descriptions of Murdoch’s helplessness as she suffered from Alzheimer’s.

How dare he! We readers had no right to be shown such scenes, and he had no right to put them before us—the cruelty of her being stripped of her words, her identity, her dignity. What’s the point of marriage, of intimacy of all kinds, if not to create a shield in which you can safely appear as you’d never let others see you, all the ways in which you, like every one of us, are pitiful, confused, and at a loss?

Goldstein stopped reading. Her reticence reminds me of the story of when, in 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the “Black Chamber”—the State Department’s office that intercepted and decoded diplomatic messages from other countries, including allies. Stimson later explained to an aide, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

I don’t have this reticence. I read biographies of all kinds, and I enjoy the private correspondence of famous people. (I was touched when a friend sent me The Letters of Kingsley Amis.) I am an avid reader of Ryan Lizza’s Substack, where he details astonishing stories about his ex-fiancée, Olivia Nuzzi. (This is a level of betrayal that is worlds beyond what Bailey did to Murdoch, though Lizza argues that he’s acting in self-defense.) And I’ve spent a lot of time perusing the Epstein files, looking for mentions of my friends and enemies.

So what’s the problem here? What precisely is wrong with reading other people’s mail? Well, let’s apply the Golden Rule. Imagine that I’m your house guest, and you walk downstairs in the morning, and there I am, sitting at your kitchen table, with your laptop open, going through your correspondence—all your emails and your texts. Happy with this?

Snoops have a standard response here: WHY DO YOU CARE IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE? Well, for one thing, people do have things to hide, and that’s totally fine. Most of us have resentments, crushes, ambitions, schemes, and opinions that we share with those we are close to, but would be horrified if everyone knew about them.

And, anyway, privacy is about more than keeping secrets. Anyone who talks to someone they love just as they would talk to a stranger is a saint, a toddler, or a simpleton. The rest of us talk differently to our friends and lovers; as Goldstein put it, one point of intimate relationships is to “create a shield in which you can safely appear as you’d never let others see you.”

If a podcast host asks my opinion on some fraught issue, I’ll carefully frame my words so I won’t be humiliated if they’re taken out of context. When I’m with someone I’m close to, I shift into a different register. I assume that they know me and like me and will be generous in interpreting what I have to say. So I bounce around ideas, push the envelope, shit-talk, and crack jokes. If I’m asked in public about what I think about a certain person, I’ll answer judiciously; when I’m talking to a friend, I’ll cut loose. (This sometimes manifests as nastiness, but it can also be a gushing admiration and affection that I’d be embarrassed to express in public.)

The world is better this way. Imagine a dystopia in which everything we say and everything we write is publicly available. (I type in your name into a certain website and get the full searchable record. Your complete web history too—no private browsing in this world.) Even if nobody is bothered by this, even if nobody mourns the death of privacy, still, this is a worse world. One thing (among many) we would lose is the chance to safely explore—to try out ideas, attitudes, and personas in a safe space before braving them in the cruel world of those who don’t love us.

Does all this mean that I’m against the release of the Epstein files, think Lizza should have his Substack taken down, or want Bailey’s books to be pulped? Not at all. For one thing, people have a right to do certain bad things. If you tell me a secret and I put it on my Substack the next day, that’s an awful thing to do, but it’s not a crime and shouldn’t be.

Also, in some cases, the benefits of exposure outweigh the costs. To take an extreme example, when the FBI listens in on two gangsters planning a hit, they are violating these men’s privacy. This is a bad thing to do, which is why there are legal hurdles to wiretapping. But it’s a really good thing to save someone from being whacked, so the math works out. Maybe the math works out for releasing the Epstein files, too.

As I said, I love reading this stuff myself. Now I wouldn’t be confessing this if I thought I was an isolated perv. But I know I’m not alone here. There is a huge appetite for tell-all biographies, leaked emails, stolen voicemail messages, tapped phone conversations, and the like. There’s nothing new here. In 1895, Oscar Wilde’s personal letters were read in open court and widely publicized, leading to his public disgrace. And I remember how excited people were to read the Royals’ private conversations many years ago.

I think there are two things going on here, two appetites at work.

One is the delight we take in discovering others’ bad acts and punishing them for them. Freddie deBoer described the popularity of this law-enforcement mentality in his 2017 post, Planet of Cops.

People who narc on their neighbors are cops, and people who want to scour test scores to get teachers fired are cops, and people who want to keep an eye on trans people when they go to the bathroom are cops, obviously. … Conservatives were born cops, they always have been, they always will. … The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7.

It’s subtle, but maybe you can tell that deBoer disapproves of the whole thing. I get this. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people he calls “little offense archaeologists” ruin people’s lives for what seem to me fairly minor offenses.

But I’m more pro-cop than deBoer is, and so this impulse bothers me less. Anyone who thinks about how good actions are sustained has to give credit to punitive impulses that make immoral behavior costly, thereby ensuring that nice guys don’t finish last. So long as there are criminals, the world needs cops. And so long as there are free-riders, sleazebags, creeps, and assholes—and so long as all of us are sometimes tempted to treat others badly—the world is better off if we are all inclined to do some policing of our own. It’s not wrong to be a cop, then, it’s just wrong to be a bad cop.

Anyway, the appetite for moralistic punishment is not the main draw of the Epstein files, or Lizza’s Substack, or Bailey’s depiction of his wife’s mental decline. There’s something more general going on here.

A while ago, there was a paper published called Monkeys pay per view:
Adaptive valuation of social images by rhesus macaques. It reported a study in which male rhesus monkeys were hooked up to an apparatus that allowed them to choose, by moving their heads, to either receive some sweet fruit juice (delicious!) or to look at a picture.

It turned out that they would give up juice—they would “pay”—to get to look at pictures of female monkey hindquarters. They would also pay to see pictures of the faces of high-status male monkeys they knew. If the first finding captures the lure of Pornhub, the second is about why the appeal of People magazine or TMZ.

We are fascinated by high-status people, and our fascination intensifies when we see them humbled. It’s not just prurient curiosity, then; it’s also a delight in bringing them down to our level.

The pleasure we take here is similar to the pleasure some take in the consumption of leaked sex tapes and stolen nude pictures from celebrities’ phones. Literally and figuratively, we want to see these people naked. The non-consensual nature of these releases makes them more appealing, not less, because it increases the feeling of power that we get.

Should you be ashamed of reading other people’s mail? Not if you’re a federal investigator investigating a crime or (contrary to what Henry Stimson believed) part of your country’s intelligence apparatus. Not if you’re a scholar exploring the lives of historical figures. But the rest of us? Well, ask yourself this: Should you be ashamed of looking at leaked sex tapes and stolen nude pictures? It’s much the same impulse, and so the answer is probably the same.

0:00 Teaser
0:59 A paywall bait masterclass
8:11 Is Paul feeling the AI acceleration?
16:00 The Freddie deBoer AI challenge
26:23 What would a true AI revolution look like?
31:51 Bob: We’re failing the AI test
39:59 Has AI really made much of a difference?
50:59 Heading to Overtime

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Bob’s appearance(s) in the Epstein files.
Paul’s bittersweet (but mostly sweet) news.
Is Elon betting on the wrongbots?
Hamnet and Kim’s Convenience.
Will Carney walk his talk?

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If you’re hungry, utopia is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Take it from the 13th-century French poem The Land of Cockaigne, as described in Nick Bostrom’s excellent book Deep Utopia.

In the land of Cockaigne, there is no backbreaking labor under scorching sun or nipping north wind. No stale bread, no deprivation. Instead, we are told, cooked fish jump out of the water to land at one’s feet; and roasted pigs walk around with knives in their backs, ready for carving; and cheeses rain from the sky. Rivers of wine flow through the land.

Bostrom goes on to point out that many of us now pretty much live in such a world. We tap on our phones, and someone quickly comes to our door with lemonade, fish, sausage, or cheese.

What would it be like if everyone had unlimited access to food and drink? What if we were done with material deprivation together—if we all had nice houses, access to the best medical treatments, the best childcare, and so on? And what if we didn’t have to work for any of this—we could spend our lives however we please?

The obvious point first: Such a world would be wonderful. There are people now who are starving, who watch their children die due to lack of clean water or medical care, who spend their days at backbreaking or humiliating labor. Even those of us who are relatively well-off often worry about meeting our own needs and the needs of those who depend on us, and many of us work at jobs that we don’t like. To be released from the yoke of all this struggle and anxiety would be so fantastic that we should feel a bit uncomfortable talking about the downsides.

And yet. Many people are interested in utopia these days, prompted by the promise of AI, and one worry keeps surfacing.1 It’s often said that if all our needs are satisfied, we would suffer from ennui and loss of purpose. Struggle is what gives life meaning, and in a post-scarcity utopia, there would be no struggle.

I agree that a good life involves struggle and some degree of suffering. In fact, I agree so much that I wrote a book about it.

But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied.2 On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.

Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.

When I was just starting off as a new Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, I wandered through the halls, knocking on doors and talking to my new colleagues. And I remember meeting this old professor, and after we talked a bit, he told me, without being prompted, that he was a tenured Associate Professor, but had never been promoted to Full Professor.

I asked: "What do you get from being a Full Professor?" A bump in pay? No, he said. More research funds? No, he said. In fact, he admitted, if he were promoted, he’d have to be on more committees, and he hated committees. And then he went quiet and just stared at his desk, and when he looked up at me, I saw that his eyes were wet with tears.

Now I get it. In the years since, I have lost out on awards and honors that were as symbolic as the promotion that my colleague was denied, and I know how much it hurts. And I remember how proud I was when the president of Yale called me into his office and told me that I was going to become a named professor (Bump in pay? No. More research funds? No.). I also remember how resentful one of my colleagues was for not becoming a named professor himself.

This is all easy to mock. There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted—see here:

Titles mean something because they mark one’s status—where one stands relative to others. There are many such “positional goods”. If everyone could get a degree from Harvard, its value would diminish greatly because it would no longer signal that the degree-holder is special. If everyone could afford a Rolex or own an original Picasso, a lot fewer people would want a Rolex or an original Picasso.

Positional goods matter. Our desires are shaped by a hunger to exceed what others have, or at least to match them—and definitely not to drop below them. This can lead to a ratcheting effect, where once some people acquire a publicly observable scarce resource, such as a larger-than-usual house, it puts pressure on everyone else to follow suit. Writing ten years ago, the economist Robert Frank gives the example of weddings.

Like a good school, a "special" celebration is a relative concept. To seem special, it must stand out from what people expect. But when everyone spends more, the effect is merely to raise the bar that defines special. The average American wedding now costs $30,000, roughly twice as much as in 1990. No one believes that couples who marry today are happier because weddings cost so much more than they used to.

Money itself can be a positional good. It’s not only how much you make that counts, but how much you make relative to those around you—those you are comparing yourself to, those whose respect you want. H.L. Mencken was onto something when he wrote that “A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”

Now, a post-scarcity world probably won’t have money. The United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek world doesn’t. But it’s full of positional goods. Not everyone gets accepted to Starfleet Academy, not everyone graduates, and not everyone gets to be captain of a starship or a similarly impressive high-ranking position. (Do you think parents in the 24th century are going to want their children grow up to be red-shirted security officers?) In the Star Trek world, there is often talk of esteemed scientists, artists, and diplomats, which implies that there are average scientists, artists, and diplomats—and, sadly, it means there must be at least some really shitty, bottom-of-the-barrel scientists, artists, and diplomats. It must hurt to be part of that group. The inevitability of hierarchy, that some people will do better than others and be more respected for it, leads to all sorts of social pleasures and social pains.

