Podcast appearances and mentions of adam mastroianni

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication (and my full-time job). To receive new posts and to support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoJoe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, which owns Mountain Creek, Big Snow American Dream, SnowCloud, and Terrain Based LearningRecorded onMay 2, 2025About Snow PartnersSnow Partners owns and operates Mountain Creek, New Jersey and Big Snow American Dream, the nation's only indoor ski center. The company also developed SnowCloud resort management software and has rolled out its Terrain Based Learning system at more than 80 ski areas worldwide. They do some other things that I don't really understand (there's a reason that I write about skiing and not particle physics), that you can read about on their website.About Mountain CreekLocated in: Vernon Township, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Mount Peter (:24); Big Snow American Dream (:50); Campgaw (:51) Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysBase elevation: 440 feetSummit elevation: 1,480 feetVertical drop: 1,040 feetSkiable Acres: 167Average annual snowfall: 65 inchesTrail count: 46Lift count: 9 (1 Cabriolet, 2 high-speed quads, 2 fixed-grip quads, 1 triple, 1 double, 2 carpets – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mountain Creek's lift fleet)About Big Snow American DreamLocated in: East Rutherford, New JerseyClosest neighboring public ski areas: Campgaw (:35); Mountain Creek (:50); Mount Peter (:50)Pass affiliations: Snow Triple Play, up to two anytime daysVertical drop: 160 feet Skiable Acres: 4Trail count: 4 (2 green, 1 blue, 1 black)Lift count: 4 (1 quad, 1 poma, 2 carpets - view Lift Blog's of inventory of Big Snow American Dream's lift fleet)Why I interviewed himI read this earlier today:The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it's embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.That blurb was one of 28 “slightly rude notes on writing” offered in Adam Mastroianni's Experimental History newsletter. And I thought, “Man this dude must follow #SkiTwitter.” Or Instabook. Of Flexpost. Or whatever. Because online ski content, both short- and long-form, is, while occasionally joyous and evocative, disproportionately geared toward the skiing-is-fucked-and-this-is-why worldview. The passes suck. The traffic sucks. The skiers suck. The prices suck. The parking sucks. The Duopoly sucks. Everyone's a Jerry, chewing up my pow line with their GoPro selfie sticks hoisted high and their Ikon Passes dangling from their zippers. Skiing is corporate and soulless and tourist obsessed and doomed anyway because of climate change. Don't tell me you're having a good time doing this very fun thing. People like you are the reason skiing's soul now shops at Wal-Mart. Go back to Texas and drink a big jug of oil, you Jerry!It's all so… f*****g dumb. U.S. skiing just wrapped its second-best season of attendance. The big passes, while imperfect, are mostly a force for good, supercharging on-hill infrastructure investment, spreading skiers across geographies, stabilizing a once-storm-dependent industry, and lowering the per-day price of skiing for the most avid among us to 1940s levels. Snowmaking has proven an effective bulwark against shifting weather patterns. Lift-served skiing is not a dying pastime, financially or spiritually or ecologically. Yes, modern skiing has problems: expensive food (pack a lunch); mountain-town housing shortages (stop NIMBY-ing everything); traffic (yay car culture); peak-day crowds (don't go then); exploding insurance, labor, utilities, and infrastructure costs (I have no answers). But in most respects, this is a healthy, thriving, constantly evolving industry, and a more competitive one than the Duopoly Bros would admit.Snow Partners proves this. Because what the hell is Snow Partners? It's some company sewn together by a dude who used to park cars at Mountain Creek. Ten years ago this wasn't a thing, and now it's this wacky little conglomerate that owns a bespoke resort tech platform and North America's only snowdome and the impossible, ridiculous Mountain Creek. And they're going to build a bunch more snowdomes that stamp new skiers out by the millions and maybe – I don't know but maybe – become the most important company in the history of lift-served skiing in the process.Could such an outfit possibly have materialized were the industry so corrupted as the Brobot Pundit Bros declare it? Vail is big. Alterra is big. But the two companies combined control just 53 of America's 501 active ski areas. Big ski areas, yes. Big shadows. But neither created: Indy Pass, Power Pass, Woodward Parks, Terrain Based Learning, Mountain Collective, RFID, free skiing for kids, California Mountain Resort Company, or $99 season passes. Neither saved Holiday Mountain or Hatley Pointe or Norway Mountain or Timberline West Virigina from the scrapheap, or transformed a failing Black Mountain into a co-op. Neither has proven they can successfully run a ski area in Indiana (sorry Vail #SickBurn #SellPaoliPeaks #Please).Skiing, at this moment, is a glorious mix of ideas and energy. I realize it makes me uncool to think so, but I signed off on those aspirations the moment I drove the minivan off the Chrysler lot (topped it off with a roofbox, too, Pimp). Anyhow, the entire point of this newsletter is to track down the people propelling change in a sport that most likely predates the written word and ask them why they're doing these novel things to make an already cool and awesome thing even more cool and awesome. And no one, right now, is doing more cool and awesome things in skiing than Snow Partners.**That's not exactly true. Mountain Capital Partners, Alterra, Ikon Pass, Deer Valley, Entabeni Systems, Jon Schaefer, the Perfect Clan, Boyne Resorts, Big Sky, Mt. Bohemia, Powdr, Vail Resorts, Midwest Family Ski Resorts, and a whole bunch more entities/individuals/coalitions are also contributing massively to skiing's rapid-fire rewiring in the maw of the robot takeover digital industrial revolution. But, hey, when you're in the midst of transforming an entire snow-based industry from a headquarters in freaking New Jersey, you get a hyperbolic bump in the file card description.What we talked aboutThe Snow Triple Play; potential partners; “there's this massive piece of the market that's like ‘I don't even understand what you're talking about'” with big day ticket prices and low-priced season passes; why Mountain Creek sells its Triple Play all season long and why the Snow Triple Play won't work that way (at least at first); M.A.X. Pass and why Mountain Creek declined to join successor passes; an argument for Vail, Alterra and other large ski companies to participate on the Snow Triple Play; comparing skiing to hotels, airlines, and Disney World; “the next five years are going to be the most interesting and disruptive time in the ski industry because of technology”; “we don't compete with anybody”; Liftopia's potential, errors, failure, and legacy; skiing on Groupon; considering Breckenridge as an independent ski area; what a “premium” ski area on the Snow Triple Play would be; why megapasses are “selling people a product that will never be used the way it's sold to them”; why people in NYC feel like going to Mountain Creek, an hour over the George Washington Bridge, is “going to Alaska”; why Snow Triple Play will “never” add a fourth day; sticker shock for Big Snow newbs who emerge from the Dome wanting more; SnowCloud and the tech and the guest journey from parking lot to lifts; why Mountain Creek stopped mailing season passes; Bluetooth Low Energy “is certainly the future of passes”; “100 percent we're getting more Big Snows” – but let's justify the $175 million investment first; Big Snow has a “terrible” design; “I don't see why every city shouldn't have a Big Snow” and which markets Snow Partners is talking to; why Mountain Creek didn't get the mega-lift Hession teased on this pod three years ago and when we could see one; “I really believe that the Vernon base of Mountain Creek needs an updated chair”; the impact of automated snowmaking at Mountain Creek; and a huge residential project incoming at Mountain Creek.What I got wrong* I said that Hession wasn't involved in Mountain Creek in the M.A.X. Pass era, but he was an Intrawest employee at the time, and was Mountain Creek's GM until 2012.* I hedged on whether Boyne's Explorer multi-day pass started at two or three days. Skiers can purchase the pass in three- to six-day increments.Why now was a good time for this interviewOkay, so I'll admit that when Snow Partners summarized the Snow Triple Play for me, I wasn't like “Holy crap, three days (total) at up to three different ski areas on a single ski pass? Do you think they have room for another head on Mount Rushmore?” This multi-day pass is a straightforward product that builds off a smart idea (the Mountain Creek Triple Play), that has been a smash hit at the Jersey Snow Jungle since at least 2008. But Snow Triple Play doesn't rank alongside Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective as a seasonlong basher. This is another frequency product in a market already flush with them.So why did I dedicate an entire podcast and two articles (so far) to dissecting this product, which Hession makes pretty clear has no ambitions to grow into some Indy/Ikon/Epic competitor? Because it is the first product to tie Big Snow to the wider ski world. And Big Snow only works if it is step one and there is an obvious step two. Right now, that step two is hard, even in a region ripe with ski areas. The logistics are confounding, the one-off cost hard to justify. Lift tickets, gear rentals, getting your ass to the bump and back, food, maybe a lesson. The Snow Triple Play doesn't solve all of these problems, but it does narrow an impossible choice down to a manageable one by presenting skiers with a go-here-next menu. If Snow Partners can build a compelling (or at least logical) Northeast network and then scale it across the country as the company opens more Big Snows in more cities, then this simple pass could evolve into an effective toolkit for building new skiers.OK, so why not just join Indy or Mountain Collective, or forge some sort of newb-to-novice agreement with Epic or Ikon? That would give Snow Partners the stepladder, without the administrative hassle of owning a ski pass. But that brings us to another roadblock in Ski Revolution 2025: no one wants to share partners. So Hession is trying to flip the narrative. Rather than locking Big Snow into one confederacy or the other, he wants the warring armies to lash their fleets along Snow Partners Pier. Big Snow is just the bullet factory, or the gas station, or the cornfield – the thing that all the armies need but can't supply themselves. You want new skiers? We got ‘em. They're ready. They just need a map to your doorstep. And we're happy to draw you one.Podcast NotesOn the Snow Triple PlayThe basics: three total days, max of two used at any one partner ski area, no blackouts at Big Snow or Mountain Creek, possible blackouts at partner resorts, which are TBD.The pass, which won't be on sale until Labor Day, is fully summarized here:And I speculate on potential partners here:On the M.A.X. PassFor its short, barely noted existence, the M.A.X. Pass was kind of an amazing hack, granting skiers five days each at an impressive blend of regional and destination ski areas:Much of this roster migrated over to Ikon, but in taking their pass' name too literally, the Alterra folks left off some really compelling regional ski areas that could have established a hub-and-spoke network out of the gate. Lutsen and Granite Peak owner Charles Skinner told me on the podcast a few years back that Ikon never offered his ski areas membership (they joined Indy in 2020), cutting out two of the Midwest's best mountains. The omissions of Mountain Creek, Wachusett, and the New York trio of Belleayre, Whiteface, and Gore ceded huge swaths of the dense and monied Northeast to competitors who saw value in smaller, high-end operations that are day-trip magnets for city folks who also want that week at Deer Valley (no other pass signed any of these mountains, but Vail and Indy both assembled better networks of day-drivers and destinations).On my 2022 interview with HessionOn LiftopiaLiftopia's website is still live, but I'm not sure how many ski areas participate in this Expedia-for-lift-tickets. Six years ago, I thought Liftopia was the next bargain evolution of lift-served skiing. I even hosted founder Evan Reece on one of my first 10 podcasts. The whole thing fell apart when Covid hit. An overview here:On various other day-pass productsI covered this in my initial article, but here's how the Snow Triple Play stacks up against other three-day multi-resort products:On Mountain Creek not mailing passesI don't know anything about tech, but I know, from a skier's point of view, when something works well and when it doesn't. Snow Cloud's tech is incredible in at least one customer-facing respect: when you show up at a ski area, a rep standing in a conspicuous place is waiting with an iPhone, with which they scan a QR code on your phone, and presto-magico: they hand you your ski pass. No lines or waiting. One sentimental casualty of this on-site efficiency was the mailed ski pass, an autumn token of coming winter to be plucked gingerly from the mailbox. And this is fine and makes sense, in the same way that tearing down chairlifts constructed of brontosaurus bones and mastodon hides makes sense, but I must admit that I miss these annual mailings in the same way that I miss paper event tickets and ski magazines. My favorite ski mailing ever, in fact, was not Ikon's glossy fold-out complete with a 1,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle of the Wild Blue Gondola and name-a-snowflake-after-your-dog kit, but this simple pamphlet dropped into the envelope with my 2018-19 Mountain Creek season pass:Just f*****g beautiful, Man. That hung on my office wall for years. On the CabrioletThis is just such a wackadoodle ski lift:Onetime Mountain Creek owner Intrawest built similar lifts at Winter Park and Tremblant, but as transit lifts from the parking lot. This one at Mountain Creek is the only one that I'm aware of that's used as an open-air gondola. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Can cybernetics rewire the way we understand the mind? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did BC hire a special advisor for the Downtown Eastside? Guest: Sheila Malcolmson, Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction Should space law protect historical sites on the Moon? Guest: Michelle Hanlon, Professor of Practice and the Executive Director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law Can cybernetics rewire the way we understand the mind? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter How are stratas and strata fees affecting the real estate market? Guest: Paul Mendes, Partner and Strata lawyer, LM Law How will BC work with Ottawa to improve public safety? Guest: Niki Sharma, Attorney General of BC The power of listening to strangers Guest: Paul Jenkinson, Man Who Launched the “You Are Not Alone, I Will Listen” Cross-Country Tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Read the full transcript here. Is the bar for what counts as new knowledge higher in psychology than in other scientific fields? Why did the field of psychology formally start centuries later than other scientific fields? Why is it so hard to make progress in psychology? How useful are social science "mega-studies"? What actually helps people stick to habits? What do scientists often get wrong about the philosophy of science? What have social scientists learned so far from the replication crisis? And how does that compare to what they should perhaps have been learning from it? Why is so much meaningless, useless psych research still being done? How can scientists communicate about their work more effectively? When might a blog be a better outlet than an academic journal for a scientific report? Is there a tension in science communication between honesty and explicability? What are the pros and cons of peer review?Adam Mastroianni is a psychologist and metascientist who writes the popular blog Experimental History. He got his PhD in 2021 and then left academia to publish research directly to the public, like a crazy person. Learn more about him at his website, experimental-history.com.Further reading"Things could be better", by Adam MastroianniSpencer's analysis of the gym mega-study StaffSpencer Greenberg — Host / DirectorJosh Castle — ProducerRyan Kessler — Audio EngineerUri Bram — FactotumWeAmplify — TranscriptionistsMusicBroke for FreeJosh WoodwardLee RosevereQuiet Music for Tiny Robotswowamusiczapsplat.comAffiliatesClearer ThinkingGuidedTrackMind EasePositlyUpLift[Read more]

In this episode, Adam Mastroianni explains why you can’t think your way out of overthinking. He unpacks why the thoughts that feel the most important are often the ones that keep us stuck. We also explore what it means to have a “skull full of poison,” how anxiety disguises itself as insight, and why real change isn’t about breakthroughs—it’s about repetition, action, and feeding the right wolf. Key Takeaways: [00:06:07] Anxiety and its misconceptions [00:08:21] Overcoming obsessive thinking patterns [00:16:25] State of psychology as science [00:25:04] Building blocks of psychology [00:27:06] Emotions as control system signals [00:30:43] Basic vs. constructed emotions [00:40:44] Context matters in psychology [00:44:31] Mental heater and air conditioner. [00:47:01] Happiness set points and variance [00:50:42] Control systems and mental states [00:54:11] Changing set points in life If you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni, check out these other episodes: The Purpose of Emotions and Why We’re Not Wired for Happiness with Anders Hansen How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We discuss Adam Mastroianni's “The Illusion of Moral Decline” LINKS The Illusion of Moral Decline Touchat Wearable Blanket Hoodie Lighthaven – Eternal September Our episode with Adam on The Rise and Fall of Peer Review The Mind Killer Scott Aaronson … Continue reading →

In the last decade, several major findings in social psychology have turned out to be hogwash—or, worse, even fraud. This has become widely known as psychology's "replication crisis." Perhaps you have heard of power poses—based on a study finding that subjects reported stronger “feelings of power” after they posed, say, with their hands on their hips for several minutes. But that finding did not replicate. Or perhaps you have heard of ego depletion—the more famous assertion that, when people make a bunch of decisions, it exhausts their ability to make future decisions. Again: did not replicate. “There's a thought that's haunted me for years,” social psychologist Adam Mastroianni has written. “We're doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers, and then what? The stack of papers just gets taller? I've never come up with satisfying answers. But now I finally understand why.” Today's episode features two interviews. First, I talk to Adam about his big-picture critique of his own field: how psychology too often fails as a science, and what it can do better. Second, we speak with journalist Dan Engber from The Atlantic, who has been reporting on a billowing scandal in psychology that has enveloped several business school stars—and raised important questions about the field. What is psychology for? What would progress in psychology mean? And how can this field—which might be the discipline I follow than any other in academia—become more of a science? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Engber Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: “Is psychology going to Cincinnati?” by Adam Mastroianni  https://www.experimental-history.com/p/is-psychology-going-to-cincinnati "I'm so sorry for psychology's loss, whatever it is" by Adam Mastroianni  https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss#footnote-anchor-3-136506668 “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger” by Daniel Engber  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This year's election might have been the most contentious in modern memory. It's not just that politics have changed, but it seems that people have too. You've probably heard this phrase: “People aren't as kind as they used to be”. Maybe you've experienced the feeling that people are acting meaner to each other, year after year. But is it true? Are people really less kind than they used to be?With that question in mind, and as we take some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, we wanted to reshare our episode with psychologist Adam Mastroianni. Mastroianni wondered if people are really becoming less moral in today's world, so he set out to find an answer, and published his findings in the journal Nature, “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” While the title may be a giveaway for his findings, he asks: If people are becoming less moral, why do we all feel the same way—and what can we do to shake this “illusion?”

