Today I speak with Adam Mastroianni - experimental psychologist, sharp critic of modern culture and science, and my favorite kind of troublemaker.
From endless remakes to cultural sameness, Adam argues that as society becomes more stable and risk-averse, we may be unintentionally reducing the “deviance” that drives originality and breakthrough thinking. We also discuss why science should get weirder, how to fight credentialism, and the dangers of professionalization.
I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
Increased Prosperity = Less Deviance
Adam Mastroianni: So there’s an idea in biology called life history or life history strategy. That’s basically, you know, organisms, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are looking around their environment and trying to decide am I going to die young or am I going to be around a while? Because if I’m going to be around a while, I can invest in a slower life history strategy. I can get bigger and stronger and make sure that I hit my KPIs at each milestone of my life. But if I’m in a resource scarce environment, if I’m in a dangerous environment, I better reproduce quickly because I might not be around to reproduce tomorrow.
I think what’s true about organisms in general is true about humans too. We do this maybe somewhat consciously and maybe mostly unconsciously. We pay attention to cues in our environment to see am I going to grow old, can I plan on seeing my grandchildren? Or might I die of disease or an accident, or might I be killed by another human? And we are much less likely to die by being killed by another human, by disease or by deprivation than we have been at any point in human history. And this is a pretty recent thing. I talk about in the piece about how both of my grandfathers were drafted to fight in the Korean War, as were their fathers fought their own wars and their fathers’ fathers fought their own wars.
I’m kind of the first generation in my family to pass my prime war fighting age without being asked to go kill strangers in a foreign land. That’s pretty new. And so it’s natural that I’m kind of looking around going, all right, well, I want to make sure I contribute to my 401k. I’m going to be around a while. Don’t mess this up by poisoning my lungs with smoke. Don’t mess this up by having a kid at 17. Don’t mess this up by flunking out of school and not going to college. Make sure to play the long game. I think that’s what’s going on.
Science is a Strong Link Problem
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, the way I think of it is science is a strong link problem where we progress at the rate that we do our best work, rather than a weak link problem where we progress at the rate that we do the worst thing. Right. So food safety is a weak link problem where you really want to eliminate the things that are most harmful. Science has the opposite property, where the things that are most useless just fade away naturally with time. The things that are most useful actually have an outsized impact. And the way that you solve a strong link problem like that is by increasing variance, taking more weirder shots. Because if they end up to be total failures, they just don’t matter, people forget it and they move on. Just like Newton’s alchemy that didn’t make a big difference.
The laws of motion made a huge difference. So we wanted someone who’s doing way over here and way over there. Because it turns out that this one was great, this one wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. We got this one. That’s the entire idea behind them.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Jim O’Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today is someone who has intrigued me for quite some time. Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist, postdoc at Columbia University, Harvard PhD, former Rhodes Scholar, also a bit of a troublemaker. Adam, welcome.
Adam Mastroianni: Hey, thanks. Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me. Looking forward to starting some trouble.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Listen, if there’s trouble to be started, I want to be there. I love it. Let’s go right at one of your central ideas, and that is you’ve argued culture is converging. I think everyone feels that. You see all the things on social media and getting ready for this, I was going back through YouTube videos, rock videos, right? And man, the 60s. You know, it’s the 60s and then all of a sudden the 70s, and you got disco and you’ve got very different. And it seems like we’re kind of collapsing into a sameness culturally. Let’s talk about that first.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to do is take a trend that everybody’s complaining about and then see if we can actually see it in the numbers. And so one of my first big posts, I did this a couple of years ago with, you know, everyone complains that every movie is a rerun, a remake, a spinoff. Is that actually true or is this just people complaining about something? And when you look at the numbers, it’s like, no, that one’s really true. Until the year 2000, if you look at the top grossing movies every year, about 25% of them were somehow related to another previous movie. But after the year 2000, it shoots up to 75% of bestselling movies every year are now part of some cinematic universe, broadly speaking.
And so with these claims of cultural stagnation or decline, I was like, okay, well what if we look everywhere? What can we see? And I think the most interesting piece of this is that there is the positive version and the negative version. And the version that’s gotten the most airtime is the negative version. It is, you know, every movie is a rerun. The buildings aren’t beautiful anymore. These things are true, you can see them in the data. But I think the better way to think about this is in terms of deviance. And some deviance is good, we call that creativity. And some deviance is bad, we call that crime normally, or rule breaking.
And if you start with that data, if you look at surveys of what young people are doing in terms of smoking, drinking, getting pregnant, these are teens, to be clear, high school students. These things just go down and down, starting mainly in the 90s. And I think we can all agree that’s a good decline of deviance. It’s a good thing that the students aren’t smoking in the boys’ room anymore. But I think it has this negative ultimate outcome, which is the kids who are smoking in the bathroom ultimately go on. Some of them, maybe some of them are closer than you might think. Some of them go on to do some interesting things as well. And so if you don’t have that deviance at the beginning, maybe you don’t get it down the line in both positive and negative forms.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And it’s an idea that is also near and dear to my heart. And I’m just looking for reasons and I’m sure you’re going to give me better ones than I’ve come up with. One of my ideas is one of the hidden variables that the generation today. And I’m sticking with culture right now. But we live in a panopticon age. When I was a teenager, I was that kid smoking in the boys’ room. We did crazy ass shit. But there was no camera to record us. There was no social media to shame us and have people clutch their pearls and say, oh, this is awful. Do you think that’s part of it or am I going down the wrong path?
Adam Mastroianni: It could totally be part of it. I think any important social trend is going to have multiple causes. But the interesting thing about this one is that it starts a lot earlier. It starts too early for a lot of these Internet based or technology based explanations. So a lot of the decline in high school deviance starts in the 90s. At least that’s as far as we can tell, which is before everybody had a camera in their pocket, certainly before everyone had a broadband Internet connection at home or a 5G connection on their phone. So while I think that can certainly speed it up and might be a factor more recently, that doesn’t seem to be the place it came from originally.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So enlighten me, where did it come from originally?
Adam Mastroianni: Well, we don’t know for sure. No one knows. But my guess is that this comes from basically increased prosperity. So there’s an idea in biology called life history or life history strategy. That’s basically, you know, organisms, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are looking around their environment and trying to decide am I going to die young or am I going to be around a while? Because if I’m going to be around a while, I can invest in a slower life history strategy. I can get bigger and stronger and make sure that I hit my KPIs at each milestone of my life. But if I’m in a resource scarce environment, if I’m in a dangerous environment, I better reproduce quickly because I might not be around to reproduce tomorrow.
I think what’s true about organisms in general is true about humans too. We do this maybe somewhat consciously and maybe mostly unconsciously. We pay attention to cues in our environment to see am I going to grow old, can I plan on seeing my grandchildren? Or might I die of disease or an accident, or might I be killed by another human? And we are much less likely to die by being killed by another human, by disease or by deprivation than we have been at any point in human history. And this is a pretty recent thing. I talk about in the piece about how both of my grandfathers were drafted to fight in the Korean War, as were their fathers fought their own wars and their fathers’ fathers fought their own wars.
I’m kind of the first generation in my family to pass my prime war fighting age without being asked to go kill strangers in a foreign land. That’s pretty new. And so it’s natural that I’m kind of looking around going, all right, well, I want to make sure I contribute to my 401k. I’m going to be around a while. Don’t mess this up by poisoning my lungs with smoke. Don’t mess this up by having a kid at 17. Don’t mess this up by flunking out of school and not going to college. Make sure to play the long game. I think that’s what’s going on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And that is consistent. I was born in 1960 and I was that generation as well. I came of age, was not drafted. Now that was because there wasn’t a draft at that particular time, but I wasn’t asked to do that. I think that’s really insightful. There’s another strand, a former guest I had on, Matt Clifford, who is in the UK and was advising the Prime Minister on their AI strategy, et cetera. His theory was intriguing to me and I’d love your take. His thesis is basically the Napoleonic wars changed everything. And by that he meant Western civilization was like, okay, we gotta come up with a way to stop these ambitious boys from trying to take over the fucking world. Let’s try to dampen the variance, right?