The writers of science fiction are well aware of this. In an episode of the original Star Trek, we are introduced to Richard Daystrom, a scientist brought aboard the Enterprise to test an advanced AI that could control a starship by itself, rendering a human crew superfluous. (Timely!). Daystrom is brilliant—a Nobel Prize winner who made his most important discovery at 24. He never managed to top this early success, though, and grew bitter over what he felt was a lack of appreciation for his more recent work. (Things do not go well with his AI creation, and Daystrom ends the episode being sent to an institution.)

In Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, there are no material needs and little personal property. But then people strive to distinguish themselves in other ways, such as skill, daring, and creativity. And so being good at games becomes of great importance, the source of great pleasure and pain.

Some readers are nodding, others are rolling their eyes. Assistant to the Regional Manager! I don’t care about that! In a post-scarcity world, I’ll enjoy the freedom to do whatever I want, and I wouldn’t care at all about what anyone thinks of me.

Status and respect do matter more to some people than others, and some are unconcerned about the hierarchies that others value. I know many professors who care deeply about accumulating awards and honors, but I also know a few who don’t, including one who really doesn’t want to be promoted to Full Professor, because she sees it as a silly honor, and would find the additional committee work to be a pain in the ass.

But I’ve never met anyone who was entirely indifferent to the opinions of others. Maybe it’s not important to be the best, but it usually stings to be thought of as the worst. More than that, everyone has some aspects of their lives where they want to be thought well of. Maybe they don’t care about being Assistant Regional Manager, Full Professor, or a respected Player of Games. But they would be deeply hurt if people thought of them as a below-average parent, one of the worst writers on Substack, or their least-interesting friend.

One of the good things about the modern world is that there are many hierarchies, and so many opportunities to do well, or at least not to totally suck. Will Wilkinson put it like this:

The cultural fragmentation some critics lament is precisely what liberates us from unavoidable zero-sum positional conflict. Surfer dudes don’t compete with Star Trek geeks for status.

In an article published in the Boston Review on status and luxury goods, I elaborated on this point, writing:

My neighbor has a Rolex and a Ferrari, so he is richer, but my children are better looking and better behaved. He is more fit, but I’ve published in Boston Review.

I admit that there’s something a bit unseemly about talking about titles, hierarchies, and status, and it’s understandable that some of us don’t want to admit to caring about such things. But the point can be put in a broader, more respectable way. A new book by Rebecca Goldstein called The Mattering Instinct explores the universal desire to matter, to be of significance. Goldstein defines mattering as

to be deserving of attention

Wanting to matter is a more respectable ambition, but, again, the problem here is that attention is a scarce resource, yet another positional good. If I matter a lot to my niece—she likes me, she thinks I’m a cool uncle—it’s a source of joy to me. But not everyone can matter to her to the same extent; she can have only one favorite uncle, and, indeed, part of the joy of mattering is being special. Some people matter more than others, to the world at large and to their friends and family. And some don’t matter at all, which must feel horrible.

I don’t think status, respect, and mattering are the most important things. Air is more important. Take away someone’s air, and they won’t be worrying about where they stand in a status hierarchy; they won’t obsess over how much they matter. Food is more important, and water is more important. But then its status, respect, and mattering that matter the most.

A related problem with utopia has to do with sexual desire. One might think that the sorts of utopias that people talk about can solve the problem of lust, with immersive VR porn and sexbots and the like. And yes, such technological innovations would scratch a certain itch—the simple desire for sex with someone (something?) sexually desirable. The opportunity for anonymous coupling is a big feature of the utopia depicted in The Land of Cockaigne, where we are told that monks get to have sex with hot young nuns, so that a lucky monk “can easily have twelve wives each year.”

But, of course, there’s more to desire—we are often attracted to a particular person. We want them; we covet them. It’s wonderful if they covet us back; it’s agonizing if they don’t. To make things worse, even if we’re lucky enough to arrive at reciprocal desire, we often want the other’s desire to be exclusively pointed our way. They not only should want to have sex with us; they should not have sex—and perhaps should not even want to have sex—with anyone else.3

And so one person’s satisfaction is contingent on the choices of another. If things don’t work out, there is no good solution. Either the person who is attracted has their desires frustrated, or, worse, the person who is the target of the attraction is coerced into a sexual relationship (possibly an exclusive one) that they don’t want.

Attempts to create Utopian communities have always struggled with the problem of sex. Some, like the Shakers, did their best to emulate what they see as our fate in heaven, and banned non-procreative sex altogether. Others, like the Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, practiced “complex marriage” where everyone was considered to be married to everyone else—monogamy was seen as a form of idolatry that detracted from one’s devotion to the community. None of this worked.

I’ve framed this as an issue about sex, but of course it applies more broadly. We fall in love with people who aren’t in love with us; we want to be best friends with people who don’t want to be best friends with us, and maybe don’t even like us. It’s the problem of mattering all over again; we want to matter to other people in a certain way, but the savage reality is that they might not feel the same way as we do.4

Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.

The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.

0:00 Teaser
1:09 How Bob’s and Paul’s names wound up in the Epstein Files
7:13 Epstein’s double option play
13:12 Power brokers after Epstein
17:49 Understanding Moltbook
25:26 Bob on the “big question” Moltbook raises
35:00 Paul: Some thoughts on Bob’s discussion with certain AI critics
38:12 Heading into Overtime: Friends in the Epstein Files, the strangest thing Bob’s ever done for money, and more.

Paid subscribers get the overtime segment, which includes:

Adventures in outrageous speaking fees.
Reactions to NonZero’s “AI Con” episode.
Bob’s Rosebud.
Are we on the brink of an AI-abetted catastrophe?
Was the current you inevitable (more or less)?
On mansplaining.

They also get an astonishing 50% discount on Bob’s podcast/newsletter.

Read more

I know a lot of people who believe all this. But I’m becoming increasingly confident that all of the above sentences are false.

There was always reason to be skeptical. For one thing, the idea of inborn spiritual yearning never made much evolutionary sense. There are plausible enough accounts of how we could evolve other appetites, including basic ones like hunger and thirst, and fancier ones such as a desire for respect and a curiosity about the world around us. But why would evolution lead us to be wired up for spiritual yearning? How would that lead to increased survival and reproduction? Perhaps it’s a by-product of other evolved appetites, but I’ve never seen an account of this that’s even close to convincing.

I know the theistic response here: So much the worse for biological evolution! Some theists would argue that the universal yearning for the transcendent is evidence for divine intervention during the evolutionary process. They would endorse Francis Collins’ proposal that God stepped in at some point after we separated from other primates and wired up the hominid brain to endow us with various transcendental features, such as an enlightened morality and a spiritual yearning for the Almighty.

I think there are a lot of problems with this view (see here for my critical response to Collins’ proposal), but the main one I want to focus on here is that it’s explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist. There is no good evidence that spiritual yearning is part of human nature. Children are certainly receptive to the religious ideas that their parents and the rest of society throw at them (they are very good at acquiring all forms of culture), but I’ve seen no support for the view that they spontaneously express a spiritual yearning that isn’t modeled for them. Children raised by secular parents tend to be thoroughly secular.

What about a milder claim? Maybe we’re not born with a drive toward the transcendent. But surely any reflective and feeling person will come to seek the transcendent in response to encountering death, injustice, the seeming randomness of tragedy and good fortune, and so on. That is, any reflective and feeling person will come to think: There has to be more going on here. There has to be some underlying order here; something spiritual and sacred and moral. And so any reflective and feeling person will be drawn to religion and spirituality.

I used to think this was plausible enough, but I just came back from a conference where I heard Tony Jones talk about this work with Ryan Burge. Jones and Burge are the principal investigators of a Templeton-funded project studying Americans who claim to be not affiliated with any religion. There are a lot of these “Nones”—about 30% of Americans, with the proportion rising to 45% when you look at Gen Z.

Jones was on a panel called “Yearning and Meaning,” and the conference organizer went around to each panelist and asked what their most surprising finding was. Rather than try to quote Jones from memory, I’ll draw on his Substack post where he talked about this finding. (This post is also where I got the Pascal quotation I used above.)

His finding concerned a specific subgroup of “Nones”. As Jones and Burge find, not all the self-described “Nones” really reject the transcendent. Some of them are indistinguishable from religious people—they just don’t like to call themselves “religious”—others fall into the category of “spiritual-but-not-religious”. The interesting finding concerns those Nones who are totally secular.

Another large group — 33 million Americans — we classify as the Dones, or the Disengaged. Ninety-nine percent of them report praying “seldom or never.” Same for how often they attend a religious service. They’re not going to get married or buried in a church. They’re not going to let their kids go to Young Life camp.

And here’s the finding.

And they don’t have a God-shaped hole. They don’t long for religion, and they don’t miss it. You might say they’re filling that hole with other things (travelling soccer teams, mushrooms, Crossfit), but that doesn’t show up in the data. Their mental health and well-being indicators are a couple points lower than the Nones who look more religious, but it’s not a massive chasm. They aren’t religious or spiritual, and they’re just fine, thank you very much.

The title of his post is: Pascal Was Wrong: There (Probably) Is No God-Shaped Hole.1

Just to balance things out, there are three claims about human nature and purpose/religion/meaning that I think are true, and worth emphasizing.

First, just to get this out of the way, nobody would deny that some people have a God-shaped hole. I’ve met atheists who tell me that they envy the solace that they think religion provides, and I’ve met religious people who tell me that they derive great meaning from their faith. I don’t think these people are lying.

But this is a much weaker claim than the view that we all have a God-shaped hole. As an analogy, I’m sure there are people who wish they played pickleball—it looks like so much fun!—as well as pickleball players who say that their sport gives them great satisfaction. But you wouldn’t conclude from this that there is a pickleball-racket-shaped hole in the soul of all of us.

Second, I do think that religion is in some sense a natural outgrowth of the human mind. If you dropped children on a desert island and waited a few dozen generations to see the society that they came up with, my bet is that this society would include religion. But the universal appeal of religion has little to do with spiritual yearning; rather, it arises from the naturalness of ideas such as supernatural beings and mind-body dualism. (For details, see my article conveniently titled Religion is natural, or my book Descartes’ Baby.)

As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, the claim that religion is about morality, spirituality, or the answers to “deep questions” is only true of more recent religions. These are not features of religion more generally. In a review of Wright’s book, I described early deities as “doofus gods”.

Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.

Religion is universal, and in some sense natural, but the sort of religion that is universal and natural has little to do with spiritual yearning.

Third, I agree that we are drawn towards meaning; this was a central theme of my book The Sweet Spot. But, along the same lines as what I just said about religion, the sort of meaning that we are drawn to isn’t inherently spiritual or transcendental. Meaningfulness encompasses such secular activities such as deep, satisfying relationships and difficult pursuits that make a difference in the world. Some people do find meaning in religion, but this is just one source among many.

I’ll end on a personal note. All my life, I’ve heard about how everyone is drawn to the transcendent. I never felt this myself, and assumed that I was strange—missing something important about being a person. It’s nice to know that I’m not strange at all, at least not in this way.

