‘David Pinsof — Everything is Bullshit’ (May 18, 2023)
The origin story first. “I got really into meditation, and it was making me feel great… I would sit down, take a deep breath, close my eyes, and I would instantly just feel good. But at some point I just kind of fell off the wagon, I just got bored of it and I stopped doing it.” Then: “Here’s this activity that makes me happy, I know it makes me happy… and yet I do not want to do it. And that was when it dawned on me, wow, I must not actually want to be happy” (41:30 to 42:23). That was “the light bulb moment for Happiness Is Bullshit” (42:31). The prediction-error account follows, with the thermostat and the getting-warmer game (43:16 to 45:02), so the theory was complete in the first post and “Revisited” added little. He credits Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True for the carrot-that-never-arrives idea (36:07) and cites Jonathan Rottenberg for the claim that the happiness myth drives depression (49:00).
The humor theory is here in 2023, in one sentence: “what humor is is ultimately the detection of a whoopsie, some kind of mistake that we’re making, some kind of mix-up, and the reason why we laugh is we want to all coordinate and get on the same page about what the whoopsie was, and the bigger the potential whoopsy the bigger the laughter” (1:12:39 to 1:12:57). That is “All Mixed Up” before the mathematics, and it settles that the coordination account preceded the McGraw benign-violation framing he used with Colin Campbell a year later. He also states the marriage of the two careers as a program: “the marriage of comedy and misanthropy that I am trying to promote in my work Everything Is Bullshit and also at Cards Against Humanity” (1:14:00), and quotes Billy Wilder, “if you’re going to tell the truth you better be funny or they’ll kill you” (1:14:14).
The personal admission comes when O’Shaughnessy asks whether he knew, making the game, that it would raise his status. “It’s very easy for me to call out these sort of ugly unconscious motivations in other people but it’s very difficult for me to do it in myself. So I have this urge to deny it, to say no, we just had this pure joy of having fun with our friends… but if I’m being honest with myself, yeah, it makes sense that there probably was that element, as there is in most human behavior” (26:20 to 26:44). He then names his project’s premise: “the biggest source of human bullshit is the unwillingness to disclose honestly unflattering truths about oneself and one’s desires” (27:04). Two other lines are biographical. He gets “sucked into Twitter debates compulsively and against my better interest” (29:43). And on social media and adolescents: “if I had access to social media as a young teenager it would have completely destroyed my mental health because I was already anxious enough about fitting in and gaining status and getting a date” (31:24). That is the only description of his own adolescence on record, and it is the Highland Park boy the bio has been inferring.
Two positions here sit oddly with later work and belong in the Lakatos section’s reversal list. He endorses the Haidt thesis outright: “I’ve been persuaded that social media has been pretty destructive for adolescent and teenage girls” (31:18), and says social media’s permanence and audience are “really weird and alien” and “probably responsible for the rise in mental health issues” (30:02 to 31:13). Two years later “A Big Misunderstanding” treats mismatch and misinformation as the intellectuals’ myth, and the reply to Williams narrows the concession. And the morality post is described in its strongest form: “morality has been the instrument of cruelty for thousands of years. It is the cheap weapon in the arsenal of a warlord or a king or a politician” (10:24), backed by Wrangham’s execution hypothesis (14:20). That is “Morality Is Not Nice” before DeScioli’s reply argued the reverse.
Honesty about motives is a prisoner’s dilemma: the lone honest man loses status while everyone else “pretends to have pretty high-minded motivations” (53:02), and the way out is “coordinating to punish defectors,” a norm under which anyone who claims to be above status “needs to be penalized for that” (54:04 to 54:22). “That’s what I’m trying to do with my Substack, to try to create common knowledge of this bullshit, to try to burst the bullshit bubble so that we can all escape this prisoner’s dilemma together” (54:49). Asked how to reach the tipping point: “the short answer is subscribe to my Substack” (56:24), and near the close, “hoping to gather an audience and start a movement for anti-bullshit” (1:15:03). A movement to punish moralizing is a moral movement, and the Set’s line about anti-moralism as a morality can cite this. His two decrees as emperor for a day are the program in miniature: stop pursuing happiness, “the pursuit of happiness is the surest path to misery” (1:16:33), and “be less confident in your political beliefs,” from the post “You Should Be Troubled,” since “if there are some powerful biases in the human mind that are leading our political opponents astray then surely those biases are leading us astray in similar ways” (1:16:56 to 1:17:32).
O’Shaughnessy’s mother told him never to say anything he would not want printed on the front page of the New York Times (32:37).
