After taking Introduction to Social Psychology with the legendary McGill professor Donald Taylor, I knew I had found my calling. Taylor—who sadly passed away during the pandemic—was a natural performer and storyteller who inspired countless young Canadian undergraduates to pursue careers in social psychology. For me, Taylor’s material came most alive when he talked about the psychology of prejudice.

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Before Taylor’s class, I had not realized there was a big part of an entire discipline devoted to studying discrimination in the hopes of not just understanding it but remedying it. As a Jewish kid, with Holocaust survivors on one side of my family and Yemeni refugees on the other, I had a keen eye for injustice. My family had been on the wrong side of hate more than once, including, I later learned, at the hands of pale-skinned Ashkenazi Jews. My formal education in Jewish history taught me that judging people by their identity rather than the content of their character was a sin, a moral stain. When I learned there was an entire discipline focused on this, I knew I had found my intellectual home.

I dove in headfirst. At Brown and NYU, where I did my PhD and postdoc, I conducted research on stereotype threat. At the University of Toronto, I created the university’s first course on the psychology of prejudice and taught it for nearly fifteen years. It felt like I was changing the world, one small step at a time. I could not have been prouder.

Then the replication crisis happened. I came to realize that much of my past work was the product of questionable research practices, and I no longer trusted it. I’ve recounted this story many times. But what I haven’t told you is the part I only see now, in hindsight. At the time, none of it felt like cheating. And I can’t help but wonder if it felt fine because the cause was good.

My work was uplifting people, or so I told myself. Looking back, I suspect that feeling like I was on the right side of history was a kind of moral cover. Maybe I felt less wrong about the p-hacking because I was promoting social justice. The conclusions I drew were what the good guys already believed, after all.

However, a scientist who wants to change the world in a particular direction is no longer beholden to the truth. They are beholden to a cause. I was. My question stopped being “What is true here?” and slid toward “How do I show that what I believe is true?” This is why I have come to believe that science and activism cannot mix. It is a plain conflict of interest.

I was never an activist, but I knew which answer I was hoping for in my research. That is all it takes. What I did quietly, some in psychology now argue the whole field should do on purpose: make scholarship serve the cause of justice. To see where that leads, let’s look at a discipline that has already done this. Consider anthropology, which once aspired to science.

Last month a group of scholars convened by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis reviewed several fields and found scholarly standards giving way to political ones, activism crowding out inquiry. They named anthropology the worst case, a discipline that had traded the search for truth for the advancement of a cause. Now one can argue about the report’s methods and conclusions, but a recent defense of anthropology by the president of the American Anthropological Association only confirms the report’s conclusions—and the public’s worst fears.

Carolyn Rouse, who once delivered a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” sat for an interview to defend her field. Shown a 2022 survey in which anthropologists split almost evenly on whether biological sex is binary, she waved it off: “I don’t believe in opinion research.” Say what!? A survey of practitioners in her own discipline turns worthless the moment it returns an inconvenient number. She compares teaching that sex is binary to turning an astronomy department into astrology.

Set aside whether Rouse is right. Pay attention to what she is doing: Evidence that agrees with her is fact; evidence that disagrees with her is contested. Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one who gives a shit about the rules?

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This is what I mean when I say science and activism should not mix. It is not that activists are dishonest or that justice does not matter. It is that science can only be loyal to one thing: the truth. When truth comes first, a survey that cuts against you is data you must accommodate. When justice comes first, that survey is noise to explain away, and the field slowly loses touch with reality. Rouse has a cause, and the cause now decides what counts as evidence.

Anthropology shows an entire discipline sorting evidence by conclusion. The next case is smaller, a single episode, but it happened in philosophy, a field I love and which is supposed to be best at following an argument wherever it goes.

In 2017, Rebecca Tuvel, then an untenured professor at Rhodes College, published “In Defense of Transracialism” in the feminist journal Hypatia, arguing that, if we accept the reasoning that supports transgender identities, and she does, that same reasoning seems to support transracial identities too. It didn’t matter that her argument was logically sound: more than 800 academics signed an open letter demanding retraction and a majority of Hypatia‘s associate editors apologized for publishing it. The stated objections were about vocabulary, citations, and the author’s identity. But everyone understood the real offense was the conclusion: if we accept Caitlyn Jenner, the same logic should extend to Rachel Dolezal.

Ten years later, in a recent interview, Tuvel reflected on what she learned from this incident. She still cares about justice, she says. What changed is the order. “I think philosophy serves justice best by pursuing the truth about justice. And the pursuit of truth about justice requires exposure to a wide range of views on contested moral and political topics.” Get to the truth first and let justice follow. She describes the world she had been working in as an echo chamber, a place where dissenting views rarely reached her and certain conclusions were treated as settled.

This is what worries me about where social psychology is heading. What captured Tuvel’s corner of philosophy is creeping into my field: scholars who know the acceptable conclusion before the evidence is in. I felt the pull myself. Now I see more of it, as more academics refer to themselves as scholar-activists.

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Don’t believe me? About five years ago, justice and truth were placed in direct conflict in my own corner of academia, and guess what happened?

In 2020, Bedoor AlShebli, Kinga Makovi, and Talal Rahwan published a large bibliometric study in Nature Communications finding that junior researchers mentored by women went on to be less successful in their careers. Twitter erupted. Within two days an open letter was circulating, hundreds of academics were calling the paper harmful to women in STEM, and the journal slapped a warning note on it. The stated objections were methodological: citations are a poor proxy for success, co-authorship a garbage proxy for mentorship. Fair enough. Except that two years earlier, some of the same authors had used the same bibliometric machinery, the same citation proxy, in the same journal, to show that ethnically diverse teams produce more impactful science. Nobody batted an eye at the method then. The method was fine when it flattered the cause and fatally flawed when it didn’t. Within weeks the authors retracted the female mentorship paper.

Now imagine a world where that paper stands and we ask why the citation gap exists. Is it discrimination with reviewers and citers undervaluing work written by women? Are women given or perhaps take on greater service loads that starve their trainees of needed attention? Do women have smaller collaborative networks, so their labs produce less? Do women, on average, gravitate toward safer, more incremental questions, while men chase the riskier and more citable bets? Each answer implies a different remedy, and several of these would help the students of female mentors. That world is better for the very people the retraction claimed to protect. But, no: we chose the world where nobody gets to know.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing for value-free science. Values can and do shape what we study. This is impossible to avoid. However, values should not determine what you find. Let injustice draw your attention to a question, but then let the evidence answer, even when the answer is inconvenient, embarrassing, or useless to your side. Publish those findings that even hurt your side because if you really care about your side, you should value truth first. I know how hard that is. The replication crisis forced me to give up findings I loved, findings that flattered things I believed. Giving them up and admitting my errors was the most useful thing I have done as a scientist.

I still want to make the world a better place. I just no longer believe a scientist does it by deciding first what the world should look like. Science demands humility. The job is to find out what is true, follow it wherever it goes, and only then decide what to do about it. Fight for whatever cause you want once the finding is in. But if justice comes first, truth is what gets sacrificed.

It happened on social media, naturally. Someone commented on one of my essays and, in my reading, ascribed bad intent to what I wrote. Uncharitable interpretations are the internet’s native tongue, so I almost scrolled past. Then I saw who wrote it. The commenter was an infamous psychologist who has been singing the same sad song for over a decade. Suddenly it was 2016 again. I could almost smell the sock puppets.

For those who weren’t there, the mid 2010s were when psychology went to war with itself over replication and reform. The battles played out daily on Twitter and Facebook, and for one regrettable year, I volunteered as referee. I moderated a Facebook group meant to keep the fights civil. Oh what a fool I was!

I wrote about that time as a paid post over a year ago, but think it deserves a second life in light of last month’s exchange. Below is a lightly edited version, now free for everyone. The wars are mostly over, but some combatants haven’t been told the bums lost. The bums always lose.

I had a front row seat to the replication wars in social psychology. Not just as an active participant who evolved from true believer to full-on skeptic, but as a moderator for a year of a Facebook group where many of the fiercest battles unfolded.

It was, without question, the worst year of my academic life.

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The year was 2016. Psychology was at war with itself. Social psychology had split into factions: younger scholars championing reform on one side, established figures defending traditional methods on the other—though you could certainly find older and younger scholars in both camps. My own position was evolving rapidly, but I remained caught between worlds in multiple ways: no longer young, but I didn’t feel established either. I remember my amusement when people online referred to me as a “senior and respected scholar.” They were talking about me?

The battlefield of this civil war was primarily social media. At that time, psychology Twitter and Facebook were must-see TV. I'd check them before class, after lecturing, and again at home. You wouldn't want to miss a minute because there was so much drama, practically every single day.

On Monday a paper would drop failing to replicate some sacred finding: “Huh, it turns out that the clothes you wear does not impact cognitive control; who knew?” On Tuesday the critics would gloat, “You see how shitty your so-called science is?” On Wednesday, the establishment would question the replicators’ abilities and motives: “Those second-stringers are trying to get famous by tearing down actual scientists.” On Thursday, some of the critics would escalate to personal attacks: “Yes, Professor X is famous, but he got famous by scientific doping!” On Friday, someone would break down in tears, crying “Shameless little bullies!” Rinse and repeat, with clockwork regularity.

This happened week in and week out for what seemed like an eternity. The replication crisis had been brewing since around 2011, with tensions escalating each year. By 2016, the field had already been through several years of increasingly hostile exchanges. The intensity of these battles made what was objectively a few years feel like decades. As much as I found this entertaining, in a horrifying sort of way, I also felt there could be a better way. Surely, someone could be the adult in the room and help us talk through our issues without so much acrimony.

Into this chaos stepped University of California Davis professor Alison Ledgerwood, who had the noble but naïve idea to create a moderated Facebook group called “PsychMAP” (Psychological Methods and Practices)[1]. The concept was simple: a space where psychologists could discuss replications, methodological reforms, and critique papers—but do it civilly, without the name-calling that had become standard everywhere else. The key to this group was that it would be actively moderated.

Unmoderated forums had devolved into hostile places where aggressive voices dominated, creating a climate of fear. Even tenured scholars hesitated to engage, worried they'd be branded ignoramuses for expressing uncertainty. And without their participation, how could the field truly take stock of itself?

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When Alison invited me to moderate alongside her, I jumped at the chance. My temperament leans authoritarian, so being a tone cop came naturally. We established ground rules: criticize ideas, not people. No ascribing malicious intent. No bullying.

A field won't take stock and actually change if there's no communication across divides. People needed space to work through these difficult realizations without being attacked, even if their initial reactions were defensive or misguided. And the only way we could have real conversation across “party lines” would be to turn down the heat. So, we tried something different, limiting certain forms of expression in service of deeper dialogue.