Nick Wise is a postdoc in fluid dynamics at Cambridge University. We talk about his 'detective work' on publication fraud which has gotten more than 800 papers retracted to date, including tortured phrases, discovering Facebook groups and Telegram channels in which people sell authorships on papers, how 'Special' issues can be exploited, and what we can do about this.BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreonTimestamps0:00:00: How Nick got involved with publication fraud: tortured phrases0:18:26: Why do people try to publish nonsense papers?0:24:27: The ecosystem of fraudulent publishing0:30:22: 'Special' issues0:49:02: How does Nick do this detective work?1:00:37: What can we do about publication fraud?1:38:52: There are practically no jobs to work full-time on fraud detection1:49:37: A book or paper more people should read1:55:13: Something Nick wishes he'd learnt sooner1:57:21: Advice for PhD students/postdocsPodcast linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-podTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twtNick's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/n-wise-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/n-wise-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/n-wise-twtBen's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twtReferences & linksEpisodes with Eugenie Reich: https://geni.us/bjks-reichEpisode with Elisabeth Bik: https://geni.us/bjks-bikEpisode with Adam Mastroianni: https://geni.us/bjks-mastroianni_2Dorothy Bishop awards 2024: https://www.ukrn.org/2024/03/28/winners-of-the-2024-dorothy-bishop-prize/Nick's guest blog post on Dorothy Bishop's blog: http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2022/10/what-is-going-on-in-hindawi-special.htmlNick's talk at Cambridge: https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/4117618Everything Hertz podcast: https://everythinghertz.com/James Heathers's series of posts on Hindawi: https://jamesclaims.substack.com/p/the-hindawi-files-part-1-the-timelineCoffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/@CoffeezillaBarnaby Jack's talk at DefCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkteGFfvwJ0Cabanac, Labbé & Magazinov (2021). Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals. arXiv.Mastroianni & Ludwin-Peery (2022). Things could be better. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2uxwkReich (2009). Plastic fantastic: How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world.

Luke Kemp (historical collapse expert; associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) has studied past civilisations and mapped out a picture of how long they tend to last before they collapse, what tends to tip them and what (if anything) can be done to stall their demise. Luke works alongside Lord Martin Rees and Yuval Noah Harari, is an honorary lecturer in environmental policy at the Australian National University and his collapse insights have been covered by the BBC, the New York Times and the New Yorker. His first book, 'Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse' will be published in June 2025. In this episode I get Luke to provide a bit of a 101 on how civilisations do indeed decline and perish and to update us on the latest theories on how and whether ours might make it through. The answer is surprising.SHOW NOTESHere's Luke's original report on complex civilisation's lifespans.Keep up to date with Luke's work hereA few past Wild guests are referenced by Luke. You can catch the episode on Moloch with Liv Boeree here, the interview with Adam Mastroianni here and my chat with Nate Hagens hereThe first chapter of my book serialisation – about hope – is available to everyone hereAnd here are the two chapters that I reference at the end--If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it's where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet's connect on InstagramIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it's where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet's connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jacob welcomes Adam Mastroianni onto the show to discuss his 2023 article in Nature about how it is human nature to assume that the world is always getting worse. This is that rare bit of content that is entirely optimistic – it invites you to consider that our perception of the world is grounded not in what is actually happening in the world but in how we are programmed to think about it. --Timestamps:00:01 - Introduction to Adam Mastriani00:15 - The Illusion of Moral Decline00:31 - Human Psychology and Moral Perception04:38 - Survey Findings on Morality02:03 - Understanding Cooperation and Negativity Bias14:03 - Exploring Political Polarization11:28 - The Role of Social Media in Perception42:26 - Conclusion: Optimism in a Complex World--Referenced in the Show:Link to article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x--Jacob Shapiro Site: jacobshapiro.comJacob Twitter: x.com/JacobShapCI Site: cognitive.investmentsSubscribe to the Newsletter: bit.ly/weekly-sitrep--Cognitive Investments is an investment advisory firm, founded in 2019 that provides clients with a nuanced array of financial planning, investment advisory and wealth management services. We aim to grow both our clients' material wealth (i.e. their existing financial assets) and their human wealth (i.e. their ability to make good strategic decisions for their business, family, and career).--This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacyPodtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Hi Everyone. I'm having a TYP breather today, so we're re-visiting this chat I had a while back with Dr. Adam Mastroianni. He is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School who studies how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds, from the person sitting across the table to the broader community buzzing around them. He writes a great blog called Experimental History, is a stand-up comic, a Harvard Graduate and I think even he'd admit that he's kind of a quirky academic-comedian-philosopher hybrid. This conversation was about as loose, freestyle and entertaining as you can get with a post-doctoral researcher. Enjoy. Twitter: a_m_mastroianniexperimental-history.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Linkpost: Surely you can be serious, published by kave on July 19, 2024 on LessWrong. Adam Mastroianni writes about "actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons", rather than just LARPing. The opening is excerpted below. I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, "We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT." 1 Everyone in the audience was like, "Hmm, interesting, I wonder if there were any gender effects, etc." I wanted to get up and yell: "EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT." If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get - does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius? Or - much more likely - the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud. Those are the options. Asking a bunch of softball questions ("Which result was your favorite?") is not a reasonable response. That's like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat actually for real, not a magic trick, and then asking them, "What's the rabbit's name?" Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Linkpost: Surely you can be serious, published by kave on July 19, 2024 on LessWrong. Adam Mastroianni writes about "actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons", rather than just LARPing. The opening is excerpted below. I once saw someone give a talk about a tiny intervention that caused a gigantic effect, something like, "We gave high school seniors a hearty slap on the back and then they scored 500 points higher on the SAT." 1 Everyone in the audience was like, "Hmm, interesting, I wonder if there were any gender effects, etc." I wanted to get up and yell: "EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT." If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get - does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius? Or - much more likely - the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud. Those are the options. Asking a bunch of softball questions ("Which result was your favorite?") is not a reasonable response. That's like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat actually for real, not a magic trick, and then asking them, "What's the rabbit's name?" Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

What's the difference between conversational 'givers' and 'takers'?

Wer ist der Mensch, mit dem du dich am liebsten unterhältst? Fällt dir direkt jemand ein? Nun stell dir vor alle Menschen nennen den gleichen Namen. Felix Sigala ist dieser Name, denn Felix Sigala ist ein Supercommunicator! Und Felix Sigala ist die Hauptfigur des neuen Romans von Charles Duhigg, aber trotzdem: Was ist dadran? Wie macht man Kommunikation spannend und wie findet man heraus worum es wirklich geht? Heute geht es wieder einmal um Kommunikation und vorallem das zwischen den Zeilen lesen. Fühlt euch gut betreut Leon & Atze Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leonwindscheid/ https://www.instagram.com/atzeschroeder_offiziell/ Der Instagram Account für Betreutes Fühlen: https://www.instagram.com/betreutesfuehlen/ Mehr zu unseren Werbepartnern findet ihr hier: https://linktr.ee/betreutesfuehlen Hier gehts zur neuen Tour von Leon: https://Leonwindscheid.de/tickets Hier Tickets für die Show in Münster sichern: https://betreutesfuehlen.online-ticket.de/muenster-2024 Buch: Supercommunicators – How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection von Charles Duhigg (wenn ihr mögt, bestellt's doch im lokalen Buchhandel) Die 36 Fragen findet ihr hier auf Deutsch: https://mitvergnuegen.com/2015/sind-diese-36-fragen-die-formel-zum-verlieben/ Top Artikel von Adam Mastroianni zu dem Thema:  https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs (kostenlos) UND https://www.experimental-history.com/p/12-baseless-opinions-about-having (hinter Bezahlschranke) Redaktion: Dr. Leon Windscheid Produktion: Murmel Productions

The favorite EconTalk episodes for host Russ Roberts are when he and his guest have an unusually powerful connection such as his recent episode with Charles Duhigg, and the ones where he learns something mind-blowing, like Adam Mastroianni's insight that you can't reach the brain through the ears. Listen as Russ explains how he chooses guests, and why EconTalk has evolved to focus on things other than economics. He also shares listeners' favorite conversations from 2023, and tells a story that shows the challenges—and opportunities—of applying EconTalk's lessons to our personal lives.

Can you be too happy? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about our emotional control systems, which seem to work at bringing both sadness and happiness back to a steady baseline. Too much happiness is--perhaps surprisingly--not necessarily a good thing. They also explore whether our general level of happiness is really related to events in our lives or connected to something much larger than ourselves.

In Episode 428 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike and The Dragon Lord Kai! Tune in to hear what this terrific trio have to say about the the exhaustion of Hollywood!!!! No One Is Watching The Crap Hollywood is giving us! Get ready for how we approach the GEEK and ALTER IT, all this and more! Only on Altered Geek!!!!!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!Movies in 2024!

In Episode 427 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike and SPECIAL GUEST The Dragon Lord Kai from Kai Dragon Media! Tune in to hear what this terrific trio have to say about the the exhaustion of streaming services and their drama!!!! Get ready for how we approach the GEEK and ALTER IT, all this and more! Only on Altered Geek!!!!!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!2024 Is The 40th Anniversary of Everything 1984!GCRN Universal Ratings System!Use TFG1Mike's LinkTree to Follow Him!!Follow Steve/Megatron on X and Threads!

In Episode 426 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike tune in to hear what Steve and Mike have to say about the Super Bowl 58 Commercials and trailers!!! Get ready for how we approach the GEEK and ALTER IT, all this and more! Only on Altered Geek!!!!!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!2024 Is The 40th Anniversary of Everything 1984!GCRN Universal Ratings System!Use TFG1Mike's LinkTree to Follow Him!!Follow Steve/Megatron on X and Threads!

In Episode 425 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike as they kick off the new year with an hour and a half discussion of what they've been up to, and then they talk about stores that are no longer around! All this and more! Only on Altered Geek!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!Stores That Are No Longer Around! Check out the photos HERE!2024 Is The 40th Anniversary of Everything 1984!GUARDIAN ANGEL!GCRN Universal Ratings System!Use TFG1Mike's LinkTree to Follow Him!!Follow Steve/Megatron on X and Threads!

Our guest began noticing a common theme between feelings of incompetence and those requesting his advice leading to speculation that we're stuck in the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog. Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seg 1: How was Aspirin developed? The historical use of willow bark in medicinal practices dates back around 3500 years to ancient civilizations. Ancient Egyptians used a concoction made from white willow tree leaves to treat inflamed wounds. Guest: Dr. Joe Schwarcz, Director of McGill University's “Office for Science and Society” Seg 2: View From Victoria: The Homeowner Grant is surviving another year with the government maintaining the eligibility threshold at $2.15 million assessed value. The Vancouver Sun's Vaughn Palmer is here with his take on the day's headlines. Seg 3: Why is Air Canada the worst on-time airline in North America? Air Canada's OTP for 2023 was the lowest among major North American airlines, achieving only a 63% on-time performance rate. Guest: John Gradek, Aviation Management Professor at McGill University Seg 4: What's in store for BC's finances in 2024? Economic experts foresee a slow growth year in 2024 for British Columbia and the rest of Canada due to high interest rates. Guest: Katrine Conroy, BC's Minister of Finance Seg 5: Why is BC's Constitution protecting drug use at parks? The "playground" amendment in British Columbia aimed to regulate the possession and use of illicit drugs within specific child-centric areas. The amendment was introduced as a measure to address rising drug-related disorders while maintaining a lenient approach to personal drug possession. Guest: Tristin Hopper, Reporter for the National Post Seg 6: Why do we feel bogged-down? Our guest began noticing a common theme between feelings of incompetence and those requesting his advice leading to speculation that we're stuck in the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog. Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Seg 7: What will we learn from Epstein's unsealed court documents? The sealed court filings awaiting release are a result of a defamation lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's accusers. These documents, numbering over 150, are believed to contain extensive information on Epstein's connections, activities, and relationships with influential personalities. Guest: Jacob Shamsian, Crime & Courts Correspondent for Business Insider Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are people ever satisfied? Two social psychologists, Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Adam Mastroianni, fell down a research rabbit hole accidentally answering a version of this very question. After conducting several studies, the pair found that when asked how things could be different, people tend to give one kind of answer, regardless of how the question is asked or how good life felt when they were asked. Short Wave's Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber digs into the research—and how it might reveal a fundamental law of psychology about human satisfaction. (encore)

In Episode 424 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike as they catch up and just chill out at the end of 2023. They give you the listeners what they've been up to, and what they are hoping to do in 2024! All this and more! Only on Altered Geek!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!10 Years of Altered Geek!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2921918/advertisement

