Sometimes It Hurts to Ask
But you should probably do it anyway
Department
Psychology.
Understanding the mind and behavior.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 566Separating the art from the artist
Podcast with Robert Wright
Aligned, but with whom?
We humans all want AIs to be ‘aligned’ with us. But what does alignment mean, and who is the ‘us’? I asked Claude himself* how he addresses this challenge
Cornell 7, Illicit Activities, Violence Interventions
Links and Recommendations
Fake it ‘til you make it (and then keep faking it)
links ‘n’ updates
Quiet Luxury for Academics
When I saw a fancy professor put an award he won in a desk drawer, I was surprised.
Does the Constitution Forbid Racial Discrimination by the Federal Government?
The Unthinkability Doctrine
What AI progress teaches us about human psychology
How the challenges of designing AI cast a new light on the human mind
Pseudobeliefs
If there’s a master key to everything I’ve written on this blog, it’s the prefix “pseudo.”
Poor People Lie Upward, Rich People Lie Downward
How wealth and social class are changing marriage and dating
A Guilty Person’s Idea of How an Innocent Person Would Behave
My review of “You Can See Everything”
On cyber-security and cyber-stupidity
Vibe coding the way toward disaster
The greater of two (or more) evils
Identifying the best option is not always easy, but in politics we are increasingly faced with a much harder task: picking the lesser of two (or more) evils. Is that the wrong way to look at it?
Bad Company, Socialism, Jealousy
Links and recommendations
Buying lottery tickets makes sense
Some speculations about fantasy, anticipation, dread, and the shortage of scarcity
You Can See Everything
Thirteen Thoughts on the Best Behavioral Economics Movie Ever
Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They're Bad
A link between high intelligence and luxury beliefs?
On Believing What We Want Others to Believe
How a powerful ‘social diffusion bias’ drives politics, media, and the madness of culture wars
Carl Schmitt and Antisemitism
Friends, Enemies, and Moral Time Travel
Can chatbots cure loneliness?
Podcast with Robert Wright
Art-ificial Intelligence?
It is becoming ever harder to distinguish Artificial Intelligence output from the product of human creativity. Why do we still feel it matters, even if we struggle to tell the difference?
Social Paradox, Confession, Bedroom Generation
Links + recommendations
The Sex Discrimination Cases of the 1970s and 1980s
Parallel Constitutional Worlds
AI and democracy: friend or foe?
How the AI revolution might impact political institutions
Claude, don’t touch my lump
OR: the secret key to permanent happiness
Is Modern Dating a Market Failure?
Speaking with Louise Perry
Ancient Wisdom Is Needed Today More Than Ever. Here Is My Book About It.
Hachette is re-issuing my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Here’s the new preface.
You’re Not Who I Thought You Were
2026 Rob Henderson Newsletter survey results
Thank You, Frances Haugen
To celebrate “The Social Reckoning” and the five-year anniversary of Frances Haugen’s testimony, we link to eight essays we ran on After Babel that draw on whistleblower information
Defining Socialism
On Friends, Enemies, and Moral Foundations Theory