Some scholars understandably bristled at the idea of not being able to fully express themselves. Critics accused us of censorship. Nevertheless, I truly believed we could have searching conversations about our collective troubles, free of rancour.

Man, was I wrong.

Moderating the group quickly became a full-time job. We were monitoring discussions day and night until we eventually realized we needed to close the group in the evenings and on Sundays just to maintain our sanity. At one point, we even added a third moderator—God bless you, John Sakaluk—to handle the volume. We'd routinely have to pull people aside to reprimand them, or step in when conversations started heating up. We had to do this so often that we developed a script. We would flag the offending post with an image of a cup of coffee—think of it as a timeout with caffeine—and then privately DM the offender explaining what the issue was.

The day-to-day chaos was exhausting. One minute I'd be mediating a heated exchange between a senior researcher and their critic, the next I'd be fielding complaints about someone's tone. But nothing prepared me for the carnival of sock puppets that emerged—fake identities created by tenured professors (all dudes) to hide behind. At one point, we had at least three of these puppets running amok.

There was the notorious provocateur posing as “Jasmine Bond,” a supposedly demure Singaporean graduate student. We found him out when he accidentally posted under his real, not sock puppet account.

Then there was the very famous scholar who couldn't handle his very famous paper failing to replicate, so he transformed into a digital graffiti artist, spamming the board daily in protest. Everyone complained about him—except for one lone champion, whose stylistic tics and particular obsessions made it painfully obvious who was really typing.

Most bizarre was the husband of a once prominent researcher who created a fake identity to defend his wife's honour, only to be immediately recognized by someone else in our community who actually knew the person he was impersonating. The whole experience was every bit as stupefying as anything you'd see in Los Angeles County.

Perhaps the most absurd aspect of moderating PsychMAP, though, was receiving private messages from tenured professors—grownups with PhDs and fancy job titles—tattling on each other like middle schoolers. “So-and-so is being mean to me!” “Did you see what he posted?” “Can you please intervene?”

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Looking back, maybe none of this should have been surprising. This was no ordinary moment. PsychMAP formed precisely when our field's foundations were collapsing in real time. Many couldn't process how they'd contributed to psychology's dismal record; denial was rampant.

As much as I wished people could talk openly and dispassionately about theirs and other’s research, I now see that I was naïve. Put yourself in the position of a scholar in the twilight of their career, suddenly learning that the methods they used to draw inferences and write all those famous papers are now being called research malpractice, possibly even fraud. Wouldn't you fight to preserve what you believed was true—and to protect your legacy?

But even without a legacy to worry about, the instinct for self-preservation runs deep. That’s why even the most impartial criticism of one’s work feels like a personal attack. It is simply too easy to conflate legitimate criticism with bullying. I was foolish to believe people could readily be objective about their own research. In the abstract, we all considered ourselves rational truth-seekers above petty biases. In practice, when our papers get criticized, even kindly and with an even hand, it fucking hurts.

After a year of this madness, I quit moderating and left the group entirely. I just couldn’t take it anymore. All the fighting got to me, and I just wanted to go to my own little corner and stop playing referee.

Things are much calmer today. The reformers won—methodological changes once deemed radical are now mainstream, and many vocal critics hold positions of power.

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But I do wonder if psychology's revolution could have been bloodless. In a recent conversation, my friend Eli Finkel noted that this tension between incremental and revolutionary change characterizes many transformative movements. Perhaps PsychMAP's failure wasn't in attempting moderation, but in my belief that reform could happen purely through civil discourse. Status quo defenders have too much invested in being right; some only change when pushed harder than polite conversation allows. Can radical transformation ever happen without metaphorical bloodshed? In my more honest moments, I suspect not.

The replication wars are now mostly behind us. We've grown thicker skin as a field and normalized criticism—science's essential self-correction mechanism. Looking at the unmoderated hellscape of Twitter today, I've gained new appreciation for the value of moderation, even if we were a bit heavy-handed. Sometimes you need to be told to shut the fuck up, Donny.

But I still wouldn't moderate PsychMAP again. There aren't enough White Russians in the world to make me deal with another sock puppet named Jasmine Bond.

[1] Much to my surprise, PsychMAP is still around, though it does not look to be a bumping place anymore. I have no idea if it is still moderated.

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First, numerous essays were widely read but didn’t generate any real disagreement. So even though I live for conflict, I’ll take it as a win. To my surprise, hardly anyone batted an eye when I suggested that academic contests like selecting which students deserve grants or deciding which faculty applicants to move from a longlist to a shortlist would be better done by artificial intelligence. My argument was that AI is good at following rubrics and, you know, actually reading the application materials. Humans get swayed by prestige and name recognition far too easily. AI could be explicitly prompted to ignore that. I suspect Claude will be less impressed than I am by a candidate Harvard’s Dan Gilbert vouched for. I consider this a plus.

So, I take the lack of vitriol online or in my comment section to mean that many readers might quietly agree with my argument. If so, would anyone be brave enough to actually recommend AI (with human guidance) to adjudicate, say, applications to the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), which is open for submissions right now? If we blinded applicants and gave AI the SPSP reviewer rubric, would we trust the results of that contest more? Something tells me folks are not even close to ready for this.

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Victória is the first author of a new working paper called The Moralization of Artificial Intelligence. I adore this paper. So much so that I want to claim it as all my own. I talk about it at conferences and invited talks all the time because it illuminates something real about the moment we’re living in. Conversations about AI have stopped being normal conversations. They’re fever-pitched, with people holding strong opinions they sometimes refuse to interrogate. Otherwise smart people lose their minds if someone dares say something appreciative about a technology that is, despite all the hype and doom, normal technology.

Victória’s paper explains why. She shows how attitudes toward AI have shifted from mere preferences into something moral, something good-versus-evil. I’ll say no more, because her own words are all you need.

Before I go, a few words about Victória herself. She is not merely brilliant. She is broadly interested in the world—from opera to technology from ethics to cognitive science. More important, she has a nose for good ideas, something that cannot be taught. She also lives well, valuing hard work and pleasure in equal measure. I credit her with getting me genuinely interested in AI. I also credit her with something I underappreciated before she joined our lab: a thriving lab needs a social connector. Victória was the lab’s glue. She made it obvious how much it matters to have someone who connects people, who makes a group feel like a group. Victória is starting a postdoc in a few months. And I’m missing her already.

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“We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines—the so-called ‘alignment’ of AI with human values—without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. […] What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.”

So wrote Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas, his recent encyclical on artificial intelligence.

If you’re chronically online like me, you probably saw the excerpts make the rounds, recast as proof that even the Pope had turned against AI. For a certain crowd, his words confirmed what they already believed: that this technology is a kind of demon to be cast out, and the only faithful response is to bring it to a halt.

But read the whole memo and you’ll notice that the pope’s stance is not an antagonistic one, but a cautious one. He acknowledges that AI is being built and embedded into our lives, as many other technologies before it. The task is not to escape it, but to take a seat at the table where its development and deployment is discussed.

Here’s the irony: the people who most need to be part of this discussion are the least likely to pull up that chair and sit down at that table. Not because they don’t care about AI, but because they refuse to share a table with the people building it: they’ve moralized it.

In a recent paper, my co-authors and I examine whether some of the AI opposition we’re seeing is moral in nature. In this post, I’ll walk through our findings and show that for many AI skeptics, moralization is a central driver of their opposition.

But before the findings, let me say more about what moralization actually is, and why it can be such a problem. (If you’ve read your lifetime’s fill of papers on moral conviction, skip ahead to the Findings.)

What Makes a Moral Belief Different

Let’s start with a distinction that seems obvious until you poke it.

You like pineapple on pizza. I think pineapple on pizza is an abomination. We argue about it for a while, and eventually one of us says “look, it’s just a matter of taste,” and we both relax, because it is just a matter of taste, and we both know it.

Now replace the pizza with the concept of animal torture.

You think torturing animals for fun is fine. I think it isn’t. Here, I do not reach for “well, it’s just a matter of taste.” I don’t think we have different preferences the way we have different opinions about pizza. I think you’re wrong and evil. There’s a fact here, the fact has a correct answer: it’s simply wrong to torture animals, and you’ve got it backwards.

Now imagine you mention to a colleague, the way you’d mention the weather, that you got your kids their flu shots over the weekend. To you this has the moral weight of a dentist appointment: a chore, a copay, a lollipop on the way out. Your colleague hears something else. To them you’ve just confessed to poisoning your children on the orders of people who profit from it, and they are now recalculating everything they thought they knew about you.

A strange feature of moral beliefs is that they don’t feel like preferences at all: they feel like facts. When two people disagree about a moral question, each one tends to quietly assume the other must be mistaken—not just different, mistaken. Thus, the way we think about morality is closer to arithmetic (where there’s one correct answer and many incorrect ones) than something like pizza toppings. Now add the fact that people don’t even agree on which questions are matters of arithmetic and which are matters of pizza, and you get two people in the same conversation, one making small talk, the other witnessing a crime, neither aware they’re playing different games.

Morality is also strongly tied to your identity. Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten last summer—just gone, a blank. Are you still you? Sure, mostly. Now imagine you woke up tomorrow believing that cruelty is good and kindness is contemptible. Are you still you? When people get asked what’s most essential to who they are, moral character beats memory and personality. Your values aren’t a feature of you; they’re you. Which is why changing a moral belief is so hard; it registers as becoming a different person.

Moral values don’t bend to the crowd. Humans are deeply, embarrassingly conformist. But here’s an exception: morality! You can tell someone that everyone disagrees with them, that the experts disagree, that the majority is overwhelming—and on a moral question, people simply refuse to bend[1].

Moral values can’t be priced. As many economists will tell you, humans operate on a constant utility calculus: Let me figure out how much each option is worth, and I will pick the one that yields the best value for me. But try to put a number on a moral value and the machinery falls apart. Ask someone what dollar amount would make it okay to sell out their best friend, and you will not get a number; you’ll get a frown. The question itself reads as offensive—as if the willingness to compute the answer is already a kind of betrayal. The mere suggestion of a tradeoff produces not a utility calculation but disgust.

So put it together. A moral belief feels true the way math feels true. It’s wired into your sense of who you are. It ignores the crowd. And it refuses to be put on a scale and weighed against anything else.

You might reasonably ask: so what? People hold some beliefs more tightly than others. Why should anyone care which beliefs sit in the “moral” bucket?

Because the bucket predicts important real-world outcomes.