While Tim finds himself confined to a plane, Kurt engages in a captivating one-on-one session with researcher Adam Mastroianni. Together, they delve into the intriguing world of behavioral science, aiming to unveil the concealed truths behind the notorious Big Dentist conspiracy urging everyone to floss. However, the episode takes an unexpected turn as Kurt and Adam embark on a thought-provoking exploration of the past, present, and future of behavioral science. From a history tainted with fraudulent studies to a present that seems tepid in terms of groundbreaking discoveries, the duo contemplates what lies ahead. Do we dare to take risks, or is maintaining the status quo the safer route? Moreover, does the current academic system truly foster risk-taking? Join us for a conversation that challenges assumptions, sparks innovation, and confronts the stigma surrounding the belief that flossing is the sole path to dental health. Tune in as we navigate the future of behavioral science, encouraging a fresh perspective on academia and the pursuit of knowledge. © 2023 Behavioral Grooves Topics  (4:09) Intro and Speed Round (8:19) When should we stop talking? (11:47) Does the fact that a study was found fraudulent matter? (16:18) Are we out of groundbreaking discoveries? (22:03) The limitations in current research and the need for a paradigm shift (27:28) Shifting mindset in scientific research (36:39) Flossing and the importance of context (48:35) Research insights and desert island music (52:19) Grooving session: Science, academia, and the importance of new ideas © 2023 Behavioral Grooves Links Experimental History (Blog) https://experimentalhistory.wordpress.com/ "Do Conversations End When People Want Them To?" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617749596 The Cochrane Collaboration Meta-analysis on Flossing https://www.cochrane.org/CD011146/ORAL_flossing-reduce-gingivitis-and-plaque Rory Sutherland's Perspective on Choice https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man/transcript Musical Links Baz Luhrmann "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI They Might Be Giants "Hot Dog!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoavHX75s_E Talking Heads "Psycho Killer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eauZzwt8Ci8

Simine Vazire is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. In this conversation, we talk about her work on meta-science, the purpose of journals and peer review, Simine's plans for being Editor-in-Chief at Psychological Science, the hidden curriculum of scienitic publishing, and much more.BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreonTimestamps0:00:00: What is SIPS and why did Simine cofound it?0:05:10: Why Simine resigned from the NASEM Reproducibility & Replicability committee0:13:07: Do we still need journals and peer review in 2023?0:28:04: What does an Editor-in-Chief actually do?0:37:09: Simine will be EiC of Psychological Science0:59:44: The 'hidden curriculum' of scientific publishing1:04:03: Why Siminie created a GoFundMe for DataColada1:15:10: A book or paper more people should read1:17:10: Something Simine wishes she'd learnt sooner1:18:44: Advice for PhD students and postdocsPodcast linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-podTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twtSimine's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/vazire-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/vazire-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/vazire-twtBen's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twtReferences/linksEpisode of Black Goat Podcast I mentioned: https://blackgoat.podbean.com/e/simine-flips-out/Mini-interview with Simine in Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-reform-minded-new-editor-psychology-s-flagship-journal-will-shake-thingsMy 2nd interview w/ Adam Mastroianni, and his blog post on peer review:https://geni.us/bjks-mastroianni_2Interview w/ Chris Chambers and Peer community in RRhttps://geni.us/bjks-chambersSimine's vision statement for Psychological Sciencehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1mozmB2m5kxOoPvQSqDSguRrP5OobutU6/viewGOFUNDME for Data Colada's legal feeshttps://www.gofundme.com/f/uhbka-support-data-coladas-legal-defenseFrancesca  Gino's responsehttps://www.francesca-v-harvard.org/NYT Magazine article about Amy Cuddy (and Joe Simmons)https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-for-amy-cuddy.htmlStreisand effecthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effectHolcombe (during dogwalk). On peer review. Personal communication to Simine.Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science.Reich (2009): Plastic fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific

How many times have you heard this phrase: “Back in the day, people were nicer” or “People aren't as kind as they used to be?” Most of us have experienced the feeling that people are becoming meaner over time, year after year. But is it true? Are people really less kind than they used to be?That's the question that has bothered psychologist Adam Mastroianni most of his life. He set out to find an answer—a search that recently culminated in a paper published in the journal Nature titled, “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” While the title may be a giveaway for his findings, he asks: If people are becoming less moral, why do we all feel the same way—and what can we do to shake this “illusion?”

Adam Mastroianni says he likes to “study how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds, from the person sitting across the table to the whole country buzzing around them.”  In this Blue Sky conversation, Dr. Mastroianni describes research he and a colleague conducted that demonstrates that human beings falsely assume that the world used to be better, and that we continue to decline in terms of moral standards and civil behavior.  This cognitive “bug” he has detected can lead us to develop a more pessimistic view of the world and also leaves us more susceptible to believe in the message of autocrats who promise to take us back to a time when the world – and people – were somehow better than they are today.  Adam's insights are fascinating, as are the techniques he uses in his research, and he explains his findings and observations with great wit and wisdom.  https://www.experimental-history.com/

Adam Mastroianni is a scientist who writes the Substack 'Experimental History'. This is our second conversation. We discuss science as a strong-link problem, why everyone is allowed to do science, and some of Adam's suggestions for how science can be done differently.Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreonTimestamps0:00:00: Adam's Substack is now his main thing0:05:32: Paradigms in psychology0:16:40: Who's allowed to do science? Science as a strong-link problem0:36:41: A fleet of ships, The Psychology House, and Dan Gilbert's supervsion1:06:53: How to cultivate good feedback1:13:20: A book, paper, or blog post more people should read1:16:26: Something Adam wishes he'd learnt sooner1:18:34: Any advice for PhD students or postdocs?Podcast linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-podTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twtAdam's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/mastroianni-webSubstack: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/Google Scholar: https://geni.us/mastroianni-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/mastroianni-twtBen's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twtLinks1st episode with Adam: https://geni.us/bjks-mastroianniPure green in Blackadder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDIJiwNk2n8Blog postshttps://www.experimental-history.com/p/lets-build-a-fleet-and-change-thehttps://www.experimental-history.com/p/an-invitation-to-a-secret-societyhttps://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-experimental-history-experimenthttps://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-reviewhttps://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/psychology-is-okhttps://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/02/10/the-scientific-virtues/Behind the Bastard's episode about libertarians recreating governments at sea: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-not-at-all-sad-history-of-89890804/ References Cosmides & Tooby (2015). Neurocognitive adaptations designed for social exchange. The handbook of evo psych.Gilbert (2006). Stumbling on happiness.Hesse (1922). Siddhartha.Mastroianni, AM & Ludwin-Peery, EJ. (2022). Things could be better. https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk Richerson & Boyd (1978). A dual inheritance model of the human evolutionary process. J of Soc and Bio Structu

How much do we remember of what we learn in school or from conversation? Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says: from little to nothing much. What do our brains retain? Mastroianni argues that often it's a mix of emotions, meanings, and values that end up shaping who we are, what Mastroianni calls "vibes." Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss the role of vibes in knowledge acquisition and the implications for how we teach, learn, and speak to those around us.

Today I am very pleased to tell you: I have good news. Morality is not actually declining in our country or anywhere else. The widespread belief that morality is declining is an illusion. That's the conclusion Adam Mastroianni '14 reached in a study recently published in the journal Nature. With Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert *85, Mastroianni found it just isn't true that people overall are less kind, honest, and respectful than they used to be. So why do we believe it? On the PAWcast, Mastroianni explained the psychological effects behind this phenomenon, and the danger we flirt with when we allow this belief to take hold.

Adam Mastroianni (experimental psychologist, Substacker) recently published a study in Nature that hit headlines. The paper, co-published with happiness expert Daniel Gilbert, demonstrated that everyone (literally) thinks the world is in moral decline, that we are less honest, and less kind, and that we need to return to the golden days of yore. The controversial bit? Everyone has ALWAYS thought this. And ALL of us are wrong.Adam and I talk through the mad cognitive biases that steer us to this error and cover a bunch more that explain why being smart doesn't make you happy, why we forget what we've learned and why we all (again) think the general public is stupider than us (we can't all be right!?). I was overdue for a confrontation on my biases and my moral despair…you?Follow Adam's Substack - Experimental HistoryRead The illusion of moral declineIf you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageFor more such conversations subscribe to my Substack newsletter, it's where I interact the most!Get your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious LifeLet's connect on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every generation seems to lament the decline in public virtues, morality, and decency. But Adam Mastroianni argues that those perceptions are generally not rooted in reality.     Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and author of the science blog, “Experimental History.” He earned his doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 2021, and his work has been covered everywhere from The New York Times to “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” He is originally from Monroeville, Ohio (pop. 1,400). Outside of science, he's also a stand-up and improv comedian, he has done over 140 escape rooms, and he once came in second on a British reality show about hosting dinner parties. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the first hour of "Connections with Evan Dawson" on Wednesday, September 13, 2023, we talk with experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni about the "illusion of moral decline."

Dr. Adam Mastroianni is a Harvard and Oxford educated psychologist who loves the idea of science, but not so much it's modern practice. After being told one too many times that his academic writing was "too fun" for academic journals, he decided to devote his time to what science should actually look like - which is passionate people being free to explore the ideas that keep them up at night. He writes prolifically about this at his Experimental History Substack, and on the podcast we talk about how peer review made everything fall apart, how all the bad papers in the world can't take down a single good idea, and the dream of buying a house in Boston and filling it with people who can spend all their free time thinking their way out of the box we're in. Adam's writings: https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory (00:00:17) Who is Adam Mastrioanni (00:07:22) Reading Science (00:13:36) Peer Review, failure of (00:15:50) Patreon Ask (00:15:50) CARD - patron ask (00:19:03) Utter mayhem (00:23:18) Grant applications (00:28:14) Vicars, spiders, & science at spearpoint (00:33:08) Epstein (00:38:07) A geometric problem (00:43:47) The internet is garbage (00:57:04) So much is left (00:58:54) Why nutritional advice makes no sense (01:05:27) Finding what's important (01:12:43) Scientific vs Intuitive (01:17:58) Conformity & compliance (01:23:48) what doesn't replicate (01:27:25) replacing spiritual guidance (01:34:35) Dreams & mysticism (01:43:36) Rat utopia (01:49:05) Metascience (01:55:41) Bay bridge building (01:58:10) Experimental History Support the scientific revolution by joining our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub #peerreview #science #experimentalhistory # Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci: https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience AND our material science investigations of atomics, @MaterialAtomics https://www.youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Join our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities. - Blog: http://DemystifySci.com/blog - RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rss - Donate: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaD - Swag: https://bit.ly/2PXdC2y SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySci MUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

Do you believe people are worse now than they use to be? That smarter people are happier people? That you know when to quit a conversation? Wrong on all counts, according to Adam Mastroianni, a social psychologist. He's also a professional improv performer and uses those skills teaching business school students.

New groom Adam Mastrioni brings his big brain to battle the boys over Invader Zim, how to write the best resume, and where the worst city in the world is. Experimental History with Adam Mastroianni https://www.experimental-history.com/ Submit Segments: https://forms.gle/rfwsaeFFnX5AAFHY8 Drunk Shakespeare United: Instagram: https://instagram.com/drunkshakesunited Twitter: https://twitter.com/dshakesunited Check out our DnD show: 'What We Do in the Basement': https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/what-we-do-in-the-basement/id1552947049

You know peer review, right?It's the way academics check each other's research papers.It ensures that only the good ones are published and prevents the bad ones from getting through.Right?Wrong.Peer review does precisely the opposite of what you think it does.It prevents the good papers from being published, and ensures that only the bad ones get through.Peer review is suffocating science.If we want to reverse the stagnation of science over the last 50 years, then we've got to get rid of peer review.—I highly recommend you read Adam Mastroianni's splendid article The rise and fall of peer reviewI first heard Adam's ideas about peer review in his conversation Adam Mastroianni on Peer Review and the Academic Kitchen with Russ Roberts on EconTalkWhy has there been no progress in physics since 1973? article audio video Scientific papers: The journal Nature began to require peer review in 1973 Millions of academic articles are published every year Some scientists simply make stuff up Fraudulent studies make it into respectable journals like Science, Nature and The Lancet Physicists: Isaac Newton Albert Einstein's four papers published in 1905 Max Planck's principle that science progresses one funeral at a time The Wolfram Physics Project: Stephen Wolfram Jonathan Gorard My projects: The Last Theory Open Web Mind Image of Adam Mastroianni by permission from Adam Mastroianni—The Last Theory is hosted by Mark Jeffery, founder of the Open Web MindI release The Last Theory as a video too! Watch hereThe full article is hereKootenay Village Ventures Inc.