‘The Sad Truth About Chasing Status – David Pinsof’ (Aug. 17, 2023)
Asked whether understanding people is hopeless, he answers: “If it was impossible I wouldn’t be researching it… so it must be possible for at least somebody to be right about why we do things, and it just so happens that I think I’m the one who’s right” (3:36 to 3:48). That is the buffered observer of the Taylor section, stated as a joke and meant. The Set’s reflexivity trump card follows two minutes later: he handles despondency “by going one step even deeper and analyzing the despondency itself” (7:19), and concedes the asymmetry, “it’s going to be much harder for you to call out the bullshit in yourself” (4:49).
“Some bullshit is better for the world than other bullshit” (26:20); science is “bathed in sacred values of knowledge and wisdom and disinterested truth seeking,” those values are bullshit, and “it’s really good that those are the values” (26:31). Then the theory of social change: “there’s no way to do that other than by changing the social norms, which ultimately means changing what gets us status and what doesn’t” (27:27). And the moral payoff he offers: “a little more compassion and empathy… everyone out there is just as scared and insecure and self-conscious and lonely as you are” (28:07). The nihilist reading of him was wrong in 2023 and he said so on a podcast.
Markets, he says, are “a pretty good status game as far as status games go, and I think that they are sadly underrated by a lot of people on the political left” (42:01), and people oppose capitalism “in order to signal that we’re not greedy,” producing “anti-consumerist consumer cultures where we consume anti-consumerist books and t-shirts and podcasts” (42:39). That sentence goes in the Four Questions. It is the one place he takes a side, the side is the one his audience holds, and it is delivered as an analysis of the other side’s signaling. Alliance Theory would say that is how a badge gets displayed.
In 2023 he already says social media is “a really weird and alien form of socializing,” that “our psychology is not equipped to deal with this” (15:53, 16:30), and that permanence and scale “are messing with our psyches in really profound ways” (17:54). When “A Big Misunderstanding” denied that misunderstanding and novelty explain much, he was arguing against a position he had held on tape two years earlier. That is a question for him and a line for the Lakatos section, since it is the kind of reversal the theory is supposed to catch in others.
“We cannot play a status game if we’re all aware that it’s a status game… wanting status is a cue of low status” (7:58, 8:04). “The trick is to conceal it maybe 90 percent of the way” (18:39), and the mechanism: “you have to make your signal look like a cue” (19:00), because “we want to catch someone in their true form as if they weren’t being watched” (20:19). The Costanza line does the self-deception work: “it’s not a lie if you believe it” (15:03). Sacred values are “cover stories… designed to protect our status games from collapsing” by “appearing as though they are the opposite of status” (23:51, 24:22), and in a cult the hierarchy becomes “a justified great chain of being” (25:01). The Succession cap example (22:38) shows him using the signal-burying model by name, “what we call that in game theory is a buried signal,” which confirms the countersignaling section’s claim that he had Hoffman, Hilbe, and Nowak in hand from the start.
Intergenerational competition theory is an original idea of his, stated here in full: desires are relative, “we compete to reassure each other that it’s not a competition” (32:55), so the only way “we can sort of outsmart evolution is by successively out-competing older generations” (34:17), and “‘Okay Boomer’ is the slogan of human progress” (34:57). He ties it to deaths of despair among people “failing to out-compete their elders” (36:48), which is a reinterpretation of Case and Deaton, and a prediction: a society whose children cannot beat their parents returns to “the zero-sum competitive tragedy of the human condition” (37:13).
Three places where the theory runs without brakes. Williamson floats a just-so story about mountain vistas and Pinsof answers, “I buy that” (1:01:17), and supplies the adaptive reasons on the spot; that is the six-line list from the bio, performed live. The happiness account is already the prediction-error theory here (44:23), so “Revisited” changed less than the essay implies. And the account of why we care about politics, “there are really only a specific set of beliefs that we can use to play social games with one another, and they have to by design be disconnected from the practically relevant ones” (1:09:22), is Hanson’s near and far modes and Caplan’s rational irrationality without the names, though he credits Hanson’s “homo hypocritus” elsewhere in the hour (1:03:32).
The closing exchange is a small gift for the Pinsof on Pinsof section. He tells listeners that competing to be interesting drives people to “spend more time listening to podcasts like this one to make virtual friendships” (1:11:32), Williamson objects that this will hurt the show, and Pinsof signs off: “I’m very friendly, much friendlier than I might appear based on my beliefs” (1:12:33). The character and the man, in one sentence, two years before he named the character.
‘AI Doom Debate: “Cards Against Humanity” Co-Creator David Pinsof’ (Aug. 7, 2024)
Pinsof argues against his own coalition, and the transcript shows why the AI essay cost him what it did: he took the founding doctrine of his set, massive modularity, and used it against the founding doctrine of the rationalists, intelligence as a single optimizing quantity. The debate is two hero systems talking past each other, and both men say so at the end.