Why the moral bucket matters. Moral conviction corrodes our ability to tolerate one another. Disagree with someone about pizza toppings and they think you’re weird. Disagree on a moralized topic and they want you gone—they want physical and social distance from you, from people like you, and from information that sounds like you.

In practice, that means they avoid people like you and act in ways that shut you out: they’re more likely to vote, donate, march, and protest alongside people who think as they do—and not as you do—even when they have nothing personally at stake.

Follow that logic to its end and you arrive somewhere dark. Moral conviction predicts not only a desire for distance but a greater acceptance of violence as a way to resolve conflict. I want to leave that thought hanging over everything that follows—because resistance to AI has already begun producing more than op-eds and think-pieces. It has produced threats, break-ins, and worse.

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Quietly, moralization sorts a society into camps that would rather not share a room—or a planet. And we already have another name for that: polarization.

Our Findings

So how do we know whether an issue is moralized?

You measure it. And the most direct way is to ask. Moralized attitudes have recognizable fingerprints, so you get them by asking people a series of questions. Do you think you’re objectively right? Is the view tied to who you are? If most people came to disagree with you, would you still hold it? Is the thing wrong only in your community, or everywhere? And if the harms were mostly fixed, would you change your mind—or not?

In three studies, my co-authors and I surveyed a representative sample of Americans about a range of AI applications: chatbots, AI companions, legal AI, AI doctors, autonomous vehicles, and more. For each one, we asked whether they opposed that specific use of AI and whether they endorsed those hallmarks of moral conviction.

The first surprise: most people aren’t AI opponents at all. Opposition ranged from 13% to 45% depending on the application—a minority in every case. But among the people who did oppose, a stark majority endorsed every hallmark of moralization. So if you pull a random American, you’ll probably get someone who’s fine with AI. But if you pull from the opponents, you’ll very likely to get someone who strongly moralizes it.

Then we wanted to know whether moral opposition actually changes what people do—not just what they say. Specifically, whether it would make people refuse AI even when using it would benefit them personally. (Remember the bit about moralized attitudes refusing the cost-benefit tradeoff?)

So we ran an experiment. We brought back participants from the earlier surveys and gave them a student essay to grade—assign a score from 1 to 10, write some feedback. We told them they could use GradeAI, a tool we described as more accurate than human graders, to help. And here’s the twist: we told them the essay had already been graded by an experienced teacher, and if their score landed within 5 percentage points of the teacher’s, they’d earn a cash bonus. In other words, we offered to pay them to use the AI to their own advantage.

Moral opposition predicted refusal. A one–standard-deviation increase in AI moralization predicted a 42% drop in the likelihood of using the tool. Put differently: the heaviest moralizers (top 25%) were nearly three times more likely to avoid using the AI than the lightest (bottom 25%[2]. In plain words: AI moralizers chose to forgo extra money to act on their convictions.

Moralization in culture

We’ve shown that individuals moralize AI. We also wanted to know whether you could see the same thing at a collective level—in the culture rather than in the survey responses of single people. So we turned to the news, and to how journalists write about AI.

This was possible thanks to a researcher who built a large corpus of news headlines and made it freely available, and to others who developed methods for detecting moral language in text. We borrowed both.

We measured how much moral language surrounds a range of topics in news coverage. Some we already knew are moralized, like abortion and climate change. Some became moralized over time, like vaccines, GMOs, and COVID. And one we expected to be essentially neutral—a control—interior design.

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Here are some example AI headlines. A highly moralized one: “Living Nostradamus warns AI is ‘digital antichrist ready to corrupt our innocent souls’”. Here’s one that scored very low in moralization: “Meet GERI, the artificial intelligence personal coach.”

AI ranked as the third most moralized topic in the headlines, behind only abortion and climate change. It drew moral language at roughly the same rate as GMOs and COVID-19, and—notably—at a statistically higher rate than vaccines, a topic with a deep, well-documented history of moralization.

Moralization of technology and social topics in news headlines from 2018 to 2024. Mean moralization for each topic. Error bars represent standard errors.

The key takeaway

So: most AI opponents moralize AI, and that moralization predicts behavior, and that’s visible not just in individuals but in the culture itself, written into the way we talk about the technology in the news. These findings have real consequences for how the AI debate is going to unfold.

The biggest one is this: when a disagreement becomes moral, it stops being the kind of disagreement you can resolve. Moralized opinions tend to make honest debate difficult, if not impossible. The usual debate + compromise mechanism runs on each side’s willingness to trade with each other. And moral values, as we’ve seen, don’t tolerate tradeoffs. Once a position becomes a moral one, the ordinary principles of good-faith dialogue start to fall apart, replaced by psychological earmuffs: a refusal to listen to, or engage with, anyone on the other side.

And that’s what I find genuinely worrying about moralization—not that it makes people care deeply, but that it may make good AI policy harder rather than easier. The people best positioned to research the risks, to develop guardrails, to ask the uncomfortable questions, are the least likely to truly engage in these discussions. In practice, that might look like ad hominem attacks—discrediting the technology based on its creators or proponents. It might also look like misguided claims about its harms. Not because concerns are unfounded, but because moralizers may latch onto confirming evidence so tightly that they lose sight of its limitations, leaving the real problems without serious advocates[3].

Take the water argument, for instance. AI critics often cite data center water consumption as evidence of environmental catastrophe—and stop there. The claim may be more contested than it appears, but let’s grant it a real risk: data centers can lead to localized water bottlenecks that may cause price surges and shortages. That is a real concern. But the conversation rarely gets to the solutions already being discussed—closed-loop cooling systems that recycle rather than discharge water, alternative coolants that don’t use water at all, taxes structured so any increase in costs don’t pass through to nearby residents, or requirements that data centers build their own infrastructure (an approach already being piloted for energy consumption through small modular reactors in the U.S. and Japan).

To be clear: AI problems are real, and they are far from solved. But dismissing a technology without reckoning with these conversations isn’t protecting the future; it’s opting out of it.

Which brings us back to where we started, and to the Pope’s quietly radical ask: that we don’t settle for the moralization of machines, and instead protect people’s ability to participate and ask questions. The hardest part of that isn’t getting AI’s champions to build responsibly. It’s getting its fiercest critics to stay in the room long enough to both listen and be heard[4].

[1] Some of you may be asking, “isn’t being an independent thinker a good thing?” I’d agree it can be. But conformity, too, can be healthy and even necessary for a society to function.

[2] If you’re interested, we have some robustness analysis in the paper where we controlled for a bunch of things, including how easy participants found the task and familiarity with AI. Results remained robust to all of that.

[3] Worth flagging that some proponents probably moralize AI too, as moral supporters. I don’t have the data yet, but I’d bet a pinky that at least some of the drive to build is powered by people who feel a moral imperative to do it. Moralization isn’t only the opponents’ problem; it just bites hardest where it shuts down dialogue.

[4] Thanks to Michael Inzlicht and Gabriel Almeida Prado for feedback on drafts of this.

A year ago I wrote an essay arguing that we’ve turned reading into a moral virtue when it’s really just one good way among many to spend an afternoon. I still believe that. So I’m republishing it today for you all to enjoy.

Please tell me why I’m wrong in the comments!

I'm about to commit academic heresy.

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I love books. One of my peak memories remains lounging at a café in Split, Croatia, lost in a non-fiction paperback while hearing the murmur of people walking by in the quaint old town. As a child and adolescent, I would escape the world with books, typically fantasy or science fiction. Later in university, I got a taste for more “respectable” literature, though of late I have returned to my love of epic fantasy, unashamed. Reading, in other words, is my idea of paradise.

And yet.

I can't help but wonder: why do we treat reading for pleasure as inherently virtuous? Why do we look down on those who prefer Netflix to novels?

I feel this tension acutely as a parent. Despite all those nights reading to my (then) young children, despite trying every trick imaginable (including, yes, literally paying them to read like some economist's experiment), they've grown into teenagers who do not read books that are not assigned to them in class. I feel like I've screwed up, as if my kids' disinterest in books reflects some parenting failure.

But maybe the real failure is turning reading itself into some kind of moral virtue, as if the medium we use to absorb ideas and stories matters more than what we learn from them.

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And when I write that “we” treat reading as a moral virtue, I really mean “I.” I look down on people who don’t read, or even who don’t read enough. I mean, I even sort of judge people who “read” via audiobook instead of text. What a prick! But I also know that I’m not alone in my prickishness: there is a growing panic about young people, even at elite universities, who don’t read.

We didn’t always moralize reading, though. In fact, some of history's greatest thinkers were deeply skeptical of it. Plato warned that reading and writing would erode people’s memory capacities. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was genuine moral panic about novel reading, particularly among women; unlike today, though, that panic was over people reading too much. Critics worried that books would corrupt minds, inflame passions, and waste precious time that could be spent on more virtuous pursuits.

Perhaps reading came to be seen as virtuous when it was perceived as a marker of class and education. For much of the 20th century, literacy, and especially recreational reading, was a privilege of the leisure class. As historian Jonathan Rose has demonstrated, some working-class readers did seek out serious literature, but they were often exceptions. For most, losing yourself in a novel remained a luxury requiring time, money, and a quiet space—things in short supply for people working long hours.

This hierarchy of reading material still haunts us. I remember browsing a used bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island during my grad school days, puzzled by their separate sections for fiction and literature. I guess what the bookstore was trying to convey was that some books were for entertainment, others for enlightenment. Never mind that this distinction often mapped perfectly onto class lines: mass market paperbacks for the masses, hardcover books for the private-school set.

Even today, we maintain an unspoken hierarchy of passive pursuits that feels suspiciously like old class distinctions. Reading literary fiction and serious nonfiction sits at the top of this prestige pyramid. Below that, we might grudgingly accept so-called prestige television or arthouse cinema (yes, you’re allowed to admit you watched Severance or love impenetrable David Lynch films). Then comes reading other books: fiction, thrillers, fantasy. Further down, we find regular TV and movies. And at the bottom, despite their complex narratives and problem-solving demands, video games.

Of course, this pyramid doesn’t just track medium, but also content. A person reading a trashy romance (or my beloved epic fantasy) might still be outranked by someone who streamed a Yorgos Lanthimos film and nodded solemnly while Emma Stone wandered around nude for the fifteenth time. But the broader structure still holds: we respect reading not necessarily because it’s more enriching, but because educated people have been respecting it for generations.

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Let me be clear about what I'm questioning here. I'm not challenging the value of literacy or the clear link between reading ability and academic achievement. What I'm puzzling over is why, once we're past our formal education, we still treat curling up with a book as inherently more virtuous than other leisure activities.

I decided to ask ChatGPT why reading is important, and it regurgitated some standard talking points: Reading improves cognitive function! Builds empathy! Reduces stress! You know the claims. But when you actually dig into the research, the evidence is surprisingly flimsy.