Do you have books in your home or workplace? And, perhaps more importantly, do you read any of them? Our guest today, Rainer Jozeps, says the presence of books is a symbol of your curiosity and your interest in engaging with the world (my words). However, that utterance was a small park of a bigger issue he drew attention to in In Review, namely, our state government's dropping of the ball (so to speak), when it comes to arts funding vs sports funding. And in the Musical Pilgrimage, thoughtful singer/songwriter, Lucas Day. You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We're here to serve! The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It's an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we'll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We'd greatly appreciate it. And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here's our index of all episode in one concise page Running Sheet: Rainer Jozeps In The House With No Books 00:00:00 Intro Introduction 00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week No SA Drink Of The Week this episode. 00:02:32 Rainer Jozeps Books on bookshelves, news avoidance, ignorance, cocooning, and art making. These five topics were woven into an intriguing piece in InReview by Rainer Jozeps, entitled, South Australia Has Become Like A House With No Books. Rainer has been involved in Australia's arts industry for more 30 years, holding senior executive roles with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Adelaide Festival Centre, West Australian Ballet, Australian Dance Theatre and Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Rainer, I'd like to use your article to give structure to this conversation, even though I'm anticipating that we will do an awful lot of colouring outside the lines. Your article begins by recounting your many visits to display homes to sate your curiosity about what was being offered by builders, noting that you'd leave with an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach because the homes had no provision for books. You then quote Greek philosopher, Cicero, who said “a house with no books is like a body with no soul”. I'd like to explore this a little because my initial reaction was to cheer your claim that “books inspire creativity, excite the imagination and stimulate the intellect”, but then I realised that I have a wall or two of books at home and many have not been touched for years. Do you think there's intrinsic value in “the having of books” or are you assuming that those with books actually read them? Does the presence of books create a more thoughtful headspace? David Olney noted that seeing books can spark conversation. Our books are on our phones – perhaps our screens could run slideshows? Russ Roberts from the Econtalk Podcast says if we read a book a week, we'll probably read about 2,500 books in our lifetime. That's not many. Are there any you believe are a must – either by title or genre? The next theme in your article is ignorance, defined as the lack of knowledge. You argue ignorance can be a chosen state (you realise other people know things you don't know), or it can simply be that you are unaware of there being things you don't know. You note that ethicists call the former “recognised ignorance” and the latter “primary ignorance”. This drew recollections of the Johari Window but also the toxic saturation of conspiracy theories that thrive in this Donal Trump-led era of Fake News. Setting aside mainstream news consumption for the moment, are you hopeful or pessimistic about our society's chances of shaking free from this almost ubiquitous, heavy veil of ignorance? I sense there are First Principles at plan here. No matter how deep the proliferation social media, if we all chose to take heed of Socrates' dictim, that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” we might create space between hearing things and reacting to them. Do we need meditation before education? I did talkback radio for a number of years and I was always dumbfounded by vocal callers who robustly stated their position on anything you put in front of them, within a millisecond. My intuition would suggest their arguments were flawed, but I always needed more time and openness from them to investigate what their beliefs were based on. Needless to say, they were never open to that. Have you mixed with such people. Have you developed any strategies, not to trick them, but to engage them in reflection? And how important is it to actually challenge bad, stereotypical ideas? I ask this because psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni has eloquently argued on Econtalk that, “our minds are like the keep of a castle protecting our deepest held values and beliefs from even the most skilled attacks. The only problem with this design for self-preservation is that it also can keep out wisdom that might be both useful and true.” He says there is little to do to change people's minds; you can't access our brains through our ears. Your thoughts? The third theme is the link between ignorance and “news avoidance”. What is news avoidance and what do we know about it? I am a former journalist and I get news from a glance through the ABC app, a longer dwell time on the Al Jazeera app, occasional reads of the Ukraine independent app which I subscrib to, Zaborona, and the In Daily newsletter when I see it. That keeps me abreast of most timely stories but for “colour, as I confessed to Peter Greste, I now get my news “sense” from news satire shows like The Bugle, Mad As Hell (when it was on, even though writer David M Green says they didn't think they were fulfilling such an important role), and comedic articles by The Chaser. By being prepared to describe the context of a story and then shout convincingly that the emperor has no clothes, they keep tabs on those in power. How would you define me on the news consumer to news avoider continuum? And where do you sit? The fourth estate has abdicated its responsibility. Peter Greste shared first hand how newsroom editors measure “success” by likes, instead of the important measure of editorial value. Your thoughts? The fourth theme is cocooning and I confess, I might be in that category. I quote: “Cocooning” is a middle-class phenomenon coined by US futurist Faith Popcorn, who predicted large swathes of the community would, in fear of an ever-changing outside world, equip their residences with entertainment rooms, streaming services, security systems and perimeter walls, and utilise ever more home delivery services. And now we want to work from home! What's wrong with this picture? I have worked from home for almost 20 years and I do everything I can to avoid driving in peak hour, if at all. I was in LA a week or two before Covid and the multi-lane highways were a non-stop channel of filth and waste and exhaust. Come Covid, they became almost deserted and peaceful, and air quality improved. Are there not good things about working from home? Going out necessitates a place to congregate with others and bars, cafes, and restaurants typically fill that need. But in an article in 2020, you lamented the noisy architecture of our eateries, where you have to shout to be heard. A client and friend of mine, Laura Drexler, has started a site called, Ambient Menu, where people can review eateries on their level of noise. Is this the other half of the deadly duo strangling social cohesion; crappy, selfish, dumbed down media and news, coupled with venues that encourage consumption and monosylabic conversations? The final theme in your article is art making. You lament our State's reduction in art funding, especially compared to its increased funding of sporting events. I quote: “The arts in South Australia are woefully underfunded relative to other states. From 2017-2022, states and territories cumulatively increased arts funding by 22 per cent, while SA was the only state to head in the opposite direction, reducing funding by 9 per cent over the same period.” I think we can accept the funding figures as fact, so let's look at your underlying reason for frustration here, you state: Our civic life needs thriving cultural institutions to counter ignorance and intolerance. How is that so? I have seen some wonderful, thought-provoking theatre that had potential to counter ignorance and intolerance, but it it seen by a select few who can afford $50+ a ticket and who are primarily people from the chattering, enlightened classes who are already doing their best to stay informed and engaged. What is the value of our State Theatre putting on worthy pieces, society-improving pieces, if only the tiniest morsel of the community can see them? At the end of every episode since 2013, we have said goodnight to Don Dunstan, to honour his legacy as a Premier who stirred things up and got our kitchen cooking (literally). In a stirring piece you wrote in 2o16, Inauthentic “vibrancy” is damaging SA's shrinking arts sector, you lamented then Premier Jay Weatherill's dropping of the ball (so to speak) in reducing arts funding. There are many buzzwords in art but especially in politics and “vibrancy” is one, along with “activation”. What have you noticed about governnment support for the arts from Weatherill to Marshall to Malinauskas? Some of the events receiving money at the moment, most likely at the expense of arts, include Liv Golf, the AFL's Gather Round, and bidding for next year's Netball grand final. Do you think these events are intrinsically unworthy of funding? Our guest, next week, for our 10th birthday episode is New Zealander, Owen Eastwood, who has written a beautiful book about Belonging, drawing on many principles and insights of his Maori culture. He has noted that the communal act of following a team and “being there” every week is actually good for the spirit and the soul. Have you ever partaken in such a thing as “following a team”? And is there something from this dynamic that we can learn from in The Arts? I am part of a netball family. My wife coaches three teams and both my daughters play in two teams apiece. It has a strong web of grassroots involvement and is a crucial part of holding many regional communities together. Could there ever be an Arts alternative? Your words to our government and us? 00:53:22 Musical Pilgrimage Our featured song this episode is Intuition by Lucas Day. Guided by what's left unsaidTempted to put my trust in itSuccumbTo intuitionLed by instincts rarely wrongHeld by hands with a mind of their ownSuccumbTo intuitionLet your soul fly freeYour desire run wildYou got nowhere else to beThan in the shared state of mindSuccumbTo intuitionDown that deep end is where I belongGetting used to that sweet unknownSuccumbTo intuitionLet your soul fly freeYour desire run wildYou got nowhere else to beThan in the shared state of mindSuccumbTo intuitionSuccumbTo intuition And here's a slice from his Facebook page with his busy schedule: why am I so happy?1st Sept BAND GIGplaying @fatcontrollerclub for the first time with @ebonyemili and @travcollinsmusic on the lineup8th Sept ONE MAN BAND GIGreturning to the @lovethegov stage supporting @noasis_official with @dumb_whales1st Oct ONE MAN BAND GIGventuring to the @terminushotelstrath supporting @bekjensenmusic for her album launch tour28th Oct BAND GIGhitting up the @spacejamsfest stage for @fleurieufolkfestthat's why!so grateful to be able to share my music with the world and meet so many awesome people stay brightLD xSupport the show: https://theadelaideshow.com.au/listen-or-download-the-podcast/adelaide-in-crowd/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni says our minds are like the keep of a castle protecting our deepest held values and beliefs from even the most skilled attacks. The only problem with this design for self-preservation is that it also can keep out wisdom that might be both useful and true. Mastroianni's summary of the problem is "you can't reach the brain through the ears." Listen as Mastroianni talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the implication of this view of mind for teaching, learning, and our daily interactions with the people around us.

In Episode 420 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by MIKE BOOTHNINJA POWERS and TFG1Mike as they are celebrating 10 YEARS OF ALTERED GEEK! They dive into a variety of topics from 3-D Printing, to DC Animation, Marvel Live Action, old apps that had been forgotten, and even remembering the good ole days of being UnPlugged and Unlimited! All this plus so much more! Only on Altered Geek!!!Show Notes:Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!Sign Up for Audiograms if you're a podcaster by going HERE!Get Altered, Get Geeky with Altered Geek Merchandise! Check out the store HERE!Use the Hashtag #WhatsGeekyToYou with what you're geeking out to this week and we'll try to feature your topic in a future episode!We hope you continue to enjoy the episodes and please feel free to respond to any and all feedback methods.We will read and reply on the show. Topic suggestions also welcome.So get Altered, Get Geeky with the Altered Geeks.Contact: E-mail | Twitter | FacebookTo see more from Steve Phillips, stay tuned into "Altered Geek" weekly or anytime on-demand on AlteredGeek.com and Spreaker.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2921918/advertisement

Seg 1: Why do people from different eras and places believe in declining morality among their peers, when, in fact, nothing has changed? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Seg 2: View From Victoria: Nanaimo's Mayor and former NDP MLA Leonard Krog is calling his city a third world country in terms of cardiac care. We get a local look at the top political stories with the help of Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer. Seg 3: British Columbia is facing severe drought conditions this summer, leading the province to take action against unlicensed water users, including farmers, who are losing access to groundwater. Guest: CKNW Contributor Scott Shantz and Sonia Furstenau, Leader of the BC Green Party Seg 4: Why the housing market requires kids to build their credit early Guest: Stacy Yanchuk Oleksy, CEO of Credit Counseling Canada Seg 5: Will replacing letter grades with proficiency scales will just create more confusion in BC's education system. Guest: Nathan Rickey, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Education at Queen's University Seg 6: Making Cents of the Market: Time for Making Cents of the Markets with Lori Pinkowski. Lori Pinkowski is a Senior Portfolio Manager at Canaccord Genuity. You can contact The Pinkowski Wealth Management team directly at 604-695-LORI or visit their website at Pinkowski.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do people from different eras and places believe in declining morality among their peers, when, in fact, nothing has changed? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have client after client tell me that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Leaders gain power by vowing a return to the “Good ‘ol days.” But is your mind playing tricks on you? According to research by Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert, your brain has tricked you into thinking everything is worse. There's a set of cognitive biases in our brains that cause us to perceive a fall from grace—even when it hasn't happened. These well-established psychological phenomena have us focusing on the negative. So before you empty your portfolio and bury your money in your backyard, listen to this episode of Best in Wealth. Because there is reason to remain hopeful. [bctt tweet="Is more decline an illusion—or reality? Hear my thoughts—and why it matters to investing—in this episode of Best in Wealth! #wealth #retirement #investing #PersonalFinance #FinancialPlanning #RetirementPlanning #WealthManagement" username=""] Outline of This Episode [1:06] How good things used to be [2:09] Is your mind playing tricks on you? [5:53] The types of questions asked in the survey [7:29] Biased exposure and biased memory [13:30] People exempt their own social circles from decline [15:40] How to remain positive despite our biases Is your mind playing tricks on you? Until now, researchers had only theorized why people believe that things have gotten worse. But Adam and Daniel were the first to investigate, test, and explain where that mindset comes from. They've collected thousands of surveys from all races, religions, economic backgrounds, etc. They've found that people believe that everything is worse now compared to 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago. But people are wrong about the decline of morality. They've been collecting this research for 25 years. When they asked people the current state of morality, people gave almost identical answers over the last 25 years. Every year, people reported a decline in morality. But why does everyone always think things are worse? Is it because they're actually worse? Now I'm not saying that things aren't bad. We're facing a war between Ukraine and Russia. People in the US are divided on every front, politically or otherwise. We are dealing with high inflation. But is it noticeably different than 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago? These two researchers compiled the evidence. What do they think? [bctt tweet="Is your mind playing tricks on you? Has the world actually gotten worse? Find out what the research says about moral decline in this episode of Best in Wealth! #wealth #retirement #investing #PersonalFinance #FinancialPlanning #RetirementPlanning #WealthManagement" username=""] Biased exposure and biased memory It's all an illusion created by our brains because of biased exposure and biased memories. Biased exposure happens when people encounter and pay attention to negative information because it dominates the news cycle. All we see are bad things. Negativity is perpetuated in our culture. Secondly, humans have biased memories. The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. When you get dumped, it hurts in the moment. But as you rationalize, reframe, and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. But the memory of meeting my wife for the first time? I can still see her walking into the bar. I'll never forget that. I still feel giddy inside. When you remember your childhood, you likely remember the holidays, the birthdays, summertime, etc. Your world was great. But do you remember getting dumped? Do you remember getting in trouble? When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you create the illusion that things are worse off now than they were. In the article, Adam says, “When you're standing in a wasteland—but remember a wonderland—the only...

Episode 99: We often hear people talk about the past in glowing ways. The people of the past, many think, behaved better, were more trustworthy and had a better set of ethical standards. But you don't have to look too closely at our history to see that past generations were much less welcoming of people who were different than them — often in pretty horrific ways. Host Richard Kyte and Scott Rada discuss this disconnect between what we think about the past and what the past was really like. Links to stories discussed during the podcast: Your brain has tricked you Into thinking everything is worse, by Adam Mastroianni, The New York Times Why it's harder for families to 'thrive,' by Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring About the hosts: Scott Rada is social media manager with Lee Enterprises, and Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode 419 of Altered Geek Steve Megatron is joined by TFG1Mike and MIKE BOOTHNINJA POWERS and they are talking about a many splendid things this week! From new tech gadgets they are using, to entertainment they are consuming, and even new social media platforms! All this plus so much more! Only on Altered Geek!!!Pop Culture Oligopoly by Adam Mastroianni!Sign Up for Audiograms if you're a podcaster by going HERE!Get Altered, Get Geeky with Altered Geek Merchandise! Check out the store HERE!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2921918/advertisement

Adam Mastroianni is a social psychologist and the author of Experimental History, available on Substack. But what is Substack? And is it a good vehicle for science communication? Adam shares his experiences writing for a non-academic audience and also reflects on the role of "science communication" in the world. Should there be a division between the scientists and the science communicators? What is a scientist's responsibility in keeping in touch with the public?We also discuss his new article in The Atlantic: "I Ruined Two Birthday Parties and Learned the Limits of Psychology."You can find the rest of this summer's science communication podcast series here.For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Welcome back to NeoAcademia! Today, I'm joined by Adam Mastioanni. Adam is a post-doc at Columbia business school, but most people know Adam from his blog Experimental History. He's an incredible writer, comedian, and psychologist who just happens also to be a Rhodes Scholar.For more on Adam and this episode's Big Nerve question check out the full show notes!

Adam Mastroianni has a great review of Memories Of My Life, the autobiography of Francis Galton. Mastroianni centers his piece around the question: how could a brilliant scientist like Galton be so devoted to an evil idea like eugenics? This sparked the usual eugenics discussion. In case you haven't heard it before: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck

This episode is a little different than normal: it's not directly about education. Instead, it's about peer review, strong- and weak-link problems, and our biases in how we remember the past and look forward to the future. Nonetheless, even though these topics don't concern education directly, they shed light on important issues in education practice, […]

This episode is a little different than normal: it's not directly about education. Instead, it's about peer review, strong- and weak-link problems, and our biases in how we remember the past and look forward to the future. Nonetheless, even though these topics don't concern education directly, they shed light on important issues in education practice, research, and policy. In particular, the conceptual framework of strong- and weak-link problems provides a helpful apparatus for thinking about the tradeoffs we make in tackling many of the biggest issues in education: school choice, university admissions, accountability, tracking by ability, teacher licensure, and more.On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these topics, and others, with Adam Mastroianni. Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and the author of the biweekly newsletter Experimental History.Show Notes:The Rise and Fall of Peer ReviewScience Is a Strong-Link ProblemYou're Probably Wrong about How Things Have ChangedThings Could Be BetterWhen Should You End a Conversation? Probably Sooner than You ThinkPop Culture Has Become an OligopolyIdeas Aren't Getting Harder to Find and Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is a Coward and I Will Fight Them

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Adam Mastroianni, who runs the Experimental History Substack. Mastroianni was the inaugural guest on the Intrinsic Perspective podcast, hosted by Erik Hoel, where they discussed his post, The rise and fall of peer review - Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing (see also his follow-up, The dance of the naked emperors). Mastroianni opened a can of worms; the post has more than 800 likes and more than 330 comments. Razib asks Mastroianni about the fiercely positive and negative reactions to his contention that modern peer review has outlived its utility. They also unveil the historically contingent origins of the practice in the mid-20th century, and how it came to be seen as a holy enterprise necessary to science. Both agree that scientific publishing needs a paradigm shift; a topic that Razib tackled in 2014 with the Genome Biology comment Dragging a scientific publishing into the 21st century. Razib and Mastroianni then discuss Experimental History, a Substack devoted to social psychology and meta-science. Why has Mastroianni decided to devote a substantial amount of energy to this project, as opposed to just publishing in journals?  Experimental History touches on some of the experimental social psychology research Mastroianni has been involved in, but it also focuses on some of the generally understood findings in psychology and neuroscience, and why they're true or false. In a world of academic science saturated with Ph.D. level researchers, Razib and Mastroianni explore the communication possibilities inherent in the Substack model. Finally, Mastroianni unpacks his opinion that even many of the robust statistically significant findings in social psychology don't matter. He believes that the lack of a single theory blocks proper understanding in psychology, and many of the results in his field are both uninteresting and fail to lead to a nontrivial increase in knowledge.