So instead of trying to conquer the world, maybe they’ll try to conquer commerce or arts or science or one of those. But then he brings into the mix and now we’ve got the Internet, which in his opinion is the largest variance amplifier that we’ve had in human history. Is that part of this conversation too?
Adam Mastroianni: It could be. I mean, like I said, I think the Internet can accelerate a lot of these trends and certainly one way it can accelerate them is by eliminating any eddies or niches in culture, right? There is no place in the world that is safe from the dominant and mainstream culture that’s being beamed onto the airwaves at all times, that you cannot be a person and not know who Taylor Swift is really, no matter who you are. You’d literally have to be in a hunter gatherer tribe to not know that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I tried. I tried for a long time, but I failed.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I mean, you go to a store and she’s going to be playing over the radio, right? Your grandchildren are going to know who she is. There’s no escape. That wasn’t necessarily true a generation or two ago. You could just be a person in, say, Belarus and not know who the most famous person was on the radio in the U.S. at the time. There’s no escape anymore. And so now if everybody has the same inputs, we’re more likely to produce the same outputs. So what could be an amplifier of variance? You know, now we have the Internet, anyone can make whatever they want. And there’s many more ways to support yourself. I think some of that has come true.
But at the same time, it is also a dampener on variance in that everyone is getting the same raw materials of culture put into their brains that get mixed up and come back out. And those now look more similar.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And it’s basically leading towards a monoculture, not only in pop culture, but in science and the arts, etc. But, you know, by the same token, on that topic, the idea that. Let’s take I Love Lucy, right? I Love Lucy. I think its final show had nearly 70 million viewers in the United States, at least. And then we fast forward today, and maybe Game of Thrones might be a similar thing to look at. I think they had 18 million. So there seems to also be a lot of fragmentation going on, right?
Adam Mastroianni: Yes. Yeah. So there’s these two things going on here where now everyone can be served content that is more to their liking. And you see this somewhat on TV, but certainly you open up social media on your phone. What we call social media, but is really just television that’s made for you on your phone. And so those are going to be seen by fewer people, but more tailored to your interests. So we have that as a variance amplifier. But what we have as a variance de-amplifier is that, for one thing, everybody knows about Game of Thrones whether or not they’ve actually seen it. So it’s part of the culture regardless. And at the same time, it gets a lot harder to grow these idiosyncratic cultures where they are.
So this is sort of a random connection, but I’ve read a lot about the Millerite movement in the 1840s. This was an apocalyptic movement. This guy thought, you know, Christ is coming back, and he’s really coming back soon. So people are selling their homes, whatever. But a really interesting thing reading into the background of accounts from that time is in the American Northeast, if you wander from one town to another, you can encounter a completely different religious culture. In this town, we are Baptists, and we really care about whether you get baptized as an adult or not. And over here, we are hardcore Unitarians, and we don’t see the distinctions that they see. And we have our own newspapers and we have our own civic society, and these are really different.
I don’t think you can get anything like that in the U.S. anymore. You drive from one town to another, you can get a little bit of difference, but nothing near that kind of cultural idiosyncrasy. And that’s because back then it would take you a day to get from one place to another. And so it would take a lot longer for culture to travel, whereas today it takes you an hour.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I’m reading a really interesting book on the story of money right now. I vibe with it because I’ve always looked at money as an information technology or a technology rather. And part of it is talking about why Gutenberg’s printing press thrived in Germany at the time that it did. And the reason for that was there was no centralized power. There was a confederacy of duchies, as you say about the different towns, same deal, very different cultures within each one. And so the idea that they could do their own thing, write their own pamphlets, and the pamphlets and what they were advocating for, et cetera, were very different. Like a 5 mile walk away to the next town.
And in places like China, the author makes the point, hey, they knew about the printing press, but they suppressed it because the emperor was like, that does not meet the mandate of heaven. And I wonder, let’s bring in your idea of the moral panics, because this is something that really annoys me. And yet, when you look historically, they’re always clutching pearls around innovations, right? You go back all the way to the novel and oh my God, everyone threw the halo up and this is gonna ruin society and ruin the youth and everything else. And it just repeats. It’s a pattern. It’s just like every time, why are we not learning from this?
Adam Mastroianni: I think it’s because it’s a bit like learning that strangers aren’t as bad as we think they are. So there’s this finding in psychology that if you ask people, hey, if you talk to this person on a bus, the stranger, how do you think it’ll go? And they’re like, it’ll be horrible. I’ve collected some of this data myself. It’ll be horrible. They won’t want to talk to me, it won’t go well. And then you make them do it and it’s like, oh, actually it was fine, but it’s because they weren’t a stranger, they were actually just a friend in waiting. And so the next one’s going to be bad. And so strangers have this wicked problem where it’s impossible to learn about the population of strangers because each time you sample from it, that person stops being a stranger.
I think there’s a similar thing going on with innovation where it’s impossible to learn about the population of innovations because each time we sample one, it becomes a regular technology. So we’re all born into a point in history where everything that was invented before we got here feels normal to us, and everything that’s invented after we get here feels like a change. And so we’re always moving through time being like all the previous innovations, those turned out fine. It’s all the future ones that are going to be bad. What I find really funny is a lot of the things that people fear about these innovations does turn out to be true. It just doesn’t hurt in the way that we thought it was going to hurt. Right. There’s a lot of people.
I’ve read this book recently, Innovation’s Enemies by this guy Calestous Juma, who tells the story of there’s several hundred years of history of resistance to coffee. And actually the rulers who wanted to stamp out these coffee houses were 100% correct about the effect that coffee houses and coffee culture were going to have on their countries. They were correct to try to stop people from drinking coffee. It just turns out that for most of us, living in a world of coffee is a better one. For a very small percentage of people, it’s a much worse world because they don’t get to rule it anymore.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I think there’s a lot of that going on too, right? Historically, you can see a common thread in all societies where the rulers want to stay ruling. And the way that they look at that is to suppress innovation, to suppress creativity, because, oh my God, what if an idea comes along? Like again, in this book that I’m reading right now, which is a lot of fun, is basically, the church was very put off by the emergence of money lenders because they had a complete monopoly on it. And it was basically, you know, time value of money. It took people. Fibonacci’s book, by the way, which ended up, the author claims, being one of the best selling first business books ever. But it was written for merchants, right?
And the church had maintained this idea that only God can determine what the time value of money is. And it just so happens we have a direct line to him. And so we’re the ones who know what the correct value is. And then Fibonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, when he wrote his book, he’s like, not so fast. And so, but there’s always been, right, this clash of old elites versus rising elites. And it’s universal, right? It’s not just culture. It’s in science, it’s in the arts, it’s everywhere. And so how do we, you know, Whitehead said the great ages have always been unstable ages. How do we design a little more variance into the system?
Adam Mastroianni: I think part of it has to come from the structure of the institutions that are producing the variance. Institutions in general have this tension where if you are an institution, you really don’t like the idea of a revolution because you’ve kind of invested in things being the way they are for a while, because you maybe own real estate, you’ve got depreciation to think about. So if everything’s going to change, that’s actually a big problem for you. So it’s a huge problem if you’re an institution that is supposed to do the innovation that there’s a very particular kind of innovation that you’re going to be interested in, which is extremely slow, predictable, where people can plan their careers around it and we can plan the sunsetting of our billions in our capital expenditures.
