1.

I was talking to a friend about book promotion a few years back, and I explained that a big part of selling your book is to appear on podcasts. And she said:

Wouldn’t that discourage people from buying your book? If they listen to the podcast, they’ve already heard you talk about all the good parts.

And I thought: no, that’s silly, she can’t be right. Everyone knows you’re supposed to go on podcasts. The publicist for the book I had just written worked hard to get me on the more popular ones, so she must know it helps book sales.

But the comment stuck with me, and so the next time I was on a Zoom call with my publicist, I mentioned my friend’s remark. My publicist looked as bored as a person could be and said:

Huh. I never thought of that. Yeah, maybe?

We never discussed it again. She kept booking me on podcasts, and I kept going.

2.

I subscribe to a few Substacks that offer tips on growing your subscriber base. One of them tells me: Don’t post too much; never more than once a week—don’t let your subscribers get sick of you. Another says: Post a lot—at least twice a week. Make sure your paid subscribers appreciate the value of their subscription.

3.

I listened to an episode of Advisory Opinions, my favorite legal podcast, that was about how to get into a top law school. (Who knows? I’m not too old to consider new career options.)

The hosts interviewed the associate dean of admissions and financial aid at Yale Law School and the dean of admissions at Harvard Law School. They discussed interview questions, which are given to the applicants in advance. The Harvard dean talked about a question she was particularly proud of:

What’s an example of a time when you changed your mind about something?

She explained that this is an excellent way to gauge whether prospective students are open-minded, which is apparently something the best law schools are looking for right now.

This does seem like a good trait. But does screening applicants based on their answers actually result in a more open-minded cohort of accepted students? Can’t even the most dogmatic and inflexible individuals come up with answers (again, these questions are given out in advance) that make them appear open-minded and accepting?

The podcast hosts—usually sharp and critical—never asked.

These examples all involve

a) a proposed method for getting something that people want
b) that is presented confidently
c) with no data that supports it
d) and no apparent interest in getting such data.

One of my motivations for writing this post was reading Helen Lewis’s discussion, The economics of writing a book, which draws on Caroline Crampton’s post, I’m done with social media. The gist of both of these pieces is that all the usual advice about selling books doesn’t work. Most of the things that publicists ask you to do are a waste of time. It’s just like what William Goldman said about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”

There are a few puzzles here—why are people comfortable giving advice without evidence? Why do people (including me!) listen to and sometimes even pay for such advice? But I’m interested here in a more fundamental question: Why does nobody know anything?

Shouldn’t publicists have this information at their fingertips? The response to my question, “Do podcasts sell books?” shouldn’t have been a shrug; it should have been a “Glad you asked—I’ll send you a PDF with detailed analyses that show exactly which podcasts work best for the kind of book you’ve written—I’ve used these analyses to help promote it.”

We know that this sort of analytic approach works in other domains. My wife is a fan of the Toronto Blue Jays, and she’s gotten me interested in baseball. (When I started to write this post many months ago, we were in the middle of an exciting World Series.) As part of trying to get up to speed, I read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and watched the movie, and became entranced by baseball’s obsession with data. There’s even a word for this specific use of statistics—sabermetrics.

This approach has revolutionized baseball. So why not Moneyball the publishing industry? Or Substack? Or law school admissions?

It’s not like the data is hard to get. Publishers have access to the sales of every book, both online and (somewhat less reliably) from bookstores. They can run a million analyses to see what happens when you put a certain type of author on a certain type of podcast. (It’s often not hard to figure out cause and effect—if book sales shoot up immediately after an appearance on Joe Rogan, then it’s a good bet that the podcast mattered, not some mysterious third factor.) Armed with these data, they can ask: Is there a special Ezra Klein boost? How does the type of podcast interact with the sort of book being promoted? Is it just a numbers game—more popular podcast, more sales—or does the kind of podcast (political vs. lifestyle, say) really matter? And certainly it should be easy enough to look at the frequency of Substack-posting and see how it correlates with subscriber growth.

Why don’t we know?

One possibility is that people don’t really care whether these methods work. I think this is true for the law school example. I bet the interview questions aren’t about screening candidates at all. (The law schools have other, better ways of doing this.) Rather, the questions are chosen to showcase Harvard’s values to the world. This explains the otherwise bizarre choice to send out the questions in advance. They do this so they can tell everyone about them.

