Experimental History
· 19 min · Original

We need more goat sacrifices

photo cred: my dad Just a quick thing before this week’s post. If you’ve preordered THE STRANGEST IDEA IN THE WORLD, I’d like to send you a little something extra in the mail. Submit your preorder receipt and your mailing address here. This is only available to folks with US or UK addresses—apologies to those who live elsewhere! In the US, everyone with a valid entry will get one; in the UK they’ll pick winners randomly. The link will be open until December 11, and we’ll start mailing things out after that. I won’t spoil the surprise, but I will say that a) it’s very silly, and b) I can’t wait to get mine. (For the US: US Residents, 18+. Ends December 11, 2026. See terms at https://sites.prh.com/strangestidea-preorder) Anyway, onto the post! Before anybody enacts a major social policy or launches any philanthropic programs, they should sacrifice a goat. There ought to be an entire liturgy of grotesqueries, in fact—pricked fingers, names written in blood, robes, candles, chanting, obsidian blades, still-beating hearts, the whole shebang. The point of this ritual is not to signal our obeisance to the gods (although if any of them want to stop by and help us out, that would be cool), but to remind ourselves that we know nothing. This is procedurally-induced humility, which is desperately necessary, because an alarming number of our best-intentioned interventions do not work. For example: In 2009, Congress spent $3 billion on “School Improvement Grants” for the worst-performing schools in the country. As far as we can tell, those grants did nothing. Universities that hired a Chief Diversity Officer between 2001 and 2019 did not end up with more diverse students, faculties, or administrators. The American government spent $280 million to help Afghan women get jobs, and now…

Experimental History
· 14 min · Original

Fake it ‘til you make it (and then keep faking it)

photo cred: my dad This is the quarterly (really more like trimester-ly) links ‘n’ updates post, a collection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months. (1) FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT (AND THEN KEEP FAKING IT) A few years ago, a blog called Data Colada presented evidence of fraud in several papers by then-Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. She was later fired, although she denies wrongdoing and the litigation is ongoing. (For more, see I’m So Sorry for Psychology’s Loss, Whatever It Is.) Now, Data Colada is making similar allegations about pop psych superstar Dan Ariely (1, 2). The paper in question is benign enough: it claims to show that when you let students pick their own deadlines, they get worse grades than when you evenly space their deadlines out for them. But both of the studies appear to be built on some funny data. One of the spreadsheets is full of duplicates, and the other appears to have been edited to show an effect after reviewers requested it. We can learn three things from this episode and others like it. First, you might think that fabulists would want their studies to be colorful and exciting—after all, if you’re going to fake your data, why make it boring? But no, it seems like fraudsters succeed by simply providing evidence for things we already suspect to be true. Second, the peer review process can actually increase the likelihood of fraud by telling researchers exactly what lies they need to tell in order to get published. And third, you can survive wave after wave of suspicion by admitting nothing, retracting your papers, and saying that you don’t remember what happened. Ariely has been suspected of funny business before—one of Gino’s papers contains a second set of fake data that Gino didn’t touch, but Ariely…

Experimental History
· 15 min · Original

Claude, don’t touch my lump

photo cred: my dad Is AI going to take all the jobs, or what? Seventy-one percent of American adults think that AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next 20 years. All over the world, a plurality of people agree. The CEO of Anthropic says that AI will spike the unemployment rate to 10-20% in the next 1-5 years. We can all hear the creaking and the screeching of the Terminators as they lumber toward us—not to kill us, apparently, but to do all of our graphic design, make all of our spreadsheets, and send all of our emails. I get why people feel this way. It seems so obvious that as technology improves, unemployment should increase. One day you’re on an assembly line, screwing the doors onto washing machines, and the next day they invent a robot that can screw on 1,000 doors in a minute, and now you don’t have a job anymore. If you take this kind of story seriously, though, shouldn’t unemployment have been steadily increasing since, say the Industrial Revolution? Shouldn’t we now be at 100% unemployment, or at least well on our way there? Why instead is the unemployment rate basically where it was 80 years ago? Economists refer to this as the “lump of labor” fallacy, the mistaken idea that there’s one long list of all the jobs that need to be done, and that list only ever gets shorter. Technology has obviously displaced human labor; if it hadn’t, we’d all still be farmers, like we were until a few hundred years ago.1 It just hasn’t replaced human labor on average. All of those technological transitions have been painful—just ask the movie theater musicians in the 1920s, the bowling pin-setters in the 1950s, the video rental store clerks in the 2010s, or the mathematicians today. Yet somehow, even as we’ve automated away lots of our old tasks, we’ve found new ways to busy…

Experimental History
· 4 min · Original

The Strangest Idea in the World

I wrote a book! It’s called The Strangest Idea in the World and you can get it here and looks like this: If you’re in the UK, you can get it here and it looks like this1: A few years ago, I got obsessed with a question: why did it take humans 300,000 years to invent the toilet? By which I mean, why did it take so long to discover and invent everything that we’ve discovered and invented? How does low-hanging fruit go unpicked for centuries? (For example, the first randomized-controlled trial wasn’t run until 1948. That idea is younger than my grandparents.) Come to think of it, how does anyone discover anything? And why does the data suggest that we’re getting worse at discovering things today—that more time, money, and people go in, but fewer breakthroughs come out? What the heck is going on here, and is there anything we can do about it? I have gone slightly insane trying to answer these questions. But I’ve come to think that you must go slightly insane, because the answers are strange. Humans did not evolve to do science, it’s a miracle that we can at all, and it’s unsurprising that we aren’t better. But we can be, if we’re willing to get ~~~weird~~~. In the book, I lay out the five steps that ultimately lead to discovery, why those steps don’t come to us naturally, and how they could. Making breakthroughs requires using the mind to do something it was never meant to do, and if you do it right, it’ll drive you nuts. The future depends on us going nuts in just the right way. A book that argues for a weird way of thinking should itself be weird. And so it is: The Strangest Idea in the World is, as far as I can tell, the world’s first interactive adult nonfiction book.2 There are secret pages, multiple endings, and a bunch of other special features that I won’t spoil.…