And I think it makes sense for some of our innovation to live in institutions like that. Because some innovations are like that. They are stepwise and slow and incremental. The most important ones are not that way. And so the most important ones cannot live in large institutions that have to have a bureaucratic apparatus to run them. Which is why I think we need a new set of institutions that are smaller and that are run differently, that are not invested in their long term survival in the current status quo. And if you look at the history of revolutionary innovations and breakthroughs, they tend to happen despite all of the forces trying to stop them from happening, that they happen because someone had a little bit of slack in their calendar, someone made a mistake and was able to take advantage of it.
They did not happen because of the purposeful functioning of the institutions. So James Scott, Seeing Like a State guy, makes this point that all formal order in these tight states, these autocratic states, are actually parasitic on informal order. That the state only works because people secretly disobey the rules. They’re secretly growing crops in the backyard. That’s why they don’t starve. If they actually did what the state told them to do, the state would collapse. So too with our institutions of innovation, they are parasitic on basically people breaking the rules. So what if we carved off some of that rule breaking and allowed it to be its own thing? I don’t know if this is literally possible. It’s kind of never been done or only been done for very short periods of time in very specific circumstances. But it’s really worth a shot.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I mean, we give every year $100,000 fellowships and we also give grants. And that’s what we’re aiming for. We’re aiming for funding the people who are way outside of consensus, but we’re really intrigued by what they’re doing. Are there any other. Like, if you were going to set up. If you were going to set. You got funding, right? And you were going to set up something like this. Walk me through what that looks like.
Adam Mastroianni: It would be what I call a science house. So I’ve run a prototype version of this on an Emergent Ventures grant for just a couple of weeks. But basically the idea is the core of scientific practice is apprenticing with someone who already knows what they’re doing. The scientific method is actually really illegible, despite our attempts to put it into a series of rules. You learn it by being close to someone who knows how to do it. Unfortunately, the only way to apprentice to someone right now is to join a PhD program, which has all of its downsides that I’m sure are familiar to you and your listeners. What if instead you went and lived basically in a hacker house where you worked on scientific projects under the tutelage of a more experienced person? You publish your results directly to the Internet.
You live there for, say, four to five years, like you would doing a PhD. But the environs are different, right? That we don’t answer to the incentives of the journals and the tenure track system. We’re trying to do weird stuff that we think is cool. And then afterward, you take that and try to make your life with it, right? There are now tons of alternative research institutions that would be great landing places for people with an alternative training. But what they’re finding is that all of their recruits come from academia, and so they need to be deprogrammed when they get there. And so we have this huge waste where we’re paying a lot of money to train people in a certain way of doing things. They’re like, oh, cool.
You can go to Arcadia, you can go to the Arc Institute, you can go to Astera, but first we have to undo this very expensive training that you had. And now you got to redo this other form of training. What if we didn’t have to staff our new world with refugees from the old world? As good as the refugees might be, what if we could grow our own there? That’s what I would like to build, is a place that we grow our own.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And again, we are incredibly aligned there. And it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem again. Back to the fellowships. The first year we did them, we’re like, we want to find people that are just way under the radar, et cetera. Guess who dominated all of our applications? Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, you know, Cambridge, Oxbridge, et cetera. And so it’s really intriguing to me because I think that we’re at a place where these types of ideas, we’re just kind of starting out with them at scale, right? So what do you do when you bring the whole. Because, look, human OS. We are status junkies. We are prestige junkies. And the old accreditation system, right? Like, one of my favorite Onion headlines was Texan who went to Harvard doesn’t know which to mention first.
And, I mean, that’s just the way we are. Me too, everyone. And so how do we hook that in with the Science House? How does that become cool or prestigious or, you know, that becomes its own credential that equals a Harvard PhD?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think every cool thing starts by people who didn’t care about being cool, and that’s what made them cool. So there are. There’s not many of them, but I think there are rare people who, for whatever reason, have the status part of their brain switched off. That part didn’t develop. They’re just obsessive about something. They can be hard to find because they aren’t trying to promote themselves as much. But if you can find them and if you can concentrate them, they do really cool things because they aren’t encumbered by trying to make themselves look cool to other people. Then other people see that and they’re like, oh, that looks actually cool. It’s pretty cool not to care what other people think about you. I’d like to do that, too. That is, I think, where this comes from.
So when I recruited for the small version of Science House, your application was just the fact that you had ever done an empirical research project and posted it directly to the Internet. That’s it. And just by doing that, I basically restricted the world to like six people who had ever done that. Because why would you ever do that? There’s nothing in it. That’s exactly why I want those people, so you can train a generation of those people and they could do cool work. Then you get the kind of people who, okay, look, they’re not insane. They care a little bit about status, but they’re willing to take a leap. And then you get those people, and then you get people who, okay, look, I do care about status, but I also really care about science.
And then you can get those people as well. And eventually. Now we’ve infected the university system as well, but that’s what that system is full of, is people who ostensibly wanted to do science, but also got caught up in the status of it. And if we can get universities to start doing what we would be doing in science houses, that’s what victory looks like.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And while I am certainly not cool, I spent most of my time in asset management. And the reason for much of my success was a book I wrote called What Works on Wall Street, which is a massive empirical study of all the favorite factors, you know, that people say I like low PE stocks. And I’m like, well, let’s see if that works. And so we took it back to the early 60s and in some cases, all the way back with data. Pretty dirty data, to the late 1920s. And every academic said to me, why didn’t you publish this as a PhD thesis? Why didn’t you just go direct to the public with a book? And I just felt I didn’t. As I’m listening to you, I didn’t even think about, I should get this as my PhD.
So now that we have the Internet, I would think and hope that we could see this happening all over the place. Are we?
Adam Mastroianni: A little bit. Nowhere near as much as I think anyone would have thought. This was the empty promise of the Internet is like, yeah, there’s gonna be a lot more people doing this. They’re just doing what they love and they’re putting it out there. There are some people who do that, and God love them. There are so much fewer than there could be, I think, because they’re waiting for permission. You kind of have to be a little bit crazy to do it. You get no status by putting stuff on the Internet. So I love doing it. It’s actually really fun to be unencumbered by status. But you know, I wrote this post that was like, hey, I am giving you permission to do science and post it on the Internet.
I got so much response from people who are like, I’m very interested in this idea. How can I help support it? And very few responses that were like, I’m doing it, and I kind of consider it a failure. I have not figured out yet how to unlock more of that sense of, whatever you want to call it, agency, permission for people to do science on their own terms and put it on the Internet to feel like, yeah, you can do it. You can do it poorly. Guess what? Most of the people doing it professionally are doing it poorly too. There have been hot moments in history where this was a thing that people were allowed to do on an amateur basis and they could contribute. How do we get that back?
I think we are just under the critical mass. I think there aren’t quite enough people doing it. There aren’t enough physical locations where you can go and interact with the scene. I don’t think it works very well if it’s all totally online and distributed. You need someplace where you can go see the talk. You need someplace where you can go hang out with people. That’s why I’m all in on the Science House idea. But I think there’s a bunch of other ways that we can make physical scenes that amp up this feeling in people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So on that note, on the permission note, I completely agree. That seems to be another part of human OS, right? People waiting for permission instead of just going and doing it. So let’s say we’ve got a super smart listener. Of course, all of our listeners are super smart who is listening to us. And he’s like, I really want to do science, but I don’t want to join the priesthood. You know, what’s the first honest step he or she could take in the next 30 days to start down that path?
Adam Mastroianni: The very first thing I would do is read this piece by my friends who blog under the name Slime Mold Time Mold called The Scientific Virtues. And their whole point is that people think you become a scientist by learning a set of practices. This is incorrect. You become a scientist by practicing a set of virtues and they have a bunch of examples and quotes from great scientists. And the virtues are all counterintuitive things like stupidity and humor and rebellion. And I think this is a good spiritual introduction to what it takes to discover new knowledge. That’s the first place I would start. The next place I would go is to look around and try to find someone doing something cool that you think is cool. And you might want to learn how to do that thing.