But this cynical account doesn’t apply to my two other examples. Publishers and authors don’t care about how to sell books? Writers don’t care about making money on Substack? Bullshit.

Another consideration is that the sort of people I’m talking about—publicists, writers, admissions officers, and the like—tend to be humanities-oriented. When they hear “regression”, they think Sigmund Freud, not Ronald Fisher. Maybe it never occurs to them to check the data. Or maybe it does occur to them, but it feels gross or reductionist or nerdy. Or maybe they’d like to do the stats but just don’t know how.

I think there’s something to this, but I can’t believe that publishers and big-name writers would just leave money on the table. Shouldn’t there be some HarperCollins equivalent of Billy Beane—the hero of Moneyball—who says: Guys, we've got to start looking at the numbers.

Here’s what I think: People have looked, and there’s nothing interesting there. Book publishing and Substack just don’t work like baseball, and there’s nothing that HarperCollins Billy Beane could tell you that you don’t already know.

When my first trade book—Descartes’ Baby—was about to come out, I was talking about it over a holiday dinner with family, and someone asked what I planned to do to promote it. I started to answer, and then my uncle cut me off and said, “It’s simple. Go on Oprah.” I was a bit irritated and said I’d love to go on Oprah’s show to talk to her about Descartes’ Baby, but I had no way to make that happen. Then I started talking about other things I planned to do—like giving a talk at my local bookstore—and my uncle looked at me as if I was just a little bit simple, shook his head, and said, “Go on Oprah. That really sells books.”

The thing is, he was right. At the time, getting on Oprah and having her promote your book was a sure route to the bestseller lists. That’s good advice, much better than my worthless plans. My inability to take this advice wasn’t my uncle’s fault!

Talking to Oprah no longer has the magic touch, so what else works? Well, you can be a famous and beloved author. (The next books by Stephen King and Sally Rooney will do well.) Or a celebrity with an interesting story. (As I write this, Lena Dunham’s Famesick is a #1 New York Times bestseller). Or maybe you should turn your book into a Netflix series or a major motion picture. That really sells books.

Or what about a massive promotional campaign? I was listening to Sarah Isgur, one of the hosts of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions that I mentioned earlier, and she talked about promoting her new book, Last Branch Standing. This involved appearances on Morning Joe, the Bill Maher show, the Ross Douthat podcast, and NPR. Does this sort of media blitz sell books? Sure does. Does it help that Sarah Isgur is a sharp and charismatic figure who knows everyone? Sure does. (Did I buy a copy of her book myself? Nope. I bought two—one for me and one for my lawyer son.)

Summing up, here’s one route to the bestseller lists.

1. Be the sort of person who gets invited to go on Oprah.

You can also try this.

2. Write something people really like to read.

That’s something else about Stephen King, Sally Rooney, Sarah Isgur, and Lena Dunham. People really like reading their books. Focusing on Substack, Tommy Blanchard put it nicely.

Yeah, try that.

I’ll end by saying something positive about Substack. To write a bestselling book, quality writing is not enough. You need to get a publishing house to take a chance on you, and that requires status and connections (or, failing that, excellent luck).

Substack is different. As with blogs and social media, there are no barriers to entry. Sure, reputation doesn’t hurt when it comes to building up a subscriber base (ask Dolly Parton or Andrew Tate), but writers have become popular on this site through quality alone. They start as total unknowns, the algorithm brings their posts to people’s attention, word spreads, and the audience grows. There aren’t many domains in life where you can make a living just by having access to a computer and being exceptionally good at what you do.1

Anyhow, that’s it. There is no hidden knowledge, no way to game the system, no secret Moneyball for publishing or Substack. The best advice is: Be well-known; Be very good at what you do.

But I bet you already knew that.

I once read that Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company bought the movie rights to Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Blink. This made me wonder if something similar might happen to my own somewhat less bestselling books. Perhaps How Pleasure Works could become a Netflix series? Maybe Ryan Gosling would consider starring in a movie version of The Sweet Spot?

No such luck so far, but something very cool has just happened with an article I wrote. I was chuffed when the New Yorker asked if I would be willing to have A.I. is about to solve loneliness. That’s a problem performed live by actors as part of a call-in radio show. (“Performed” in the sense that the actors will read an abridged version of the article aloud.) Here is the summary.