Take that seductive claim that reading fiction makes you more empathic. This idea exploded about a decade ago, with headlines that would make a grifter take careful notes. The BBC, for example, suggested reading could make you a better person—as if reading Macbeth could transform you into someone morally spotless.

But like so many findings from that era of psychology, these studies haven't exactly aged well. New information has come to light, man. Whether you're looking at forensic statistical analyses or attempted replications, the evidence keeps coming up short. I checked in with my friend Raymond Mar about this—he's a professor at York University and basically the expert on this stuff. His take? While reading fiction over years might nudge your empathy dial up a bit, there's nothing magical about books. TV shows and movies seem to work just as well. Of course, it probably depends more on the story’s content than the medium. There are trashy books and brilliant TV shows, and vice versa. Raymond tells me that as long as the story invites you to think about other minds, it seems to do the job, whether it’s printed on paper or streaming on HBO.

Sorry, book snobs. Yes, me too.

And those vaunted cognitive benefits? Sure, reading engages our brains, but so does trying to assemble IKEA furniture or having a heated debate about who makes the better bagels—sorry New Yorkers, Montreal bagels are obviously superior. The evidence that reading specifically fights off cognitive decline or boosts working memory isn't particularly compelling.

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Yes, books are fantastic learning tools. But let's not pretend they're the only game in town. These days, you can learn from podcasts, documentaries, long-form articles, or even (gasp!) YouTube tutorials. Which brings me to a personal example: why should I judge my kids for learning cooking basics from TikTok instead of cracking open celebrity chef Matty Matheson’s latest cookbook? (Fun fact: I live next door to Matty!)

There is also the notion that reading is an active form of leisure. Yes, reading does require you pay attention, move your eyeballs, and to generate your own mental imagery, but is that really more active than playing a complex video game or watching a film? When I'm truly absorbed in a good book, it doesn't feel effortful at all; I'm just as passively consuming the story as I would be watching a great movie. There’s one important difference: books stop when you stop. They don’t keep playing in the background while you scroll Instagram. That demand for sustained attention might be part of the magic. Reading doesn’t allow your attention to drift in the same way as movies or TV (though, neither do video games). It asks you to stay with it, to resist distraction. And maybe that’s exactly why we value it.

Sustaining attention, after all, is effortful. Reading takes more discipline than watching a movie, at least to start and to persist. And I wonder if the effort cost of reading makes it seem more important and meaningful.

In a paper just published from my lab, my industrious student Aidan Campbell found a connection between how hard something feels and how meaningful we appraise it to be. It’s the same reason we value the imperfect IKEA furniture we build over the perfect IKEA furniture we get built for us. In a separate, newish paper, Aidan found that effortful activities detract from pleasure at the same time that they add to perceived meaning. In other words, we might not necessarily enjoy reading that Faulkner novel, but we’ll think we accomplished something important after doing so. So, do we value reading because it’s harder than the alternatives? Is it a story we tell ourselves to justify the hard work we put in?

Our collective attitude toward audiobooks is telling. While we've grown more accepting of them, there's still a subtle hierarchy where "real" reading ranks above listening. But why? If the goal is absorbing and engaging with ideas, why does it matter whether those ideas enter through our eyes or ears? One reason might be attention: it’s easier to let your mind wander during an audiobook than when staring at a page that doesn’t advance itself. The audiobook skepticism suggests our reverence for reading might be more about the perceived virtue of effort than actual outcomes.

The more I think about it, perhaps what we need isn't a defense of reading, but a more honest conversation about why we've loaded this particular leisure activity with so much moral and social significance.

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Sure, we all look down on the Love Island USA viewer (unfairly or not), but even among high-quality, complex content, we still elevate the reader. Someone working through the latest Margaret Atwood novel is generally seen as more intellectually or morally serious than someone watching House of the Dragon, even if both are engaging with rich, layered storytelling. Perhaps we can acknowledge that someone who never reads books for pleasure but devours thoughtful podcasts, engages with complex games, or critically analyzes film isn't intellectually inferior to a bookworm.

I’ll keep reading because I love it. But I’m going to try my best not to judge others who spend their leisure time doing something else. If the medium doesn’t consistently lead to better outcomes, then maybe what we’re really defending isn’t reading itself, but the cultural halo we’ve built around it.

Maybe it feels good to think we’re better than the screen watchers. But what if we’re not?

That would mean our issues would be more or less settled, and I could continue to conduct normal science. But recently I had a set of experiences that made it clear that our issues are not settled. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at The Ohio State University, and the question period and private discussions after gave me whiplash.

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I delivered my talk at Ohio State’s new Chase Center for Civics, one of these new conservative-leaning civics centers popping up across American campuses. The political bent of the audience is an important detail here. I talked about my lab’s work on moralization, mostly an analysis of news headlines and polling of Americans on their views. The details are unimportant, save to say the research was mostly descriptive, and we’ve replicated parts of it already.

One of the first questions came from Hollis Robbins, a very impressive professor of English at the University of Utah, who also served as a dean at various universities for nearly a decade. Her question was direct: “Why should I trust anything you say?” At first, I was taken aback, uncertain how to respond to a brilliant woman doubting the results of basic polling. But then she mentioned the new Nature replication paper, which showed that attempts to replicate basic social science findings succeeded only about half the time—a paper I know well, as I am one of its (many) authors. She was wondering why she should trust anything I say because I work in a field that’s generally unreplicable. I suspect many conservatives feel the same way. And honestly, after the past few weeks, I’m starting to think they have a point.

I’m writing this angry. In the past two weeks alone, I’ve watched senior colleagues, in private but also in print and on social media, treat the past decade of methods reforms as a sort of overreaction. It’s 2026, but the past weeks have given me flashbacks to 2016’s greatest hits: accusations that replications were poorly executed, failed replications blamed on hidden moderators, social media drama that construes a defense of criticism as a defense of bullying.

I’m fucking angry.

Angry enough to name names. Paid subscribers get the rest.

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Several professors in the audience shared my concerns and asked tough but respectful questions that gave the student pause. The student’s advisor probably should have pushed them harder before the talk, but in the room itself, other professors did what academia is supposed to do: they productively challenged a student to think more carefully about their work. A normal day at a university. And I’m glad to see normal days again, because for a while there, they weren’t.

In recent years, a strange norm took hold. Critical feedback from someone with more power directed at someone with less became suspect, an example of punching down. Critiquing student work was a professor’s job, sure, b…

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Yes, a post by a mid-career psychology professor with a modest social media following was being widely circulated, discussed, liked…and loathed. This was a disorienting experience, but honestly kind of fun.

The post crossed 500,000 views within 24 hours. Every time I checked my socials, I kept on seeing lots and lots of engagement. I clicked on what was trending that day and my little post was there. I screenshotted it immediately because I assumed it would vanish.

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It didn’t vanish. And my post wasn’t ratioed either. But lots of people disagreed and they didn’t mind being loud and angry and sometimes unhinged in expressing their disagreement. I want to talk about it. But, because I’ll be dishing more than doing science, I’m putting this behind a paywall. Among the replies: someone who wanted me lined up at the guillotine, a eugenics comparison, and a surprisingly good philosophical argument. I want to talk about all three.

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The Power of Us

We share science and the stories about social identity, group dynamics, and collective behavior in organizations and society. Hosted in collaboration with the Center for Conflict & Cooperation.

By Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

I've known Dominic and Jay for over 20 years. We first met when they were both graduate students at the University of Toronto and I was a visiting speaker. I left that visit energized and, frankly, jealous. The intellectual culture in the psychology department was exactly what I'd been looking for—lively, rigorous, genuinely curious. I applied for a job at UofT a few weeks later and have been here ever since.

But as I reflect on my remarkable visit and the wonderful time I had, I realize that Jay and Dominic played an outsized role. A major reason I found the culture so stimulating is that I found Jay and Dominic so stimulating—they loved discussing ideas, were open to different perspectives, and liked lively debate. I was later amazed by how varacious a reader Dominic was and is and how charismatic and curious Jay was and is. I am now convinced the reas…

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I wrote the piece below about 18 months ago. A few weeks ago, my friends Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel republished it in their newsletter, The Power of Us, under the title “The Downfall of Stereotype Threat.” That republication landed in the inbox of roughly 10,000 people, which is fine. What happened next is more interesting.

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Mary Murphy, a prominent stereotype threat researcher, wrote a lengthy public rebuttal on her own Substack, taking issue with my conclusions and the timing of the republication. She makes some arguments I want to engage with seriously, and maybe I will in a future post. This isn’t the place for that. But I will say this: Mary's rebuttal left me wondering when stereotype threat stopped being about the Black-White or male-female testing gaps and started being about how people feel in uncomfortable rooms. Vibes, basically. Important vibes, yes, but vibes nonetheless. If that’s where we’ve landed, that’s worth talking about.

For now, I'm putting the original piece behind the paywall, with a few small additions. If you're a free subscriber and want access, now is a good time to upgrade. You'll get the essay, the drama, and eventually my response to Mary. Consider this your warning that things might get a little spicy.

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There was a well-attended session asking whether SPSP is a healthy scientific organization, a presenter who had enough chutzpah to deliver his talk using 100% AI-generated slides, and a heartfelt memorial for a dearly departed psychologist. I’m going to get personal and name some names, so I’m putting this behind a paywall to give me the freedom I want and you, the gossip you expect.

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But for others, conferences are a source of anxiety and despair. They invite all kinds of upwards social comparisons—there is always someone better than you doing more interesting research no matter how well established or how cool your research is—that leave one deflated. And then there are all those people to talk to!

Because conference season is here, I thought I’d reprint (with light edits) my essay on what conferences are really for (hint: it it not to learn about the latest research) and how to do it well even if small talk is not really your thing.

Conference season is here, and I can feel the electric buzz of anticipation in academia's virtual hallways.

I’m heading to Chicago for the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), where I won’t be presenting anything but there to soak in the atmosphere of the world’s largest gathering of social and personality psychologists. If you’re there, come say hi!

Whether it’s SPSP, APS, CNS, SAS, or any other acronym-filled gathering, conferences can be overwhelming. For junior researchers, especially, the experience of seeing your academic heroes stroll by—knowing you should strike up a conversation but feeling too anxious to—is all too familiar. You wonder: Why would she even want to talk to me?

That anxious knot in your stomach? It’s likely tricking you into overestimating how awkward those interactions will be. Research by Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder shows we chronically underestimate how much others enjoy talking to us; and how much we’ll enjoy those conversations, too. Small talk may have a bad reputation, but it’s usually a lot less painful (and a lot more enjoyable) than we expect, even if you don’t think you’re a pro at it.