And you could even just start by trying to replicate a thing that they did. People really worry starting out that I need to do something no one else has ever done. No, the way you get practice is you paint the still lifes. The scientific version of a still life is doing a replication. This is also a really useful thing that so few things get replicated that if you could just redo something, literally check the code, run the thing and whatever you’ve contributed to science, post it on the Internet, send it to the person who did the original version. And as soon as you’ve done that, you’re in it, you’re doing it, you’ve become the thing. I think the next steps will be a lot clearer because you’ll be in that world talking to the people who are doing it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And on those ideas of replication, crisis, medical fraud, policy capture, you know, institutions giving grants. In the old days, you know, grants came from industry, they came from universities, they came from a disparate and somewhat very different philosophical place. Now, you know, the government has sort of taken that over. Now we have all of the various journals that one must publish in to be, in quotes, air quotes, taken seriously. And yet when you look at that, I love your idea because there’s so much bad science out there and you could really kind of make a name for yourself just by trying to replicate, not replicating. I think there’s also a gold mine in things.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota and we had basically two charlatans there, Ancel Keys and Frantz Jr. who basically were trying to prove that seed oils are much better for the heart than saturated fat. They did a big study between 1968 and 1973, didn’t like the results. They ultimately ended up getting published in ‘89. But they were so hell bent on their little pet peeve that saturated fat is bad, you got to replace it with these seed oils. Now we all know what happened with that, but there’s gotta be just reams and reams of data that is just flat out wrong. Grab that and try to replicate and then say, here’s why.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, totally, just check the code. Probably no one’s ever checked the code. Probably no one’s ever checked the data. Most publications, no one ever looks at it. No one checks it before it gets published. So if someone took a finding that a lot of other people are relying on and was just like, hey, I couldn’t get the same results from the code and the data, hey, maybe I did something wrong. That would be so useful. And it’s a way that anyone can participate. I mean, I had a high schooler reach out to me a year ago, was just like, hey, I saw your post about moral decline. I’m supposed to do an experiment or something for my high school class. I’d want to replicate it.
And I’m like, you don’t understand how useful this is because I as a researcher have to go through so many hoops if I want to survey high schoolers, anyone under 18. If you do this as a class project, you can ask people. Just asking someone who’s 17 is contributing to the scientific process. You can do it. And I think people don’t understand how low hanging the fruit is that they can pick and can contribute. And if you start doing that, there’s so few people doing it. Another thing people worry about is like, well, I’ll do it and no one will pay attention. So few people are doing it that it really will get to the people that it should get to quickly.
I think this is a promise of the Internet that did turn out that the Internet has a pretty efficient circulatory system, that it really does sort things toward the people who need to know about them. That so often I find someone who doesn’t seem to have many followers or have much attention, but is doing something really relevant to me. And I see them a couple of weeks after they start doing what they’re doing. How that happens, I don’t know, is part of the magic of the Internet. But you too, if you replicate something and just post it, it will get to the person who needs to get to. I mean you should just email it to them, but it will get to the right people very quickly.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And my experience writing What Works on Wall Street, I had to walk the data, literally. And that introduced me to dirty data. And literally for several years, the folks at Compustat, which is the data set I used to write the book, said that I was their best error finder. And I’m like, at first I was like, oh cool. And then I was like, wait, what? Why am I your, why aren’t you having your people walk this data? And then once you see it, you can’t unsee it, right? Because if you would take one of the biggest stocks, Apple, okay, let’s look at what Bloomberg says the PE is. Let’s look at what Reuters says the PE is. Let’s look at, you know, and they’re different. And so I got really kind of freaked out.
And so my poor team, I sat on a multi year data cleansing operation. But it was very useful. And I’ve always, I love reading psychological research, for example. And there’s several books that I don’t know, 15 years ago I loved. And now I’m seeing that more than half the studies in those books don’t replicate. And so it’s a bit, I think it kind of ties into this everyone believing we’re in moral decline, right? I’m sure it’s apocryphal, but they said that one of the first Sumerian tablets that they translated said, you know, I’m not going to bother writing poetry. All the greatest poems have been written already. And so it seems to be part of our human nature, but then also back again. Human nature, right.
So David Bohm, I’m sure you’re familiar with him, well known physicist and you know, the author of the hidden variables thesis and everything. But when you look into that history, what you see is basically the movie Mean Girls playing out. So David Bohm had attended a communist meeting or two, and this is during the Red Scare. And so basically the government says to Oppenheimer, who was his mentor, no, you got to suppress whatever he’s doing. And Oppenheimer actually sent a telegram. I can’t remember exactly how he conveyed the message to his fellow researchers, but there was a line that said something like, “If we cannot disprove David’s thesis, we must suppress it.” That’s going on all the time. And by the way, that’s not now, that was a long time ago. And the same is true of nevertheless, it moves.
There are these competing power structures and there’s us, we humans. I don’t know, you’re probably too young to remember the Pogo cartoon by Walt Kelly, but one of his famous panels was, it’s Pogo sitting very contemplatively and saying, “We’ve met the enemy and it’s us.” I mean, how do we work that into the mix?
Adam Mastroianni: I mean, I think it’s a huge opportunity, right, that I think people think that science or discovery or innovation in general is hard in the way that mental math is hard. That you just, you gotta squeeze your brain really. And this is why you need to be super smart to do it. And it should really hurt. And actually that’s not the way that discoveries happen. A discovery is much more like seeing a color that no one’s ever seen before. It’s hard in that way. It’s not hard in a straining way. It’s hard in this is too weird kind of way.
And this always gives an advantage to outsiders and to people who don’t have a strong sense of identity in whatever field is going on, or they’re not well established in it because their brain isn’t thinking in the same groove as everybody else. So even if you don’t think you’re as smart as the smartest physicists, if you aren’t as established as the most established, there is still a chance that you are able to think a thought that they could not think because it is too strange to them. And it turns out that if you look closely enough at every major breakthrough, there is always someone, well credentialed who’s saying it can’t happen, it didn’t happen, it’s impossible, it’s stupid. And that person might ultimately be able to overpower you. They could really ruin your life.
But in the long run, they can’t stop the truth. And so hopefully, if you were trying to be an outsider doing science, that your story is a triumphant one rather than a tragic one. But I think if you find a new piece of truth, it is a triumph. What is for people in the establishment, I think a liability is for everybody outside of it an opportunity.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I agree. And yet when I hear things like the science is settled, I cringe. And because that is not the scientific method. That is scientism, trademark. Right? The descent into orthodoxy in the major scientific schools is just such a problem that I’ve taken to the point where I read something and I read a lot of the studies and everything else, but then I immediately thank God for AI, right? Because I put it in and I say, okay, so build the strongest steelman for this article. But then I also have it build the strongest steelman against. And is that something that could catch on? Is, we’re talking a moment ago about walking the data, right? Well, God, if AI had a great use case, that’s it, right?
Walk this data, find out where all of the anomalies are, find out the inconsistencies. Now you got to have a good data set, right? So you can’t be just using a commercially available large language model. You’ve got to train it and everything else. But I think that could unlock a ton of fascinating things and paths to go down.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think so too. I think that there’s a lot of promise in automating things that are a huge pain in the ass to do right now of just like, oh, yeah, okay, you want to replicate this data well, it’s labeled poorly. You got to do all this formatting. I think that could be really helpful. I think, you know, uncovering things that are not well connected to the literature, not well cited. I think that can be automated and made better. Where I worry about getting basically lock in and burn in AI tools is in this thought experiment. It’s just thinking of, if we had trained an LLM on all extant text up until the year 1550, would it then spit out Copernicus? Would it give us Galileo?