0:00 Teaser
1:06 Different readings of the Renee Good videos
15:04 JD Vance vs Stephen Miller: compare and contrast
18:55 Trump vs Hitler: compare and contrast
23:55 ICE agents and stormtroopers: compare and contrast
35:34 Has Elon totally lost it?
43:22 Paul: Politicians are people too!
47:40 Heading to Overtime

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Bob on (sleeping) drugs.
Has AI put professors on the chopping block?
Is the AI wave crashing?
Bob Weir (barely) remembered.
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How skeptical is too skeptical?

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NOTE: I post this at the start of each semester, making edits and corrections each time.

Please add more teaching tips in the comments.

Several years ago, I put together some informal teaching advice for college and university profs teaching their first classes (though I hope it applies more generally). Here is what I wrote.

1. Enthusiasm. When you’re in class, you should act like there’s no place in the world you’d rather be. Enthusiasm is infectious—it makes your audience perk up, enjoy the material more, like you more, and learn more.

2. Confidence. Act as if you know your shit. Act like you’ve done this a hundred times before, and it’s always gone smashingly. This will reassure the students that they’re in good hands and they’ll learn better.

3. Mix it up. Don’t just repeat the same thing; add some variety—movies, demos, etc. Variety is the cure for boredom.

(yes, I have been told that some of the above is also sex advice.)

4. Bring in other people. Guest lectures, interviews, etc. Easy to do with Zoom.

5. Be modest in your goals for each class. The most common mistake of beginning teachers is cramming too much material into a single session. (Early in our careers, we teach as if our advisor were in the room, drumming his or her fingers impatiently.)

6. Be yourself. Everyone has strengths; teach in a way that aligns with what you’re good at. For example, if you’re funny, engage the students with humor—if not, don’t bother. Serious and intense is also a fine way to run a class ... but so is cheerful and mellow. There are a lot of ways to do this right.

7. Teaching prep can leech away your time; don’t let it. Say to yourself, Diminishing Returns. Then, say, Opportunity Costs. Repeat as needed.

8. A well-timed “Great question. I don’t know — but I’ll find out for next class” is charming and makes everyone feel good. This is so powerful that some profs are rumored to do this even when they DO know.

9. Use specific students as examples in arbitrary ways. For example, in a Developmental Psychology course, you might say: “So, Stella? — let’s pretend you’re a 5-year-old. So imagine we asked you ...”. You don’t have to actually ask Stella anything, but once students become aware that you do this, they’ll pay more attention, wondering if next time it will be them.

10. When I was in the second grade, I asked a stupid question, and the teacher, Mrs. Pound, made me feel like an idiot. It says something about how awful this was that I still remember this experience so many years later! Don’t be like Mrs. Pound. Every question a student asks is, at minimum, “Interesting!”. If it’s total gibberish, go for something like: “Parts of your question might go a bit too far beyond our topic for today, but one of your points raises something really neat ...” and then talk about something else.

11. Use concrete examples whenever possible, often from your own life. They don’t necessarily have to be true. (There is no Mrs. Pound).

12. Many good teachers self-medicate before class, especially if they suffer from anxiety. This is fine, so long as you’re careful with dosage.

[Thanks to Chaz Firestone for comments on an earlier version of this]

Over the years, I’ve received objections, support, and new ideas over email and X. Some feedback was good; some wasn’t.

One person was offended by my silly sex joke and wanted me to remove it but wouldn’t explain why, so no. Several others pointed out that some of the other points are also good sex advice. My friend Tamler Sommers voted for #4: “Bring in other people.”

A few people complained about #12, but I don’t see the problem. Of course, it’s irresponsible to teach when you’re drunk, baked, or tripping balls. But there is a Goldilocks level of anxiety, and many people benefit from taking something to calm them down. I know a famous professor who pops a lorazepam before she lectures, and nobody gives her any grief, and nobody should. I don’t think a gulp of vodka is any different (though, given that not everyone sees it my way, pop some mints, too.)

As an extreme case, Scott Stossel, editor at The Atlantic (an excellent editor—he worked with me on a few articles), suffers from extreme anxiety. Here is how he deals with it.

Let’s say you’re sitting in an audience and I’m at the lectern. Here’s what I’ve likely done to prepare. Four hours or so ago, I took my first half milligram of Xanax. (I’ve learned that if I wait too long to take it, my fight-or-flight response kicks so far into overdrive that medication is not enough to yank it back.) Then, about an hour ago, I took my second half milligram of Xanax and perhaps 20 milligrams of Inderal. .. I likely washed those pills down with a shot of scotch or, more likely, vodka, the odor of which is less detectable on my breath. … I need the alcohol to slow things down and to subdue the residual physiological eruptions that the drugs are inadequate to contain. In fact, I probably drank my second shot—yes, even though I might be speaking to you at, say, 9 in the morning—between 15 and 30 minutes ago, assuming the pre-talk proceedings allowed me a moment to sneak away for a quaff.

Scott gives a great talk.

Others benefit from a stimulant like caffeine to get them going. They’re not naturally hyped up enough; the double espresso gives them a spring in their step. As with many things, the motto here is: Know Thyself.

A few people objected to #1 and #2—they see something insincere about projecting enthusiasm and confidence when you may not feel it. Now, I should emphasize that I’m not suggesting dishonesty. As I said in #8, we should be up-front when we don’t know something. But there are many ways to present oneself honestly, and my advice is to choose a relatively confident and self-assured mode. Projecting the notion that things are going well can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I know some disagree. A while ago, someone described on Twitter how they start a new class each semester. I lost the link, but it went like this:

I’m honest. I tell the students about my own struggles with my career and my life. These are hard times, and we’re all doing the best we can, and so I try to make it clear that I know what they are going through. And humility is important. I’m not some sort of guru, some “sage on a stage”, and I don’t want them to see me that way. They’ll learn from me, sure, but I’ll also learn from them, and we’ll make it through this class together, as a team.

I tried to be fair and not caricature this view. And maybe there is something to it, particularly in a small advanced seminar where the professor and the students work together on complex and unfamiliar material.

But I don’t think it’s the right approach for a less advanced group of students. It’s self-indulgent; it centers the professor too much; it places too much responsibility on the students. It’s like a therapist saying: “I know you’re here to talk about your problems, but I’m a person too, and I have my own problems, so let’s approach this as equals and help each other.” This isn’t how successful therapy works.

Now, these things are on a continuum, and I’m mindful of the advice of #6—There are many ways to do things right. But I do think my way is better.

Here are three things I think I got wrong.

First, regarding #4, people have pointed out that bringing in other people is risky, particularly for a lecture class. Most guest lecturers are awful (most lecturers are awful), and when the lecture goes poorly, the students blame the prof, as they should. Even when the guests do well, the act of bringing someone else in can signal laziness on the part of the professor and can disrupt the flow of the class. So now I do it sparingly.

Second, I’ve been persuaded that the advice in #8 isn’t for everyone. Making a big deal of how I sometimes don’t know the answer works well for me, but I am an older white male professor. Students have stereotypes that work to my advantage. They start with the assumption that, in general, I do know my shit. If you are younger, or non-white, or non-male, you won’t have the same leg-up, and so confessions of this sort are riskier and perhaps best avoided.

Third, I do think #11 is sensible—using concrete examples from one’s own life are pedagogically useful. But I said that it’s ok to make them up. Lying is wrong, so I take that back. (You can, however, exaggerate for comic or dramatic effect. There are no good stories without exaggeration.)

Here are some further pieces of advice.

13. At least for the first class, arrive early and make small talk with the students who are also early. You also need plenty of time to check if the AV works.

14. Take notes after class about what worked and what didn’t. I sometimes give a lecture off old notes or slides and then get to a point where things go badly (an explanation doesn’t work, a joke falls flat, a graph is unreadable), and I think, goddamn, this same thing happened last year when I gave this lecture! It wouldn’t have happened if last year I had taken notes after class. Take these notes immediately once the class is over; your memory and motivation will disappear the moment you walk out of the room.

15. You have a captive audience that relies on you for your grades. This is a position of power. They can’t walk out or tell you that you’re being an ass. (Well, they can, but at a cost.) Don’t abuse this. Your lecture class on computational neuroscience or your seminar on the 19th-century British novel is not the time to tell your students your opinion of Elon Musk or the final season of Game of Thrones. Be a fucking professional.

16. If you can help it, don’t swear unnecessarily. It offends some students, and the rest will think you’re trying too hard to be cool.

17. This will be the most controversial opinion of all, but I’m not a fan of having students give presentations in seminars. Most student presentations are awful (of course they are—it’s really hard to give a good presentation; as I said above, most professors give awful presentations), and while the students might get something out of preparing and presenting, it’s boring for everyone who has to listen.

18. But I do like to make sure that every student talks in every seminar meeting. One way I do this is by beginning each class with some statement, argument, or story relevant to the day’s topic and then going around the room and having everyone give a short remark about it.

    For instance, in a moral psychology seminar about the role of social pressure in how people act, I might begin by telling the story of the Ring of Gyges, which bestows the power of invisibility on anyone who wears it. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon says that anyone who had this power would do whatever they pleased without concern for morality:

    No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

    I go around the room and ask each student whether they agree with Glaucon. What would they do if they had the ring? I then respond to what they say and connect their answers to those of other students: Great answer, Moira, but why do you think you disagree so much with Eva about this? Eva—why are you so much more optimistic about human nature than Moira? And so everyone, even students who will never talk otherwise, gets to say something to the class and helps shape the discussion.

I’ll end by returning to the issue of centering yourself in the classroom. It’s an issue I struggle with. There are many rewards to being a good teacher, and one of them is getting a reputation as a good teacher. This can feel wonderful.

There are worse goals that a person can have—among other things, students tend to learn better if they feel they’re in good hands (see #1 and #2 above). But too much focus on how students see you can distort your priorities. You can start preparing your lectures to impress and entertain—as opposed to just teaching well. Sometimes these goals are in synch, but not always. So, here’s the final bit of teaching advice:

19. Remember: It’s not about you.

About ten years ago, I was co-chair of the Dean’s Committee on Online Education at Yale.1 Our primary mission was to explore making some of Yale’s classes freely available to students worldwide by creating MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

I thought this was a fantastic idea. Giving away our best courses to people who would otherwise have no access to university education seemed like just the thing a great university should do. I also saw the rise of MOOCs as poised to revolutionize higher education in North America. Some of Yale’s best professors were lined up to teach these courses, including the physicist Ramamurti Shankar, the psychologist Laurie Santos, and the Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller. Few professors at American universities can teach as well as these scholars, so wouldn’t it be wonderful if their lectures were available to students everywhere?

The committee decided to proceed with the plan, and I volunteered to present its recommendation at a meeting of senior faculty.

It did not go well—I got my ass handed to me. Many of my colleagues hated the idea. They said that free open classes would dilute the value of a Yale education. It would endanger their jobs and those of their students. There were strong feelings expressed, and a bit of yelling.

The committee met after the meeting, and I remember an Associate Dean looking at me sympathetically and murmuring, “Well, this isn’t really the sort of thing that requires a faculty vote.” So we just did it.2

Nobody talks about MOOCs anymore. Like professors everywhere, my colleagues and I are now obsessed with AI.