Yet, despite this, we cling to our phones like they’re shields, pretending to check emails while secretly praying that the person who just made eye contact doesn’t actually come over. We convince ourselves that everyone is too busy, too important, or too uninterested to talk to us. But, you’re also silently hoping someone else will break the ice so you can stop pretending to be absorbed in the same email you’ve skimmed three times already.

And here’s the twist: those small, seemingly inconsequential interactions? They’re the main reason you’re at the conference. So, let’s clear up a major misconception: the goal of a conference isn’t to attend every talk and absorb every bit of information. It’s about connecting with ideas, with potential collaborators, and yes, with those strangers you’re too nervous to approach.

If you want pure information, read the papers or let an AI summarize them for you. Conferences are about people—meeting them, talking to them, and, most importantly, forming connections that go beyond academic citations. This is why online conferences, for all their accessibility, were a bust. They missed the whole point: building relationships.

If your idea of a conference is to fly in, give your talk, and fly out, you're doing it wrong. You’re like a child wondering into the middle of a movie.

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Let me tell you a story about why these connections matter. A few years ago, I hired a postdoc named Blair Saunders, now a professor at the University of Dundee. Blair’s application stood out not just because of his brilliance but because I had already met him. Months earlier, at a pub event after a conference talk in New Orleans, Blair saw me wrestling with a neon-colored Hurricane (a truly deadly concoction) and mustered the courage to chat. We discovered shared research interests, and when his CV crossed my desk later, I already knew he was thoughtful and engaging. That conversation over a drink made him more than just another name in a stack of applications.

Here's something they don't tell you enough of in grad school: the most successful academics aren't just brilliant researchers; they're also skilled networkers. I know, I know: the word "networking" probably makes you cringe. It sounds calculated, maybe even a bit sleazy. But these personal connections matter more than you think. They lead to collaborations, job opportunities, chapter invitations, and symposium spots. But more importantly, they make this whole academic endeavor more enjoyable.

OK, so how does one network?

First, ditch your university crew. I know it feels safe traveling in packs, but those gaggles of grad students from the same labs or departments? No one's approaching that fortress of familiarity. Instead, work in pairs at most. One conference buddy is ideal; you've got backup but you're still approachable.

Next, be ready for the inevitable “What do you study?” question. Have a concise three-sentence version for casual chats and a longer version for when someone is genuinely interested. And don’t forget to ask real questions yourself; not setups to pivot back to your own work, but genuine, thoughtful inquiries. If you’re nervous about sounding dumb, don’t be. Most speakers love questions, even simple ones. If you are anxious still, have a go-to question you can ask multiple people (mine used to be about individual differences that they believed could moderate their effect of interest).

Be strategic. Skim the program ahead of time and prioritize talks and posters that genuinely interest you. Then, make a point to chat with presenters afterward, especially grad students, who are often thrilled to have someone engage with their work.

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Another way to be strategic is to email people in advance. Maybe you noticed that a few professors you admire are going to attend. Why not send them a brief email expressing how much you admire them and their work and then ask if they could meet for 15 minutes over coffee. Several students have reached out to me in the past, and I usually say yes to a brief meeting because I’m human and while I want to help them, I really like it when people like me and my work! Yes, flattery works.

Here's something else: hang out with your advisor strategically. It’s a long story, but I did not have a social psychology advisor during grad school (my advisor was a cognitive psychologist). So, when I went to conferences, I had no one to open social doors for me. But advisors can and should do this. So, ask your advisors to introduce you to people they know—that's literally part of their job. And when they do, don't just stand there nodding. Join the conversation. And follow up with these people later.

And don’t skip the social events. Yes, the poster sessions and talks matter, but the real networking happens over drinks and food. This is where job leads, collaborations, and friendships are born.

Here’s a hack most people overlook: volunteer for everything. Seriously, everything. Hand out name badges. Join student committees. Help review poster submissions. These seemingly mundane tasks are networking gold mines. You’ll get face time with other academics, and the connections you make can pay off years later.

One last bit of advice: Try acting extroverted. Yes, I know that sounds terrifying, but research shows it can make you happier and more likable. When you engage enthusiastically with others, when you smile and act assertively, they tend to mirror that energy back, creating a positive feedback loop that makes everyone feel good. It's like a social chain reaction that benefits both sides.

So, if you see me at your next conference, come say hi. I’m the short, bearded, bald guy wearing a Big Lebowski t-shirt under a blazer. And who knows? That awkward small talk might just be the start of something big.

I hoped—prayed, even—I would never have to write about research on ego depletion again. But then a new paper comes along that forces me to take notice. And now I feel obliged to say something.

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I won’t go through the whole sordid story; not only is it a long one, but I’ve recounted it a few times already in different venues, including right here in this Substack. So, here is the Cliff’s Notes version.

Ego depletion was social psychology’s golden child for nearly two decades. People went gaga over the idea that self-control runs on a limited resource that depletes with use. Resist that cookie now, fail at the gym later. Simple and intuitive, but ultimately unsupported by strong evidence. The cracks in the resource model of self-control, as it came to be known, appeared in the early 2010s. First came theoretical problems (what exactly was this so-called resource?), then came replication failures. The death blow arrived with not one but tw…

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But I’m no longer convinced that was the responsible choice. Like Paul Bloom, I am starting to wonder if not using AI in such cases is the right thing to do.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I have little confidence in the quality of my comparative judgments, even in my grading of a pile of student papers. I know my evaluations are skewed by whether a candidate came first or last in the pile, whether I am in a good mood or nursing a headache. I usually get a feeling about a paper or candidate and then just go on vibes. I’ve been doing this for decades, and every time I finish, I’m left with the nagging feeling that I’ve made tons of mistakes or that I have been unfair. Yet we trust humans like me to do this kind of work. And some of us would be horrified if we learned that a colleague outsourced some of this work to AI

Yet, if I had a well-written rubric with specific criteria, I’m pretty sure AI would do a better job than I would. It would be more consistent, less biased by irrelevant factors, and certainly not influenced by whether the Eagles are playing on the radio while it’s grading.

This bothers me. A lot. It made me think back to a piece I wrote last year about predictive AI, and why I think the anti-AI crowd has it wrong. So here is that essay again, with just a few edits.

It’s fashionable these days to be anti-AI. If you don’t believe me, check out this social media mob that tore into my University of Toronto colleague for having the audacity to promote an AI-powered educational tool.

Critics are right to call out the serious problems with AI, like biases in U.S. healthcare decisions, discriminatory fraud detection in the Netherlands, or even error-prone search results. These issues are real and demand attention.

But bias, discrimination, and errors aren’t unique to AI; they’re deeply embedded in human decision-making, too. If you think humans are the gold standard, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Our judgments are inconsistent, riddled with bias, and nearly impossible to fix. The real question isn’t whether predictive AI is perfect, but whether it’s better than the messy systems we’re already using. Spoiler: it usually is.

That question—whether AI is an improvement over the status quo—was on my mind when I picked up AI Snake Oil, a book by Princeton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. The title alone promised a scathing critique of the technology, and I wanted to see if their arguments would challenge my perspective. Was I just an unapologetic AI stan after all? Determined to keep an open mind, I dove in, ready to hear from experts. The authors didn’t disappoint in their skepticism. They didn’t just criticize AI; they came out swinging.

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The book covers a lot of ground, and I found the chapter on the history of AI especially enlightening. I learned a ton. But when they turned to evaluating the technology itself, the gloves came off. To their credit, they acknowledge AI’s strengths in areas like autocomplete, chatbots, and even some uses of generative AI for coding and images. But when it comes to predictive AI, their critique takes a sharp turn. They don’t just find flaws. They call for the outright abandonment of predictive AI—if not of prediction altogether.

This is where I part ways with them. Prediction itself, even if flawed, is essential. Decisions need to be made. Who gets admitted to an ICU when there aren’t enough beds? Who is likely to reoffend and should not be released on parole? Who gets hired for a job when there are hundreds of applicants? Prediction is how we allocate scarce resources, prioritize care, and maintain justice and fairness.

But what do we mean by prediction here? Prediction is about using data to anticipate outcomes and guide decisions in structured ways. For instance, it could mean predicting which ICU patient is likeliest to recover, which parolee poses the least risk, or which refugee might face persecution if returned to their home country. Prediction isn’t about certainty—it’s about estimating probabilities to make decisions that matter.

These decisions are high-stakes, and without prediction, they’d often become arbitrary, relying on gut feelings or flawed human judgment. AI enhances this process by handling complexity, processing massive datasets, and reducing bias. It doesn’t eliminate the challenges of prediction, but it allows us to make better, more consistent decisions than humans alone. This is why prediction isn’t just essential—it’s unavoidable.

When it comes to making better decisions, research makes it clear that algorithms are the way to go. The term algorithm gets thrown around like it’s synonymous with computers and AI, but it originally had nothing to do with machines. An algorithm is simply a set of steps or rules used to make a decision. We could create and implement one with nothing more than a pencil and paper.

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Take graduate admissions. Instead of relying on unstructured interviews where we decide based on whether we like someone or deem them a good fit, we could create a decision rule. Assign each applicant a score out of 10 on criteria like undergraduate grades, research experience, writing ability, math skills, ability to work with others, even likability. Then, give each criterion a weight, say, 25% for grades, 15% for likability and so on. A little algebra later, and you’ve combined the scores to compare candidates and select the highest-scoring ones. Congratulations! You’ve just created and implemented an algorithm. It’s not perfect, but it’s far more objective and less biased than gut feelings or intuition.

I know this from personal experience. When I evaluate students or job candidates—which I do regularly—I can feel my judgments shifting based on completely irrelevant factors. The same application looks different if I read it first thing or its the last application in my pile. A candidate who reminds me of a former successful student gets an unfair boost. Someone whose writing style annoys me gets dinged for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual qualifications. An algorithm doesn't have these problems.

And this isn’t like just my opinion, man. Decades of research shows these kinds of algorithms consistently outperform so-called holistic human decision-making. Yet we resist them. Maybe it’s because we trust our intuition or clinical judgment too much, or maybe it’s because we balk at the idea of reducing people to a number. However, intuition simply isn’t good enough when the stakes are high. We tell ourselves we’re seeing the so-called whole person when we rely on holistic judgment, but in reality, we’re influenced by irrelevant factors that cloud our thinking. Was the candidate too dressed up? Not dressed up enough? Did they hesitate too long before answering? Did they answer too quickly? Were they sweating and nervous? Or maybe too blasé? And, of course, there’s the baggage of stereotypes—conscious or unconscious—that shapes how we perceive people, no matter how hard we try to suppress them. Algorithms aren’t flawless, but they don’t care about any of this nonsense, which is why they consistently outperform human judgment.