Or would it tell us, if you asked it, is it plausible that the sun might be at the center of the solar system? It would tell you, actually, many esteemed sages have thought about this and dismissed it for all of these very good reasons, which would be completely true. But the truest thing is the thing that wasn’t in, or the most important thing was not in the data set and in fact clashes with the data set, which is why I feel optimistic for the future of humans doing science. But I do think those humans will be well augmented by all of these tools that are going to allow them to do things much better, faster and better.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love that example because that’s right. You know, I’m a fan of David Deutsch and The Beginning of Infinity, and he has that great line in the book, hey, what were the smartest people in the world in 1900 saying and writing about the Internet and about quantum physics? Nothing. Because all of the prior data did not suggest either. And I definitely think that is something that many, it’s easy for people, even smart people, to overlook that fact. Right. When you live in a dominant paradigm and all of the official evidence and all of the official writing and all of that says, yeah, no, no, the Earth is the center of the universe and you put that into a large language model, well, that’s what you’re going to get. But that’s the human spark that encourages me about these new tools. Right.
They give you a means, but you’ve still got to work on the meaning. Right. And I think the idea of the ability to get those new insights is definitely something you’re not going to probably get. You could get it maybe faster and maybe more complete with the help of these tools. But the tools themselves are probably not going to do it. One idea that we have here at OSV is we have our own AI lab because we want to avoid the lobotomized AIs. And one of the things that we’re going to do hopefully this year, but maybe next, because we’ve got a lot of things on our plate, is basically just have the AI just generate via negativa. In other words, hypotheses with null sets.
And one of the things that if you just look at very few people apply for a grant, I want to prove that this doesn’t work. So I think that we’re missing a lot via negativa. Right. And we would kind of generate all these and then populate them to an open source data set. Are there other things that these tools could be used for that would both encourage, but also assist these. This new. The new people in the Science House?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ideally, I don’t think they’re there now, but they could be that if these things could acquaint you with stranger ideas and experiences and if they could show you like, okay, look, what if we entertain the idea that rather than working in this paradigm, we work in this paradigm. Let me show you what things would get solved and what things would get unsolved. Let me show you the implications. This is really hard for people to do. And I think it would also be pretty hard for an AI to do. I think it would take a lot to get it to do it. But if you can induce in people what Thomas Kuhn had when he has this passage where he’s like, I finally understood what Aristotelian physics was. It clicked for me.
And I understood how the system is internally consistent and leads to non-trivial predictions that do happen to be true about the world and why people found it so compelling for so long. You know, he did that by steeping in the works of Aristotle for a long time. If there’s a way to speed run that to make it a little less mysterious and to do it in forward motion rather than reverse, I think that’d be really useful. I listened to your episode with Julian Gough, which I loved, and I thought it was one of the best examples of the paradigmatic. What it takes to think through a paradigm shift. And I think there’s a reason why the guy who’s doing this is weird. And I mean that in a lovable way. Right. That he’s not a professional physicist.
He was a rock guy. He wrote a poem, he writes children’s books. There’s a reason why he’s capable of thinking these thoughts in a way that all the pieces are there for all the professionals. And it really seems like the professionals have looked at his work and been like it could be. But why did it take that guy? It’s like, well, he was exposed to a pretty different training set. And is there a way that we could make more people like that by exposing them to experiences in more rapid fire succession? I don’t know if that’s possible. You really might just have to do a lot of drugs and be in a rock band and write poetry. I kind of want that to be true. But I’d also like more Julians in the world, so I’ll take a little bit of both.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Julian was one of our grantees. The first conversation I had with him, I just adored because he was coming. I’m a huge believer in cognitive diversity. Right. There’s that great quote. I can’t remember who it is, but there’s simply no way that you can ask a person to write a list out of all the things that would never occur to them, right?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so by putting together very disparate minds, very different backgrounds, very different experiences, you can create some really incredible opportunities. And we’re actually seeing it play out in real time when we bring our grantees and fellows together. Very, very different skill sets, very different cognitive abilities. And one example was we had a woman working on a project where you could basically take your poop and put it in this home thing and analyze it. And it was kind of devoted for runners and athletes and things like that. But she sat with the editor in chief of our Infinite Books publisher and for an hour and a half he explained to her why all of her ways of trying to get it out into the world were wrong. And you know, he walked her through it.
Anyway, she came back to me and she’s like, that was the best hour and a half I have ever spent. I mean, she goes, because I didn’t think about any of the things that he brought up. And maybe that’s another element of your science house, right? You get very different thinkers and then get them to talk to each other.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. This has been the dream is that, you know, you have this thing running and then we invite some people from the local psych department. Right. If I’m running, we’re doing some kind of psychology and they come in and see that this is a different way that you can do things. And I would want my students to see that this is the established way of doing things. And I think there’s advantages to both. But think about this thing that you’ve just literally never done. And why have you never conceived of it? I always felt like at the time, this seems so normal. Now it seems so strange that when I was in psych departments, everybody only did psychology.
There was no, you know, I’m going home and I do a weird botany thing on the side. Or there’s no, oh, you know, I’ve been playing around with different ways of training neural nets. It’s like I do my one thing which is really strange. Why is the world organized such that there’s only these strands of knowledge that never touch each other? Do we not care about investigating the world in other ways? I understand we’re paid to do one particular thing, that’s fine. But are we not interested even in attempting to query the universe in other ways?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, and I think that is critical. I mean, you know, you look at Richard Feynman, bongos, the letters to his wife. I mean, he was a polymath. Claude Shannon, are you kidding me? He spent more of his time tinkering on other things and you know, the trumpet that had the flames come out of it and all of that. Oh, and by the way, information theory. And so I wonder about why that is. Newton, of course, the obvious example, he spent most of his time on alchemy and you know, he had a variety. And talk about weird. He was weird, right? And you just wonder, those people, we didn’t completely change the human condition here.
And was it kind of that transition to the man in the gray flannel suit in business and the man in the white coat in science and all of that, or I’m looking for a cause here.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, no, I think it is the professionalization of science that there’s a lot to be said for professionalization. Right? It raises the floor of what people do, but it also lowers the ceiling. It is a variance reducing measure, which is why professionalization makes a ton of sense for your dentist and makes no sense for your scientist. Really, I don’t need the best dentist in the world. I just need one who’s not going to harm me and is going to perform procedures competently. I do need the best scientists in the world because it’s only the very best work that ends up mattering. I would trade a thousand people who produce papers that never get cited for one Newton. There’s no conversion between them. And I think we lost the culture when we professionalized.
If you read the accounts of early Royal Society meetings, it’s like, we got some unicorn horn powder and we made a circle. We put a spider in the center to see what it would do, and the spider ran away. Here’s I found a piece of glowing meat. And all of these things are considered part of the world of natural philosophy. And some of them turned out to be a total waste of time and we forgot about them. That’s fine. Some of them turned out to be really important. And we didn’t forget about them because we kept using them. Now, there’s no feeling of that in professional science. It is embarrassing to do something that doesn’t work or is kind of far afield.
It would be, you know, you’d kind of be laughed out of your department if you came and you’re like, I’ve been trying to graft plants onto each other and make a new fruit. They’d go like, what are you doing? And I think when we created that culture, we lost the old one of like, look, it’s a big weird world. Let’s bump our heads against it from every direction possible to try to understand what’s going on with it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And that’s the crux of the matter, I think, is that when you just. What was the great quote? Specialization is for insects. A human being ought to be able to do all these things. And then his final line, specialization is for insects. And yet I think that gets wrapped up in what we’re talking about earlier with the whole CV issue. The, you know, you’ve got the stamp of approval. I’ve always said that a degree of any kind from any institution suggests that you have capabilities, but that’s all it does. It just suggests, work can suggest, and maybe even more profoundly that you have these capabilities. And it just seems to me that I’ve been stewing, how do you create a new group of polymaths who are a little nuts?