AI companionship can soothe loneliness, but can technology meet our human need for connection, as painful and messy as it can be? Psychologist Paul Bloom probed that quintessentially modern question in “A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem,” published in 2025 by The New Yorker. Now, actors Bill Murray (Lost in Translation, Rushmore), Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window at BAM), and Lois Smith (East of Eden, Five Easy Pieces) will perform Bloom’s article in a live call-in radio show, presented by Theater of War On The Radio on stage at BAM’s Harvey Theater.

The reading will be followed by a discussion led by Kai Wright (WNYC’s Notes from America, The Guardian’s Stateside) and Bryan Doerries (Artistic Director, Theater of War Productions), featuring calls from listeners. Audience members will also be able to participate in the discussion following the conclusion of the radio broadcast. …

Or tune in on Wednesday, May 27, at 8pm EDT on WNYC 93.9 FM or on WNYC.org to catch the live broadcast!

You can buy tickets here.

So excited! I would be there myself, but this is not an ideal time for me to travel.

(This is a lightly revised version of a post originally sent to paid subscribers.)

—

“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. Cartoons Hate Her has a good discussion of consensual non-consent (CNC)

which can range from something as edgy as full rape role-play parties with strangers, or something as seemingly normie as granting your accountant husband of twenty years 24/7 access to your body, buffered only by a safe word.

The sports cases and the sex case are different in an interesting way. In boxing, the possibility of being touched is a necessary evil; the best outcome is that you go into the ring, pummel your opponent into submission, and never get a glove laid on you. For CNC, the “non-consensual” touching is part of the fun. (The accountant husband who gallantly respects his wife’s space is missing the point.) In boxing, the resistance is genuine; in CNC, it is (some of the time? partially? read the linked article for discussion) feigned.

What sports and sex have in common is an insistence on current consent. There’s always a safe word in CNC. For the grappling martial arts, the match stops immediately when someone taps their opponent or slaps the mat. There is no agreed-upon safe word for boxing—consent isn’t usually withdrawn in the middle of a bout—but you can stop a match. The most famous example of this is the 1980 fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Durán, in which Durán gave up in the 8th round by telling the referee, “No más” (Spanish for “no more”). You can see it below; go to minute 32.

I have some true counterexamples coming up, but consider first the question: Why do we put so much value on current consent? Why not past consent?

The philosopher Meghan Sullivan explores this issue in her book “Time Biases: A Theory of Rational Planning and Personal Persistence.”1 Sullivan thinks many of us do poorly in life because we are “time-biased”—we have unwarranted preferences about when events should occur. Maybe you have a “near bias”: you eat the popcorn just before the movie starts, even though you would probably enjoy it more if you waited. Or maybe you have a “structural bias,” preferring your experiences to have a certain temporal shape: you plan your vacation such that the best part comes at the end.

For Sullivan, all of these time biases are mistakes. She advocates for temporal neutrality—a habit of mind that gives equal weight to the past, present, and future. She argues that a rational person prefers that “her life going forward go as well as possible”, and so a rational person’s preferences “are insensitive to arbitrary differences.” Temporal differences are, in her mind, arbitrary.

She has a neat example of how this principle clashes with the notion that the priorities of one’s “present self” matter the most. Imagine, she writes, that you have trained for a triathlon for many months. Now it’s race day. The weather is fine, you’re healthy, but you just don’t feel like participating. Suppose you’re fairly certain that, if you don’t participate, you won’t regret your choice in the future. Should you race, even though you don’t feel like it?

Sullivan says that you should. She argues that you have no reason to take your current goals more seriously than your past ones. “The mere fact that planning was done in the past is no reason to ignore it now,” she writes.

Sullivan isn’t talking about consent here, but I will. The conclusion that her theory leads to (which I’m not endorsing, not yet anyway) is this: Suppose you care about someone. You have their interests in mind; you want their life to be, overall, as good as possible. If so, and if they are time-biased, you should sometimes override their current preferences. They probably won’t be happy with this, and this unhappiness has to be considered when deciding whether to violate their current consent. But if the overall positive gain to their lives outweighs this momentary negative, the right thing to do is to force them.

Such a violation of consent for someone’s own good is sometimes called paternalism, and it has its champions, such as the philosopher Jason Hanna, in his book In Our Best Interest: A Defense of Paternalism.2

There’s one type of paternalism that everyone is comfortable with—being paternalistic about one’s own future actions. That is, we sometimes think about what we will want to do in the future, realize that it’s not in our own best interests, and act now to try to block that future bad decision (which, at the time, will be the current bad decision) from happening.