Seg 1: What can ruining birthday parties teach about psychology? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Seg 2: How could more funding improve the Surrey School District? Guest: Terry Allen, Chair of the Budget Committee for Surrey First Education Seg 3: Have RCMP staffing levels improved in BC? Guest: Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Commanding Officer for the BC RCMP Seg 4: Can you use chip bags as an emergency blanket? Guest: Jasmine Chow, Grade 7 Student at St. Michael's Catholic Elementary School and SFWU Finalist Seg 5: How reinstating SFU's Football Program would benefit young athletes in Surrey Guest: Dianne Watts, Former Surrey Mayor involved in SFU Community Engagement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can ruining birthday parties teach about psychology? Guest: Dr. Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist and Author of the “Experimental History” Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We discuss The Rise and Fall of Peer Review, with Adam Mastroianni from Experimental History We also touch on The dance of the naked emperors and Ideas aren't getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a … Continue reading →

Dr. Adam Mastroianni is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School who studies how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds, from the person sitting across the table to the broader community buzzing around them. He writes a great blog (I checked it out) called Experimental History, is a stand-up comic, a Harvard Graduate and I think even he'd admit that he's kind of a quirky academic-comedian-philosopher hybrid. This conversation was about as loose, freestyle and entertaining as you can get with a post-doctoral researcher. Enjoy.  Twitter: a_m_mastroianniexperimental-history.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this podcast, Kushal speaks with Adam Mastroianni about two essays he wrote on his substack titled "The rise and fall of peer review, Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing" And "The dance of the naked emperors, A followup to "The rise and fall of peer review”. Follow Adam: Twitter: @a_m_mastroianni Substack: https://www.experimental-history.com/ #PeerReview #Science #Psychology ------------------------------------------------------------ Listen to the podcasts on: SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/kushal-mehra-99891819 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1rVcDV3upgVurMVW1wwoBp Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-c%C4%81rv%C4%81ka-podcast/id1445348369 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-carvaka-podcast ------------------------------------------------------------ Support The Cārvāka Podcast: Become a Member on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKPx... Become a Member on Fanmo: https://fanmo.in/the_carvaka_podcast Become a Member on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/carvaka UPI: kushalmehra@icici To buy The Carvaka Podcast Exclusive Merch please visit: http://kushalmehra.com/shop ------------------------------------------------------------ Follow Kushal: Twitter: https://twitter.com/kushal_mehra?ref_... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KushalMehraO... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecarvakap... Koo: https://www.kooapp.com/profile/kushal... Inquiries: https://kushalmehra.com/ Feedback: kushalmehra81@gmail.com

Isabel Thielmann is a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the study of crime, security and law. In this conversation, we talk about her background as a competitive sprinter, her research on prosocial behaviour and personality, the role of affordances, how game theory and interdependence theory can helpus understand human social behaviour, and Isa's experiences in having started a lab.BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreonTimestamps0:00:04: Isa used to be a pretty good sprinter0:11:03: Lessons from athletics0:16:40: How Isa got into psychology and doing science0:26:47: Breadth vs depth in research topics0:33:32: Start discussing Isa's review article 'Economics Games: an introduction and guide for research'0:46:06: What are game theory and interdependence theory?0:59:06: Affordances and economic games1:10:44: Personality and economic games1:34:20: Isa's experiences starting her lab and becoming a PIPodcast linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-podTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twtIsa's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/thielmann-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/thielmann-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/Thielmann-twtBen's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twtReferencesAmir, Rand & Gal (2012). Economic games on the internet: The effect of $1 stakes. PloS one. Cameron (1999). Raising the stakes in the ultimatum game: Experimental evidence from Indonesia. Econ Inquiry.Columbus, Münich & Gerpott (2020). Playing a different game: Situation perception mediates framing effects on cooperative behaviour. J Exp Soc Psych.Diehl, Thielmann, Thiel, Mayer, Zipfel & Schneider (2014). Possibilities to support elite adolescent athletes in improving performance: Results from a qualitative content analysis. Science & sports.Galizzi & Navarro-Martinez (2019). On the external validity of social preference games: a systematic lab-field study. Management Science.Halevy, Chou & Murnighan (2012). Mind games: the mental representation of conflict. J perso and soc psych.Kuper-Smith, Voulgaris, Briken, Fuss & Korn (2022). Social preferences and psychopathy in a sample of male prisoners. PsyArXiv.Liebrand (1984). The effect of social motives, communication and group size on behaviour in an N‐person multi‐stage mixed‐motive game. Eur J soc psych.Peysakhovich, Nowak & Rand (2014). Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype'that is domain general and temporally stable. Nat Comm.Thielmann, Böhm, Ott & Hilbig (2021). Economic games: An introduction and guide for research. Collabra: Psych.Thielmann & Hilbig (2015). Trust: An integrative review from a person–situation perspective. Review of Gen Psych. Thielmann, Spadaro & Balliet (2020). Personality and prosocial behavior: A theoretical framework and meta-analysis. Psych Bull.Adam Mastroianni's article on conversational doorknobs: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs

In this episode, we interview Dr. Adam Mastroianni. We discuss misperceptions about social progress and political hatred. We also have an extended discussion about the problems with the scientific system of peer review and what we can do to fix those problems. Adam's Blog: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/ Adam's article on misperceptions about society: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/youre-probably-wrong-about-how-things Adamn's article on political hatred: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-great-myths-of-political-hatred Adam's article on peer review: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review People are not as divided as we think: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/27/no-america-is-not-on-the-cusp-of-a-civil-war Adam's peer reviewed work on misperceptions: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2107260119 Nosek peer review paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2012.692215?casa_token=VW9tufGR3c4AAAAA%3AYNjm4dcV7FB1Xe8jyz_IFo9AttZeLTjdqpD-kygJCqPDMSFrG7H-pxdMSlmeFBBxwdJJmWa3jqGT “Elsevier makes 40% profit”: https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing

Econtalk Podcast Notes Key Takeaways The way that peer review actually works is not how most people think it does  Peer review is a relatively new thing in the history of science that has not yet stood the test of time Many papers are not rejected because they are untrue, but because they are considered unworthy or not interesting enough to be published in the given scientific journal Letterheads at the top of papers do not mean much to the scientists that just want to use the information contained in the paper; a significant portion of the peer review process is status gamesThe referees do not even look at the data or the analysis of the paper most of the time; checking the results of the paper is virtually never doneThe primary misconception of the peer review process: people assume that the paper is being checked for accuracy when it is submitted when in reality it is being evaluated for how interesting the findings are Most of the papers that are published will never be cited by anybodyThe peer review process costs 15,000 person-years, per year in time spentFraudulent studies are typically caught after the paper has been published and not during the review stage of the peer review processIf a system claims to be doing something that it does not actually do, then the people that rely on the said system are worse off because they have been misled into trusting something that they should not have We are not at the end of science; humanity will continue to progress beyond our lifetimes and we will look ignorant very soon You can imagine an alternative way of doing something when you understand that the current way that it is done is not how it has always been doneWe do not gain much from preventing the publication of low-quality work; however, we do lose a lot from preventing the publication of very high-quality workThe truth tends to win out in the long term, so we should strive to increase the variance of the work that is conducted   We need the freedom to say the things that we believe to be trueRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgPsychologist Adam Mastroianni says peer review has failed. Papers with major errors make it through the process. The ones without errors often fail to replicate. One approach to improve the process is better incentives. But Mastroianni argues that peer review isn't fixable. It's a failed experiment. Listen as he makes the case to EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a new approach to science and academic research.

Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says peer review has failed. Papers with major errors make it through the process. The ones without errors often fail to replicate. One approach to improve the process is better incentives. But Mastroianni argues that peer review isn't fixable. It's a failed experiment. Listen as he makes the case to EconTalk host Russ Roberts for a new approach to science and academic research.

Adam Mastroianni is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School and a writer whose research focuses on how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds. Does being smart make you happy? Does being dumb make you miserable? Why did the guy who created eugenics also get published in Nature for a revolutionary way to cut a cake? Adam is one of my favourite writers so today I get to ask him all these things. Expect to learn why super smart people can be so stupid, Adam's issue with the productivity approach of eating frogs, whether you can learn arithmetic by smell, why humans misjudge what other people want to talk about, why we forget so many of the things that we've learned, how come it's trendy to call the general public stupid and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias' nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Follow Adam's Substack - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/ Check out Adam's website - https://www.adammastroianni.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

Are humans ever satisfied? Two social psychologists, Ethan Ludwin-Peery and Adam Mastroianni, fell down a research rabbit hole accidentally answering a version of this very question. After conducting several studies, the pair found that when asked how things could be different, people tend to give one kind of answer, regardless of how the question is asked or how good life felt when they were asked. Short Wave's Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber digs into the research—and how it might reveal a fundamental law of psychology about human satisfaction.

Welcome to the end of Flash Forward. This is the first episode in our three-part show finale!! As I say goodbye to Flash Forward, I wanted to leave you all with a rumination on how to think about the future. How do you stay hopeful? How do we imagine better futures? How do we actually GET those better futures? This is my three-part love letter to you all, and to tomorrow. ✨ BECOME A TIME TRAVELER ✨Guests: Jack Shepherd — former editorial director BuzzFeed, author of On Words and Up Words newsletter, co-host of Strange Bedfellows podcast Dr. Adam Mastroianni — postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School and author of Experimental History newsletter  Liz Neeley — science communicator and founder of Liminal  Dr. Ruha Benjamin — professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want → → →  Further reading & resources here! ← ← ← This episode of Flash Forward was written by me, Rose Eveleth; edited by Avery Trufelman; produced by Ozzy Llinas Goodman and sound designed by Ariana Martinez. Much of the music in this episode is by Ilan Blanck. The outro music is by Hussalonia. The episode art is by Mattie Lubchansky. Special thanks to Libby Larsen, who read Plates by Ethan Leos Verne; Emily C, who read Nailbunny's post; Afi Yellow Duke who read “Sorrow is Not My Name” by Ross Gay; and Marge Piercy who read her poem “To be of use.”Poems Credits“Sorrow Is Not My Name” from Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay, Ⓒ 2011. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.“To be of use” by Marge Piercy Copyright ©1973, 1982 by Marge Piercy From CIRCLES ON THE WATER, Alfred A. Knopf. Used by permission of Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

In this episode of Come Rain or Shine, Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, joins the show to discuss the relationship between intelligence and happiness.  In the past hundred years, there have been many efforts to measure intelligence. More recently, new tests have discerned the multiple types of intelligence including the performance tendencies of subject matter experts. However, as Adam explains, there's also a general intelligible that can capture a person's ability to define and solve problems. While a one-size, fit-all metric is hard to quantify, what is clear is the correlation difference between problem and dilemma with intelligence and happiness. As Adam notes, problems involve optimal solutions, but dilemmas often lack a clear right or wrong, a principle evident in the contrast of emotional and intellectual responses. Although the psychological drivers of happiness are highly variable, the empirical data behind general intelligence is more concrete. Therefore, one can never assume a more successful person on paper is automatically happier. Resources: Website: https://www.adammastroianni.com/ Connect with Dan: www.dancockerell.com Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dancockerell/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dancockerell/ Facebook - www.facebook.com/dancockerellspeaker Quotes: “Life ain't chess. Nobody agrees on the rules. The pieces do whatever they want and the board covers the whole globe as well as the inside of your hear and possibly several metaphysical planes as well..”

Adam Mastroianni is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School. In this conversation, we talk about his work on conversations, his Substack/blog, his article Things Could Be Better and why he chose to publish it this way, improv comedy, and much more.BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. In 2022, episodes will appear irregularly, roughly twice per month. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.). Timestamps0:01:20: Did Adam fake having a girlfriend when he appeared on Come Dine With Me?0:08:51: Adam's Substack called 'Experimental History'0:10:51: Good conversations have lots of doorknobs0:15:33: What can people learn from improv comedy?0:23:10: Why did Adam start his Substack? / A discussion of academia, alternative ways of doing science, and the problems with academic publishing1:12:26: Start discussing Adam's paper 'Do conversations end when people want them to?'1:27:28: What makes for a good conversation?1:29:59: Some words of advice from AdamPodcast linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-podTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twtAdam's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/mastroianni-webSubstack: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/Google Scholar: https://geni.us/mastroianni-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/mastroianni-twtBen's linksWebsite: https://geni.us/bjks-webGoogle Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholarTwitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twtLinksRowan Atkinson saying words in a funny way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UhHrtKx8-sSubstack article on conversational doorknobs: https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobshttps://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/02/10/the-scientific-virtues/Episode with Joe Hilgard about scientific fraud: https://geni.us/bjks-hilgardGet me off your mailing list: https://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scamDan Quintana's YouTube with Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/@dsquintanaAdam's Rhodes speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H68w3543lkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlineshttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.htmlReferencesGilbert (2009). Stumbling on happiness.Mastroianni, Gilbert, Cooney, & Wilson (2021). Do conversations end when people want them to? PNAS.Mastroianni, AM & Ludwin-Peery, EJ. (2022). Things could be better. https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwkSchwartz (2008). The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science.

New research shows that news coverage of word events is not captivating audiences the way it once did. But why do people seem to be increasingly tuning out the news? For insights we welcome: Adam Mastroianni, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Columbia School of Business; investigative journalist Amanda Ripley; and Colette Brin, director of the Center for Media Studies at Laval University.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni returns to discuss a recent post of his entitled "Why aren't smart people happier?" plus other entries from his (highly recommended) blog ExperimentalHistory.substack.com

Modern Wisdom Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Check out the Modern Wisdom Episode Page & Show NotesRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgGurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He's written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defence, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimisation should be a priority, why authoritarians lose sight of rationality and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's new MegaThread - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253  Adam Mastroianni's post - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

Modern Wisdom: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He's written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defence, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimisation should be a priority, why authoritarians lose sight of rationality and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's new MegaThread - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253  Adam Mastroianni's post - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

Have you ever lost a friend to misperception? Have you lost a friend or a family member to the idea that your views got so different, that it was time to end the relationship — perhaps by unfriending each other on Facebook?As it turns out, we often think our ideological differences are far greater than they actually are. Which means: we're losing relationships and getting mired in polarization based on warped visions of each other. This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're talking with Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School who studies how we perceive and misperceive our social worlds. Together with Adam, we're going to explore how accurate — and inaccurate — our views of each other are. As you listen to our conversation, keep in mind that relationship you might have lost to misperception, and that you might be able to revive as a result of what you hear.CORRECTIONS: In the episode, Adam says in 1978, 85% of people said they'd vote for a Black president, but the actual percentage is 80.4%. Tristan says that Republicans estimate that more than a third of Democrats are LGBTQ, but the actual percentage is 32%. Finally, Tristan refers to Anil Seth's notion of cognitive impenetrability, but that term was actually coined by the Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher Zenon W. Pylyshyn.RECOMMENDED MEDIA Widespread Misperceptions of Long-term Attitude Changehttps://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2107260119   Adam Mastroianni's research paper showing how stereotypes of the past lead people to misperceive attitude change, and how these misperceptions can lend legitimacy to policies that people may not actually preferExperimental Historyhttps://experimentalhistory.substack.com/  Adam's blog, where he shares original data and thinks through ideasAmericans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly halfhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32412-yAcademic study showing that Americans are living in what researchers called a “false social reality” with respect to misperceptions about climate viewsRECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Mind the (Perception) Gap with Dan Vallonehttps://www.humanetech.com/podcast/33-mind-the-perception-gapThe Courage to Connect. Guests: Ciaran O'Connor and John Wood, Jr.https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/30-the-courage-to-connectTranscending the Internet Hate Game with Dylan Marronhttps://www.humanetech.com/podcast/52-transcending-the-internet-hate-game 

Gurwinder Bhogal is a programmer and a writer. Gurwinder is one of my favourite Twitter follows. He's written yet another megathread exploring human nature, cognitive biases, mental models, status games, crowd behaviour and social media. It's one of the best things I've read this year, so I just had to bring him on. Expect to learn how bad things can sometimes feel better than good things, why people die on the hill of opinions they've only just begun believing, why intelligence plus ideology is a nightmare, how comedy can be a troll's last line of defence, the biggest lesson I learned from Joe Rogan, why regret minimisation should be a priority, why authoritarians lose sight of rationality and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Gurwinder's Substack - https://gurwinder.substack.com/ Follow Gurwinder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal Gurwinder's new MegaThread - https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal/status/1545510413982474253  Adam Mastroianni's post - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/underrated-ideas-in-psychology  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

In Episode 406 of Altered Geek, we present you with the next interview here on The GCRN! It's time to talk about stuff! From Pop Culture being an Oligopoly, to just who Adam Mastroianni is, and what he's all about as a person, and as a Social Psychologist! Plus sooooooo much more! Right here only on Altered Geek!