Because the need for being a little crazy. Right. Is really profound. And the fact that we have just abandoned that entirely. Now we’re doing our little part by trying to fund all these guys and women and I would love to see more of that, but you mentioned Kuhn. Right. And The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the structure. And you know, it wasn’t he who said it, but wasn’t it Max Planck? Science advances one funeral at a time. And so is there a catalyst, do you think, that you’re seeing right now that gives you hope that, hey, we can get back to this?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I see the raw materials there. I see people like Julian, like Slime Mold Time Mold, that I think those people, there’s always a base number of people who are like that, who are produced just by the happenstance of the universe. If you want more of them, you have to concentrate them. And then they have to create the culture in which more people like that reproduce. I mean, another way of asking is it sounds like you had a radicalizing experience in your career that there is a version of you that could have been managing assets until the sunset, and that does not appear to be what you’re doing with the rest of your life. So what was it that did that for you? And how do you encapsulate that radicalizing experience and give it to other people?
Because some people, they can become this kind of person, but it needs to be unlocked. Only very few are born. I’m certainly not one of them. For me, I had the radicalizing experience of felt like I was being told to lie in academia that it’s like, if you want to get ahead, you must do this wrong thing. And eventually it felt to me like I’m being a Catholic asked to stick a crucifix up my ass. It’s like it’s sacred. I won’t do it. But it took someone like my friend Slime Mold Time Mold to be like, what if you did something else instead? What if you wrote a blog? I was like, no, that’s stupid. What if you did? I’m like, okay, fine. And then it unlocked it for me. And yeah, what was that for you?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So I think in my case is, for whatever reason, I had a predisposition to being extraordinarily anti-authoritarian. And so anyone telling me what I had to do, I was apt to do either nothing or exactly the opposite. I had a very strong rebel streak. And so I don’t know that it was a single event, but I think it was probably when I was in a class in high school and the professor was giving the party line. And I love history. And so this was a history class and I raised my hand and I said, yeah, but Professor X, that doesn’t jive at all with, you know, and then I gave all of the things and literally he just shut me down. But you know what?
As I’m telling you this story, I think there was an earlier event when I was in grade school, in second grade or third grade, we had this thing called the SRA reading program. And it was basically a box of cards, and you would read the story and you would turn it over and you would write out the answers to the five questions that they had. I love to read and everything. And I read it. I did it all the way through. And rather than send me to the library to read other stuff, they punished me. This is a Catholic grade school in the 60s, so, you know, they’ve moved on, I hope. But anyway, literally during the SRA hour, right, that all the kids were meant to work on SRA, they made me sit at my desk with my hands in a Christmas tree.
And I think that now that you’re bringing it out, I think that was the moment of radicalization. Like, fuck you. Are you kidding me? You and your correct answer machine, and you’re not going to send me to the library. And so I, but then I was lucky enough to have parents when I went home, and I was like, you know what they did to me? And my father just said, come here. And he walked me into the library and he put me in front of the Encyclopedia Britannica and he said, read that. So I think that was probably my moment.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, this would be a good symbol for a Science House kind of thing. Remember this?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And, or Zoltan, do you ever see Dude, Where’s My Car?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so that’s one way, right? You get inaugurated to this old world by being abused by the previous one. But I think, what would it have looked like to have been in a school where, you know, you read the whole stack of cards and they go, great, now pick any book you want and do the same thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I would have been in heaven.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You know, that brings up the interesting question. Would I have turned out that way had they sent me to the library? Had they said, yeah, here, go. You’ve done this. Good for you. Go read some additional books. We want book reports from you. You know, my son always has this great saying, which I agree with, which is the result of good work is more work. Right. And that’s the way it should be. But in so many of these institutions and everything, you must follow the rules every time. And I’m not a good rule follower unless I make the rules.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it might have been whatever school you were in you were going to rebel against regardless. And I think there are people like that. Right. The world is always producing people who are rebelling against the way things are going right now. And but right now I think a lot of that potential is squandered that most people don’t end up doing what you did. Right. Most people just end up feeling resentful toward the systems as they white knuckle their way through them for the rest of their lives. And I don’t think it’d be that hard to build more places for the person like that who just needs a little bit of activation energy to be pried out of this way of doing things and to do things this other way instead.
But I think that mainly we don’t build places like that right now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. But I think, and again, why I’m so intrigued by you and the way you present things. I am a lover of humor. Right. If you’re gonna tell the truth, you better be funny or they’ll fucking kill you.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And so I think that we are kind of at a moment when you look at kind of, let’s not be histrionic about it, but institutions ain’t doing great these days. And it seems that the zeitgeist is ready for these types of ideas, the Science House. And you could replicate this in a variety of ways and try different strategies in each house. And I think that’s probably got to come from private sources because the government ain’t going to do it. And you know, certain universities might be more open toward exploring these types of things, but certainly not the granddaddies and those that are at the top of the elite structure. They’re, as we said earlier, they’re going to want to perpetuate that structure and that rule for a long period of time.
But it does feel to me now like this, all of this could work in terms of getting more and more of these people. You know, maybe one way in is people do seem to love, psychology says now, most of it’s bullshit. And, but maybe that’s a great idea for a book or a podcast or whatever. Take something that is, you know, this is a truth with a capital T, and then just demolish it. Do you ever see the show by the magicians Penn and Teller called Bullshit?
Adam Mastroianni: No, I watched a bunch of Fool Us, which is another show they did, but I never saw that one. No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, it’s great. And maybe recreate that show because that’s what basically what they do, they basically take a widely accepted and disseminated across society idea and then. Or for example, the one that is popping in my mind is recycling. And they actually study recycling and find that actually it doesn’t work nearly the way everyone says that it works. And yet I wonder too, recycling, I recycle. I still do. Even after watching Bullshit. I feel like that maybe that’s back to the morality issue. I don’t know. But what other things are there from your point of view, that people are still doing, even though we have figured out doesn’t replicate. In fact, it goes the other way. Any ideas of those that you can share?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a bunch of social psychology. There’s sort of this idea of situationism that I think has come out of psychology from the past since really the 60s and 70s of tiny changes in people’s environment and tiny changes in the way that you stimulate them can cause these massive changes in the way that they act. And I don’t think that idea is completely false. It’s just that we thought this was way easier to do than it turned out to be. That it turns out people are not just plastic bags blown around in the wind by whatever experimenters say to them. People do have personalities, they do have preferences. And you can’t just reprogram them on a whim.
And so I think there’s a lot to be gained by reinvigorating the personality tradition that was lost basically because it couldn’t produce experiments that were as interesting and flashy as the social side could. At the same time, I’m like, there’s so much to tear down. But really the fun part is building the next thing, right? And it would be great to build a thing that can be usefully torn down. The last time that basically there was a whale fall in psychology when behaviorism.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, yeah, I was. As you were talking, I’m thinking, oh, my God, I got to go right to behaviorism.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, so we’ve learned so much by what behaviorism got wrong that it did us a great service. And so the story for me isn’t like, oh, those guys were so stupid with their pigeons and their boxes and they thought that they could reprogram humans. It’s like they at least put out a claim, a really strong claim that wasn’t right. Parts of it were on the right track and how productive it was to push against it. That is, I think what we haven’t been doing in psychology since then is trying to state claims that are strong enough that even if they’re wrong, we’ll learn something useful by figuring out how they’re wrong. That’s what I wish we did more of.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, and I could not agree more. And behaviorism is the right example here because I totally agree with you. At least they had a thesis that they were very bold about. I can’t remember which researcher it was, but he was the guy who was like, give me 12 kids, you tell me which one you want to be a plumber. I’ll make that guy a plumber. I’ll make this guy a doctor. I’ll make this woman a lawyer. And like, bullshit. No, you won’t. But really useful because you get to say, at least they tried. Here’s why it failed. Maybe we should start looking into the fact that we aren’t born a blank slate. We are born. We’re fairly unique in many regards in terms of personality preferences, talents, skill sets, all of those things. And then go in that direction.