The genesis first, because it feeds the fifth extension. The essay began, he says, as an attempt “to resolve my own cognitive dissonance” about “a group of people that I really intellectually respect who are right and I agree with on pretty much everything” (1:39 to 1:55). He names them: LessWrong, Yudkowsky, Hanson, Scott Alexander, 80,000 Hours, EA. The topic came from a reader poll at the blog’s one-year anniversary (2:34), and he adds a second motive: “the quality of AI doomer criticism is so low, there are just so many dumb lazy takes, and I wanted to fill the void” (3:55).
The position is his psychology applied to machines. “At the heart of every AI doomer piece I’ve read is this core assumption that intelligence is one thing… that’s an assumption you’re making and that needs to be defended” (5:50 to 6:29). Against it: “different problems require different solutions” (16:18), “you can’t train a system to become the president” (17:52), and the claim that “if you were to put that hypothesis forward in a room of evolutionary anthropologists or evolutionary biologists or evolutionary psychologists they would laugh at you” (28:08), the hypothesis being that humans are chimps with bigger learning blobs. Humans are “apes plus a whole variety of complicated social and cognitive abilities” (36:13), and Pinker’s cognitive niche “is very much on my side here” (25:37 in the second hour). The global economy is his model of what a superintelligence would look like: “not one homogeneous blob” but “an incredibly elaborate system of cooperation and division of labor” (1:02:39), and specialization is “the master principle of economics” (1:10:02). That is Tooby and Cosmides, Hayek, and Hanson, and he cites two of the three.
His best argument arrives at the end and is his own: the Fermi paradox for animals. If intelligence is “a very simple easily scalable copy and pastable thing and it literally gets you everything you want,” then “this is a buy one get a hundred free deal that is just lying on the table and evolution has not picked it up for four billion years… where are all the intelligent animals?” (1:20:16 to 1:20:48). Shapira answers with fitness landscapes and activation energy, and Pinsof’s reply, that animals with nervous systems already have the machinery and should have scaled it (1:34:05), is the strongest exchange in the debate. It is also the argument the essay’s critics said did not touch the strong doom case, and you can see why: Shapira concedes that no simple physical tweak makes a clam smarter (1:32:38) and keeps the claim at the level of observed optimization, which is a different claim from the one Pinsof is attacking.
His P(doom) is “something pretty close to zero,” under 1 percent (4:17, 4:24), low enough that “we shouldn’t even have a plan B” (5:34). An hour later, asked whether a superintelligence, granted for argument, would wipe us out, he says “I think it’s actually very uncertain, I’d put the odds at like 50 percent” (1:18:09). Those two numbers require him to put the probability of superintelligence itself near 2 percent, and he never defends that figure; he says instead that such numbers are pulled “out of our ass” (4:56) and refuses precision. Meehl would call the sub-1 percent a claim without a Spielraum, and Shapira, to his credit, tries to get one.
Two concessions. He grants instrumental convergence in full, given agency: “if we’re assuming that an agent has long-term goals… then yeah probably it’ll have a lot of the same instrumental goals as us” (47:55 to 48:19), and locates his objection in the word “goals,” which he says “masks a lot of complexity” (48:43). And after resisting the war-room argument for several minutes, “I will accept that point” that humans would beat any species in an existential conflict (24:03), before pulling back to “you’re implicitly assuming that intelligence is one thing” (25:00).
The closing statement is the Set’s value system in a paragraph. “I am really attracted to parsimony, I love parsimony, that’s part of why I love evolution so much” (1:35:33), three assumptions explain “literally every functionally organized chunk of matter in the biological world” (1:35:49), and he has “a paper that tries to explain political belief systems by making as few assumptions as possible” (1:36:08). Doomerism “sets off my unparsimony alarm bells” (1:36:16) and is “hideously unparsimonious” (1:37:19). Shapira replies that from his side he is “just following simple logical implications of my parsimonious idea” (1:38:47), and they end as “two open-minded people modeling a high quality conversation” (1:39:28). The point for the essay is that both men claim parsimony and the disagreement is over what counts as one assumption. That is the same shape as the Ganzach exchange, where he and Pinsof agree on the description and differ on what holds it together, and it is worth saying that Alliance Theory’s critics make the same charge against Pinsof that Pinsof makes against the doomers: a small set of assumptions that explains everything and forbids nothing.
“Intelligence is not one thing” is the modularity doctrine, and it puts him on the opposite side from the hereditarian right, whose case rests on g, as well as from the rationalists. The AI essay is the one place where he has stated a position on the unity of intelligence, and it happens to be the position that keeps him inside his set on both borders at once.
‘David Pinsof | The Harsh Truth about our Motivations’ (July 21, 2024)
The Colin Campbell interview of July 21, 2024 is a small British podcast and, like the other small ones, it is where Pinsof says things he does not say to larger audiences.