Universal access to LLMs poses problems that we can’t duck. How can we keep assigning reading responses and take-home essays when every student has access to LLMs that can do their work for them in seconds? (Despite all of the talk of AI slop, the finished product is typically hard to distinguish from good student writing.) I’m teaching a freshman seminar this semester, and I’m struggling to figure out how to assign work that most of the students won’t cheat on.

On balance, though, I am excited by the rise of the machines. Putting aside all the ways LLMs have helped my everyday life—including dealing with bureaucracy, offering advice on home renovations, and providing feedback on medical reports for elderly relatives—they have made my work life better in countless ways. It’s not just that ChatGPT can quickly handle many of the bullshit tasks that fill a professor’s day. It can, in ways I’m just coming to understand, help me as a scholar and researcher. I use it to brainstorm ideas, provide critical feedback on my papers, and write extended summaries of research areas. It has taught me a lot—I’ve got a lot of mileage out of the command: “Explain such-and-so to me like I’m a 10-year-old”. ChatGPT is becoming more and more like a sycophantic, erratic, and occasionally brilliant research assistant; maybe one day it will be a collaborator.

I’m not really a tech guy, and much of my pedagogy, mentoring, and research can be charitably called “old school”. So I wouldn’t have thought I’d be ahead of the curve here. But I am. It’s such a surprise to me how few of my colleagues share my enthusiasm. If you go on academic Bluesky and say anything positive about AI, you’ll get slammed. I have attended meetings where other faculty members with far more technical chops than I’ll ever have proudly announce that they refuse to learn how to work with AI. More than one prof I know has said that they would ban it if they could.

This reaction reminds me a lot of the reaction to MOOCs years ago. And this makes me wonder: Do professors fear the future? Are we anti-innovation?

Now that would be a hell of an extrapolation to make from two anecdotes. A more charitable interpretation—one that I bet many readers will have settled on—is that profs know bad ideas when they see them. Maybe MOOCs were a mistake; maybe AI is a genuine threat to education, science, and scholarship, and professors are sharp enough to appreciate this. Rejecting dumbass ideas isn’t fearing the future; it’s just being smart.

Well, maybe. But I think there is something going on here that’s a lot broader than MOOCs and LLMs.

Imagine being an American undergraduate in the 1980s and suddenly zapped by a time machine into the present. Things are different! There are a lot more women. It used to be about fifty-fifty; now, colleges and universities are about 60% female. In 1980, non-White students accounted for under one-fifth of undergraduates; now they’re roughly half. There are technological changes. Assignments, syllabi, and readings will be posted “on the web”; lecturers will use “PowerPoint”; people will sometimes say “Let’s meet over Zoom”. You’ll be pleased to discover grade inflation—it’s a lot easier to get an A.

But most of the life of an undergraduate will be similar. The popular majors have shifted a bit (interest in education has dropped; now there’s computer science), but the big picture is largely unchanged—students tend to cluster into business (by far the largest major), economics, psychology, and the humanities. The graduation requirements for these majors are often pretty much the same. And, just as in the 80s, you’ll go to lecture halls for introductory classes, attend labs if you’re a science student, and take smaller seminars as a junior or senior (if you’re lucky enough to get into them). You’ll do the same sorts of take-home reading responses, essays, and problem sets, and you will take the same sorts of exams (multiple-choice, short-answer, etc.).

If you were a time-travelling graduate student, you would notice hardly any difference at all. In the 80s and in the present, you’ll attend seminars, suffer through qualifying exams, meet with your committee, meet with your advisor, work in a lab (sciences) or spend time in the library (humanities), and go through various hurdles to get your PhD.

And what if you were a faculty member? You’ll be sad to discover that it’s still publish-or-perish. There’s the same academic hierarchy. Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, then Full Professor, with Adjunct Professors still being exploited and doing much of the work. Your day will include writing letters of reference, meeting with students, flying to conferences, spreading malicious gossip, and attending faculty meetings.

I love campus novels (see here for a list of my favourites), and one of the best is Straight Man. This was published in the late 90s, and, rereading it now, it could just as well have been written last year.

Most of the changes that occurred, such as shifting demographics, were beyond professors’ control. (The interesting exception is grade inflation.) And most of what remains the same was within our control. We remain in the world of the 80s, I believe, because this is just the way we professors like it.

#NotAllProfessors, of course. It’s professors who thought up the idea of MOOCs; some professors, such as Tyler Cowen and Ethan Mollick, are bullish on AI, more so than I am, actually. But they are a minority. At least in the humanities and social sciences, the fields that I’m most familiar with, professors are wary of change.

It turns out that there’s a word for people who feel like this. In his mission statement for the National Review, William F. Buckley described a conservative as

someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop!

Most professors are conservatives.

Is this conservatism a bad thing? It depends on whether the past is worth conserving. My own view is that we are often right to be conservative. As one example, seminars are a wonderful institution; they’ve been around at least since Socrates, and there’s every reason to keep them. Administrators sometimes chafe at their expense—it’s not efficient, they will tell us, to have a prof sitting with a dozen students instead of teaching hundreds. But professors are right to insist on their value. Another example is tenure; I strongly support the protections of tenure and have no patience for the Republican radicals who want to get rid of them.

But there are all sorts of things about the university that we should have radically transformed. The softest target here is lectures. In a world with laptops and Zoom, would you cram 500 students into a lecture hall for 60-90 minutes to watch a professor stand on a stage and show slides? Is this the best we can do? Whenever I talk to professors who teach large lecture classes, their biggest complaint is that students don’t show up. My sympathies are with the students. If we are going to have lectures at all (and this is hardly obvious), why have students schlep over to campus at 9 AM to watch them on a hard seat in an auditorium? Why not record them and let the students watch them whenever they want? Actually, if we’re going to do that, why do the lectures have to come from a prof on campus? Why not have them presented by the best professors in the world—in other words, why not MOOCs?

My point here isn’t to convince you to throw your support behind online courses—it would need a much longer discussion to make this persuasive. My point is that this isn’t a conversation anyone is having. And this is because professors are too conservative to explore alternatives to the usual way things are done.

Everyone knows professors aren’t politically conservative. We are famously more progressive than the rest of the population, more prone than average to favor more liberal political parties—in some departments at Yale, for instance, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 78 to 1. Now, being a Democrat is weak sauce, but professors are also more likely than most people to hold truly radical views and to endorse sweeping social and political change.

We are also radical in our ideas—we often shock the world by rejecting received views on religion, gender, the family, and morality. And, more generally, while a time-travelling student or faculty member will find little of the university's life has changed, he or she will notice immediately that the content of what is studied and taught is profoundly different. The ideas explored in a lab meeting or seminar discussion now will have little overlap with whatever was happening in the 80s. Professors are not, in general, stuck in the past.

It’s interesting, then, that the only aspects of our lives where we abandon our bold thinking and our enthusiasm for radical changes are those that matter the most to us.

I think there are two reasons for this.

The first is from the historian Robert Conquest (His “First Law of Politics”).

Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows most about.

In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis recounts a conversation with Conquest, in which Conquest used Amis’s views on education as an example of this generalization.

he [went on] to point out that, while very ‘progressive’ on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience.

Conquest was conservative himself, and his point was that conservatism is the smart default; radicalism is often grounded in ignorance. We are conservative about what we know best because we appreciate the value of the traditional ways of doing things and are sensitive to the risks of giving them up.

I’ll put myself up as an example here. I have a lot of ideas about how to improve the Supreme Court, the training of medical students, and the making of Hollywood movies, but I have to concede that my enthusiasm for radical change might be in part because I don’t understand these institutions very well.3 Conquest would say that if I were better informed, I would have a clearer understanding of the value of the status quo and a better appreciation of the drawbacks of some of my radical ideas. I’d be more conservative.

There’s a professor friend of mine who is very politically left and very pro-union. He wouldn’t cross a picket line if his life depended on it, and he has fought for workers' rights to unionize. There’s just one case where he’s anti-union, and I bet you can guess what it is. Graduate students at his university. He offers sophisticated arguments that graduate student unionization is a mistake, that students aren’t employees in the relevant sense, and that a management-worker dynamic would damage the special (perhaps even sacred) relationship between students and advisors. He may or may not be right, but, regardless, it’s a nice example of how everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows most about.

The second reason we are so conservative is less respectable than Conquest’s First Law. It’s not about expertise; it’s about skin in the game. If you have a lot invested in a system, you won’t want it to change. Asking a prof about AI is like asking a taxi driver to weigh in on Uber. I think I have good reasons for my (conservative) defense of tenure, but you’d be forgiven for assuming that, having worked for and benefited from the protections of tenure, I don’t want them taken away. Part of professors’ unwillingness to give up on lectures is that they take a long time to prepare—once that time is invested, we don’t want to start anew. We certainly don’t want to transform the university in a way that risks making us obsolete. Upton Sinclair put it nicely:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

This second consideration—self-interest—explains why some things do change. These are the cases where the changes are painless. Turning Cs into Bs and Bs into As is no work at all, so once there was sufficient pressure to do so (from students and from promotion committees who care what the students have to say), grade inflation was an easy decision. Other changes, such as restructuring the university hierarchy, giving up on or transforming lectures, and dealing with AI, are considerably more threatening to our way of life, so it’s natural that we balk at them.

If this analysis of academic conservatism is right, it’s very general. These considerations apply to anyone in a field; to anyone with skin in the game. It applies to soldiers, lumberjacks, State Senators, priests, basketball players, and tax accountants—all are predicted to be conservative about what they know best and what matters most to them.4

If this is true, one thing follows. When things do change—for better or for worse—it won’t be the professors who are pushing for it. It will come from the outside, from legislatures, donors, and parents. Like all good conservatives, professors will fight for the status quo.

0:00 David Lynch, Jane Goodall, and other notable 2025 losses
8:35 When Bob called James Watson a "mad scientist"
13:38 Predicting 2050: Star Trek abundance vs. "Total Chaos Planet"?
21:22 The age of algorithmically guided attention
25:54 Global poverty reduction (and its flip side)
30:30 Will anyone care if your newsletter is AI-written?
34:24 Trump's USAID cuts killed a lot of people
37:24 Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the age of the "manifestly crazy"
40:40 Can the Supreme Court stop Trump?
44:54 JD Vance's identity crisis: Tech bro or populist?
48:51 The "Black Swan": When AI starts killing people
52:46 AI scientific breakthroughs to come
59:58 Bob and Paul's 2025 Entertainment Awards
1:04:28 Which jobs are truly AI-proof?
1:18:15 Bob's Epstein document deep-dive
1:27:15 Bill Ackman's conspiracy-theory-brained year
1:30:44 Are US arms sales pushing China to invade Taiwan?
1:36:49 Barry Weiss’s journalistic scruples

I thought that the goal of scholarship is to produce the highest quality academic content. However, many of my colleagues who I respect seem to think that the goal is something more complicated, they endorse things like that it is preferable that the content be fully produced by humans without help from AI. (Ethics seems to have this policy). I’m trying to understand this perspective. Consider a medical journal that does not publish a paper because it was made by AI, although the paper contains the cure for a deadly disease and would be published if it was made by a human. I assume everyone would think that the academic journal has made a grave error. So what’s the difference between this case and philosophy (or related fields)?

Ángel considers an extreme version in which AI writes the paper itself. I want to change the case a bit. Suppose a human remains the author, but AI helps write the paper—it’s involved in brainstorming ideas, clarifying arguments, identifying the relevant literature, anticipating objections, tightening prose, and so on.