What’s something today? Behaviorism, mid 20th century. What’s something today that would be really fun. That was a useful idea that was tried. But then we’re like, that didn’t work out so well. But that we could also build up the other cases you’re advocating for.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think one of them is the whole tradition of heuristics and biases, which I think has a really useful thesis to it, which is humans have bounded rationality. We try to solve problems that were relevant in our evolutionary environment. We optimize for solving those kind of problems. If you’re optimizing for solving a problem in general, you’ll probably fail at solving that problem in certain specific situations. If we can evoke those situations, we might be able to back out the rule that people are using. All that’s great. And now we’ve kind of squeezed all the juice out of that orange, I think, and now we’re just listing out more and more of these ways. I’ve done this too. I’m guilty of this as well, of just adding more to the list.
And I think we are ripe for overturning this idea entirely of like, okay, we’re actually not going to be able to delineate the outlines of the mind by just focusing on the mistakes. We need to roll this back to what is the structure of the mind? What’s the mind made out of. And this is the thing that I’m most excited about in psychology right now is resurrecting a cybernetic view of it that I think a useful way of thinking about the mind is it’s a stack of control systems. Humans need to keep many things at the appropriate levels or else they die. We can’t get too hot or get too cold. We can’t get too full or too hungry. We need to spend time with other people, but we also need to get our work done. These are all control system problems.
And so what if a big chunk of our psychology is in fact these control systems? If you think that way, then you’re like, well, okay, how many are there? What are they controlling? What’s the sensitivity on the system? Which ones win out when they compete? How do they compete? What’s that system look like? This leads to, I think, really interesting questions that look very different from the way we do psychology right now. And it has, I think, two cool bonuses, which is if you could figure out the number of systems and the set points and sensitivities on that system, you get a theory of personality for free. Because now the difference between you and me is the difference between my set points and my sensitivities and yours. So that’s cool.
And you get a totally different way of thinking about mental illness that now disorders are malfunctions of some point in the system. Oh, it’s because your gain is off, that’s why this isn’t working. Or, oh, it’s because this reward system isn’t funneling into the correct chamber. That’s why you get multiple kinds of depression. Some people who are depressed don’t feel anything. Some people who are depressed feel really sad. These are obviously different malfunctions. So where in the control system did we lesion to cause that? That’s what I’m really fired up about these days. And I think it can come from realizing this old way of doing things is not getting us much closer to being able to describe how are people different from each other? Why do people feel really sad sometimes?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And you know, good old Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes. And I’ve been intrigued by that thesis for a long time that, yeah, we have a lot of subsystems. You know, we attempt to cohere, but lots of times we decohere. And maybe that’s because one of those subsystems is fighting with the other one or it’s off or it’s poorly calibrated, what have you. And I especially agree with you on the whole idea of the way to look at mental illness, the way to look at addiction, the way to look at a variety of these problems, that a lot of the old solutions work well enough, but they could work significantly better under a new thesis.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah, I think it should be of big concern to us that of all the disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, we have not cured one, we’ve not come close to curing one. Many of them we can treat a little bit and all of our effort goes into, you know, increasing the meta analytic effect size from, you know, 0.15 to 0.17. And I see why we’re doing that because it works a little bit. What if it could work a little bit better? It’s never going to work well enough that we can say we cured depression or we cured anxiety. That’s where I think our ambition should be. Just like, you know, we want to cure cancer, we cured smallpox, we did it. We understood mechanistically how it works and we exercised our human mastery over it.
I think we could do the same thing for disorders of the mind. It’s just that we don’t understand their structures well enough yet.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But also I think that there’s a lot of kind of the social effect. If you look at the DSM volume or the second edition of the DSM and you look at the fifth edition of the DSM, things that were considered absolutely psychological abnormalities are now considered normal. Is a lot of that being driven by underlying research or is a lot of that being driven by the way society and the mood in the air, so to speak, is influencing those editors of the DSM?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, I think it’s much more the second than the first. Right. There’s no study that comes out that proves that same sex attraction is not pathological. It’s actually fine. It’s not a scientific claim, it’s a moral claim.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
Adam Mastroianni: But it intersects scientifically with the problem being that we define pathologies by their symptoms. And so we are never going to understand their structure. It’s like trying to organize all the coughing diseases together. It’s like if you’re like these things make you cough. Well, lung cancer makes you cough, choking makes you cough. These things have nothing in common. A cold makes you cough. Right now we’re doing the same thing with okay, these are all the disorders that make you feel bad. It’s like, well, and so we’re going to be putting things into and taking them out of the DSM as long as we are categorizing them by the symptoms that they have.
If we’re able to understand the structure, and instead we categorize them by, these are things that are caused by a malfunction of this part of the control system or of this system, now it’s like, well, all of those things can be cured in the same way through whatever treatment that restores that kind of functioning. And I think if we do that, we’re going to have a lot less of things flopping into and out of these diagnostic criteria, because it comes from looking at a blueprint rather than making a list that these things are fundamentally different intellectual projects.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And there’s also the problem of the medicalization of everything. Right. And there’s financial incentives. Right. When you think about bipolar and you know the history of that, they used to call it manic depressive and then they gave it a new name. Very few people know that it was a campaign by the pharmaceutical companies that came up with a solution for bipolar. And literally the pamphlets, the. All of that left in the doctor’s office, and if you look at a graph of people under such treatment, it goes exponential. And so I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to know whether their claims are correct or not. But I think I’m smart enough to know that when you incent something financially and you have advocacy groups out there selling it actively, you’re going to probably see more of it.
The intersections interest me because if you want to be incredibly cynical, you would say that if you’re a big pharmaceutical company, what you want is recurring revenue. So you’re not going to get recurring revenue if you literally solve a problem.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, exactly. This is why statins are a great drug. Right. They work somewhat. Take them for the rest of your life. That’s great. You took it once and your high blood pressure went away. Horrible.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. A friend of mine once gave a talk on free cures. And I wish that the list were longer. The main one that I remember is that there is a really effective cure for the hiccups, but there is no reason to commercialize this cure. It’s just a specific way of breathing that just you breathe. I can’t remember the exact steps, which is maybe a problem with it, but when I’ve had the hiccups before, I’ve remembered to look it up and I’ve done it and it’s worked 100% of the time of just you breathe in really deeply and then a little bit more and you hold it for a couple seconds and whatever. And that information is just out there. It’s really effective.
It’s not going to go anywhere because no one can make money off of selling that to people. There is actually a straw that you can buy that’s meant to help you do this. But you know, the problem unfortunately isn’t big enough to do it. But I think that’s. Those same dynamics play out where, you know, no one can make enough money off of the best thing for society, which is why it doesn’t happen.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And but I think you could also invert that and maybe you publish a book with all of those free cures, maybe you have a podcast in which you cover with an expert such as yourself one every week or whatever. There’s a lot of ways to get that information and monetize that are not necessarily, you know, a recurring customer taking your drug. But it’s always fascinated me because all of these things do intersect, right? And we, I might agree, economics is totally worthless by the way because literally most of the precepts are wrong. Most of the economic literature posits that we are 100% rational actors. I mean, ha ha, really. Have you ever met a human Mr. PhD in economics? Because I think you might be a little off on your axiom there.
But I wonder how much of that also is how much of the sort of collective wisdom. It’s, it’s not. I was thinking about you. You’re not an anti-institution guy, you’re a pro-discovery guy. And I might be a little more of an anti-institution guy, but I’m really a pro-discovery guy as well. And you wonder back to academia for a minute, why aren’t there courses aligned this way, right? The confluence and intersection of incentives of. That’s why this particular illness is now the illness du jour. That’s why this particular cure. You know, I’m being inarticulate, but do you understand?
