Small Potatoes

An origin story

I’m starting this Substack because of a personal failure. A writing project that I had been counting on fell through suddenly and unpleasantly. I was complaining to a friend (hi, Azim!) and he suggested that I do something entirely new with my writing, I should start a Substack. And I thought: Huh. Worth a shot.

It does seem like fun to have a place to just write and get feedback on my ideas, without editors and other gatekeepers. A while ago, I read Erik Hoel’s piece on the joys of Substack writing and though I’m more pro-editor than he is—I’ve had some wonderful editors, especially at The New Yorker and The Atlantic, who have made my essays much better—he made a convincing case for the value of this less constrained sort of writing. So here we go.

One day when it burns a bit less I’ll talk more about the failure that brought me here. But not today. Now, I’ll explain why I’m calling my Substack Small Potatoes.

In 2001, Jonathan Haidt published in Psychological Review what is perhaps the most famous article in all of moral psychology—”The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” In it, he argued that “moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached.” Emotions and intuitions play a powerful role in our sense of what’s right and wrong; rationality matters a lot less than we think it does.

I read this article when it came out, but I didn’t study moral psychology at the time and didn’t give it much thought. But one day, David Pizarro—then a graduate student at Yale, now a professor at Cornell—dropped by my office and we started to discuss it, and we realized that we both agreed that while Jon made some good points, we thought (and still think) that rational deliberation is much more important than Jon gave it credit for. And so we decided to write a response. After some revision, it was published in 2003, as The Intelligence of the moral intuitions: A Comment on Haidt (2001).

(Side note: I owe David a lot—this was my first publication ever on moral psychology and it led to a shift in the direction of my academic career, where morality is now the focus of most of my work. And this was the first of many collaborations between David and me; our most recent one being the podcast Psych.)

The relative contribution of rationality vs. emotions in our sense of right and wrong is a matter of ongoing controversy, and I might say more about this in a later post, but the story here isn’t about morality; it’s about the editing process. One of our drafts included the phrase “This is not small potatoes”. The editor, Walter Mischel, sternly told us to remove it. It’s idiomatic, he said, and might not be easily understood by the large international audience of Psychological Review.

So we took it out. Not a big thing. And maybe Mischel was right; it’s a judgment call. But, weirdly, it grated on me. So, as the world’s tiniest and saddest acts of rebellion, I made a point of inserting the phrase into my articles and books. Such as How Pleasure Works (2010):

Do children evaluate objects based on their history? For them to do so, they have to be capable of thinking about objects as distinct individuals. This is not small potatoes.

Or The Sweet Spot (2020):

I suggest that we can have it all. … Happiness and meaning were correlated— having one ups the odds of having the other. Keep in mind as well that it’s not as if people in wealthy countries have lives bereft of meaning—for instance, two-thirds of the respondents in Japan and France—relatively happy and rich societies—told the pollsters that their lives had meaning. This is not small potatoes.

Or my most recent, Psych (2022):

Piaget was right—so much of human nature can be revealed through the study of babies and young children. This is not small potatoes.

By choosing Small Potatoes as a name for this Substack, maybe I’ll finally get it out of my system.

---

Here are some topics that I plan to write about in the next few months. This should give a flavor of the sorts of things I’m interested in.

• Why Chomsky is right that literature (sometimes) tells us more about human nature than sciences does

• The strange logic of who gets credit for ideas

• The sorry state of positive psychology

• Why I’m not a hedonist.

• The psychology of perverse and transgressive actions. This is a topic of real interest to me and I plan to devote several posts to it.

Thanks for reading and I hope you sign up for more!