Adam Mastroianni on the oligopoly of pop culture and much more. Read more of Adam's work at ExperimentalHistory.substack.com

In this episode, we continue discussing Adam Mastroianni's "Against All Applications" (https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/against-all-applications?s=r). What is wrong with the application process, both for hiring and for education, and what are the alternatives?Toby Napoletano. Michael Hughes

In this episode, we discuss Adam Mastroianni's "Against All Applications" (https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/against-all-applications?s=r). What is wrong with the application process, both for hiring and for education, and what are the alternatives?Toby Napoletano, Michael Hughes

Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention. We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it. And if you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe to my Substack newsletter at againsthabit.com or leave a five star review on iTunes.Thank you for listening. Here is Nick Seaver.Cody: One of your current areas of interest is attention. And while I think this is a topic that is a pillar of how we understand our own modern lives and definitely has a long history of study in fields like psychology, it's not really something that anthropologists have covered as much in a direct way. So I'm curious to get your current perspective on why people talk about attention so much, what this word might really mean, and what an anthropological take on it might show us.[00:07:46] Nick: Yeah. My interest in attention stemmed from the earlier work that I did, sort of my PhD dissertation project and first book, which was about the developers of music recommender systems. And one of the things you realize if you, you know, study recommender systems at all, is that people are really interested in attention.They're interested in ways that you measure — how you measure if someone is listening to some music, what they like on the basis of their listening habits, your interest in trying to encourage them to listen more, to do all this stuff with their attention. And that was going to lurking in the background for me for a long time.So when I had a chance to design a new seminar to teach at Tufts for our anthropology undergraduates I thought, you know, okay, I want to learn more about attention and try to find stuff about it. So I proposed a course, which I called "how to pay attention," uh, which was a little bit of a click baity title. We don't really do attention hacks or anything. And it was a chance for me to read really broadly across media studies about across history, across psychology, cognitive science, uh, and some anthropology art history and so on to think about like, what is this thing? Like, what's this, this concept that seems so important for the way that people describe anything in the world now.And as an anthropologist, I was, uh, struck by that because, you know, when you find a concept that does so much work for people, it's — I would argue it's hard to find one that is doing more work in the present moment than attention — you know you've got something culturally rich. But a lot of the ways we talk about attention in public, the kind of popular discourse around attention is very narrow. It's very individualizing. It's very sort of a thing that happens in individual brains.So the line I like to give, uh, is that, you know, the question is: what would it look like to take an anthropological approach to attention? Well, it would look like putting attention in a social context and in a cultural context.And my thumbnail definitions of those are, you know, society is this sort of world of relationships and roles in which people live. It's where you have bosses and spouses and professors and students and pets and doctors and sheriffs and all these other kinds of roles that people occupy. And we clearly pay attention within those social structures, right? We pay attention to the same things as each other. If I'm sitting in a classroom with students, they're paying attention to me and each other in certain ways that are governed by our social roles and relationships. And we also pay attention in a cultural context, which means we pay attention in a world where we value certain things, sort of arbitrarily where we make associations between certain kinds of entities and other entities.So we might say, oh, let's, you know, focus our attention over here. And we talk about our attention as though it's a kind of lens or an optical instrument, or we'll talk about attention as being like a filter, right? We have information overload because there's not enough filtering happening between information and the world in our heads.So these are all cultural phenomenon. There's nothing intrinsically attention-like about them. And to my mind studying how people make sense of attention in the present moment in these cultural contexts, uh, is just a fascinating question. So that's the sort of how I got into it and where I think an anthropological approach is different from the sort of stereotypical psychological approach.Not that all psychologists are like this, um, but you know, the stereotypical psychology approach would be, let's do experiments with reaction times and individual people, you know, in a lab setting. And that's not really what I'm interested in. I'm really interested in the fact that people talk about attention all the time and they use it to explain all sorts of things and they think that it's really important.[00:11:12] Cody: There's definitely a trope in psychology that whatever you are studying. Whether it's memory or visual search or whatever it is, you can kind of at always some point just boil it down to, you know, some explanation: Oh, well this is what the person is attending to. This is, this is what their attention is focused on. But it's not actually — it's often kind of just a hand-waving way of, of saying, oh, well, yeah, it's what they're concentrating on without having, having any specific idea of what that really means. So I'm kind of curious what, what does putting the idea of attention in a social and cultural context — what do you think we've misunderstood about attention by individualizing and overlooking those social and cultural contexts?[00:12:01] Nick: I would say one thing is to note that there are lots of folks working in the sort of intersection of philosophy and cognitive science who are very interested in that kind of circularity of, uh, of explanation that you just described. Right. That are like: wait a minute, what does attention mean then? One of the ones that I am familiar with her work — Carolyn Dicey Jennings is one such philosopher who works in close collaboration with cognitive scientists and is sort of interested in offering a philosophically rigorous account of attention that isn't just like the thing that you point to when you've given up on giving explanations.But one reason I love reading and cognitive science around this is that you've started to realize that it seems really obvious what attention is. And of course, the famous line that everyone has to quote in all of their articles and books seems to be from William James, the godfather of American psychology who says everyone knows what attention is.And then gives you the sort of basic definition of, you know, it's when you, uh, focus on something and sort of don't focus on other things. But of course, when you push on attention, it's not really clear what it is. And it's sort of a grab bag concept that pulls together all sorts of stuff, right? It includes your ability to focus for a long time or so your sort of endurance. It includes vigilance, right? It includes the sheer sort of, uh, arousal state. Like if you're really sleepy, you're maybe not as attentive. It also includes that basic filtering capacity, the ability to, you know, in a crowded room, to listen to the person who's talking to me, instead of hearing all of the other stuff that's happening. There's all these things that you may not necessarily want to, or need to combine into a single concept.But there's not really internal coherence there. But while that's sort of a problem for psychologists, they right. They say we want to be studying one thing. We don't want to be accidentally mixing a bunch of different references. It's really normal in a cultural context, right? For any given symbol, say attention as a symbol here, to mean lots of different things and to be specifically a way to sort of draw together a bunch of different discourses in one place.So to my mind, that got me thinking, well, you know, attention just is a cultural phenomenon, just like as a defined thing. Like the fact that we think of, uh, you know, a first grader's ability to sit in their chair in the classroom for a long time, we think of that as being the same thing as my ability to, you know, listen to you and not just have my mind wander off to some other thing, while we're talking — those don't have to be the same as each other. And yet we think of them as being totally connected to each other.Another example I like to give often to talk about the sort of various layers at which attention works — in the way that, you know, in sort of common usage — has to do with Donald Trump, which is not the most fun example but there was a lot of attentional discourse around Trump, which ranged from when he was elected this sense of like, oh, you know, the press was not paying attention to the right people. This was a surprise to some people because there was not collective attention to the right parts of society. There was not an awareness that was happening.So there's an attention that's not an individual's attention, right? That's like everybody's attention. But what is that? That's not the same thing as what happens in the brain.All of those things tangled together through this weirdo concept that nobody seems to really question. We really take it for granted as like an obvious, important thing.[00:15:10] Cody: You mentioned in one of your papers, this metaphor that I'm really interested in. And it's that the way we usually talk about attention is in terms of "paying" attention, which is based in an economic metaphor. and certainly I hear a lot of people talking about like, "okay, well your most valuable asset is your time. No, no, no. Actually wait, that's just the convention. Really, your most valuable asset is your attention, which is kind of this cycle, psychological function of time." But anyway, that's kind of how we normally talk about attention, but you propose this idea that actually the sort of verb there should be "doing" attention as in some sort of action forward notion of what it means to attend.So can you say a little bit more about what that means?[00:16:00] Nick: Clearly the economic metaphor is in many ways the dominant attentional metaphor at the moment. Of course, there's a sense of paying attention. And there's also this idea that we live in an attention economy, right. And the classic explanation for what that means is from Herbert Simon, who is a sort of cognitive scientist, political scientist, economist, et cetera, working in the sort of late post-war period in the United States where he says, you know, you might say we live in an information economy. But that's not really true because we have tons of information. Information is not scarce, but information consumes attention. And therefore attention is the scarce resource. And if economics is the study of how to allocate scarce resources, that means that attention is the thing that is being economized.That's not an argument we have to agree with necessarily, but that's the sort of groundwork for thinking about how attention itself might be an economic kind of thing and how it's become really, really natural I think for lots of people across all sorts of political orientations and disciplinary affiliations to think of their attention as being really like naturally economic, right? We might question all sorts of applications of economic logics to other domains, but attention is a hard nut to crack. It really feels like, you know, sure, we don't like this way that people like try to economize every last part of our lives, but attention isn't that just, you know, you have a limited amount of it. You have a limited amount of time. What else can you, can you have? And so I think one of the things you're pointing to in your, in your question, is this history in the social sciences have a real skepticism around the role of money in society.So the classic spot for this is Georg Simmel, the sociologist writing around the turn of the 20th century, who gives what my PhD advisor used to call the money as acid hypothesis, which was this argument that when you introduce sort of money and, and, you know, uh, assigning prices to things into domains where it didn't exist before, it tends to reduce everything to the monetary as like a lowest common denominator. Right?You start to think of everything in terms of how much it's worth. And that feels not great in a lot of domains. It allows some people to do some things very strategically. Um, but generally we, we take that as a sort of sad, sad thing that money has to sort of dissolve some of the richness of social interaction.Um, and it becomes sort of the, you know, the basis for everything. It's the source of the phrase, you know, time is money, right? This idea of time is money. That's why it's important. But when you're pointing at is now we've got a kind of shift in the way that that discourse happens, right? It's not really the case that time is money. It's more, that money lets you buy time. And some people are suggesting that the basic thing, the sort of most fundamental value thing is your time or maybe your attention.And that is so interesting to me because now we've got the attention as acid hypothesis, which is that attention and this sort of an accountant, any kind of social life in terms of how much attention we're paying to what, um, it becomes the, the framework in which basically anything, uh, can be, can be expressed — in an almost, it feels more fundamental than money to some people, right? It feels more essential. If money is an arbitrary and position, attention is just the real thing.And as anthropologist, my interest is not so much in deciding whether that's true or not. But in cataloging and noting the way that that works, the way that people talk about it, because it's something that's pretty emergent at the moment. But it's not quite obvious to folks like what, what it's going to mean. Like what's going to happen, as people take this more and more seriously.[00:19:32] Cody: So, as you alluded to at the beginning, attention is kind of this big, big topic that we all understand is this governing force in our lives. We're not really sure what it is in either a colloquial sense or a professional academic sense. But it's definitely, whatever it is, it's critical to whatever we're doing over here in psychology.And you began to understand that through your research in music recommender systems. And that has been your main area of study for the past 10 years or so the kind of recommender systems and algorithms used by platforms like Spotify and Pandora and all that sort of stuff. So you've done a series of in-depth ethnographic studies, which will come together in your book, Computing Taste, which I'm really looking forward to reading when it's out this December. Um, but I want to get into some of that material now.[00:20:28] Nick: Sure.[00:20:29] Cody: So one of my favorite papers of yours is called "Seeing Like an Infrastructure: avidity and difference in algorithmic recommendation." So can you tell me a little bit about this concept of avidity and how it plays out in the way engineers think about musical recommenders systems.[00:20:48] Nick: So that piece, seeing like an infrastructure, came about — it's going to be partly in this book, but the basic gist of it was this: I wanted to know how the people building recommender systems for music in particular thought about their users. This is sort of basic stuff. But it's very important, right?The way you build your technology, uh, is going to be shaped by the people that you think use it. Um, a side question that sort of rose to great public prominence during the time that I was working on this project, you know, over the past, like you said, 10 or 12 years was the question of diversity within these fields.So it is, you know, a well-known problem, certainly by now, um, that there is a lot of demographic homogeneity in tech companies and among the people who build these software systems. And many people suggest that the shortcomings are some of the shortcomings of these systems, um, or, you know, biased outputs, some of the racist outcomes we get from some machine learning systems, maybe directly traceable to that lack of diversity on the teams of the people who, who build them.Uh, so aside question here for me was how did the people building these systems understand diversity, uh, because there's more than one way to think about what diversity means and what kind of effect it might have on the technologies that you build. So one of the things I realized was that when people talked about music listeners, as you know, developers of recommender systems, they were very well aware that the people who used a recommender system were not really like the people who built the recommender system.And that's a kind of realization that doesn't always happen. It's been the subject of critique in lots of domains. Some people call the absence of that the iMethodology, which is what we use to say, you know, someone builds a system because it meets their own needs and they assume that they are, uh, like their users.So you get this class of startup ideas, you know, like, um, laundry delivery, uh, which is because, you know, you've got a bunch of dudes who have just graduated from college and they don't want to do their own laundry, and they're trying to solve their own problems, right. This kind of sector and, uh, style of development.But the people working on music recommendation seems pretty aware, uh, that they, they're not like the people who are using this. So the question then is in how — and well, the main thing that people would talk about when they talked about how they were different from their users and in how their users might be different from each other was what I ended up calling avidity, which is sort of my term, um, for a collection of ideas that you could sum up basically as how into music are people, right?How, how avidly do they seek out new music? How much do they care about music? How much should they want to listen to music? You know, how much work do they want to put into, uh, finding things to listen to and a recommender system, as you might guess, uh, is generally, uh, geared, especially these days toward less avid listeners, right? They're intended for people who don't really want to put that much effort into deciding what to listen to. If you knew what you wanted to listen to, you would not need an algorithmic recommendation.But on the other hand, the people who worked in these companies, they generally were very, very enthusiastic about music. And so when they were building recommender systems, they understood themselves as having to build those for someone that was not like them, which poses this question: how do you know what your users are like then? If they're not like you, what are you going to do?And so in short, the argument and the pieces that they come to understand their users primarily through the infrastructures that they build. So they learn things about their users, through the data collection apparatus or through the infrastructure that they create. An infrastructure is designed to capture things like how much you listen, at where you click, you know, the frequency of your listening to certain artists and so on. And in that data collection, what's most obvious? Avidity.How much you listen, how much clicking you do, because here's a database that's, you know, full of click events, listening events and so on. And so I argue in that piece that avidity is both a kind of cultural theory about how people are different from each other, but also something that's very closely tied to the specific infrastructure that they work on.So they want to try to be rational. They want to try to be objective. They don't want to try to build from their own personal experience. They're aware of that shortcoming. But the solution for that is in this sort of circular solution of using the actual data collection infrastructure that they've been building on. So they kind of reinforce this vision of avidity at the center, in the place of, you know, other kinds of variety that some of their critics might care about such as, uh, demographic homogeneity and so on.[00:25:22] Cody: Yeah, so that to me is such a fascinating insight. It's like, okay, if you're someone who doesn't have any preconceptions about what this might be like, you might come in and think, okay, well, if I were going to segment people up to recommend music to them, I would look for demographic qualities. I might look for things that I think would correspond to interest in certain genres, all of that, all of that sort of thing. But, based off of what you're saying, this dominant way of understanding people is through the amount of effort they're willing to put in to find something that they do not already know about.And you give an account from one of your informants who says they kind of have this pyramid : at the bottom is the musically indifferent than you have casual and engaged listeners and then musical savant at the top. And then in each of these four sectors, you have a totally different way of how you're trying to engage them and what it might mean to have a successful recommendation for them. And that to me just seems, uh, like a very interesting way of conceptualizing what it means to, to be engaged with music and to understand the different kinds of, of ways in which people are listening to a combination of what they like and what they might potentially like.[00:26:43] Nick: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, uh, maybe one thing that will help put us in some context is to think a bit about the history of algorithmic recommendation. Because you might think, yeah, like you said, that, uh, the first place you would go to sort of segment listeners to music would be demography because that's of course in the dominant mode of, of segmenting audiences for music, uh, ever since, you know, the origin of the recorded music industry. It's been a very, very dominant frame in the production of certain genres, you know, radio stations, stores, labels, charts, all the rest of it.There's a bunch of rich history of essentially race, uh, in the categorizing of, of music. And I'm talking here specifically at the United States, but you have similar dynamics globally. Um, but a very central sort of point of concern within the overall recommender systems world — and this includes things beyond music — is that using demographic categories for personalization is bad, right? That it's biased at best, that it's racist at worst. And that what recommender systems do — and this is an argument people are making in this field from its very origins in the mid 1990s — is provide a way for people to sort of escape from the bounds of demographic profiling. So it's very important to people in this field that they don't use demography, uh, the sort of recommender systems as the anti demographic thing are — it's a trope that's through, you know, it exists all the way through this, through this field from, from back then until, until the present.Um, what's striking about it, of course, is that, uh, in a world where people have race and they have gender and they have class. Those features do emerge in sort of proxy form in the data, right? So you, it is not always hard to guess someone's demographic qualities, uh, from what they listen to. You know, it's not deterministic relationship, but there's certainly a correlation there.So it is possible for demographics to re-emerge in this data, right. For them to think, oh, you know, they, these look like sort of feminine listening habits and so on. Um, there's a lot of work in, in, in how those categories emerge and how they can shift around over time. Um, but it's very important that people are working in this field that they don't take demography into account.In part because they're worried about doing what they describe as racial profiling. But even if that would be a sensible way to start, right — to think, well, there is certainly a racial pattern in production of music and, and listening patterns. They really hold that off limits intentionally.[00:29:11] Cody: One of the things that I've heard you talk about before in other podcasts interviews is that your job as an anthropologist is not simply to infiltrate these companies and collect secret facts about how the algorithms work. Your job is something closer to trying to describe the cultural processes, underlying their creation and figure out how the people who build these recommender systems understand what it is they're doing.So as you say, the more detailed you get on describing the algorithm itself, the more transient data information is. for example, how Facebook is, is weighting one aspect of the newsfeed on any given day — that could change tomorrow, but the underlying cultural and social constructs are more stable and in a way more fundamental to what it means for our society in our, in a larger sense.So I kind of want to bring in another paper that you've written in this sort of line, which is "Captivating Algorithms: recommender systems as traps" in which you compare the way Silicon valley engineers talk about their products and anthropological studies of literal animal traps. And so most tellingly, you have this quote, which I love, it's from a paper from near 1900 by an anthropologist named Otis Mason, I believe, which reads: the trap itself is an invention in which are embodied most careful studies in animal mentation and habits. The hunter must know for each species it's food it's likes and dislikes its weaknesses and foibles. A trap in this connection is an ambuscade, a temptation, irresistible, allurement. It is a strategy."So he's describing how the people he's studied think" about trapping animals. And in a sense, uh, you know, you're saying that you're leveraging the animal's own psychology against itself.Your point in this paper is that this is essentially the same language, or at least a very similar language, to what many people use in describing the quote "persuasive technologies" being built today. So can you expand on that idea a little bit and say what the anthropologist's perspective on studying these kinds of technologies looks like?