Adam Mastroianni: No, I know what you mean. That the universities are organized in such a way that those questions get difficult to answer because they exist between the distinctions between the departments of the university. Why do those departments, why are they carved up that way? Part of it’s historical, part of it is this person who created this field hated this other person and that’s why they’re in different departments. They can’t be the same. But part of it too comes from the structure of the funding that the government especially expects to see things fall into certain silos and things that exist between them. It’s unclear who’s supposed to evaluate them. How do we know that your ideas work or that they’re going to work?
Which reinforces the idea of there is molecular biology and you look at the cells. But don’t think about anything. Don’t think about big things because you study only small things. You do the mind. Don’t think about society. All the minds, think about one at a time. And I think this is the downside of professionalization is that it creates these distinctions that people now really care about. Well, I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist, not a molecular biologist. And identities get caught up in these things. But these distinctions are given by the Dean and the grant review committee. Not by God and not by nature. But it’s hard to understand those things when they’re so intertwined with your own ego and your own training. Right.
You start to think of yourself as, I am this kind of person, I do this kind of thing. But that effect is no different than the person who was younger at the time, on the younger side in the Royal Society and coming in and being like, oh, I’m the kind of person who does this set of things and that set just happens to be broader. No one was really strongly articulating a view of the world that was just backed out from watching what other people were doing. And I think it’s the same thing, we’re just getting the opposite effect.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And I’ve always kind of had a problem with labels because they are sort of the. Don’t think about this. Once something gets put into a bin with a label on it, people are like, okay, that’s sorted, I don’t have to worry about that anymore. And back to the Royal Society, everyone was a natural philosopher, which is just such a better all encompassing. If you want to label somebody, I’d much rather label them a natural philosopher. By implication, it allows that they’re going to be interested in a variety of things because with the molecular biology example, for example, and all of the other specialization, what’s happening is you’re creating a monoculture and monocultures are very fragile. And it just sometimes seems to me like, you know, you do the Homer Simpson. Oh, why are these smart people being so dumb?
Adam Mastroianni: I’m writing a book right now, and the second chapter is about how we trust that other people basically know what they’re doing. And this is a limitation on the rate of discovery of just we never feel like we chose to trust this thing. This is what I think of as background bullshit. Everyone knows that there’s foreground bullshit that, yeah, I know the used car salesman is going to try to get me to do a certain thing. I know people can lie to me sometimes. All of these things are things I’m on the lookout for. But there is, there’s this bullshit beneath the surface that we never think about. You would never think that just no one would ever just make up their data from whole cloth and put it out there.
That wasn’t something that I thought to be on the lookout for. And I think this too, specialization, professionalization, becoming trained in a certain discipline makes certain ideas into background bullshit. That in psychology, one of them I think is that, you know, we can ask survey questions to people online and make extrapolations from that. Actually, there’s a lot that goes into, are those people real? Are they now just LLMs? What are they doing when they’re taking these surveys on their phones? Are they on the bus? What’s going on? Anyone outside of psychology, when you tell people about survey research like that, they’re always like, well, but obviously that’s a big problem. And I’m like, actually, we’ve sort of just decided that’s not a problem.
Not because it’s not a problem, but because it’ll be a problem for us if it were a problem. So that’s background bullshit for us. We don’t like to think about that. And I think every field has their versions of that that become impossible to see once you’re inside it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Which is part of the reasons why I always like taking somebody from a completely different field and showing them all that and saying, what do you think? Because, you know, I’m a fan of Terence McKenna and he had this great quote which is, “The truth does not require your participation in order to exist.” And yet we literally are unaware of our participation because it’s background. And just push it over here. Well I think that your idea behind the science house is great. What, if you got a big grant, what would you do with that? Would you do a science house?
Adam Mastroianni: I would work on this cybernetic psychology idea that I think that is, that’s where the more I dive into that. And this also comes from my friend Slime Mold Time Mold who have put out a whole book about what if we start from first principles thinking about what are the units and rules that make up the mind that I just think there’s so much there and it just wouldn’t be that hard to do something interesting even in a couple years, even with just a handful of people. That’s where I would go first. But I think the advantage of the science house model is that it’s an archipelago, right? That you can have five people in a house working on applying cybernetics to psychology.
And down the street there’s people doing weird botany and around the corner there’s people doing Julian’s thing in astrophysics and we can all get together for a barbecue. That we don’t have to inhabit some kind of bureaucratic superstructure. Maybe we share the same accountant, but we cross pollinate without having to recapitulate what a university is. The advantage of these is that they’re small and idiosyncratic and their success condition is that they do cool stuff, not that they grow. Growing is a failure condition for them. Unlike university where every additional billion dollars they get is a win condition for them. That’s a fail condition for a science house. You should just do mitosis and create another one. So I would start with cybernetic psychology because that’s what I know the best and what I’m most interested in.
But I maintain a list of people that, man, if I had the next chunk of money then I’d put this person in charge of it because they could do cool stuff. So.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Size the cost of that for me. How much would that cost?
Adam Mastroianni: You could endow a science house in perpetuity for $15 million. Now I’ve talked to a bunch of people who are like, don’t try the endowment thing, go another route. But if you think about buying the house makes it cheaper because now rather than paying each person to pay for their own housing, you solve the housing problem for everyone. So you pay the students a stipend. The advisor lives somewhere nearby. It’s not a cult, it’s not they don’t all get married. The students live in the house, the advisor lives somewhere else. I mean, it’s only as much as a cult as academia is. Right. It’s a cult to a good amount. So you could do it forever.
And that turns out rhetorically to be very useful because that’s what Harvard spends every year on postage is $15 million. So for what Harvard spends to mail its, you know, pamphlets and I imagine move, I don’t know, plasma things around, you could have one of these houses forever. Or, you know, you could run it for a couple years for less than that. For a few hundred thousand dollars. You could run it for a few years.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, if you decide to really go down that path, definitely get in touch with me because I would definitely participate in something like that because I think the more people like you that we have doing these things, you know, let a thousand science houses bloom. You know what I mean? And there’s going to be somebody whose idea about it’s pretty different than your own. Great. Let’s try that one too. Because it’s that kind of diversity and that. A little injection of. I hate to use the word chaos, but variability. Let’s use variability instead. I think that would be a great project to embark upon.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, the way I think of it is science is a strong link problem where we progress at the rate that we do our best work, rather than a weak link problem where we progress at the rate that we do the worst thing. Right. So food safety is a weak link problem where you really want to eliminate the things that are most harmful. Science has the opposite property, where the things that are most useless just fade away naturally with time. The things that are most useful actually have an outsized impact. And the way that you solve a strong link problem like that is by increasing variance, taking more weirder shots. Because if they end up to be total failures, they just don’t matter, people forget it and they move on. Just like Newton’s alchemy that didn’t make a big difference.
The laws of motion made a huge difference. So we wanted someone who’s doing way over here and way over there. Because it turns out that this one was great, this one wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. We got this one. That’s the entire idea behind them.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love it. Adam, this has been super fun for me to chat with you. Our podcast is, that’s the whole point of this podcast, by the way, as you know, it’s not scripted. We didn’t send you questions because I think that they can be great for when just having a great conversation that you discover what emerges as the various themes. So we also do have the final question though, which is we’re going to make you the emperor of the world. You cannot kill anyone. You cannot put anyone in a reeducation camp. Okay, can’t do those things.
But what we are going to do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that everyone in the world, whenever their next morning is going to wake up in the morning and say, you know, I just had two of the greatest ideas. And I’m like, all the other times I’m going to actually act on these two things. What are you going to incept into the world’s population?
Adam Mastroianni: I think it’s be brave, be kind.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love both. I saw there’s a great quote about basically that unites brave and kind, which is something along the lines of only weak people are truly cruel. It takes bravery and all of that to be kind. So I love both of those. Adam, we will have all of the various details to how to find you in the show notes, but in the meantime, thank you so much. This was so much fun.
Adam Mastroianni: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Great to talk to you.