Examples: Dieters buy food in small portions so they won’t overeat later on. Smokers trying to quit tell their friends never to give them cigarettes, no matter how much they may later beg. In her book on gluttony, Francine Prose tells of women who phone hotels where they are staying to demand a room with an empty minibar. My son once had a terrible time getting up in the morning, so we bought him an alarm clock that rolls away as it sounds; to shut it off, he had to jump out of bed and find the damn thing. At 11:55, I know I’ll be tempted to check my phone during the noontime talk I have to go to, and since I want to engage with the ideas and be respectful to the speaker, I leave it in my office. At 12:10, bored out of my skull and wishing that I could check my email and play Spelling Bee, I’m bitter about my past choice to thwart my current desires.

Sometimes we enlist others to help block our future bad desires. Take the classic story of Odysseus and the sirens.

Odysseus wants to hear the song of the Sirens, but doesn’t want them to lure him into the sea. And so he instructs his men to put beeswax into their ears and bind him to the mast. He adds:

If I beseech you and command you
to set me free, you must increase my bonds
and chain me even tighter.

He does beseech them, and the men follow his earlier instructions.

Their song was so melodious, I longed
to listen more. I told my men to free me.
I scowled at them, but they kept rowing on.
Eurylochus and Perimedes stood
and tied me even tighter, with more knots.
But when we were well past them and I could
No longer hear the singing of the Sirens,
I nodded to my men, and they removed
the wax that I had used to plug their ears,
and untied me.

Odysseus isn’t the slightest bit upset at his men for disobeying his orders and not freeing him3, and no reader has ever thought that his men should be punished. So much for current consent.

In a classic article written 40 years ago (Self-Command in Practice, in Policy, and in a Theory of Rational Choice), Thomas Schelling gives a series of examples of ways we might implore others to help restrain the choices of our future selves.

Please do not give me a cigarette when I ask for it, or dessert, or a second drink. Do not give me my car keys. Do not lend me money. Do not lend me a gun. …. Do not let me go back to sleep. Interrupt me if I get in an argument. Push me out of the plane when it’s my turn to parachute. Don’t let me go home drunk unless you can remove my children to a safe place. Blow the fuse if you catch me watching television. Make me get up and do my back exercises every morning. Keep me moving if I am exhausted in the wilderness.

This is a diverse set of examples. Some are unproblematic from a moral view. Take “Please do not give me a cigarette when I ask for it”.

-Hey, Paul, pass me a cigarette.
-Sorry, Joe. You told me a while ago you’re quitting.
-Well, I’ve changed my mind. Hand it over.
-No, you told me not to.
-I changed my mind, dammit.
-Sorry, no.

We can argue whether I’m being a good friend (I think yes), but there’s no sense in which I’m violating Joe’s consent. It’s my cigarette; it’s up to me whether I give it to him. Yes, I’m being paternalistic, but if so, it’s a benign sense of paternalism.

Now consider “Push me out of the plane when it’s my turn to parachute.”

-I’ve changed my mind, Paul. I’m not jumping.
-Sorry, Joe. You told me to push you. [Push]
-STOP THAT! I’m not jumping.
-[Push]
-STOP THAT! I DON’T WANT TO JUMP! I CHANGED MY MIND! STOP PUSHING!
-[Push]

This seems different. I’m putting my hands on him, against his current wishes. Is this okay? I’m not sure, so here’s a poll.

Are there cases in which it’s morally permissible to violate someone’s current consent even without their prior agreement? Sure. If someone hears terrible news and, on impulse, tries to jump out of a window, the right thing to do is to try to stop them. Or consider this case, from Schelling.

A few years ago I saw again the original Moby Dick, an early talkie in black and white. There was a scene—not in the book—of Ahab in the water losing his leg, and immediately afterward below deck under a blanket, eating an apple with three of the crew. The blacksmith enters with a hot iron to cauterize the stump. Ahab begs not to be burned. The crewmen hold him down as he spews out the apple in a scream, and steam rises where the iron is tormenting his leg. The movie resumes with Ahab out of pain and apparently glad to be alive. There is no sign that he took disciplinary action against the blacksmith or the men who held him while he was tortured.