Pinsof says the game “tries to cope with the horrors of the human condition by looking at it askance and finding a way to laugh at it. My blog has a kind of similar vibe… it’s kind of a blunt instrument in the way the cards are a blunt instrument,” and “my skill in writing for Cards Against Humanity and writing the cards and writing the copy on the website… it’s a voice, and I got good at writing in that voice and I was able to leverage that for Everything Is Bullshit” (51:01 to 51:43). That sentence can replace the bio’s paraphrase.
Asked whether founding the game is a status move, he says “of course it is,” that without it “my Substack wouldn’t have reached you,” and then: “I do bury that signal. I’m not very upfront about my involvement with Cards Against Humanity. I’m not sure if the burying has been successful in elevating my status or not, but I think it has certainly helped attract attention to the blog” (50:05 to 50:36). That is the freedom display described by its author as a buried signal, in the technical sense he defines fifteen minutes earlier: a signal whose detection you reduce so that the few who detect it reward you more (14:11 to 15:21), with anonymous donation as the example. He has told you in so many words that the card-game money is the thing he underplays so that it counts for more.
Asked about education, he endorses Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education “wholeheartedly” (42:33): education “is an elaborate signaling system,” “most of education is wasteful signaling,” “we have too much education, we valorize it way too much… we need less education,” and if any, “very precise targeted vocational training” and apprenticeships (42:42 to 44:36). He calls it a rant and the host agrees. With the 2023 remark that markets are underrated by the left, that makes two positions on record, both from the same corner of the map, both delivered as analyses of everyone else’s signaling.
The game “came around for fun”: “one of our favorite activities was putting dirty words in the blanks of Mad Libs,” they made it for themselves, “played it at a New Year’s party with some friends and it was a big hit,” put it online free for about three years, then ran the Kickstarter (45:15 to 46:25). His account of why it works is worth the humor paragraph: laughing about taboo subjects among friends “is a costly signal that we all trust each other” (47:03), the game is “a kind of cope” (47:43), he cites McGraw’s benign violation theory by name (47:58), which is the theory his own preprint later displaces, and he offers the cancer card and the grandfather’s ashes as cases where a joke “actually is healing” (48:31 to 48:47). He also notes what the game sells: “we’re giving you all the tools you need to be funny… we’re giving people the experience of being the funny person, that’s something that is really precious for a lot of people” (49:42 to 49:57).
The rehearsal theory of self-deception, practicing “a list of ready-made excuses” for when “someone comes out and accuses us” (28:44 to 29:09), is already here in July 2024, nine months before the Procel interview, so it is not new there. Status, he says, “can collapse literally like an economic bubble” (7:50). He credits Will Storr: “as far as I know he coined the term status game… it’s a beautiful phrase” (5:04 to 5:12), which settles where the Set essay should send the phrase. The “humbled by their achievements” line is here: achievement “should be inflating you, but we have to say that it’s humbling us because we have to be pursuing the opposite of what we’re actually pursuing” (25:57 to 26:15). The suffering pill poll, “I think it was like 80 percent of people said no” (1:01:11), gives the happiness argument a number. And he practices the consistent cynicism he preaches: after analyzing the host’s podcast as a status vehicle, “I don’t want to belittle you or accuse you of having unsavory motives, just to level the playing field I have these same motives too, we all do” (31:11), followed by the line that closes every appearance, “I’m friendly, despite my cynical exterior” (1:03:07).
The intergenerational passage here (35:33 to 40:29) adds the claim that failure to out-compete elders explains “the political extremism that has been arising in the US,” concentrated among “people who are less educated… in smaller towns,” with housing costs as the driver. That is a causal story about the same population Alliance Theory treats as a coalition, and it is dispositional rather than coalitional: status frustration produces the politics. Ganzach would say that is the theory he was looking for.
‘David Pinsof: The Psychology of Incentives and Opinions’ (Jan. 10, 2025)
Building on Storr’s three status games, success, virtue, and dominance, Pinsof adds a fourth: “epistemic status games,” the competitions among intellectuals “to be more reasonable, more thoughtful, more epistemically credible and reliable, more meticulous” (13:37 to 14:27). Then: “there’s actually a surprising scarcity of academic literature on epistemic status games. I feel like there should be tons more on this topic, but I think it’s because it’s the water that intellectuals swim in that they have a hard time seeing it” (14:27 to 14:40). That is the paper the first extension says he should write, named by him as missing. Later, prompted by Lopes, he extends the opinion game to science itself: “I hadn’t thought a lot about whether the opinion game applies to science, but I think it may well apply,” a scientific theory becomes an opinion once the scientist “makes positive judgments about the people who agree with that theory and negative judgments about the people who disagree” (42:41 to 43:30), and “the prevailing theories will often bend toward the interests of the intelligentsia and the politically powerful” (45:16). He quotes Trivers, “the greater the social content of a discipline, the slower its progress” (47:12), and adds “other sciences have gotten us to the moon and social sciences have gotten us to a replication crisis” (47:27). Truth in science “is a byproduct of the institution when it’s working well, but it’s not the goal of any individual scientist” (48:23).