Is there anything wrong with this?

If you think using AI will make the paper worse, then it’s obviously wrong to use it, just as it would be wrong to intentionally use a malfunctioning statistical program. But suppose that AI will make a paper better. (What’s “better”? For present purposes, imagine a blind assessment: experts compare a version created alone versus one created with AI; whichever is judged better is better.) Whether or not we’re already there, it’s easy to imagine a future where this is true.

There’s nothing wrong with using AI in these circumstances. In fact, if an author could improve a paper by using AI, it would be irresponsible not to do so.1 What would you think of someone who decided to use the second-best statistical test, who purposefully did a shoddy literature review, or who had the chance to get sharp and useful comments on the paper’s arguments and chose not to? That’s just bad scholarship.

I can think of just one good argument against this conclusion. Producing valuable scholarly work is a good thing, but it’s not the only good thing. Suppose I could do better experiments if I violated ethical rules and harmed my subjects. Still, I shouldn’t do this—the costs outweigh the benefits. Similarly, someone who believes that AI depends on cruel labor practices, has terrible environmental costs, or degrades our cognitive powers, probably shouldn’t use it—unless their work is very important, as in Ángel’s example of curing a deadly disease. Even if you think there are more minor costs, ethical or otherwise, you should take these into account, just as you would factor in the costs of using any other sort of assistance.

The responses to Ángel’s Facebook post, many of them by philosophers, went in a different direction. They didn’t object to his claim that we should use AI if it would cure deadly diseases. But some of them said that philosophy isn’t like that at all. Some likened philosophy to a conversation; others described it as a game. In either case, using AI ruins the endeavor. As one respondent put it,

I would still never make use of [AI] myself in my own papers, because I might as well just read it and leave it at that (for the same reason I wouldn’t look on the internet for the answer to today’s Wordle).

I don’t know what to make of this. Sure, it’s fun to figure things out on your own. But there are certain pleasures that serious scholars have to give up.

After all, nobody would respect a cancer researcher whose work was shoddy because she chose not to take steps to improve it. We think of cancer research as having objective value—it’s important to do it well. Well, I think this is true for other forms of scholarship, including the sort of psychological research that my colleagues and I do, and including philosophical pursuits concerning ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the like. Some of this work is better than others—the arguments are clearer, the examples are better, the ideas are richer, the theories are more responsive to the data, and so on—and since there is value to doing good work, there is an obligation, all other things being equal, for scientists and scholars to use the best tools available.

Does this obligation extend to philosophers who see their careers as Wordle marathons? I guess not—as the expression goes, what’s not worth doing is not worth doing well. I certainly don’t think of philosophy in general in these terms, but maybe there are some careers, maybe even some subfields, where it’s really all a game. Such players can forgo AI—and anything else that makes the game less enjoyable.

Now, I’m framing this in terms of extremes—you’re either curing cancer or playing word games—but, more realistically, even those of us who take our work seriously often let other considerations shape the sort of papers we publish. People rush out papers that aren’t quite ready because they’re on the job market or up for tenure. They cut corners to save time or money. And, like the philosopher quoted above, sometimes they’d take the time to work something out themselves rather than use a tool that quickly does it for them.

These decisions are understandable—they are venial sins at worst. But they really are sins. It’s one thing to refuse to use AI because you don’t think it helps or because you think using it is morally wrong. (I disagree with both of these claims, but if you believe them, then your decision makes sense.) But to refuse to do it because it feels yucky, or it’s not fun, or it’s not authentic—those are bad reasons. Someone who offers these reasons is saying, essentially, that the quality of their work doesn’t matter that much to them. This is not an attitude to be proud of.

Betteridge’s law of headlines states that any headline that ends in a question mark will be answered with a “no”. This post violates the law. Is it irresponsible for academics to refuse to use AI? If they think AI improves the work, and there are no substantial costs, then, if they take their jobs seriously, the answer is yes.2

0:00 Elon’s reckless response to the Brown shooting
11:19 Susie Wiles gone wild
14:31 The weirdest thing about Trump’s weird Rob Reiner post
25:09 The Piers Morgan/Nick Fuentes encounter
37:58 Judging Oliver Sacks
43:26 Heading to Overtime

Paid subscribers get the overtime segment, which includes:

When Bob edited Oliver Sacks.
The Jared Diamond and Napoleon Chagnon fact-checking affairs.
Is Pluribus an allegory for AI?
Other things to watch (and to skip).
Rob Reiner’s greatness.
Writing with—and for?—AI.

They also get an astonishing 50% discount on Bob’s podcast/newsletter.

Read more

This is a free version of a post previously sent to paid subscribers, substantially revised in response to comments. I’m very grateful to the commenters and to Max Bloom, Daniel Greco, Yoel Inbar, Mickey Inzlicht, and Azim Shariff for comments on an early draft.

This is a long one, so you get a TL;DR:

1. Viewpoint diversity is great at the level of the intellectual community.

2. But it’s not necessarily something we should aspire to at the local level—in fact, when it comes to hiring faculty, viewpoint homogeneity is often better.

3. Fans of viewpoint diversity should recognize that trade-offs are involved—encouraging diversity involves making difficult, uncomfortable choices.

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Just about everybody cares about, or pretends to care about, viewpoint diversity.

Many on the left pretend to care because they see appeals to viewpoint diversity as a good way to get the sort of diversity they really want, which has to do with race and gender. Many on the right pretend to care because it’s a way to have their own favored views taken seriously, land themselves plum jobs, and get their right-wing kids accepted to good universities. The Trump administration pretends to care about viewpoint diversity (they do!—see their letter to Harvard) in part for the same reasons as others on the right, and in part because it’s a clever way to own the libs, using their own diversity rhetoric against them.

The test for whether people actually care about viewpoint diversity is whether they continue to value it when it doesn’t favor their side. I’ll believe that people on the left care when they push for gender studies programs to have more emphasis on evolutionary biology. I’ll believe that people on the right care when they stop trying to get professors punished for being critical of Israel. And I’ll never believe that the Trump administration cares about viewpoint diversity because I’m not an idiot.

Viewpoint diversity is a good thing

Pretending to care about viewpoint diversity is a useful rhetorical strategy because there is a general consensus that viewpoint diversity is a good thing. It’s obvious to many that progress in the sciences and the humanities benefits from an openness to new ideas and a willingness to challenge received wisdom.

As I was writing this, I came across a Substack post that summarizes what many think of viewpoint diversity (and the lack of it in academia), featuring a nice quote from Jonathan Haidt.

I’ve long been a supporter of viewpoint diversity. I attended the most recent conference of the Heterodox Academy, which has this on its website:

We advocate for policy and culture changes that ensure our universities are truth-seeking, knowledge-generating institutions grounded in open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement - because great minds don't always think alike.

And, following Haidt and others, I’ve argued that academia has suffered from insufficient diversity—see, for instance, my Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings.

We can see how acceptance of diverse viewpoints makes a difference. Looking at my own field, the areas of psychology where we’ve had the most success are those with the most vibrant debates between different perspectives. And some of our notable failures as a field—many of them revolving around the “replication crisis”—have occurred when discussion has been stifled, often because people were discouraged from challenging a politically popular orthodoxy.

As a different source of support for viewpoint diversity, a terrific article has just appeared in which the philosopher Elizabeth Barnes discusses how much she has benefited from arguing with Peter Singer about disability issues. She begins by outlining the standard arguments in support of this kind of conflict.

More often than not, when we talk about open disagreement and free exchange of ideas, we tend to focus on their broader social value. We say things like: promoting open disagreement is crucial to protecting free speech; promoting open disagreement is the only way to prevent harmful silos and echo chambers; promoting open disagreement is vital to democracy, etc.

Then she adds:

But I think an under-discussed aspect of striving to have conversations across serious disagreement is the personal value they can bring. For entirely self-interested and self-regarding reasons, I think these kinds of conversations are good for me. I think they make me a better philosopher and a better thinker.

She has a lot to say about this—really, read the whole thing—but this discussion really stood out to me:

I’ve always tried to think that the single most valuable gift that someone can give me, qua philosopher, is a really great objection. If I’m doing philosophy well, I need to care more about what’s true than about being right. And this is stupidly hard, because the longer I play with an idea the more attached to it I become, and dammit I want to be right. But if I’m messing up, I (should) really want to know. And for that, I need the best objections.

But the truth is that people who are in broad philosophical agreement with me—while they can and do provide robust criticism—are just less likely to hit me with the toughest and hardest objections. That’s not from any lack of rigor on their part, it’s just that people who are broadly sympathetic to what I’m saying are less likely to be sympathetic to opposing viewpoints, and so less likely to defend them.

… Peter is an interlocutor who has given me a tremendous gift: he will always say what he thinks. No pandering, no soft-balling, just a good old-fashioned objection. I need this more than I’d realized.

But should we value viewpoint diversity when hiring professors?

As I said, I find this all persuasive. But here I am, with some second thoughts. While I think it’s overwhelmingly positive for scholarly fields to include and welcome diverse viewpoints, I am more skeptical about the claim, often made, that we should favor viewpoint diversity when hiring new faculty members.

My arguments aren’t the usual ones. Many people are skeptical about viewpoint diversity because they worry about the harm caused by the expression of certain views. I’ve heard academics say that those who express skepticism about affirmative action can cause psychological damage to minority students. Others argue that certain anti-Israel views shouldn’t be expressed in universities because they are offensive to Israeli students or Jewish students more generally. For both communities, these types of viewpoint diversity have more costs than benefits—the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. These concerns extend naturally to faculty hiring; they are arguments for not hiring the economist who argues against diversity programs or the historian who writes about how Israel is a genocidal state.

Whatever one thinks of this anti-diversity critique—and as you can see, they are endorsed by both the right and the left—this isn’t the argument I will be making.

As a final point, we’re not discussing free speech and academic freedom here. I recently wrote a post (Why are so few professors trouble-makers) arguing that scholars with diverse views—even those that many find repugnant—should have considerable latitude to express them. I haven’t changed my mind about this. My skepticism is rather about how much we should encourage such diverse views through faculty hiring.

OK, enough throat-clearing. I have three concerns regarding viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring.

1. Some diversity gives you less diversity

Even if you favor viewpoint diversity, there’s a limit. You should be cautious about bringing into the fold individuals who themselves hold anti-diversity views.

This is a version of what has been known as the paradox of tolerance, with Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies being the classic source. The paradox is that if you extend tolerance to intolerant people, you risk having intolerance win in the end. Therefore, a tolerant society may have to be intolerant of those who are intolerant.

When we think of people who are intolerant of views different from their own, it’s natural to think of those who hold extreme political or social positions, such as communists, fascists, “the woke”, the MAGA crowd, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, and militant atheists. But there are other, less obvious threats to diversity.

Here is a story I heard from a friend (slightly modified to maintain anonymity): Many years ago, there was a prestigious psychology department where the faculty worried that they didn’t have enough people working in neuroscience, which they all agreed was a valuable area to represent. So they hired some. It turned out, though, that the neuroscientists they hired had a low opinion of research that wasn’t sufficiently similar to their own. And once the department reached a critical mass of new neuroscience hires, they worked together to make it difficult for the department to hire anyone who wasn’t a neuroscientist (and, more specifically, the type of neuroscientist they preferred). The department has become increasingly narrow in its viewpoints and will likely become even more so in the future.

