My paper with @DanTGilbert is out today in Nature: people believe that people are less kind than they used to be, they're probably wrong about that, and we have an idea where this illusion comes from. nature.com/articles/s4158… My whole life, I've heard people complain about the demise of human goodness. "Used to be you didn't have to lock your doors at night!" etc. Is this just a vocal minority, or do most people believe this?

Turns out, it's most people. 177 surveys, N = 220,772. Here's a sample:

There are two kinds of problems: strong-link problems and weak-link problems.

Weak-link: quality depends on how good the *worst* things are

Strong-link: quality depends on how good the *best* things are Figuring out which kind of problem you're facing is really important, because the way you solve them is totally different.

Recently I wrote a post suggesting that peer review doesn't work, and then some weird things happened. A tenured professor threatened to get me fired. Strangers sent me unhinged emails. (People said nice things too.) This week I sort through it all.

experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-dance-of… One common argument: "peer review is a barrier against misinformation; without it, wackos like creationists could publish their 'findings' unhindered!" Well, here's The Journal of Creation, a peer-reviewed journal all about creationism. creation.com/journal-of-cre…

Science ran a big experiment on itself for the last ~60 years. It didn't work out.
experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and… People think peer review has been with us for centuries. Not really! Scientific publishing was always a hodgepodge and most outlets were nothing like our current system. Pre-publication peer review only became common in the 1960s. lps.library.cmu.edu/ETHOS/article/…

We live in a golden age of people writing words on the internet. Here's some top-tier stuff I've read recently.

1. "The Scientific Virtues" by @mold_time. Required reading for anyone who wants to do science.

slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/02/10/the… 2. This piece by @IDoTheThinking. I always thought gentrification = luxury apartments and Sweetgreens. I was way off.

darrellowens.substack.com/p/the-look-of-…

Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct. People have a lot of explanations for this, but they're all incomplete because they don't realize the same thing is happening everywhere. An oligopoly has conquered all of popular culture. In television, for example, it used to be pretty rare for two versions of the same show to appear twice at the top of the viewership charts. Now it's common.

Published today in PNAS: people don't know how American public opinion has changed. I've been working on this for a very long time and I'm excited to share it. Here's a thread so you don't have to read the paper. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… (If you do want to read it, this link will be available until the Feds shut it down. Science should be free!) shorturl.at/deuJ9