Ahab is very much touched without his consent. He’s not a child, he’s not drunk. And it’s not like the previous cases where he expressed a prior desire to be restrained. He’s not Odysseus.

Do you think the men did the right thing?

Suppose you agree that they did the right thing. (For what it’s worth, this is my view, and Schelling’s too.) What makes it right—why do we see it as okay, in this case, to touch someone without their consent? I see two possibilities.

Best Interests. In certain extreme cases, we see it as morally right to act in a person’s best interests, even if it goes against what they want. The qualification is needed here—I might think it’s in your best interests not to eat so much processed food, but it’s not acceptable for me to smack a croissant out of your mouth. But in the Ahab case, he will likely die unless he is restrained, and this is enough to make this intervention not only morally acceptable, but, in the eyes of some people, morally obligatory.

Unsound Mind. Maybe we’re only allowed to intervene because Ahab isn’t in his right mind. Admittedly, the story doesn’t explicitly say this, there’s just:

Ahab begs not to be burned.

But the way I imagine it, he’s screaming in terror, and in this (understandably) panicked state, his wishes matter less. This intuition that you can sometimes touch someone without their consent if they’re not in their right mind is codified in law. If an adult says that they don’t want medical treatment, even if the treatment is life-saving with no risks, doctors are forbidden from treating them. But if the person is delirious, intoxicated, confused from blood loss, etc., there is a shift to a standard of “implied consent". This standard applies when doctors arrive on the scene of an accident and treat someone who is unconscious—they assume that if they were conscious, they would consent. Similarly, they will treat someone who is delirious and screaming that they don’t want to be touched, under the assumption that if this person were in a rational state, they would want to be treated.

Maybe, then, when we think the men were right to hold Ahab down, we think of Ahab as being (as the expression goes) mad with fear. And so his consent isn’t needed. The same logic applies to a case raised earlier.

If someone hears terrible news and, on impulse, tries to jump out of a window, the right thing to do is try to stop them.

And, of course, it applies to Odysseus, who is under the spell of the Sirens.

We can think of these theories as competing accounts of common-sense morality, and it’s clear they differ in interesting ways.

Best Interests gives some weight to what a person wants (people are upset when their wishes are ignored, and it’s wrong to upset people), but this is just one consideration among many, and if the stakes are high enough, a person’s most sincere and deliberated decisions can be overridden—by force, if necessary. This is a paternalistic view.

In contrast, the Unsound Mind account is consistent with the view that personal autonomy is sovereign, and for an adult of sound mind, you can never override it. The only cases where it’s right to touch a person without their consent are instances in which we assume the person is, as we sometimes put it, “not themselves”.

These theories make different predictions. Consider Ahab again. The original story includes

[Ahab is] below deck under a blanket, eating an apple with three of the crew. The blacksmith enters with a hot iron to cauterize the stump. Ahab begs not to be burned.

Consider now this modification.

Ahab is below deck under a blanket, eating an apple with three of the crew. He turns to them and says calmly, “Look, I’ve been a captain for a long time, and I know how this goes. The blacksmith is going to arrive to cauterize my wound. But I don’t want this. It’s extremely painful. On balance, I’ll take the chance of infection. So I’m ordering you not to burn me.”

Notice that in both cases, it’s in Ahab’s best interests to cauterize the wound. Paternalism says: Do It. But if these cases feel different to you—if you are less inclined to approve touching Ahab without his consent in the case where he is calm—then this favors the Unsound Mind theory.

I find this issue fascinating, and Joshua Confer and I are beginning a series of studies exploring it, asking about the circumstances under which ordinary people sometimes think it’s acceptable to touch someone without their consent.

0:00 Teaser
0:49 Paul’s new baby is reportedly cute
6:54 The Tucker-Trump fracture
12:16 Parenting later in life
19:36 Paul's TED talk on AI and loneliness
25:25 When does embryo screening become eugenics?
34:13 Is intelligence a positional good?
43:00 Heading to Overtime

Paid subscribers get the overtime segment, which includes:

Modern fatherhood.
How Bob bonded with Al Gore.
Tony Robbins and Easter Island.
Betting on our AI future
Theories of parenting
Why are siblings so different?

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

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There are bad ways to be famous. I feel awful for Rachael Gunn—the Australian breakdancer who went viral due to her unfortunate performance in the 2024 Olympics. She was the second-most-popular Halloween costume that year, which is not the sort of fame anyone would want.