For instance, in hiring, unstructured interviews are less predictive of job performance than algorithmic assessments based on structured data. And it's not just hiring—it's any evaluation task where we're comparing people against defined criteria: student admissions, fellowship awards, job applications, promotion decisions. In all these domains, human evaluators show alarming inconsistency. We're influenced by attractiveness, by whether someone's name is easy to pronounce, by whether we're tired or hungry or distracted. We tell ourselves we're good at this, that our years of experience have honed our judgment, but the data says otherwise.

Algorithms, in contast, don’t suffer from these biases. For example, in parole decisions, machine learning models have shown they can reduce errors where parole boards unnecessarily incarcerate low-risk individuals while releasing higher-risk individuals. These examples highlight how algorithms can improve fairness and accuracy by mitigating the biases and inconsistencies of human judgment.

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AI builds on these algorithms, making them faster, scalable, and, when designed well, less biased. And scalability matters because there are more decisions and predictions to make than humans can handle, even if they used algorithms themselves. Take refugee claims in Canada. In 2023, over 260,000 people sought asylum—six to seven times as many as just a few years earlier. Every claim needs to be processed and assessed, yet the system is so overwhelmed it takes the government about four years to make a decision. In the meantime, these claimants live precariously, unsure if they’ll be accepted or deported. Automated algorithms—yes, I’m talking about AI here—could process this data more efficiently and accurately, even if it makes mistakes. Unlike humans, AI doesn’t burn out, get distracted, or let a bad morning cloud its judgment.

Yet AI Snake Oil relentlessly attacks AI for not being perfect, pointing out its mistakes as if they invalidate the entire enterprise. But this critique misses the point: AI shouldn’t be judged against some platonic ideal—it should be judged against what we’re doing now, which is far worse. Humans are inconsistent, irrational, and riddled with biases we don’t even realize we have. The bums always lose when they rely on gut feelings and flawed intuition. We also make mistakes, and more of them.

At one point, the authors discuss how AI can be gamed. For example, candidates in automated video job interviews might use fancy words they’d never normally use, like “conglomerate” (is that really a fancy word or have I just been in the Ivory Tower for too many years?) or strategically place books and paintings in the background to score higher. Sure, this is unfair. Pretending to have a strong vocabulary or curating your background says little about your actual ability to do a job. But this kind of gaming happens all the time in real life too. I once had a friend with perfect vision who wore fake prescription glasses to a job interview because she thought it made her look smarter and older, and thus more hirable. Defendants in court wear suits to seem respectable and trustworthy. Anytime you construct a decision rule, people will find ways to exploit its weaknesses. That’s not unique to AI.

Consider an important study by Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues, published in Science. They found racial bias in a healthcare algorithm that underestimated the health needs of Black patients compared to White patients. The bias stemmed from the algorithm’s reliance on healthcare costs as a proxy for need, which systematically disadvantaged Black patients because they, on average, incurred lower healthcare expenses—not because they were healthier, but because they faced systemic barriers to accessing care. But here’s the crucial part: the bias wasn’t hidden. Researchers identified the problem, reformulated the algorithm, and effectively eliminated the bias. Good luck doing that with human decision-making. This is what happens, Larry. When humans make biased decisions, we rarely know why—let alone how to fix it.

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To be fair, AI Snake Oil raises important concerns about how AI is implemented. Algorithms need high-quality training data—garbage in, garbage out. AI decision rules should be made transparent and understandable to stakeholders. Systems must be rigorously tested to ensure they are an actual improvement over current practice. And algorithms need to be adaptable, tailored to the populations and environments they’re used in. These are real challenges, and AI companies and the organizations that use their products need to do better.

Still, the authors take their skepticism of predictive AI too far for my taste. They suggest replacing prediction (AI and human alike) with lotteries.

Imagine that. Instead of a parole board—whether relying on human or AI judgment—deciding whether a prisoner should be granted parole, we’d toss their name into a hat and let fate decide [1].

The reality is that prediction is essential. Lotteries can sometimes make sense, say when equity is the primary goal, or when there’s little-to-no predictive ability. Some argue, for example, that academia’s grant system is so poor at predicting high quality research that distributing research funding by lottery might actually be an improvement.

But when decisions have real consequences—like who gets parole, who gets hired, or who needs extra care—randomness isn’t enough. Prediction allows us to systematically analyze and use data to account for meaningful differences between people, such as their likelihood of rehabilitation, job performance, or recovery. This ensures decisions are informed by relevant factors rather than arbitrary guesswork or biases. Refusing to predict doesn’t make decisions fairer; it just makes them arbitrary. When lives, resources, or justice are on the line, we need to make the best decisions we can. AI isn’t perfect, but it helps us get closer.

AI isn’t snake oil; it’s a tool. It’s a flawed tool, sure, but one with incredible potential. It forces us to confront the inefficiencies and biases in our current systems, exposing problems we’ve ignored for too long and offering solutions we didn’t think were possible. Perfect? No. An improvement over the status quo? Yes.

[1] To be fair, the authors suggest lotteries after some initial selection process. By allowing for even some selection, however, the authors reveal that we and AI might have some predictive ability after all.

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Nearly every Jew I know—no matter their political beliefs or ideological commitments—has had to reckon with how their ethnic/religious/cultural group is now perceived. For many like me, this is a new thing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I grew up in a golden age of Jew tolerance, where Jew hatred was something I learned about from dusty textbooks or my father’s and uncle’s stories of Living While Jewish in Europe. Sure, I witnessed some acts of hate—in 1987, my synagogue in suburban Montreal was graffitied with swastikas and the phrase “Burn Jews”—but this was the exception. I never thought my Judaism made a lick of difference in how I was treated.

That carefree sense of psychological (and even physical) safety is no longer. The god damned plane has crashed into the mountain. I got a taste for this on October 8^th, 2023, when demonstrators on the streets and campuses of North America’s finest cities were telling Jews …

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Today I am reposting my love letter to my favourite movie of all time. I might just make this an annual tradition. Enjoy your time off, taking it easy for us all sinners. And if you’re in Toronto for New Year’s Eve and want to usher in the new year abiding, might I recommend you catch a screening of TBL at the Hot Docs Cinema. Thanks to my student Emily Zohar who let me in on this annual tradition.

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Merry Christmas everyone. Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to greet you with a generic Happy Holidays, but today is Christmas day, so merry Christmas it is.

I’ve always loved Christmas, which is a strange thing for a Jew to say. But what’s not to like? I love the office parties where we get to see our bosses or co-workers in sometimes compromising positions (informational hostages?). I love all the food—panettone anyone? I love the ugly sweaters. And I even love the music—my fave Xmas song has got to be Wham!’s Last Christmas. And, as a Jew, I celebrate the birth of Jesus as it should be celebrated—with other Jews stuffing our faces with Chinese food. In this spirit of giving, I decided to write a lighthearted post about my favourite movie of all time, The Big Lebowski. Think of it as a little Christmas gift for all the Little Urban Achievers out there.

I was one of those rare people who saw The Big Lebowski in a movie theatre when it was first released in 1998. While the movie became a cult classic years later, it bombed with critics and movie goers alike upon its initial release. I was in the first year of my PhD at Brown University and watched the movie with my good friend Terry McGee at the cineplex near the Lincoln Center in New York City.

I liked the movie, but it didn’t leave much of an impression and I found the plot confusing in spots. But some scenes did stay with me because they were so absurd, and when I found myself in a different state of mind (lol), they made me chuckle. Like the scene with the Black cab driver who kicks the Dude out of his cab because the Dude bad-mouthed The Eagles. I too hated (and still hate) The Eagles, so I felt like the filmmakers were speaking to me personally, showing me that my hatred was not so uncommon. Or the scene of Walter smashing a brand-new Corvette while repeatedly invoking the phrase, “You see what happens Larry? This is what happens Larry when you… find a stranger in the Alps!” These were funny scenes, but nothing more.

Then a few months later I heard my friend Kamran Diba—now a professor of neuroscience at the University of Michigan—quoting a scene, and I was amazed he had seen, let alone liked the movie. Clearly, I had missed something. The movie was out of theatres after a short run but was released on DVD (or was it VHS?) soon thereafter, and Kamran had a copy.

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I watched it with him and my other grad school buddies again. And again. And again. After each viewing, the movie got funnier and deeper and more meaningful. I was in love, smitten with the Dude, Walter, and Donny, but also Maude, Jesus, Bunny, and even Knox Herrington. I started getting into the Coen brothers’ other films. What was more, I learned that other people, mostly other men, also loved the movie and watched it and quoted from it endlessly. I have since bonded with other Lebowski fans the world over and have deepened friendships based on our shared passion.

So why do I and so many other middle-aged Gen X men love this movie so much? I’ll try to explain, though it might be unexplainable—maybe it’s some kind of eastern thing.

Let’s start by crossing one reason off the list: it’s not the plot. The plot is kind of confusing. It took me a few watches to untangle it, and when I finally got it, I realized my thinking about it had been far too uptight. The truth is the plot doesn’t really matter. Even Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers, admitted it’s a “hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.” But for those whose minds are not sufficiently limber, here’s a summary to help you abide.

Spoiler Alert (Brief Plot Summary)

Loosely inspired by the detective novels of Raymond Chandler, The Big Lebowski centers on Jeffrey Lebowski, better known as The Dude, who is mistaken for a wealthy philanthropist by the same name. This other Jeffrey Lebowski, the millionaire, is the big Lebowski. After thugs invade the Dude’s home and ruin his cherished rug, The Dude confronts the big Lebowski, only to be drawn into a bizarre scheme when the man claims his wife, Bunny, has been kidnapped. The Dude reluctantly agrees to deliver a $1 million ransom, roping in his volatile bowling buddy Walter Sobchak, who is rarely wrong but always an asshole, and the soft-spoken Donny, who is always out of his element. It’s eventually revealed that Bunny wasn’t kidnapped at all. She staged the disappearance herself, working with a group of nihilists to pocket the ransom. To make matters worse, the big Lebowski was never actually rich, living off a strict allowance from his late wife’s family, and had no intention of paying the ransom in the first place. What unfolds is a chaotic, absurd series of events where no one truly wins, but The Dude, ever unbothered, simply abides.

Again, the plot is not the issue. Forget about the plot.