2. It’s not really diversity that we usually want (or should want)

I mentioned earlier that everyone cares about viewpoint diversity, but that’s too simple. My sense is that:

People typically don’t want diversity for its own sake. Instead, they want (what they see as) good views that aren’t currently represented.

The distinction is subtle, but there really is a difference. To see this, consider that I like dessert. Now, someone might like dessert because they want a diverse meal. Something sweet adds a bit of variety after a meal of protein and starch. But that’s not why I like dessert. I like dessert because it tastes good. If you said “Paul likes a diverse dinner”, you wouldn’t be wrong, but the diversity is a by-product of me getting what I want, not a goal in and of itself.

Or consider again the neuroscience story. One could imagine that the psychologists wanted to hire neuroscientists because they read a lot of Jonathan Haidt and wanted to challenge themselves and foster a real marketplace of ideas. But (as the story was told to me), it wasn’t like that at all. They simply viewed neuroscience as a valuable approach to understanding the mind. They hired a social neuroscientist, say, for the same sort of reason that I had ice cream last night.

Similarly, one can imagine that the neuroscientists voted against hiring non-neuroscientists because that sort of work was too different from their own, and they hated viewpoint diversity. But that wasn’t it at all. The neuroscientists wanted a good department, and (they would say), you don’t get a good department by hiring people who do crap research.

Or consider how professors respond to the demands of the Trump administration. The relevant section of their letter to Harvard begins with this:

What should we think of such a demand? A New York Times article on the topic included the following response from a strong advocate of viewpoint diversity.

Steven Pinker, a prominent Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, said on Monday that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory to have the government force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

Plainly, some “diverse” hires are not a good idea. Marxists in the economics department, Jungians in psychology, and homeopaths and Native American healers at the med school would increase viewpoint diversity and challenge established views. But these would be ridiculous hires; no department should make them, and no department should be forced by the government to make them. (If these examples offend you because you are a fan of Marxists, Jungians, homeopaths, and healers, consider the more standard examples of Holocaust deniers in history departments and creationists in biology departments.)

Once again, this isn’t a free speech issue. If one of my colleagues decides to go full Jungian—not as hypothetical as it may sound, Jordan Peterson was once in my department—I don’t think they should lose their job or face any punishment. I just don’t think we should hire someone who works in that area.

Even if you like viewpoint diversity, then, it’s not enough for a potential hire to have views that differ from others; they have to be views worth taking seriously, as judged by experts in the area. And, yes, experts can be wrong. But there’s no alternative to making the hard choices about which views are intellectually valuable and which are not.

Here I’m following the lead of a particularly thoughtful piece by Daniel Greco, who writes

… with government grants, tenure track professorships, and the like—it’s impossible for all views to be equally supported, and anyone allocating limited resources needs to make substantive decisions about which projects are the most promising.

If you think the narrowing of academic debate is a problem, you can’t just point to the fact that some views aren’t represented; you need to make a targeted case that we’d be better off spending more of our intellectual energy discussing the views you worry we’re missing.

3. Homogeneity is good, too

A good response to this by a fan of viewpoint diversity is to concede the points above—sure, we don’t want to hire people with diverse views who themselves oppose diversity; sure, we don’t want to hire crackpots and nutcases—but to insist that, still, there is real value to viewpoint diversity within a university department. Holding everything else constant, it’s best to bring on board people who challenge the consensus.

Let’s explore this. Imagine a psychology department with a strong social psychology group that includes a community of like-minded scholars working on implicit biases. The group has the opportunity to hire a new faculty member, and there are two top candidates.

• Agatha — who does research that is very much in agreement with that of the existing faculty. Agatha has appeared on conference panels with the social psychologists there; they collaborate with some of the same people, they praise and promote each other’s work on social media, and so on.

• Craig — who is critical of implicit bias work and collaborates with researchers who argue that such biases are unimportant and uninteresting. When people in the department submit papers, they often request that Craig, Craig’s advisor, and their colleagues not be asked to serve as reviewers—Team Craig is described as too opposed to their work to be truly objective. (In case it matters, Craig’s own research explores explicit biases, which he believes are the only biases that matter.)1

The social psychologists will probably favor Agatha. It’s normal to prefer people who like and respect your work. And, human nature being what it is, they will probably say (and believe) that Agatha’s work is objectively better than Craig’s. But, for the sake of this example, imagine that they (begrudgingly) agree that Craig is as serious a scholar as Agatha is. Both come from reputable labs, have excellent publication records, and have received numerous awards. In fact, since I get to create this example, imagine that Agatha and Craig’s qualifications, in the eyes of someone with no skin in the game, are perfectly matched.

So, who should the department choose? For a proponent of viewpoint diversity, it’s a no-brainer. If favoring viewpoint diversity means anything at all, it means that you should prefer the more diverse candidate when it’s a coin flip situation. They should hire Craig.

I disagree. I think they should hire Agatha.

One concern is that it’s unrealistic to expect Craig to shake things up. In my experience, faculty members with different views tend to avoid conflict. (At Yale, I had a colleague who thought my research was bullshit, and yet we were great pals; we just never talked about my research.) It’s a pleasant fantasy to imagine that Craig and his new implicit bias colleagues are going to enthusiastically argue about these issues, engage in adversarial collaborations, and cheerfully work together to converge on the truth. More likely, the social psychologists will complain amongst themselves about how the rest of the department bullied them into hiring this loser and will tell their students not to take his seminars. And Craig will hide in his office and apply for jobs in departments where people might like and respect him.

(To make matters worse, there is the problem of the academic hierarchy. If Craig is untenured, he will worry about offending his senior colleagues, who will ultimately decide whether he keeps his job. If Craig is tenured, then he should worry about engaging too sharply with the junior colleagues he disagrees with, since he will ultimately decide whether they get to keep their jobs.)

Again, I’m not denying the overall value of having people of different views engage in productive debate. I’m just denying that this is what happens when people of different views are in the same academic department.

Return now to Agatha. There are real benefits to having Agatha around. She will have colleagues who are interested in and respect her work; she can collaborate with them, teach seminars with them, co-advise students with them, and all of that good stuff. Everyone benefits.

We have an expression for this in academia—something we trot out when we want to hire someone who does the same work we do: Building For Strength.

The more general point here is that, at the local level, homogeneity can be a good thing in science.2 It’s no accident that the most productive collaboration in all of psychology, between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, was between two individuals with similar backgrounds who agreed about just about everything.

Now this can go too far. You don’t want to hire a faculty member who is a perfect clone of a prof who is already there (and I’ve seen that happen, as when a prof successfully campaigns to hire their student or their close collaborator). 100% overlap is too much. What you want is a near neighbor who is interested in the same questions as you are, respects your work, and also brings something new to the table. But 90% overlap? That’s just right.

The value of homogeneity holds more generally. Here is Peter Thiel on startups.

Startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams. They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world. The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek. Most important, we were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments. For the company to work, it didn’t matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.

If any readers are left at this point, someone is shouting: An academic department is not a freaking startup. OK, fine, so consider the story of the George Mason University economics department. I only learned about this through podcasts and conversations, so I asked ChatGPT to provide a summary:

In the early 2000s, George Mason University sought to strengthen its economics department by recruiting scholars who aligned with the Austrian and public choice traditions, which emphasize limited government and market-oriented policies. This strategic hiring approach was instrumental in shaping the department's distinctive identity. Notably, Nobel laureates James Buchanan and Vernon Smith were among the prominent figures who joined the faculty during this period, contributing to the department's growing reputation.

They couldn’t do what a department like Harvard could do—hire the best people across all areas. So they decided to build a tight community of like-minded people, and it paid off nicely.

Diversity is great. But have you tried building for strength?

I don’t think all departments should be like the George Mason economics department. If you have the resources, it’s good to cover a range of approaches—not so there can be productive debate, but because there is pedagogical merit in this sort of breadth. You do have to teach undergraduates and train graduate students, after all. A psychology department, for instance, should have professors who study different things—child development, social cognition, neural processes, and so on.

This consideration, by the way, is a rejoinder to those who say, “Why not just hire on merit?” Departments have never hired just on merit, and they would be foolish to do so.3 Suppose a psychology department has several people who study shyness in adolescents, but no one who studies memory. In that case, they should prioritize a new applicant who studies memory over yet another shyness maven, even if there is a shyness applicant who is, otherwise, a stronger scholar. Any decent department needs to have people who can teach about memory.

This sort of diversity—covering the right range of topics—is plainly relevant when shaping a department, and even more obviously relevant when creating a university. To put it a bit self-deprecatingly, if universities really did work by hiring the very smartest people, there’s no way that psychology would regularly be one of the largest departments.

So, yay, diversity. But we’re not talking about viewpoint diversity here. The goal with this sort of broad hiring isn’t to get to the truth through clashing perspectives and productive debate. (Nobody expects the shyness profs and the memory prof to ever talk to one another.) Instead, you want a department to be diverse because there are different jobs to be done, in the same sense that a baseball team needs good pitchers and good outfielders.

Or, as another example, a team of heroic mercenaries like The A-Team is pleasingly diverse, containing a strong but caring leader, an unstable pilot, a handsome con man, and a tough-guy mechanic who is afraid of flying. (This was made in the 80s; if it came out later, it would include a smartass computer hacker.) I think good departments work like this, except that there’s a neuroscientist, an expert on child development, a clinical psychologist, and a strong but caring department chair. But once again, this is not viewpoint diversity.

So here’s my recommendation for how to hire professors:

Try to cover the relevant areas a department needs with the best people you can get. Make no effort to bring in faculty with views that clash. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Two counterarguments

Suppose you agree with everything I’ve said so far. Still, there are a couple of things to worry about.

The first is best explained with an analogy. Suppose you believe that gender and ethnicity should play no role at all in faculty hiring. Still, you might end up supporting policies that favor women and racial minorities.

Is this a contradiction? Nope—sometimes there are pre-existing biases against certain groups that need to be corrected. If search committees have a bias towards men, say, one way to correct for this and get the totally merit-based system you want is to establish a countervailing bias in favor of women.

To make things unrealistically concrete, suppose search committee members assign numerical scores to candidates and hire the person with the highest overall score—but, because the committee members are sexist, they give male candidates 5 points more just because they’re men. If you do nothing, you have an unfair and sexist system, but if you respond by automatically adding 5 points to the female candidates, everything is now perfectly fair. In some cases, bias + bias = no bias.

Going back to viewpoint diversity, there might be an unfair prejudice against certain research programs, and so some countervailing bias might be called for. Greco again, this time on how some professors deal with views different from their own.

It’s not enough to note that some views are beyond the pale and gesture vaguely at crackpots and bigots. If you think we haven’t lost much by marginalizing certain kinds of dissent, then you too need to make a substantive case: that the views in question are sufficiently implausible or intellectually barren that there’s little to be learned from engaging them. As it turns out, I think that in plenty of parts of academia there’s a powerful case to be made that we need more political diversity; we’re missing out on perspectives that are not relevantly similar to holocaust denial, and our research suffers for it.

Once again, while I’m a fan of viewpoint diversity in general, I don’t think we should favor diverse views in faculty hiring—no affirmative action for iconoclasts! And indeed, maybe there should be a bit of preference for the conformists, because of the value of homogeneity.