But what about the fame of a professional athlete, popular musician, or big-name actor? What’s that like? Should we want it?

I once spent an hour with a famous person. Many years ago, Alan Alda came to Yale to film some of the developmental research there for the PBS series The Human Spark. At one point, I walked with him to pick up coffee from a place a few blocks away from the Psychology building.

Now, Alan Alda was 73 at the time, and he didn’t have anywhere near the fame of a Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift. We didn’t need police protection; he had no bodyguards; there was no danger of a riot. And when we walked along Grove Street, some people passed us with no change of expression, zero recognition.

But we walked past others, and I saw their eyes widen in surprise. Some poked their companions and whispered to them. One guy spun around and started to follow us. Alda seemed oblivious, though he must have noticed. And once we got to Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea, people gathered around Alda to ask for his autograph and to tell him how much they liked his work, and he responded with warmth and grace.

And imagine what it must have been like to do this walk in the 1980s, when his character Hawkeye Pierce was the star of M*A*S*H—one of the most-watched television series ever—and Alda was one of the most recognizable people alive, an international sex symbol? I’m not sure we could have made it down the street without him getting mobbed.

Many wouldn’t want the fame that Alda had when we took that walk. And many more would find the more extreme fame of a Michael Jordan or a Scarlett Johansson to be a living hell.

But others, particularly young people, would kill for it. Ask a teenager what they most fantasize about becoming, and many will tell you: Professional Athlete. Famous Actor. Rock Star. Or they might talk about wanting to be a famous person of a sort that didn’t exist until recently—an Influencer, a Gamer, or a YouTuber like MrBeast.

Maybe their ambitions lie elsewhere, but even then, fame is often part of what they wish for. If they want to be a politician, they’re usually thinking of being president, not a state senator. If they want to be a scientist, it’s the sort who wins a Nobel Prize; if it’s a writer, it’s the sort who writes bestsellers.

The famous are typically rich, and the two modes of success go together: Rich and famous. But I think it’s mostly the famous part that appeals. Sure, some might fantasize about growing up to be a wealthy businessman like Walter Hachborn, co-founder of the Canadian home improvement chain Home Hardware …

… but a lot more would want to be Leonardo DiCaprio, LeBron James, or Taylor Swift.

If you ask many famous people, though, even those who are a lot less famous than Alan Alda, they’ll tell you about the downsides of fame.

One is the loss of personal space. Every once in a while, I’m stopped on the street by someone who has taken my online course, seen me being interviewed, or watched me on YouTube. They always have kind things to say, and it feels nice. I am pleased with my nano-fame. But if it happened all the time? If I couldn’t walk to the liquor store without strangers walking over to talk to me, without being hassled by the paparazzi? I live close to a fairly ugly shopping center called Dufferin Mall; what would it be like to be Theo James, whose visit to The Dirty D is the topic of posts on X and an article on a major Toronto website?

I’d never leave the house.

It gets worse. The writer and lifehacker Tim Ferriss has a terrific article called: 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”).

He begins with a nice quote from John Adams in a letter to his wife.

Let the cymbals of popularity tinkle still. Let the butterflies of fame glitter with their wings. I shall envy neither their music nor their colors.

Ferriss puts the problem like this. If you are famous, many people know your name and face; you are on their minds. Most are nice, normal folk, but a small proportion are, as he puts it, “crazies, con artists, extortionists, possible (or actual) murderers, and so on.” Most of us will go through life without encountering any such individuals, but if a million people are thinking of you—and Ferriss has way more than a million monthly subscribers—some of them will fall into this scary category. If they see you on the street, they are likely to approach you. They will use social media to try to capture your attention. You become the target of death threats, rape threats, stalkers, and harassment (and not just of you, but of the people you love). There is a non-trivial risk of real harm, of being assaulted, kidnapped, or killed.

And so Ferriss, who is only mildly famous, has to take steps to ensure his security, and he recounts stories of harassment, blackmail threats, and one foiled kidnapping attempt. (Aella, who is internet famous to a similar degree, recounts how someone posed as an FBI agent and tried to abduct her.)

And the super-famous? By one estimate, Taylor Swift spends over ten million dollars a year on her security detail. One quite poignant theme of Prince Harry’s autobiography Spare was his fear that the Royal Family would take away his bodyguards, leaving him unable to protect himself and his wife, Meghan Markle, from the constant threats of violence they faced.