So why do I love thee? Let me count the ways

1. I love the characters

First, there’s The Dude, played with effortless charm by Jeff Bridges, who somehow manages to make laziness seem heroic. The Dude gets all the love because he is easy going, carefree, tender-hearted, and quick to light a joint pretty much anywhere. He loves the band Creedence Clearwater Revival, bowling, and appears to have been unemployed for quite some time. In short, he’s a lovable 60s hippy burnout, who wears jelly shoes and Cowichan sweaters. (My awesome student Greg Depow, now postdoc at UCSD, once gifted me with a Cowichan sweater, and it is one of my prized possessions to this day). Jeff Bridges apparently strongly identifies with the Dude, too. In interviews, he’s mentioned that he sees a lot of himself in the character and has admitted to enjoying the occasional White Russian and being a bit of a hippie at heart. Bridges has also embraced the cultural phenomenon that The Dude has become.

Everyone loves the Dude. But the soul of the movie belongs to his best friend Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman. Walter is a Vietnam vet who takes everything far too seriously, from bowling league rules to his ex-wife’s dog to being shomer Shabbos. His unhinged intensity is the perfect foil to The Dude’s laid-back apathy. His outbursts—whether he’s shouting, “You’re out of your element, Donny!” or “Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?!”—are the stuff of legend.

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Then there’s hapless Donny, played with understated brilliance by Steve Buscemi. Donny spends most of the movie like a deer in the headlights, perpetually confused and constantly interrupted by Walter. Nothing captures Donny’s clueless charm better than his classic line, “phone’s ringing, Dude,” spoken with genuine earnestness to a visibly exasperated Dude, who has been very aware of his “mobile” phone ringing for the past 15 minutes.

Who can forget Maude Lebowski, played with eccentric brilliance by Julianne Moore? A feminist avant-garde artist with a flair for commanding every scene she’s in; Maude is equal parts hilarious and intimidating. Whether she’s coolly explaining that her art is strongly vaginal, which makes some men uncomfortable, or laughing maniacally while discussing the Biennale with Sandro, she’s a force of nature—bizarre, self-assured, and utterly unforgettable.

And then there are the minor characters. Jesus Quintana, played to sleazy perfection by John Turturro, struts onto the screen in just two unforgettable scenes, stealing the show with his purple jumpsuit, unsettling trash talk, and the iconic line “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.” Brandt, the big Lebowski’s sycophantic assistant, is brought to life by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose awkward attempts to impress the Dude are cringeworthy yet endearing. Even the nihilists, with their laughable incompetence and bizarre threats of cutting off the Dude’s “Johnson,” leave a lasting impression.

2. I love the eminently quotable lines

I quote The Big Lebowski in nearly every post, and anyone who’s in the know will understand: It’s not just a personal quirk; it’s what we diehard fans do. Put two or more of us in a room together, and within minutes, we’ll be volleying lines back and forth like a game of verbal ping-pong. I mean look at this incredible exchange between eight random people on Reddit each riffing off each other, and it making perfect sense… kind of. This was in response to an image of the big Lebowski, played by the late David Huddleston.

The more obscure the quote, the better. I once went to a party where I only knew a handful of people, but by the end of the night, I had new friends and a deep respect for the guy who casually dropped a line I’d never heard used before: “What are you, a park ranger now?” Instant legend.

Then there are the Talmudic debates over what any one line actually means. Take the Stranger, played to perfection by a mustachioed Sam Elliott. What does he mean when he says he takes comfort in “The Dude takin’ ‘er easy for all us sinners”? Is it a profound statement about modern morality—or just a cowboy rambling? And what about this cryptic observation: “Sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, cuz what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man.” Is it a poetic meditation on The Dude’s unique place in the universe? Or does it mean absolutely nothing? What?!

And just when you think you’ve absorbed everything there is to know about The Big Lebowski, the movie surprises you with something new. A few years ago, on a camping trip, my good friend Roy Baskind (host of what has to be the best neurology podcast in the world), his friend Rodney, and I found ourselves in a heated debate over one of Walter’s many memorable lines: “Life does not stop and start at your convenience, you miserable piece of shit.” To me, it’s obvious: Walter is berating Donny for his usual, well-meaning cluelessness. But Rodney passionately argued that Walter is addressing the big Lebowski, whose gift of a beeper had clearly gotten under Walter’s skin. It turns out we hadn’t stumbled upon some hidden gem of Lebowski lore; this quote has been debated by fans for years. Like everything else in this movie, even a single line opens new layers of absurdity and discussion.

3. I love all the cuss words

My father-in-law—hello, Fred!—who also happens to be this Substack’s biggest fan, once expressed concern about all the swearing in my posts. He might as well have quoted the Stranger himself: “Do you have to use so many cuss words?” But Fred, fine man though he is, is not a fellow Little Urban Achiever. He doesn’t realize that whenever I let a swear fly in this Substack, I’m quoting The Big Lebowski. Every single time.

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And let’s be clear: this movie swears. A lot. The word fuck is used 292 times in The Big Lebowski. That averages out to about 2.4 uses per minute, making it quite possibly the sweariest film produced in Los Angeles County, which would place it in the running for sweariest worldwide. It’s not just the frequency but the sheer variety of ways the word fuck is delivered—angry, confused, dismissive, philosophical—that adds to the movie’s charm. Few films have ever used swearing so charmingly.

If you want proof (and a good laugh), here’s a mashup of every single f-bomb in the movie

And that’s why, when I quote from The Big Lebowski, the cuss words are non-negotiable. Without the profanity, the quotes wouldn’t just lose their charm, they’d be unrecognizable. “Who are you, man?” just wouldn’t have the same impact without that f-bomb. The swearing is essential.

4. I love its absurdity

You already know the plot doesn’t matter, but that barely scratches the surface of how bizarre and delightfully absurd The Big Lebowski truly is. Take The Stranger, for instance: who is he? Why is he a cowboy narrating a story about bowling in Los Angeles? And why is he sipping sarsaparilla like it’s 1885? Then there’s The Dude’s landlord, Marty. What on earth was his interpretive dance performance, his “cycle,” his… “what-have-you”? Did they actually put Donny’s ashes in a Folgers coffee can? The movie is a fever dream that never bothers to explain itself, and that’s exactly why it’s brilliant.

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And the musical numbers—what even are those? Valkyries in bowling alleys, Saddam Hussein handing out rental shoes, all set to retro tunes that somehow make it all work. These dreamlike interludes are as ridiculous as they are mesmerizing.

And then there’s the fan culture, which is almost as absurd as the movie itself. There was Lebowski Fest, which started in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2002—a glorious celebration of all things Dude—but sadly, it’s no longer running. Other gatherings, however, have popped up to fill the void. And the merch. Oh, the merch. There used to be a shop in New York City, right around the corner from where I worked at NYU, that sold nothing but Lebowski-themed stuff. My friends know how much I love the movie, so every year I get at least one Lebowski-related gift. Over the years, I’ve received t-shirts, bobblehead dolls, Creedence tapes (yes, actual tapes), talking bowling pins, Lebowski art, sweaters, bowling shirts, and even books. You name it, I’ve probably unwrapped it. There’s even an art project called the Little Lebowski Project, where fans photograph miniature figurines of The Dude and Walter in iconic or bizarre locations around the world.

The absurdity of The Big Lebowski spills over into every aspect of its fandom, making it a phenomenon as strange and endearing as the movie itself. Some fans have even transformed the world of The Big Lebowski into an actual religion: Dudeism. A few years ago, I embraced the absurdity and became an ordained Dudeist priest. Let me know if you need someone to officiate your wedding—I’ll bring my own bathrobe.

So, this Christmas, I hope you’ll accept this love letter as my small token of appreciation for a movie that has brought me endless joy. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to pour yourself a White Russian, settle in, and let The Dude guide you through the chaos. If you don’t love it, watch it three more times. And if you have seen it, well, pour yourself a drink anyway, because the world could always use more people who abide.

To all the Little Urban Achievers out there, I hope this holiday season brings you peace, absurdity, and maybe even a rug that really ties the room together. And to all my Substack readers and subscribers, I appreciate you.

Merry Christmas, man.

To celebrate this Christmas Day ode to The Dude, I’m holding a new Lebowski contest. I’ll comp two lucky winners with a 3-month paid subscription to this Substack—but here’s the catch: the winners will be the ones who come up with the most obscure Lebowski lines or quotes in the first 24 hours. I’m talking about the quotes that I haven’t thought about in years, the deep cuts buried beneath the iconic ones. So think hard, dig deep, and drop your best obscure line in the comments. Bonus points if you do it in your Christmas-day pajamas, White Russian in hand. Let the quoting commence!

This is a sensitive topic for me because of my uncle Shlomo, his personal story, and the tremendous impact he had on my life. He passed away a few years ago, but I remain grateful for all that he taught me over the years. I miss him dearly.

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Every Mother’s Day, I send out two cards: one to my mother in Montreal and one to my second mother in New York City.

My second mother is in reality my aunt, my mother’s eldest sister, Rachella. Because my aunt was born in Yemen, where they did not keep such records, she does not know how old she is or the date of her birth. My family guesses that she might now be 86, and she marks her birthday as the day she immigrated to the US in her early 30s. Rachella has always treated me as a son. Growing up in my chaotic and sometimes unsafe childhood home, Rachella was a beacon of love, a guardian, and the most generous person I know. I love her completely.

Rachella married Shlomo when I was in grade 7, but I had loved him long before. Shlomo instilled in me a love of science; he always lifted me up and encouraged me. He was my role model.

When Shlomo told me he had grown up in Będzin, Poland, in the 1930s, I couldn’t grasp what he meant. When Shlomo spoke of a sister I knew only through faded sepia photographs, I couldn’t grasp what he had lost. And when Shlomo refused to explain the strange numbers etched into his arm, I couldn’t grasp what he had endured. It wasn’t until I was older—until I learned of Auschwitz and its horrors—that I began to understand. At the same age I was playing road hockey with friends, Shlomo was fighting to survive in a world trying to erase him.

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His story didn’t end in tragedy, but it didn’t end easily either. He escaped Europe after spending time in a displaced persons camp with his surviving brother. They both gained passage to the US, where they built new and remarkable lives for themselves. Yet, the scars of his early life never fully healed. He had nightmares until the day he died a few years ago, his sleep haunted by what he endured. He struggled in his relationships, sometimes letting others take advantage of his kindness. Despite his many achievements, he never seemed comfortable in his own skin, as if constantly needing to prove his worth. His survival was a triumph, but it came at a cost he carried for the rest of his life.

So, when I think of Poland, I think of my uncle Shlomo and the tattoo on his arm that he refused to have removed. When I think of Poland, I think of a land that had once been hospitable to Jews.

Yeah, this is going to be another post about Jew hate. I won’t make a habit of it, but I recently visited Poland, where I was giving a university talk, and could not shake my feelings of discomfort while there. I never have the same feelings when I visit Germany, however. I want to use this post to wrestle with why.