The sentence the Alliance Theory of belief rests on: “often it is more important for us to coordinate with one another and get on the same page with one another than it is to coordinate with reality itself” (22:45). Norms are “just widely shared opinions” (31:57), an opinion is a preference “combined with a set of positive judgments about the type of people who hold those preferences and a set of negative judgments about the people who don’t” (29:22), and expressing an opinion is an attempt “to shape social norms in our favor” (31:43), which requires making “our opinions look more objective than they really are” (33:41). Norms form when “a high status or charismatic or a politically powerful person” gets on a soapbox and others shift toward him (38:52), and “if I have a popular Substack thousands of people read… I’m going to have a pretty big effect on the prevailing opinions” (39:52). That is the Pinsof on Pinsof section’s argument, stated as a general law with himself as the example. He leaves a door open: “genuinely better opinions rising to the top” is possible “insofar as the evidence is undeniable,” though “heavily biased by the interests of high status and powerful people, as most things are” (40:16 to 41:22).
On why incentive talk disappears from political speech: coalitions “spread these kinds of self-glorifying, other-demonizing narratives to help them compete,” and “in creating those narratives, incentives go out the window and in some cases they’re even taboo to acknowledge” (24:11 to 24:44). And in the closing answer, asked whether scientists would do better science if they understood evolutionary incentives: “it is my opinion that that is correct, and it is of course my self-serving opinion, as most opinions are, because I’m an evolutionary psychologist and so touting the virtues of evolutionary psychology is in my status interests. But yes, despite the fact that this opinion is self-interested, I do think it is correct” (53:49 to 54:12). He also names strategic cynicism as a status tactic of the low: exposing a game “would be most damaging to those who are winning” and “most beneficial to those who are lower status,” which “can give rise to strategic cynicism whereby people try to make a status game collapse in order to increase their relative standing” (18:40 to 18:57). That is the Set’s cynicism arms race and its risk, in his words.
He is a compatibilist: free will is “the ability to respond to your incentives” (3:11), which “makes a lot of sense of a lot of our punitive institutions and intuitions” (3:19), while the idea that “we can defy our incentives and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps” is “dumb, for lack of a better word” (4:16). Virtue is “roughly desirability as a social partner” (11:45), so morality “can be pretty cleanly reduced to the virtue game” (16:22). Basic desires come from selection and cannot be removed, “you’re never going to make your hunger go away” (6:11); instrumental ones, like money, vanish when they stop buying what we want (5:37). And he refuses the biological-versus-cultural evolution fight: “whether cultural evolution or biological evolution, whatever, I don’t have a dog in that fight” (54:56), while calling it “one of the great distortionary pressures in science that evolutionary psychology is not common sense at this point” (54:44).
The Ted Danson example from Curb Your Enthusiasm, the anonymous donor who tells everyone he donated anonymously and thereby outranks Larry David’s named wing (15:13 to 15:51), is the best illustration of the buried signal he has given. And Pinsof’s name appears in the show’s patron roll in the closing credits (58:15), alongside his opening line that he is “a huge fan of the podcast” (0:37). He funds one of the outlets that hosts him.
‘Your Brain Is Designed to Lie to You | Dr. David Pinsof’ (Apr. 12, 2025)
Pinsof has abandoned the Trivers version of self-deception. He calls it “beautiful and intriguing and horrifying” (1:20), and then reports that its key prediction failed: if we deceive ourselves so as not to leak the cues of conscious lying, then people should be good at spotting liars, and “people are actually pretty mediocre at figuring out when a person is lying or not. They’re barely above chance” (4:45), the polygraph is “probably unreliable” (4:33), and “one key prediction of this model is starting to be falsified by a lot of empirical evidence” (4:58). His replacement is the lawyer rehearsing an opening statement: “what we’re doing when we deceive ourselves is not so much deceiving ourselves but practicing our bullshit story in front of the mirror” (7:41), so that “when we are put on the stand… it comes out of our mouths smoothly” (8:57 to 9:09). He would rename the phenomenon “self-persuasion or self-bullshitting rather than self-deception” (9:17), and the model’s prediction, which he says has support, is that people are vigilant against bullshit and hidden agendas, citing Mercier’s Not Born Yesterday (9:58). Two consequences. The bio line should say that Pinsof takes the Trivers problem and rejects the Trivers solution on the lie-detection evidence, which is the Bond and DePaulo meta-analysis though he does not name it. And the Lakatos section gets a clean example of him dropping an auxiliary hypothesis because a prediction failed, which is the progressive behavior the essay has been asking for.