[00:31:29] Nick: I love that line from, from Mason. I think it's very rich, uh, in helping us think about what we might be doing with technology from an anthropological point of view. Like I've been talking about one of the central concerns I have is how the people building these systems think about the, the, their users, uh, and one of the common things that they do then when they talk about what they're, what they're up to, is they talk about trying to capture them, right.They try to talk about capturing their attention, to bring attention back in. They talk about capturing market share. There's all of these captivation metaphors. And of course they don't literally mean that they're trying to, you know, cat trap you in a box or drop you in a hole through a layer of leaves or something like that.But one of the things that anthropologists get to do, which is fun and I think useful, uh, is draw broader comparisons in the people that we are talking to and talking about than they draw, to sort of put things in comparison, across cultural contexts. And so comparing these, you know, machine learning systems that are imagined to be high tech, the reason for the high valuation of all of these big tech companies, uh, thinking about them, not as being some brand new thing, that's never been seen before and requires a whole new theory of technology to understand, but thinking of them as being part of a continuum of technologies, that includes digging a hole in the ground and putting some sharp sticks in it. That I find really, uh, enticing, because it's going to help us think about these systems as just technologies, right? They're ordinary in a lot of ways, despite some of their weird qualities. So the basic argument of the traps paper is that we have this anthropology of trapping that suggests, okay, well, what is a trap? It's a weird kind of technology that really foregrounds, uh, the psychological, uh, involvement of the entities that's trying to trap, right? A mouse trap doesn't work. If the mouse doesn't do what it's supposed to do, uh, in the same way that your, you know, iPhone won't work, if you don't use the iPhone in the way you're supposed to. And this is in some ways a now classic argument within science and technology studies that you really have to configure a user for a technology in order for technology to work. There's no such thing as a technology that just works in isolation from a context of use. And so reminding ourselves of that fact, uh, is really handy in this domain because there's a lot of work on algorithms and AI that falls prey to this idea that, you know, oh, they're brand new, we never used to, we didn't want to go to technologies as being, you know, really determining of our situations and of advancing according to their own, their own logics before, but now it's true. Now algorithms are truly autonomous. And that's not really true, right. There are people who work on them who build them, who changed them over time. And they're doing that with a model of prey in mind.So I'm drawing on a little bit of an expansion of that anthropology of trapping tradition by an anthropologist named Alfred Gell, who has a very famous article in anthropology, where he talks about artwork as being a kind of trap. Also a similar, you know, the idea of like a good, a good work of art is going to produce a psychological effect on its viewers.But it's going to do that using technical means, right? So, and, uh, really intricately carved statue could cause someone to sort of stand still and look at it. And we don't want to forget that that statue, in addition to being quote unquote, art, uh, is also technology, right? It's also an artifact that's been created by people using tools.And it is in some sense, a tool in its own right for producing an effect in a viewer. And so I like to use this anthropology of trapping literature to think a little bit more expansively about questions that have really been coming up lately around ethics and persuasion in digital media. So we have documentaries, organizations, and so on, like I'm thinking "The Social Dilemma" from the center for humane technology is the sort of most prominent one, that suggests that, you know, Facebook is like a slot machine. It is trying to get you addicted to it and is trying to produce bad effects in your mind. YouTube is doing this as well.They're incentivizing people to make outrageous content because they're trying to maximize the amount of time that people spend on their sites. Now, these are all stories about digital technology that really fairly explicitly figure them as trap-like in the sense that I've been describing . Facebook is designed to make you do things against your will, uh, which are also against your best interest. So they have the trick you using them. And so we see that kind of trap metaphor out in the wild there, um, in critiques that people will make of these systems. So it was really striking to me to see that in both critiques, but also just in the self descriptions of people working in this space.It was not weird for people working in music in particular to say: yeah, of course, I want to get people addicted to listening to music. And it maybe didn't even seem that bad. But is it really bad if you listen to more music than you used to listen to, is that worthy of being called an addiction? Is that really a problem?But thinking about trapping in this sort of broad anthropological way, I hope, um, steps us back from this binary question. You know, are these things harmful? Are they coercive or not? And into a gray or a space where we say, you know, sort of all technologies have a bit of persuasion and coercion mixed into them.They all sort of demand certain things of their users, but they can't really demand them entirely. And so if we step back, we can start to think of, um, technologies as existing, within a broader field of psychological effects of people trying to get other people to do what they want them to do. And it sort of field of persuasion, um, where we don't have to say, okay, well, you know what the problem is, recommender systems is they really, you know, deny you agency, which they can't. They can't ultimately deny you agency entirely. But they do depend on you playing a certain role in relation to them.[00:37:22] Cody: Cody here. Thanks for listening to the show. I'd love to get your thoughts on this episode. One of the challenges, as you might imagine, as a writer and podcast producer, is that it's hard to get direct feedback from your readers and listeners, what they like or don't like what's working well or needs to be rethought.You can tell a little bit about this from metrics like views or downloads, but it isn't very nuanced. So I've created an avenue for getting that kind of feedback: a listener survey available with every podcast episode. If you have feedback on what you found most interesting or what you thought could be improved, I'd love to hear it.You can find the link in the show notes or at survey.Againsthabit.com. That's survey.againsthabit.com. Now back to the show.What do you think the role of habits are in everything that we're talking about here? Because it seems largely that the psychology that engineers are relying on when they're building their products, when they're thinking about persuasive technologies, when they're trying to trap a user, it's largely the psychology of habits and habit formation.So I don't know. What do you, what do you make of that? And, you know, what's what does that sort of suggest to you about how we should think about these technologies and the way they're exploiting our habitual psychology?[00:38:47] Nick: That's a very nice connection. There is a historian of science named Henry Cowell who is working on some of this history of the psychology of habit in relation to attention , which might be interesting. But from my point of view, in sort of anthropology side of things, when I think of habit, I think of what we often talk about in the social sciences as a, as habitus, which sounds a fancy way of saying the sort of collection of habits that you acquire as part of becoming an inculturated person.So as you grow up, you learn a bunch of habitual things. It's not the sort of small-scale habits of like, you know, self-help books where they say, oh, if you remember to, uh, you know, put your toothbrush out in a certain spot in the morning, it'll trigger you to brush your teeth on time, but rather it's something broader than that, right? Which is that we have a bunch of tendencies in the ways that we behave in the ways that we respond to the outside world and the way we use our bodies that are those, those are all solidified in us over time. And so if you ever have the experience of culture shock of going to a place where people don't have quite the same habits as you do, it becomes very obvious that what seems totally natural and comfortable and regular to you, it doesn't seem that way to, to other people.And so technologies are part of that broader field of habits or habitus in that a lot of the kind of habits that we have are sort of organized around technological implements, right? So very explicitly people working in this field, um, folks like Nir Eyal who's book, Hooked, is plainly about this, about how companies can learn to sort of incite habits and their users, they suggest that, you know, what, what you want to do, if you want your company to become really successful is you want to make users use it habitually. Something like, you know, users will open up Facebook, um, before they've even consciously thought about what they're doing. And I'm sure plenty of people have had the same experience of, you know, being on Twitter or on Facebook, closing the window on their browser, opening a new window on their browser and going immediately back to that website before realizing, wait, what am I doing?That kind of unthinking habitual behavior is where that intersection of persuasion and coercion sort of happens. Right. If someone's making me do that, um, that's probably not quite what I want. It takes place within the sort of broader field of overall habits. And arguably, and this is something that people in the social sciences have argued for a while now, your taste is also part of this, right? So you learn to like certain things. It's very easy for people to learn, to, you know, uh, to dislike a style of music, for instance, such that when it comes on the radio, you'll turn the radio off immediately and be like, that's horrible. You know, I can't imagine that anyone else would like this, but of course other people do like it. Which just gives lie to the idea that there's something objective going on under there.But technology and recommender systems in particular and the way that I try to think about them in my book and through my, uh, articles, uh, I want to try to think about recommender systems as really occupying that in-between space between technology and taste, or as you know, the title of my book, computing and taste. Cause we often talk about those domains as though they're really separate from each other, right? Computers are rational, they're quantitative, they're logical. Whereas taste is subjective. It's individual, it's expressive, it's inexpressible through numbers. Those two ideas, you know, we think of them as being really opposed. There's no accounting for taste and so on.And yet they come together in recommender systems, uh, in a way that some people fault because they think that you shouldn't do that. You shouldn't cross the streams from these two, these two different domains. Um, but which I think of as not being that weird, if we think of taste as being a sort of set of habits as being part of this kind of, you know, apparatus through which we live our lives, and we think of technology as also being part of this broader scene of habits and habituation, right? Technologies are not, uh, separate from, from the human world. Computers did not invent themselves and they do not program themselves. So actually all of this is getting played with together, uh, in a way that's not that weird if you think about it. Now, it may be done in ways that we don't like, and it may have effects that we don't want. But it's important. It was important for me to try to give an anthropological account of recommenders systems that didn't start from the premise that, oh, this is impossible. Like you can't do this. Everybody knows that human expression and feeling cannot be worked on through the computer. Because it's pretty clear that it can be worked on through the computer. What's not clear is what that means for how we understand computers and for how we understand taste.[00:43:24] Cody: Okay. Here is an easy question then. What is your theory of taste?[00:43:32] Nick: Ooh. Okay. This is a fun question. So my theory of taste, I have to start with the, with the, the sort of default social science theory of taste. The default social science theory of taste is what we would call the homology thesis, which is that there is a homology or a sort of structural similarity between class and taste. So fancy people like fancy things and less fancy people like less fancy things. If you like the opera, or if you like country music that tells me something about who you are. That's the sort of canonical, a social scientific argument.And in that case taste is really not the thing that most people think it is where it's like, oh, this is just my personal preferences. It's actually something that sort of determined by your social status. Now that's a fairly vulgar account of that theory, but I think it's fairly widely shared among lots of people that taste is effectively arbitrary. And at the end of the day, it really just reflects your sort of social position, maybe also, you know, your race. But certainly essentially like how fancy you are in a sort of class based system.My thinking on taste is largely informed by a tradition in sociology that is usually called the pragmatics of taste, which suggests that sure, maybe that happens, that homology thing. But the problem with that homology thesis is that it doesn't tell you how or why fancy people come to like fancy things or why people in any social group come to acquire the tastes that are associated with that group. And so what these folks do, um, usually through fairly rich ethnographic observation, which is maybe why I like them, um, is they try to describe all of the conditions by which people come to acquire taste. And so they have these studies of, you know, uh, opera fans. There's a book by Claudio Benzecry about how opera fans learn to become opera fans, um, or how, you know, people who listen to, uh, vinyl records set up their little listening stations in their home. There's a lot of stuff that people do to try to, uh, instrument their taste, to, to orchestrate encounters with music in particular.And so I'm really invested in that idea of taste as something that you do rather than something that you just sort of have. Uh, and as something that's very much entangled with technology, a favorite example of mine is, you know, we have a sense of what it means to have taste right now, right? What music do you pick on Spotify or something like that. But if we go back, you know, 50 years, uh, what it meant to have tasted in music might have to do with what radio stations you listen to, uh, what records you bought at the record store records. You know, they're all the same shape. They're all the same color. Basically the more or less cost the same so when you're picking among them all you're doing is expressing yourself, right? You're just making a cultural claim. But what it meant to have tasted that moment was really entangled with technologies, the radio, the LP. Go back a hundred years before that you don't have recorded music. So can anyone have a taste in music then? Certainly not in the way we can now. At the very least taste would mean something different. And so I'm really interested in the idea that what tastes even is is totally entangled with these techniques by which we come to acquire and encounter, uh, cultural objects.So that is a very long-winded way of saying that I think of taste as being this kind of emergent thing that people do in particular settings with particular tools. And one of the tools that they use nowadays is recommender systems.[00:46:47] Cody: One of the things I'm interested in along this line is whether or not our tastes are becoming more monolithic. So my colleague, Adam Mastroianni has a recent essay on this. He puts together these data showing that through the year 2000, about 25% of a year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. But now, uh, closer to 2020, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. And he has similar data for TV shows, books, and music as well.So what role do you think recommender systems might be playing in this and in particular, are platforms like Spotify, Netflix, and the like funneling us into these kind of genre enclaves, where they find it legitimately difficult to point us towards something that is at the same time, both new and something that we'll like. What do you make of that, and is that a function of recommender systems as you've come to understand them?[00:47:51] Nick: Well, it's a great question because you're pointing out that the basic tension at the heart of recommender systems . Which is that they're about helping people find a music that they don't know about yet. So there's an assumption that you're, that you like more than, you know. but they're based on this idea that you won't like everything, right?So it has something to do with what you are already know. There's this tension between the constraints, profiling someone and saying, okay, what do you like? And that idea that what you might do with that profiling is broaden people's horizons. And that's a real tension. It's something that I think a lot of critics don't appreciate, that there is a commitment to broadening horizons in this field. Whether or not they achieve them is another question.But that's something that people in the field are really concerned with and trying to figure out: wait a minute, we're sort of pigeonholing people, but we don't want to pigeon hole them. We want to help them. And forever, we've always been saying that recommender systems are about, you know, like, like we were talking about earlier about, you know, cracking you out of a given categories to help you find new things. Or they used to say, you know, 20 years ago that recommender systems would help you go down the "long tail." They would help you find more obscure things that you would never find otherwise, because there were too many things, you just wouldn't have a way to know about these less popular objects.Of course, now we have a lot of concern — this is not a new concern — but the continuing concern about monoculture, about a kind of similarity. And algorithms have emerged as one of the kinds of entities we might blame for why that is, of course, because you know, oh, you like that, you want more like that. There's this kind of valorization of the similar in recommender systems that maybe seems like a cause for this problem more globally.I think it's certainly part of an overall apparatus of cultural production, which is very risk averse now. So one of the things you see in this context of, you know, every movie occurring within the Marvel cinematic universe or whatever. I think you can't really say a recommender system did that. Because certainly a recommender system didn't get to decide what was happening there. But you do have, you know, industries that are organized around trying to maximize their, their successes, and clearly are finding, you know, success, uh, in doing what they're doing and doing what, uh, Mastroianni calls that oligopoly of production.So I think one thing that points us to is the importance of looking at the overall system, you know, recommender systems are a more and more prominent part of cultural circulation now, but they're not everything. And so we don't want to say, oh, it was the algorithm. So it points us to that. But it also points us to this other really interesting, like philosophical question, is you mentioned this idea of genre enclaves, which is a lovely way to put what other people would describe as like filter bubbles. And one funny thing about recommender systems is that if I know enough to recognize a filter bubble, to put you into one, to recognize similarities, such that I can put you there, that means that I have enough data, if I'm a recommender system, to take you out of it. I know what similar is. That means that I know what different is also. And so within that very same system, in theory, I should be able to use the recommender system in a different way, not to give you exactly the same thing, but rather to very on-purpose, um, give you something else to give you something that is different. That's already entailed in the idea that I know enough to put you in a filter bubble in the first place.So in some sense, the, the problem may not be with the technology itself, but with this particular style of implementation, right. We could be implementing recommender systems that more aggressively are about spreading people away from the similar, and that's something you would do with more or less the same system you have now just tuned in a, in a slightly different way.Why is it not tuned in a different way? Well, that's not an algorithm thing, right? That's a business decision. Uh, the algorithm could go either way. It doesn't really care.[00:51:34] Cody: That seems like it comes back to the distinction that your engineering interviewee was talking about where you have the pyramid, with the sort of least engaged, they want to, as he says, lean back, put the music on and then just not really have to do anything to have to make any decisions, find new stuff, skip songs.And then you have the lean in musical savant and more engaged listeners. And clearly the vast majority of listeners and our viewers are going to be in that bottom chunk of the pyramid. And you have the highest probability of reaching the largest number of people by catering to that listener or viewer as your default option, rather than saying, oh, I'm going to try and shape the musical tastes of the youth in a way that exposes them to the meritorious histories of, of jazz and the, you know, unexpected sides of hip hop and all that sort of stuff. So it seems to me like that's a big current in all that's happening here.[00:52:38] Nick: Yeah, I would say one of the sort of stories that emerges over the course of my whole book is this transformation of music recommendation from the sort of first contemporary recommender system named as such in the mid 1990s, um, to the present. Where in the beginning, those early recommender systems were designed around the idea that the user was a really enthusiastic or avid listener, right? You were like really into music. You were going to put in some effort, you were going to open up a recommender system and try to use it specifically to find new stuff, right? You are almost by definition, a kind of crate digger, uh, in that context. Cause it was like more work to use a recommender system than to just turn on the radio. So you already had a way to not put a lot of effort. And uh, so you were in. You know, contemporary industry terms would, would put it, uh, you were a lean forward listener, right? You were someone who was sort of, uh, enthusiastically pursuing a new music.And then over time, since then, just what you described has happened, right? This sort of default assumption of what a user for these systems should be like, um, became something different, right? It became this lean-back listener. It became this person who like, eh, they might not even listen to music at all. So we need to find some way to, you know, entice them into doing it. And a recommended system was maybe a way of doing that. So you open up your Spotify or whatever, and you see, as long as you see something that you're like, sure, I'll listen to that. Then that would catch that person who otherwise may not listen at all. And that's a big change and it comes along alongside a change in data practices, to sort of loop back to this, uh, seeing like an infrastructure question, because those early recommender systems, what data did they have? They had data that you proactively gave them about what you liked, right? You would have to go in and explicitly rate artists, or if it was movies, uh, you know, you know, five stars on Netflix or whatever. And over time, those explicit ratings really get mostly replaced by what they would call implicit ratings. So the idea that listening to a song means that you like it a little bit. You listen to it a lot that becomes more of a sign that you like it. And this is the kind of logic we're very familiar with now in this sort of big data moment, right? This is what big data is all about. This idea that these behavioral traces are, uh, more real. They're easier for people to do. I don't have to explicitly rate something you to sort of know on the basis of what I'm doing. Or you think, you know, uh, what I like, and you might suggest that's a better account of what I like, you know. I might go on Netflix and, you know, give five stars to all of the fancy, classy people movies, but I never watched them. And if you kept recommending them to me, I wouldn't really use Netflix as much, but what I really want is, you know, 1990s action movies. And if you saw what I actually watched, you would know that that's a common argument that they'll make. So we have that transition in sort of three different things at the same time. The change in the kind of data that's available to recommender systems, right? This sort of like trace data of user behavior. We have this change in the economics of, uh, the online media industry right where everything's sort of become streaming and it's not, you know, Netflix used to be a DVD rental company, and then now it becomes something else, right, where they want you to spend more time on it. And that will feed back into getting more data. And then the third thing that comes around is this changing how we know things are, how the people building these systems, know things about their users, which are all entangled together in this sort of emergence of, uh, sort of modern data collection apparatus. And they're all mutually reinforcing cycles.So that's a really big change, I think in the way those, those systems work. And if people are looking for ways out of it, I think that one way that an anthropology of this can be useful is to really foreground and describe what exactly the situation is that we're in.And so one thing I tend to argue is that if we want to get out of some of this really aggressive data collection situation, which happens obviously in domains beyond music and in many other domains where it's much more significant. One thing we might want to think about then is how to intervene in these imaginations of users, right? In the vision of the user, as someone who doesn't really want to get involved, who we sort of tricked into listening, and therefore we have to capture as much data about them as possible because they're not going to give the data to us on purpose. If we change that model, if we change the way that we think about people, then I think that's a key part of the overall edifice of data collection and why data is seen as so valuable now.[00:57:08] Cody: I see that as, as tying into what we were talking about earlier with the model of the individual that the engineers are using is based off of basically the psychology of habits. And so data are most valuable in understanding how to exploit habitual systems and how to essentially, to go back to your metaphor use products as traps for habits and attention, whatever attention may be.And so it seems like part of what you're saying or another, a rephrasing of, of what you're saying an implication may be, is that the more we're able to put in to achieve that higher effort level of avidity, to engage more in a direct and meaningful and thoughtful way with whatever content we're consuming, the less we rely on habit, the less we can be exploited by an understanding of what we habitually do. And the more we can kind of be liberated from the cycle of collect data, exploit it, go further down the rabbit hole of social media and digital content consuming our attention and our lifestyles.[00:58:31] Nick: Yeah. And I think just to like loop back to what we talked about earlier this is one reason why I think having a kind of cultural understanding of the logics behind these systems and how people think is really useful, because a lot of the critiques of these systems we've seen now are couched in the sort of same habits science, behaviorist framework as the systems they're criticizing. So people who say, oh, you know, Facebook's a slot machine or whatever really believe that the best way to model human behavior is still that same behaviorist habit model, that same, you know, press a lever, give you a treat, rat in a cage kind of model. And I think that that model is really constraining in what kinds of futures we can imagine for what humans are going to do. And it really limits us to a certain narrow set of technical interventions. And so by trying to name that by trying to step back and say, what is this, what is this model of the human that's involved in these systems? I want to try, and this is something I'm trying to do with in my newer work on attention, to think about the sort of arbitrariness of those models, and how, if we want to imagine different futures, we might need to think about some of these foundational assumptions differently as well. I'm not sure that we're going to lever press our way out of a sort of behaviorist hellscape that we find ourselves in now.[00:59:54] Cody: Nick. It's been a great pleasure to talk, and I appreciate your perspective on all these things. I could probably go on asking you questions about this space of topics for the next two hours, but you've been really generous with your time. So thanks for taking the time to talk.[01:00:09] Nick: Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.[01:00:11] Cody: That was my conversation with Nick Seaver.I hope you enjoyed it. One of the topics that we didn't get around to is the connection between avidity and anthropological field work itself. It's a topic I know Nick has thought about in his work on attention, and it is also one of the things that I personally most admire about anthropology.My own field, psychology suffers from a historical lack of attention dedicated toward Western people. We study American college students. We assume that whatever we find there will apply to the rest of the world. The field has started to correct this in recent years, but I believe it's an assumption that's built into the psychological worldview in ways that are important and difficult to eradicate.But the premise of the field of anthropology, starting with historical figures like Tylor and Malinowski, is that attending to what other people are up to is actually a lot of work. It's not just enough to be vaguely interested in what other people are doing, especially far away people, but you actively have to search out the best possible vantage from which to observe and make sense of their behavior. To me, that's an application of this basic idea of attention as effort.So in this case, avidity — the amount of effort we're willing to put into acquire new information or seek new experiences — is not only crucial when it comes to the kind of content we consume, but crucial to our ability to understand people with different perspectives.This nods toward one of the foundations of our polarized society. We tend to be, especially as Americans, intuitive psychologists. We assume that the minds of people far away from us mostly look like the minds of people who are in our immediate vicinity. Then we're shocked to find that people who don't occupy our same cultural milieu think in a way that's totally foreign to us.Maybe we need to operate less in our default mode as intuitive psychologists and instead explore what it might mean to operate as intuitive anthropologists.I'd love to know what you thought of this episode. If you want to give me some feedback, you can go to survey.againsthabit.com. If you'd like to subscribe to my Substack newsletter for more content, you can go straight to againsthabit.com.This episode was edited and produced by Emily Chen. I'm Cody Kommers, and thanks for listening to Against Habit. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit codykommers.substack.com/subscribe