But this consideration does make me temper my view a bit. If there is an irrational bias against people with opinions that push against the consensus—”hiring someone skeptical of our theory of implicit biases is like hiring a Nazi”—you might need some countervailing bias in favor of viewpoint diversity. Because sometimes, bias + bias = no bias.

The second concern is a potential collective action problem.4 I’ve argued that:

• A department shouldn’t care about viewpoint diversity and is probably better off without it.

• It’s important and valuable to have diverse views in the field.

These can be perfectly compatible. Suppose that there are psychology programs that focus on innate mechanisms and care deeply about evolutionary considerations, and others that hate innateness and are deeply suspicious of evolutionary psychology—and suppose as well that neither department will hire someone from the opposing camp. We build for strength, the departments say. We should be cool with this, so long as there are enough instances of both types of departments to sustain a vibrant debate within the field as a whole.

But it doesn’t work out so cleanly. Imagine a contentious debate in which 80% of professors support side A and 20% support side B, and suppose that this 80/20 distribution holds across all departments. If everyone followed my advice on faculty hiring, someone who supported side B would be unemployable. Side B would end up with no representation in the field because defending it would be a career-killer. And this would be a bad result for anyone like me who supports viewpoint diversity more generally.

To make this a bit less abstract, I think this situation actually holds for advocates of conservative and libertarian perspectives in certain branches of psychology and philosophy. I said that in the world I prefer, there would be no pressure for departments with a more standard progressive perspective to hire such people. No affirmative action for non-liberals; departments should act in their own intellectual interests and build communities of scholars that can work well together, and since progressives usually don’t want and don’t benefit from non-progressives in their midst, they shouldn’t be pressured to hire them. But if there are no departments that welcome such people, their ideas don’t get an airing in the field as a whole, which is definitely not the world I prefer.

So I think there is a difficult trade-off here. I still think it’s not in departments' best interests to take viewpoint diversity into account when hiring. But I’m willing to consider that they should do so anyway, taking a hit for the good of science more generally. In other words, if you really care about viewpoint diversity at the level of the field, you might have to support policies that end up hurting individual departments.

There are always trade-offs

Many years ago, I was on a search committee where we began by ranking the files separately and then doing some math to produce a ranked list of top candidates to discuss.5 We had planned ahead of time to invite the top three to four candidates, and, conveniently enough, when we looked at the spreadsheet, three candidates stood out: #1, #2, and #3 were clustered together, ranked highly by all committee members, and there was a bit of a gap before we got to #4.

Did we invite those three? No, we did not.

It turned out that they were all men. We were reluctant to bring in an all-male slate (even if we wanted to, these short-list decisions go to a higher committee, and we knew they would balk), so we short-listed a fourth female candidate, who was lower on the list.

We also threw out one of the top three candidates. He was a brilliant scholar by any measure, but as we discussed him, it became clear that the direction of his work overlapped too closely with research currently done in the department. Though we didn’t put it this way at the time, we wanted more diversity. We decided to bring in #4 instead.

Now, I know that some of you will have strong feelings about our choice to bring in a female candidate over men who outranked her in terms of research quality and productivity. This sort of thing really upsets some people—including some of the biggest fans of viewpoint diversity. But I’m telling this story here to make the point that the second choice I described involved exactly the same sort of trade-off. Our desire for viewpoint diversity meant, again, that we ended up short-listing a weaker candidate over a stronger one.

If you’re a fan of factoring in viewpoint diversity when hiring, then, you should accept that this means that merit (in the usual sense of research productivity, publications, grants, etc.) has to matter a bit less.

This raises a question for proponents of viewpoint diversity: How much should we give up to get it? That is, how far down the list should we go to find a suitably diverse candidate? And how much should departments give up in terms of cohesiveness and productivity so as to help make the field as a whole sufficiently diverse?

The issue of trade-offs isn’t limited to faculty hiring. A reader who wished to remain anonymous emailed me in response to the paid-subscriber-only version of the post and said the following about undergraduate admissions. (It’s worth noting that the reader self-identified as conservative, so he is arguing against his own interests.)

It probably is healthy for an undergraduate body to contain a representative diversity of opinions. … [But] the problem here is more difficult than conservatives like to acknowledge: most smart young people are liberal and for reasons that aren’t totally understood, universities make them more so. My own view is that meritocracy is more important than diversity of viewpoints, so it isn’t the end of the world to have top universities that vote 80 or 90 percent Democrat.

Maybe you don’t accept the premise (that smarter people tend to be liberal), and even if you do, maybe you wouldn’t make the same choice. You might value viewpoint diversity more than my correspondent and would opt for a more diverse community of students who are not as smart. Similarly, when it came to the search I described above, you might agree with the committee that viewpoint diversity is important, even if it means tossing one of our very best candidates and replacing him with someone who is less impressive as a researcher. Or you might not be willing to take that sort of hit, which means that you don’t really care that much about viewpoint diversity after all.

It’s easy to say that you value viewpoint diversity. The interesting question is: What will you give up for it?

[This is a reposting of something I wrote just when I started Small Potatoes. I’ve substantially edited and revised it, but kept some of the old-timey examples.]

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Everybody knows the problem with the feedback system of social media sites. The system of likes, reposts, restacks and the like encourages mobbing, clickbait, and other bad behaviour. Jonathan Haidt talks about this in an Atlantic article.

One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

I agree with much of what Jon writes here, but I want to talk about a less serious issue with the feedback system, one that only affects a small group of people. But who knows, maybe you’re one of the people this applies to, and then this post will be useful, maybe life-changing!

Consider five sorts of posters. For the first three, the feedback system provides accurate information.

1. Those who say nice things

I’m thinking of popular posters like Steve Martin (4.5 million followers when he posted the one above), who write posts that make people laugh or go awwwwww. And I’m also thinking of the small fry who use social media to congratulate students and colleagues on accomplishments or provide information and opinions on low-controversy topics, like, I don’t know, pretty sunsets they’ve seen or writers that are obscure but really do a great job.

These people can count up likes, retweets, restacks, and responses, and use this as a rough measure not just of how many people engaged with their post, but also of how many people liked it, in the original sense of “liked”—having positive feelings about it. The two measures (engagement and liking) are very similar.

Verdict: ACCURATE.

2. Controversialists (edgelords, shitposters, etc.)

Take Jordan Peterson, who, when he posted this, had about the same number of followers as Steve Martin. (For health reasons, he’s been off social media for the last several months.) A lot of his posts are controversial, and he intends them to be. He can calculate engagement with his tweets just as Steve Martin does, by counting likes, reposts, and so on.

He can also get a fairly accurate sense of how many people think his tweets are stupid, cruel, and ignorant because they will tell him. They will reply to him with nasty remarks; they will repost his tweets with derisive or mocking comments. If he wants to tweak the offensiveness of future tweets, he has plenty of information about which topics and presentation styles enrage people the most.

Verdict: ACCURATE.

3. The Accidentally Famous

There are cases where an otherwise normal social media user goes viral, such as the father who posted a lengthy thread about how he refused to open a can of baked beans for his daughter, insisting that she figure out how to use a can opener by herself.

When the reaction is negative, as it was for “Bean Dad”, the poster will learn this by being deluged with hateful comments, getting death threats, losing their job, and so on.

When, less frequently, the reaction is positive, the poster will learn this by getting praise, job offers, and, in one case, having their tweets turned into a television series.

Verdict: ACCURATE.

Now consider two other cases:

4. Nasty people in a small world

A while ago, a professor on Twitter posted a series of nasty remarks about someone I like, attacking their work and making it personal in an ugly way. I was pissed, and I wasn’t the only one. The professor’s name would come up in conversation with other people in our relatively small community, and the consensus was that he was an asshole.

This surely had consequences for the professor. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but people take these things into account when deciding whom to collaborate with, whom to invite to give a colloquium, and whom to offer a job to.

But here’s the thing. If you looked at the responses to his posts, they were overwhelmingly positive. There were a lot of likes, reposts, and overall cheering on.

Why didn’t people respond negatively? Why didn’t the haters like me speak our minds? I think there are two factors at work here.

• In this small community, most people post under their own names.

• There are risks to calling a person out. In some cases, it’s because they are powerful and in a position to retaliate; they might be at a university you hope to work at one day or an editor for a journal you might want to send a paper to. Or, paradoxically, it could be because they are perceived as lacking power, and so criticizing them would be seen as “punching down”. Or their attacks could be of a sort that makes complaining about them risky. If someone is accused of being racist or sexist, say, attacking the accuser might make people think you yourself are racist or sexist, or at least don’t take racism or sexism seriously enough. Best to be quiet and just bitch about the accuser to your friends.

(Should professors be braver? Probably, see my Why are so few professors trouble-makers? But that’s an issue for another day.)

I’ve seen this happen, to varying degrees, many times in the last several years. In each case, the social media feedback system meant that—unless some friends told them about the real-world consequences of their actions—the poster likely didn’t know people were pissed. Actually, they might have thought the opposite: Boy, people love my posts, and they love me.

Verdict: NOT ACCURATE.

5. Boasters, self-promoters, etc.

There is nothing wrong with broadcasting your good fortune—your new job, your prestigious award, your fantastic new publication, the fact that your latest book is on the New York Times bestseller list. I’m not a cynic about human nature; we can hear good news about someone, particularly someone we like, and feel warm fuzzies. We can be genuinely happy for them.

But some people are known to overdo it, and it gets to be a bit much. Adam Smith, in his masterpiece The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, notes that someone who gets lucky in life

may be assured that the congratulations of his best friends are not all of them perfectly sincere. … envy commonly prevents [them] from heartily sympathizing with his joy.

And Smith gives advice:

If he has any judgment, he is sensible of this, and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him.

If you can’t resist spreading the news about your successes, don’t make such a big deal about how happy you are.

Going back to social media, you see where this is going: The person spreading good news might be envied and derided in the real world, but all they’ll see on social media are likes and retweets and congratulations.

I hate to single anyone out here, so I’ll take myself as an example. I recently posted about a professional accomplishment and got a positive response, lots of likes, a warm “congrats, bud”, and a few people saying “well-deserved”. It felt nice.

It’s only as I write this that I realize that no rational person is going to respond with “Who cares about your pathetic little prize?” or “Not well-deserved at all, Bloom!”—but they might think this way and talk about it with others. Maybe many of my followers hate me; how would I know?

Verdict: NOT ACCURATE.

Last point: Everyone talks about how unnatural social media is, how it differs from everyday face-to-face interaction. But in this regard, social media is just like real life. The person who endlessly shit-talks other people or boasts about their own good fortune may pay a social cost—even if they might never be aware of it.

I always thought that wokeness and effective altruism were sharply contrasting moral outlooks with nothing in common. But then I read Hanno Sauer’s The Invention of Good and Evil, and it changed my mind. This post includes some of my own ideas, but mostly it’s just me conveying Sauer’s arguments, which I find persuasive.1

To be fair to my past self, these approaches really are different in many ways. For the woke, the worst evil is racism, particularly anti-black racism. For effective altruists, racism is small potatoes, a rounding error in moral math. They tend to worry instead about the suffering of the very poor and of the billions of animals that are tortured to death through factory farming, while those of a more “longtermist” bent think we should focus much of our energies on combating existential threats such as asteroids, climate change, and, of course, superintelligent AI.