Pinsof says humans are “deeply skeptical and deeply vigilant,” “constantly paranoid about being deceived” (10:10 to 10:17). A month later, on Philosophy Everyday, he says we are built to fall for charisma and that being deceived can be symbiotic. His reconciliation, in that later talk, is that we choose to be fooled when the deceiver will have allies. But the vigilance claim and the concealed-signal claim pull against each other, and the 4D Chess model has to say which audiences are vigilant and which are charmed.
The second half of the interview is his account of belief, and it is borrowed and credited. Beliefs held for signaling “are more like clothing” (12:12); absurd beliefs signal loyalty because “if I burn all my outside options, that’s a really good signal that I’m going to be committed to the group” (13:54 to 14:00). Pizzagate is Mercier’s example: millions “believed” it and one man went to the pizzeria with a gun, “and he was acting,” so “the rest of them didn’t truly believe it” (16:50 to 17:02), while the others “would leave like one-star Yelp reviews” (17:02). Reflective versus intuitive beliefs is Sperber’s distinction, credences is Neil Van Leeuwen’s, and Pinsof’s own coinage is “pseudo belief,” “where the goal is to mimic the appearance of a belief to gain social rewards” (18:20). The heaven argument is his: “if you truly believed that you were going to a paradise of infinite pleasures after you died, you would be really excited to die… and yet no one is excited to die” (21:17 to 21:42). That is the argument Ganzach would call dull and Meehl would call risky, since it predicts an observable absence.
On the source of the cynicism: “at the heart of human psychology is selfishness, nepotism and tribalism” (25:48), from the post “Darwin the Cynic,” and the argument that “you cannot believe that the human brain… came from evolution, and yet we have emotions and motivations that are completely unrelated to things that would have enhanced our survival” (24:22 to 24:41). That sentence is the adaptationist core, and it is the exact claim Williams’s mismatch argument attacks, so the Williams exchange can quote it. On morality: “I think we need these self-righteous stories to commit evil. Morality is our primary means of being immoral” (44:04 to 44:11), with the post “Morality Is Not Nice” and the finding that hatred of the political outgroup correlates with a sense of meaning (43:23). On meaning: its function “is to cause us to pursue long-term fitness-enhancing goals in the face of obstacles and setbacks and discomforts” (41:47), illustrated by his daughter’s tantrums (42:05), and objective meaning is a status device: “if meaning is objective and part of reality, then if we know what it is, then we get to be superior” (51:27). On intellectuals and the meaning of life: a game of interrogation in which “you keep going down the chains of why” and the players answer “with high-minded abstract rhetoric about wisdom and virtue and sacred values instead of the grubby unflattering motives that they actually have” (47:29 to 47:49).
He debunks priming on air, “that’s bullshit, that hasn’t replicated” (39:31). He repeats the boundary from the other interviews: “you don’t necessarily need to be a cynic in your everyday life. I think it might actually be a bad idea, but when we’re trying to understand and explain, I think cynicism is a really helpful and underrated perspective” (28:36 to 28:47). And asked how to know oneself, he answers “read the work of David Pinsof, who’s a really smart guy” (52:25), then recommends Mercier’s two books (53:15). The joke is the status theory performed.
‘Is Evolutionary Psychology Bulls**t?’ (May 20, 2025)
Pinsof: “My origin story was I was in the middle of a kind of existential crisis in my youth. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was a theater major, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I moved to New York with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and I quickly became disillusioned with acting and the theater world” (3:35 to 3:59). Then: “I was at that time also discovering that I had a brain and I had a pretty good one. It took me a long time to discover, because I hated school throughout most of my life. I didn’t find it rewarding. I just coasted and bullshitted my way through it” (4:05 to 4:16). The awakening came from two bestsellers picked up at random “because they looked like something that smart people would read and they had lots of big words”: The Selfish Gene and The Blank Slate (4:47 to 5:05). “I just felt like all of the puzzle pieces were just coming together,” and he went through the Center for Evolutionary Psychology’s website “reading them one by one like I could not get enough of it” (5:20 to 5:39). The decision: “this is what I want to study. I don’t even care if I’m particularly good at it, or I don’t need to be that high status in it. I just want to be a part of it. I just want to be around other people who are thinking this way” (5:47 to 6:06). The metaphor is the Matrix: “I could just see the lines of code behind all the things that we do” (6:46). And the acting connection the bio inferred, confirmed: “When I was an actor, I was more interested in the character psyche than the average actor was, and my acting teachers would often tell me to stop thinking and analyzing too much” (7:23 to 7:30).