Ferriss quotes Bill Murray.

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.

The thing is, Bill Murray is wrong. Fame gets you a lot.

One benefit raised by Ferriss is the influence it brings. George Clooney can make things happen because everyone wants to be with George Clooney. Ferriss is a decent guy, and so when he discusses how this influence can be put to use, he talks about creating a “real positive dent in the world.”

Another perk—and I’m afraid that this is a lot less transcendent than the first benefit—is that if you have the right sort of fame, the sort that actors, athletes, and artists have, a lot of very attractive people will want to have sex with you. Now, I know there will be comments saying, Ew, who would ever want that? But some find this an appealing prospect.

These two considerations are instrumental—tangible consequences of fame—but I think the main appeal is more primitive. We are social animals, and as such, we are attuned to status—we like being respected, admired, and loved; we like mattering to other people. (I write about this in detail here.) Doesn’t it feel nice to be in a community where you’re liked and respected? Doesn’t it feel good to have someone tell you how much they admire you, what a positive influence you’ve had on them, how amazing you are? Imagine being so wonderful in other people’s eyes that just a short encounter with you will be a story they will tell for years.

So don’t think about the many positive and many negative implications of mattering so much to this many people. Rather, just imagine the feeling of basking in this much admiration and love. If this doesn’t move you, well, you are either a saint or something is wrong with you.

Fame has its pros and cons, then. Pros: You can make the world a better place, have lots of sex with hot people, and bask in the joyous feeling of being loved and admired. Cons: Endless hassle, loss of privacy, and someone might show up at your house in the middle of the night and kill you and your family. You choose!

There’s a lot to be said here about different kinds of fame and how they interact with the pros and cons. I have a friend who once told me that he has a fair number of fans who adore him … but they’re all nerdy young men, so some of the perks of fame elude him. Some famous people have famous faces and so get stopped on the street, even if few people know their names (many character actors); others have famous names but are fairly unrecognizable and so are less hassled (many authors).

Some forms of fame come with certain downsides. There are real negatives, for instance, to being seen as a tough guy. In Matthew Polly’s biography of Bruce Lee, he says that once Lee became a superstar, men would regularly approach him on the street and demand to fight. You can see it from the men’s point of view—wouldn’t it be something to win a fight with Bruce Lee? Even getting one’s ass kicked by Bruce Lee would be something to boast about! And if Lee refused to take you up on your challenge, well, who’s the tough guy now? Lee’s solution? When in public, he would always be surrounded by his friends, and when challenged, he would deal with it by having the challenger fight one of his friends first … to show he was worthy. (Thinking about it, there are drawbacks in being a friend of Bruce Lee as well.)

It must be rough in a different way to be an attractive, famous woman. You are then the focus of the often unhinged romantic and sexual desire of countless men. The fantasy of a regular schmoe having an affair with a beautiful, famous movie star might make for a good romcom …

…. but the reality of these obsessions must be a terrible thing for many famous women.

Famous people, because they don’t want to inspire envy, often downplay the upsides of fame. But I’ve noticed that even those who complain about fame seem to enjoy it.

Like Bill Murray. It’s strange to read him being so negative about fame, given that there is a whole movie about how much he loves it. Apparently, Bill Murray enjoys showing up unexpectedly—at bachelor parties, Frisbee games, karaoke clubs, and so on—so that people go “Holy shit, that’s Bill Murray!” and are delighted by their accidental encounter with a famous person. I don’t begrudge Bill Murray his hobby, which really does add joy to people’s lives, but it does seem disingenuous for the same guy to say “meh, there’s nothing positive to being famous”.

Kevin Bacon is more honest. In The Arabian Nights, a king disguises himself so he can walk among the common people of Baghdad. Just like Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Bacon wondered what it would be like to be a nobody.

Putting on a baseball cap wouldn’t do the trick (Bacon: “I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognizable.”). So he had a special effects makeup artist create an elaborate prosthetic disguise, including glasses, a modified nose, and fake teeth. It worked. Bacon walked through an outdoor shopping mall full of tourists, and nobody recognized him.

Here is what he said about it. He’s being funny, of course, and self-deprecatory, but I think there’s a real truth here.

“People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, this sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”

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

Paid subscribers get the overtime segment, which includes:

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?

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

Read more

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.

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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.

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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.

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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