The woke tend to be deeply invested in the policing of speech—”Words are violence”, as the expression goes. Effective altruists tend to be anti-censorship and believe that violating speech taboos might be necessary when dealing with hard moral problems.

Not surprisingly, then, effective altruists often describe the woke as virtue signaling scolds. Like, here:

[they] combine extreme self-righteousness with opposition to actually doing anything of consequence, and spend much of their time condemning those with the temerity to try to make the world a better place, rather than joining reading groups where they fatalistically complain about the impossibility of genuine progress.

Or here is a quote from Sauer (though he’s expressing the position of others—not his own).

[Wokeness] is ultimately an elite project from smart alecks and goody-two-shoes who keep coming up with new linguistic landmines to signal that they belong to the moral avant-garde, which always knows itself on the right side of history, and who behave insincerely and self-righteously.

It’s harder to provide quotes where the woke attack effective altruists because, while wokeness is a popular and influential movement (a lot more popular and influential than effective altruism, actually), the term “woke” is somewhat pejorative, and people don’t usually describe themselves as such. So rather than put individuals into a category they might reject, I’ll give up some symmetry here and say that progressives have little love for the effective altruists. Here’s a typical quote from an article called “The predictably grievous harms of effective altruism”:

EA is morally and politically wrong-headed, pernicious in its basic precepts, covering up systemic injustices embedded in the fabric of existing capitalist societies in a manner that clears the way for the perpetuation of significant wrongs. It is doing harm, in an increasingly global manner, to the work of activists for liberating causes.

My own impression is that the woke/progressives see effective altruists as hyper-rationalist, privileged white nerds with no real respect for those who are less fortunate than they are and no real interest in social justice. And they see the broader community that they are most associated with—“Rationalists”—as rife with racists, sexists, incels, and sex pests.

In romcoms, mutual hatred is often a sign of repressed passion. I don’t think this is happening here (though I’d definitely see a movie about a crazy love affair between a woke gender studies prof and a Silicon Valley longtermist). But I am tempted by the milder Freudian claim that a tacit recognition of profound similarities contributes to this mutual hatred, where a narcissism of small differences drives opposing groups to assert the worthlessness of their foes and their own superiority.

And what are these profound similarities?

First, Sauer notes that both groups represent the extremes of Western values. This is obvious for the effective altruists, who draw explicitly on Western philosophy, including contemporary philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, as well as old-school utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (though not all effective altruists are utilitarians). More tendentiously (and Sauer doesn’t go here), it’s worth considering Tom Holland's argument in Dominion that Christianity, with its emphasis on the moral status of the weak, is another, less acknowledged, foundation for what seem to be secular moral movements such as Effective Altruism.

Sauer makes a good case that this origin story is true for the woke, too.

Protecting minorities, calling for social justice and demanding equality, anti-discrimination and anti-racism are ideals that are especially prominent in [Western] societies. Discrimination, exploitation, subjugation, genocide and inequality are the default, both historically and in the present, global sense (beyond simple, prehistoric tribal societies).

The woke are no fans of the West, though. Unlike the effective altruists, who worry about the suffering of people in faraway lands and the distant future (even poor Americans, they would tell you, are doing so well that it’s a waste of resources to try to help them), for the woke, morality begins at home, which for most of them means the United States. When it comes to sexism and misogyny, say, they are more outraged by what happens in Hollywood movie studios and Manhattan law firms than in Iran and the Sudan.2

For Sauer, this self-directed critical focus leads to a paradox.

The paradox of wokeness is that in its most extreme manifestations, spurred on by moral hypersensitisation, it could begin to reject the one major form of society that has ever made an imperfect, but at least serious, attempt to overcome the moral deficits it rightly sees as such. At its fringes, wokeness becomes an autoimmune disorder: a desire for moral improvement, which is intrinsically worth striving for, begins to question the foundations that allowed this desire to arise in the first place.

The second similarity lies in the extreme demands that these movements make.

Most everyday moral philosophies—the ones that most of us live by, that we intuitively accept—tell us that if we keep our noses clean, we’re doing just fine. Thou shalt not kill, steal, etc. Give to charity, but it doesn’t have to be too much. Feed your kids, hug them occasionally. Maybe, as the Apostle Paul said, a perfect person would abstain from sex entirely, but if you can’t do that, get married and don’t sleep around. (“Better to marry than to burn.”). Do all this, and you’ll get to heaven just fine.

The woke have no patience for such low expectations. Before I read Ibram X. Kendi, I thought that my sole moral duty regarding race was not to be racist. It turns out, though, that you’re either racist or anti-racist—actively fighting against racism. There’s nothing in between. As Sauer puts it, for the woke, racism “remains impossible to eradicate or can only be remedied, if at all, through constant penitence, soul-searching and flagellation.”

And this is nothing compared to the demands of effective altruists. Before being exposed to Effective Altruism, I thought I was a pretty good guy overall; now I worry that I’m a moral monster. At the very minimum, I should have moved to a vegan diet long ago. I should give much more of what I earn (much more) to effective charities. More generally, instead of spending most of my time pursuing my own interests and those of my friends and family, I should be working tirelessly to maximize the flourishing of all sentient beings, present and future. That’s a lot.

As Sauer writes, these views share

a moral absolutism that always views the private as political, which allows no compromise and knows no escape, to which everything must subordinate itself in the eternal struggle of the good (to which we belong) against the evil (to which the others belong), which makes every waking moment and every sphere of life, from loving and laughing to eating and sleeping, subject to the dark and monastic asceticism of a moral demand for purity.

The third thing the woke and the effective altruists share is that they are unpopular.

The woke tend to be hated by the non-woke. In the last election, Harris carefully tried to position herself as a reasonable non-woke centrist, avoiding any appeal to her race and gender as reasons to vote for her. Trump, for his part, did his best to paint Harris as woke, talking about her support for “government-paid transgender operations on illegal aliens” (a very woke idea) and putting out ads saying “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”. Such attacks are far from a complete account for why Trump won—but they sure didn’t hurt.

The effective altruists aren’t hated to the same extent because, to be hated, people have to have heard of you. The movement has not caught on outside a particular elite community (the sort of smarties who read Small Potatoes). Those few who know about them tend to find them irritating. Occasionally, the New York Times writes an article about the effective altruists, and even the best of these articles (like one I’m going to talk about below) can’t resist a tone of sneering disapproval.

It’s hard to see either view getting popular. For one thing, some of the woke and some of the effective altruists hold rather incredible views. For the woke, these include: Standardized tests like the SAT are inherently racist and should be abolished—even if they help identify talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and Cooking food from another culture, or practicing yoga, can be forms of cultural theft, even if done with admiration. For the effective altruists, these include: Preventing the suffering of future digital minds—billions or trillions of simulated beings—may be more morally urgent than improving life for humans now, and Factory farming is akin to the Holocaust, and one of the greatest injustices is … the suffering of shrimp. It’s hard to sell the Normies on any of this.

Then there’s the point raised in the previous section. The woke and the effective altuists tell us that we need to transform our lives, to become warriors in the fight against racism/shrimp farming. Is it any surprise that these are messages we don’t like to hear?

The fourth thing that the woke and the effective altruists have in common is that they are probably both doing something right.

It would be a miracle, after all, if the commonly accepted moral worldview right now turned out to be the right one. More likely, moral progress has not come to an end. We’re probably still doing things wrong. The pressure to get better will come from people who are making annoying and ridiculous-seeming demands on us, just as the pressure to get better in the past—as in the movements against slavery, for women’s suffrage, and for gay rights—came from people who made annoying and ridiculous-seeming demands on people in the past.

I find it easy to like Effective Altruism. (Privileged white guy with strong rationalist leanings is a fan of EA—big surprise). I forgive its excesses and the occasional bad choices, because I think many of its core claims are right and believe that in the future, we’ll look back and wonder how anyone could have ever doubted them. I think the cruelties we inflict on animals are terrible and that we should care more about the people who are suffering the most. I am sold on the core effective altruist idea (it’s in their name!) that we should direct our charitable efforts in ways that are the most effective, rather than supporting causes that give us the warm-fuzzies.

It’s not just the movement I like; it’s the people. When I read about individuals who devote their lives to the cause, like Julia Wise (profiled in Larissa Macfarquhar’s wonderful Strangers Drowning), I am moved by the extent to which they care for others.

And I respect the efforts that prominent effective altruists make for their cause, which includes downplaying their movement’s more extreme demands. They might want you to give away most of your money (and one of your kidneys!) to strangers, but baked into the logic of their movement is the idea that a little bit is better than nothing, and so they try not to scare people off. You can see in a quote that a prominent effective altruist gives in a recent New York Times article called “What if Charity Shouldn’t be Optimized?”

Even the chief executive of the Center for Effective Altruism, Zachary Robinson, said in an interview that optimization did not dictate all his ways of doing good. He gives to effective altruist causes — but he also donates locally, supporting YIMBY Action because he is concerned about the housing crisis in his own community, San Francisco.

“We don’t need to be dogmatic,” Mr. Robinson said. “I don’t think this should be the entire part of someone’s life or altruistic portfolio.”

You can help those who need it most, says Robinson, but there’s no need to be weird about it—you can also support the causes that matter most to you personally.

I’m less fond of wokeness (as you can probably tell from my failed attempt here to treat the two movements on a par). In part, this follows from my appreciation of effective altruism. As I said earlier, the movements care about different things. The woke would have you send your money to racial justice groups and transgender protection groups (two causes promoted in the anti-optimization New York Times article), and they don’t care about preventing children in Africa from getting malaria. The effective altruists have the opposite priorities. They both can’t be right.

And there are other issues as well. There isn’t really a woke equivalent of Zachary Robinson, telling people that there’s no need for dogmatism—fighting racism can be just part of one’s life, and it’s fine if you also care about other things, like the suffering of animals. Some of the prominent features of wokeness, such as the obsession with language, a focus on us-them identity politics, and what Sauer describes as “the constant penitence, soul-searching and flagellation,” really are features, not bugs—take them away from wokeness, and there’s nothing left. I find little to appreciate in any of this.

But this isn’t the note I want to end on. Sauer has persuaded me to try to be humble here, to accept the possibility that my moral positions are almost certainly flawed and that I can learn something even from a moral movement that I find unappealing. So I should try to extend my open-heartedness to the woke, forgiving their excesses and occasional bad choices. I should recognize that they may hold moral insights that are of real value. This is Sauer’s own view, and I’ll end with his positive words.

Wokeness is here to stay. For we cannot do without it: in a modern society committed to the ideals of freedom, equality and human dignity, but which has only implemented them imperfectly so far, there will, and must, always be a social movement that reports on what inequality and disadvantage feel like with the authenticity of those affected, and that takes their authority and formulates demands to help us all get along better. These demands should not be trusted blindly, but they should be listened to.3

0:00 Bob’s Doha trip takeaways
3:42 The Epstein-Bannon-Trump connection
9:10 Can MAGA survive the Epstein saga?
12:21 Email hygiene 101
17:38 Larry Summers gets advice
28:53 Olivia Nuzzi hikes the Appalachian trail

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Why podcasts are going visual.
Pluribus and peak TV.
Punishment: What is it good for?
Are women ruining the world?
Lisa Feldman-Barrett vs Paul Ekman (and Bob) on emotions.
Antisemitism, left and right.
AI “bubble” update.

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