Experimental History
· 16 min · Original

I like 'em thick

photo cred: my dad I owe an apology to every English teacher I ever had. I always assumed that so-called “great” literature was a hoax, a punishment inflicted upon adolescents for the crime of being young. These books did not have anything special about them, and covering up that fact was simply a make-work exercise for former English majors, a sort of “jobs for snobs” program. I was wrong about this. There is such thing as greatness. More specifically, there is such thing as thickness. Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention. The more time you spend with them, the more you get out of them. That kind of responsiveness is so addicting that it can lead people to do crazy things, like try to teach literature to high schoolers. But thickness is tricky, because rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one. And this is where I would like an apology in return from my English teachers, because while this might have been obvious to them, they never made it obvious to me. I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something. But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some…

Experimental History
· 16 min · Original

Incentives are for losers

photo cred: my dad We can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.” I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them? My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing? There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid. Which is: incentives are for losers. Doing something simply because an arbitrary reward system will give you a lil treat—that’s for pigeons, not people. If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you’re a dummy and a schmuck.1 COME HELMET OR HIGH WATER When I played Little League baseball for a few disastrous years, my least favorite part was going up to bat, because you had to wear one of these ratty old batting helmets supplied by the local rec department. None of them fit right, and they all smelled like a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you, because a hundred sweaty 10-year-olds had worn them before you. And so every at-bat carried not only the risk of striking out, but also the risk of contracting head lice.2 A few kids, the serious ones, brought their own helmets—custom fitted, tastefully decorated…

Experimental History
· 11 min · Original

Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.

photo cred: my dad Here’s a reasonable thought: as the replication crisis has unfolded over the past 10-15 years, a bunch of psychological phenomena have been debunked and discarded forever. Power posing, ego depletion, growth mindset, stereotype threat, walking slower after reading the word “Florida”—all gone for good. Surely, nobody studies or publishes on these topics anymore, except maybe to debunk them a little further, like infantrymen wandering around a battlefield after the fighting is done and issuing the coup de grâce to those poor wounded soldiers who are dying, but not yet dead. This isn’t true. All of these ideas live on, mostly undaunted by news of their deaths. Nobody calls it “power posing” anymore, but you can still find plenty of new studies on “embodiment” and “expansive posture”, like this one, this one, and this one. Ego depletion studies keep coming out. I count over a thousand papers published on growth mindset just in the first three months of 2026. People are even doing variations on the slow-walking study, but now in virtual reality. This leads to some absurd situations. One psychologist who used to work on stereotype threat now disavows the theory entirely: “I no longer believe it is real, but you can make up your own mind.” But another psychologist claims that “stereotype threat is real and virtually universal [...] there is a lot of evidence supporting [its] existence (and impact)”. We’re not arguing about whether stereotype threat is powerful or weak, or whether it is pervasive or rare, but whether it is obviously alive or obviously dead. That’s literally the premise of a Monty Python sketch. Perhaps stereotype threat is merely pining for the fjords (source) It might seem like the way to resolve these disputes is to weigh up all the…

Experimental History
· 18 min · Original

Infinite midwit

photo cred: my dad The better AI has gotten, the less anxious I’ve become. A few years ago, when the computers first started talking, it was reasonable to believe that we would soon be in the presence of omnipotent machines. For someone like me, whose job is to produce words on the internet, it seemed like only a matter of time before I would have to fill my pockets with stones and wade into the sea. But we’ve gotten a closer look at our electric god as it has slouched toward San Francisco to be born, and it isn’t quite like I feared. I don’t feel like I have access to an on-demand omnipotence. Instead, I can talk to an infinite midwit: a stooge who is always available and very knowledgeable, but smart? Well, yes and no, in weird ways. Even as it has learned to count the number of “r”s in the word “strawberry”, even as it has stopped telling people to put glue on their pizza, there’s still a hole in the center of its capabilities that’s as big as it was in 2022, a hole that shows no signs of shrinking. I only know this because that hole is where I live. G WHIZ Some problems have clear boundaries and verifiable solutions, like “What’s the cube root of 38,126?”. These problems require objective intelligence. Other problems are vague and squishy and it’s not clear whether you’ve solved them, or whether they exist at all, like “How do I live a good life?”. These problems require subjective intelligence. Objective intelligence can be trained, reinforced, and validated. Subjective intelligence cannot. It’s unfortunate that people use one word to refer to both of these capabilities, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other. It is also, ironically, a case of objective intelligence overshadowing subjective intelligence: these skills are obviously and intuitively…

Experimental History
· 14 min · Original

Text is king

photo cred: my dad The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves. I am skeptical of this thesis. I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down”. Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; 422 new indie shops opened last year alone. Even Barnes and Noble is cool again. The actual data on reading isn’t as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don’t find any other major trends over the past three decades: Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in reading over the past decade: And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023: Purple line = reading with children. Turquoise line = reading for personal interest. These averages include everybody, not just those who spent a…