Working for the company “I had developed this kind of blunt, cynical writing style, that’s sort of the voice of our branding, and I thought that it would be a great way to pair that skill to ideas in evolutionary psychology, a marriage of these two sides of myself” (8:37 to 8:55). “I sort of have developed this blunt, cynical evolutionary psychologist character on Everything Is Bullshit, and I think people understand that it’s a character, because if you look at the difference between the essay and the comments and my responses to the comments, it’s like, provocateur in the streets, scholar in the sheets” (8:55 to 9:18). That last phrase should go in the bio next to the July 2025 line. He also says he tried to quit: “I thought I could just do that after getting my PhD, but I couldn’t. I missed it too much” (8:13 to 8:18), and describes himself as “a research affiliate at UCLA now” (9:24).
“I don’t have that many publications, but the ones I do have, I’ve spent a lot of time on and thought really hard about them… I just don’t think academia exists to facilitate that kind of scholarship where the emphasis is more on quality over quantity, deep thought over superficial thought, theory over empirics. I think it’s the other way around in academia for all three” (11:16 to 11:39). “I do think I’m uniquely privileged to be able to think about these big picture questions, like what is ideology, what is social status, what are our sacred values all about, what is humor all about” (11:46 to 11:58). That is the research program, listed, in his own order.
The origin of the status theory: “Honestly, it sort of came randomly” (13:09). He had always been interested in status because “we kill for status, we die for status,” but the trigger was “some new psychology paper” that was “not even evolutionary psychology,” an empirical paper showing that being seen as a status seeker carries real social costs, which he recalls as “Status Is a Four-Letter Word or something” (13:41 to 14:07). From that one contradiction, that status matters enormously and seeking it discredits you, “most of the ideas in the paper, about sacred values, about cues and signals being unstable, about politics being about dominance but we can’t reveal the fact that it’s about dominance, all those things just kind of naturally fell out” (15:39 to 16:00). So the American Psychologist paper began as a reaction to an outside finding, and the countersignaling section can note that his starting point was a social-psychology result rather than the economics literature he later cited.
The hierarchy inversion, stated in full: once we know “this is all just an elaborate pissing contest, those at the top are the people who are most obsessed with winning that pissing contest… those at the bottom were relatively uninterested in it presumably, and so they begin to look a little bit more humble” (41:37 to 42:00). The sacred-narrative solution to collective dominance: “we have to seek intergroup dominance without creating common knowledge that we’re seeking intergroup dominance. We have to come up with a sacred narrative that disguises what we’re doing in moralistic or altruistic terms” (54:50 to 55:16), which is the Alliance Theory of sacred values in one sentence. And Pietraszewski’s connection of status to alliance, “kind towards whom,” citing Lukaszewski and Krems: “status at the expense of others, towards whom” is the hard problem (31:30 to 32:15), which he explicitly ties to “this sort of alliance idea of politics” (32:15 to 32:27).
On whether he wears the Darwinian hat at home: “I certainly don’t wear that hat when I’m hanging out with my daughter. Yeah, at the end of the day it’s a gene replication strategy that I’m so interested in her well-being, but I’m not thinking that way when I’m taking care of her. There’s a time and a place to put on this perspective, and it’s not necessarily all the time” (1:40:02 to 1:40:27). Pietraszewski answers with his son and rejects the choice as false: “I feel sheer joy… and at the same time I realize why that exists” (1:41:28 to 1:41:49).
‘Controversies in Evolutionary Psychology’ (June 3, 2025)
They spend the hour on sex differences and feminism. Race is not mentioned once. Group differences, heritability, and the hereditarian question do not come up. The episode billed as the plunge into the field’s controversies takes the controversy the field has learned to survive and leaves the one it has not, which is the boundary described in the Set essay, drawn in real time by two men who did not notice they were drawing it.