David McRaney is an author and host of the podcast You Are Not So Smart. In June, he's releasing a new book—How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion (you can pre-order it now). In the book, David goes on a wild journey to understand the mechanics of persuasion. He combines research in psychology with stories of persuasion on the ground to arrive at an understanding of when and why people end up changing their opinions. In our conversation, David shares how he got wrapped up in reporting on social science research, why he wanted to learn more about persuasion, and what he's learned about how minds change.Also at the top of the episode is a look at some brand new research by Adam Mastroiannion how public opinion in the United States has changed over the years…and how people are generally ignorant about what these changes have been. For details, check out the paper (Mastroianni & Danas, 2022), which came out last week in PNAS. (You should also check out Adam's blog, Experimental History.)Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/how-minds-change-with-david-mcraney/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

First up in Poppin' Culture we talk about toxic relationships and triangles in Netflix's Bling Empire - and that friends interfering in these relationships can inadvertently push them to continue. Next up, we do a very fun deep dive into a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article about the gift of gab, and how we decide to end conversations once they've started. A research team out of Harvard (Dr. Adam Mastroianni and Dr. Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, Dr. Gus Gooney at UPenn, and Dr. Timothy Whilson at the University of Virginia) recently found that we actually exit conversations pretty poorly - and we almost never end a conversation when either of us want to! Last up, a Good or Bad Advice segment where we break down signs your partner may be cheating from Worried Lovers.Popin' Culture Show: HERE: Academic Deep Dive Article: HERE Good or Bad Advice Article: HEREYouTube: HERE

Post-pandemic, design critic Alexandra Lange says we would all benefit from city-wide, street-based events. And it might be worth asking what the kids would want. Meanwhile researcher Adam Mastroianni has found that conversations tend to last a length of time that makes no one happy.

In dieser Folge erfahrt ihr, warum der Lockdown den IQ senkt, Gespräche unzufrieden machen und ein hohes Einkommen vielleicht doch glücklich.

Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert explore why conversations almost never end when people want them to.

Iszi talks about her work on Making History, Music Hall, her mother in a wheelbarrow, The Other Winston Churchill (there were two) and Adam Mastroianni does a talk on Paul the Epistle and the other Paul the Epistle... if there was one... which there might have been. Yes.  For any questions suggestions and feedback get in touch via  FEATURING: Deutero Paul  Winston Churchill  Adam Mastroianni is a comedian and resident cast performer at Improv Boston–      Iszi Lawrence is a comedian and podcaster and contributor to BBC's Making History and presenter of The British Museum Membercast.   The Z List Dead List is a podcast about obscure people from History. Created by Iszi Lawrence. To help support the show please share it with your friends and on social media. Also leave us a review on iTunes - this makes us more visible so that other people can find us. For any donations please use the paypal button. Thanks very much! MUSIC All Licenses can be viewed on www.freemusicarchive.org. Theme: Time Trades Live at the WFMU Record Fair - November 24, 2013 by