Poland once hosted a Jewish population of 3.5 million, often called the “Paradise of the Jews” for its tolerance. By the war’s end, 93% had been exterminated, leaving only 10,000–20,000 Jews today.

The German occupying force was brutal and efficient. The scale of the Germans’ murderous scheming is unparalleled and remains today the epitome of evil. Many Jews today cannot and will not step foot on German soil. My wife, who loves traveling, refuses to visit Germany. Some Jews avoid buying German products. I recall as a high-schooler how my mother’s friend Sophia—a Lebanese Jewish woman all the boys had crushes on—admonishing me for my German-made Faber-Castell eraser. I can still hear her raspy, accented voice explaining how even hearing German being spoken gave her shivers of fear.

Yet, I hold no animus toward Germans today. These are the authors of my father’s grandparents’ murder, but I have forgiven, moved on. Why? Germans did the unthinkable but have since wrestled with and taken responsibility for it. They faced their history with honesty, creating monuments, laws against hate speech, and offering reparations.

I am a forgiving person. I can forgive even the unforgivable. But you need to ask for it, truly and deeply. Germany has done this. And as such, I have no ambivalence when I visit Berlin, Cologne, or Tubingen. I feel comfortable there and truly admire German culture and people.

But Poland…

Let me just say that I feel like an ingrate for writing about these feelings, particularly given the kindness of my Polish hosts. Despite the generosity I received, I couldn’t shake my sense of unease there. Certainly, my uncle Shlomo’s experience and the near-complete annihilation of Polish Jewry explains some of my discomfort. But Poles were also victimized by the Germans. The Nazis occupied Poland and terrorized Poles, who were deported to Germany and sent to forced labour and concentration camps too. The Nazis murdered many, many non-Jewish Polish civilians during the war.

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So why would I feel more comfortable in the land of the oppressors than in the land of the oppressed? Because some Poles were also oppressors. Yes, sometimes victims are also victimizers. Certain factions within Polish society victimized their Jewish neighbours, actively collaborating with the Germans, sometimes enthusiastically.

It is now well-documented that some Poles chose to kill Jews. They actively participated in rounding up their Jewish neighbours, sometimes volunteering their efforts but more often accepting payment to betray their fellow Poles. And after the war, when Europe was liberated, some Poles continued to kill Jews, particularly those who tried to return to their homes, which were often occupied by strangers. In the first year after liberation, more than 1,000 Polish Jews were killed, not by Germans but by the local Polish population. There were still pogroms in Poland after the war, most notably in the city of Kielce.

I could go on. But I won’t. If I were in the same situation as a poor Polish peasant, maybe I too would give up my neighbour to feed my children, even knowing what would happen to them. The fact that some Polish people participated in atrocities does not make them unique. Evil, after all, can be banal.

Like I said, I am a forgiving sort. I want to forgive. But has Poland asked for forgiveness? Have the guilty admitted to their active participation in the mass murder of their Jewish neighbours?

In 2000, a full 55 years after the war, the Polish-American historian Jan Gross published the book Neighbors about the destruction of a Polish Jewish community in 1941. Refuting the common Polish story that the occupying Germans were the sole perpetrators of this mass murder, the book states that some of the perpetrators were also ordinary Polish civilians. There was an outcry in Poland when the book was published, with many denying Polish involvement. Later forensic studies confirmed the book’s central claim of Polish complicity, though the exact number of victims remains debated.

But this fact had been well known among Jews for decades. I remember learning about it in my Jewish high school in Montreal in the late 80s, based on many survivor witness accounts. So, why did it take over half a century for Poland to admit their own wrongdoing and complicity? Why did the publication of this book cause so much controversy in Poland? Some of it was no doubt due to Poland being behind the Iron Curtain for so many years with strict limits on free speech and the sort of self-criticism that free speech allows.

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Poland is now trying to make amends, but there are consequences when a nation denies its own evil for too long. This evil can rise again and more quickly. On Good Friday of 2019, for example, some people in the town of Pruchnik dragged an effigy of a Jew through the streets before hanging it and setting it on fire. The last populist government of Poland, no longer in power, passed a law making it illegal to discuss Polish complicity in the war. Although the populist government backed down from the worst aspect of this law—it is no longer a jailable criminal offense, but a finable civil offense—it has still made life difficult for some. Professor Michał Bilewicz, for example, is a Jewish social psychologist who studies genocide and antisemitism, and he is widely praised for the quality of his scholarship. However, the Polish President has refused to sign off on granting him full professorship because of Bilewicz’s insistence that some Poles collaborated and were not exclusively victims. Bilewicz is still waiting for his well-deserved promotion to this day.

To be sure, Poland’s story doesn’t end there. Over the decades, there have been real efforts within Poland to confront this past. Initiatives like the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw or Kraków’s Galicia Jewish Museum have spearheaded public conversations about Polish-Jewish relations. Liberal newspapers like Gazeta Wyborcza actively promote reconciliation. Yet, these efforts coexist with deeply ingrained stereotypes and resistance to historical accountability among certain groups. And some of these stereotypes are promulgated by the Polish state: Polish textbooks given to school children, for example, continue to peddle in antisemitic tropes. Clearly, a lot more work is needed for real reconciliation to occur.

When I visited Krakow, I did not see any overt denial of history or any hostility. Everyone I met was charming and welcoming and kind. But some things felt off. While wandering Krakow’s old city, I noticed paintings of stereotypical Jews—usually men, often bearded and black-hatted, and always handling coins. When I asked an artist about the images, she said they were believed to bring good luck and financial fortune. I later learned this is a common Polish superstition, with sales of stereotypical Jewish figurines handling money a common feature in parts of Poland.

That evening, I dined at a Jewish restaurant in Krakow’s former Jewish quarter. The food was classic Ashkenazi and delicious, but the setting was not quite right; paintings of stereotypical Jews adorned the walls for example. Worse, I later realized that it was Yom Kippur eve—the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar when observant Jews fast for over 24 hours—so no authentic Jewish establishment, let alone restaurant would be open, making the experience feel like a performance of Jewishness.

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I had many interesting conversations in Poland and returned home with good memories. I’d like to return one day. Hopefully, this piece will not foreclose that possibility.

But forgiveness is only possible when people take responsibility, a lesson my Uncle Shlomo knew all too well. He kept that tattoo as a testament to his survival, a mark of what couldn’t be erased. Forgiveness requires honesty, a willingness to confront dark truths, even if they can’t be undone. While some liberal corners of Poland are making strides toward this reckoning, denial and defensiveness persist in other parts of the country. Perhaps one day, these efforts will coalesce, and I’ll find myself ready, at last, to forgive.

Coda

Reflecting on this piece—which I wrote a few months ago—I’m reminded of the criticism Ta-Nehisi Coates received for The Message, his anti-Israel book accused of presenting a one-sided narrative without engaging dissenting views. Did I, like Coates, focus on what aligns with my discomfort while overlooking signs of progress or the nuances of modern Polish society? Was I too quick to see stereotypes while neglecting efforts at reconciliation and the diversity of Polish thought?

Perhaps my discomfort stems less from Poland itself and more from the lens I’ve brought with me. Had I sought out more contemporary voices or ventured beyond the tourist sites, maybe my impressions would have been different. I can’t help but wonder if I’m holding Poland to a higher standard because its relationship to my history feels more personal.

This post is me wrestling with all of this, and I now realize just how easy it is to tell a story that feels true enough but isn’t the whole truth.

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I attended a departmental colloquium earlier this month by the very impressive Dr. Daisy Singla, a clinical psychologist and senior research scientist at Toronto’s Centre for Addictions and Mental Health (CAMH). I loved Dr. Singla’s talk and walked away having learned something important. Though perhaps not what she intended.

New information has come to light, man.

Her talk, “Scaling up access to patient-centered psychotherapies,” focused on large-scale trials she’s run around the globe showing that non-specialists and video-conference delivery of mental health support are effective and scalable. While she talked about a few papers with samples from Uganda and Bangladesh, I want to focus on one published in Nature Medicine a few months ago.

The paper itself is impressive. It reports the results of the “Scaling up maternal mental healthcare by increasing access to treatment” (SUMMIT) trial. SUMMIT is a large, multisite randomized trial conducted across hospital networks in Canada and the United States, pulling in 1,230 pregnant or postpartum women between 2020 and 2023 who were suffering from depression.

Everyone in the trial received the same behavioral activation therapy, a brief, structured, evidence-based treatment for depression. What varied was who delivered the therapy and how. Patients were randomized to see either a specialist (licensed clinicians) or a nonspecialist (doulas, community health workers, peer supporters, or nonclinical hospital staff). These are not randos off the street, but hospital staff who have some perinatal experience but no formal mental-health training or licensure. Therapy was delivered in-person or via videoconferencing with technology like Zoom.

The nonspecialists weren’t thrown in cold. They received structured training in behavioral activation following a standardized manual that included learning basics, observation, role-play, games, and homework. After this initial workshop, they entered an eight-week supervised internship, where they delivered behavioral activation to one or two real patients from start to finish while being monitored for competence. During the trial itself, they continued to receive weekly to biweekly supervision.

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Take my goal of losing a few pounds. I’ve had the same goal for about a year now, and while I did manage to lose a few pounds before my trip to Japan last spring, I’m now back to the same weight I was pre-diet. But, if I’m honest, my plan for this goal was less of a plan and more of a vague hope. I told myself I wanted to maintain a certain weight, but after reaching it, I didn’t follow through.

Also, there’s this carrot cake from Hot Oven Bakery in my neighbourhood in Toronto that keeps calling to me at night…

(If you’ve never had their carrot cake—moist, cream cheese frosting, worth every one of its expensive dollars—don’t start now. It’s irresistible. A month ago, I spent an entire evening craving it and didn’t have a single slice. Victory!)

Contrast that with my writing. As you know, last year I set a goal to write one Substack post every week. Week in and week out, I did it. Not because I had to force my…

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Sure. All of that and a pair of spectacles.

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I don’t usually write grateful, mushy pieces. For better and worse, I’m more comfortable critiquing than celebrating. But I’m in a happy place today and I want to acknowledge and celebrate some of the people who shaped me over the years.

I’ll start at the beginning.

Avi Ben-Zeev was my PhD advisor at Brown University. Actually, he was my second advisor—my first was denied tenure. Scrambling to find someone new after realizing my first advisor’s termination would derail my entire career was no fun. But once I started working with Avi, I understood what an advisor could be. An Israeli from a working-class background, Avi got me. He gave me the freedom I n…

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