Inside the controversy they chose, Pinsof runs Alliance Theory on his own discipline’s reception, which is the closest he comes to the first extension. “I have a whole paper on political beliefs as rationalizations for coalitional interests” (40:58). Feminism’s social constructionism, he says, is “a whole slew of beliefs that I think are well designed to mobilizing support for the feminist cause,” and “we can debate whether those beliefs are correct or not… but I ultimately think that is the purpose of those beliefs, they are tactics for mobilizing support for one side of a conflict” (41:43 to 42:02). Then the mechanism: “once evolutionary psychology starts to interject with those kinds of ideas, we’re primed to see the world as you’re either with us or you’re against us… I don’t think that evolutionary psychologists intended to elicit this inference. I think most evolutionary psychologists that I know are strong feminists. But because their ideas activated these cue-based inference systems of are you on my side or are you not, they got inadvertently categorized as being on the other side” (42:40 to 43:23). The rule is the smoke-alarm principle: “it’s much less costly for us to assume someone is an enemy even when they aren’t than to miss a real enemy,” so “any deviation from the narrative, even if it’s a mild one,” reads as enmity; “if they don’t cross every t and dot every i on our political narrative, then they’re an enemy” (48:33 to 49:19). His conclusion is conciliatory, “I don’t think that it is incompatible with feminism, and I think that the things that it challenges about feminism are relatively subtle” (49:45 to 49:59), and his general theory of the dispute is the one from Strange Bedfellows: any group with more status “will invariably try to justify that advantage in terms of superiority,” the disadvantaged challenge the narrative, and “where the power ends up lying is going to depend in large part on how plausible each disputant finds the narrative,” because “the narrative is a kind of coordination device” and “a big part of politics is just a battle over narratives” (46:27 to 47:56). Asked about the converse, whether conservatives are drawn to the field, he says they are “in so far as it justifies the traditional gender hierarchy,” but “you need to believe in evolution and cold Darwinian thinking to get there, and they’re often opposed to Darwinian thinking for religious reasons” (44:05 to 44:30).
The rest of the episode belongs to Pietraszewski. On the STEM example, he accepts the interest-difference premise and then asks whether the current distribution reflects “who makes the best scientists for that topic” or “the evolved psychological differences in the human beings that have been granted status to do that science and generate the research questions” (59:16 to 59:55), adds that “academia is deeply classist” (1:00:58), and concludes “it may be an injustice” (1:02:27). Pinsof grants the case and then makes the alliance point about it: “that case is different from the case that has conventionally been made,” it “took you a long time to spell out,” and anyone making a different argument for feminism “gets rightly or wrongly categorized as being on the other side” (1:02:50 to 1:03:49). Pietraszewski also criticizes the “we are all moral hypocrites” narrative as “not ideal” (1:47:22 to 1:47:37), and says of the herding view of the public that “people are not so stupid that other people need to make the decisions for me… that does not do justice to the dignity and autonomy of people” (1:48:56 to 1:49:14). That is “A Big Misunderstanding” six months early, from the cohost, and it is also the aim Pinsof’s essay takes at the intellectual class. The two men share the conclusion and differ on what to feel about it.
Pietraszewski supplies two biographical items of his own that bear on the show’s chemistry: he grew up “in a very religious fundamentalist upbringing” and recognized possession and speaking in tongues in the hunter-gatherer literature (1:14:11 to 1:14:30), and he started the podcast after colleagues told him how bad the YouTube evolutionary psychology was, searched, and found an episode titled “Kamala Harris is a lobotomized communist,” which he listened to as “a student of the David Pinsof et al. argument” about his own political reactions and found “super reductive and pretty lazy” (1:04:34 to 1:07:04). The hosts frame the enemy as the manosphere version of their field, which is the third boundary in the Set essay.
The closing exchange gives you Pinsof’s ambition in a sentence. Asked how bullish he is, Pietraszewski answers pluralism: the field should put itself out of a job, not everyone needs the evolutionary approach, “there should be a plurality” (1:50:43 to 1:55:56). Pinsof answers maximalism: “I think that it ought to be the meta theory of social science in general,” and “it should subsume much of philosophy,” free will, morality, consciousness, all of which “ultimately derive from evolved psychology” (1:56:27 to 1:59:00). That is the disagreement between the two hosts in its cleanest form, and it maps onto the difference between them at the end of the first episode, the hat that comes off and the hat that does not.
One line for how the field gets read: its complexity is “filtered through, number one, what we find titillating, which is sex and death, and number two, political preconceptions and where the battle lines are drawn in the existing culture wars” (15:09 to 15:29).
‘Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems’ (June 12, 2025)
The first half is the formal paper, presented as a game with the audience. The simple majority game, three players, any two who choose each other win and the third loses, is “a staple in the international relations literature for decades” (4:41), and it lets him define an alliance as “a coordinated, mutually beneficial relationship that comes at a cost to others” (5:12). He shows the same payoff ordering in four games, favoritism, grabbing, Kathleen Bawn’s policy game, and the witch hunt, then asks whether forming alliances is evolutionarily stable. The answer, “the tragedy of the human condition in math, as I like to think of it” (13:13), is that it is, and the reason is the part to quote. The costs of being ganged up on “could be as high as death in theory,” but “neutrals are just as likely to suffer these costs as allies,” so “the cost terms actually cancel out in the math. The costs don’t matter” (15:15 to 15:40). Evolution “does not care about the good of the species” (15:55). Ten stable strategies follow: play the game, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the three other axioms of transitivity, like attracts like, follow the leader, target your competitors, eat the rich. Two of them are worth the essay’s attention. Leadership “emerges naturally as a byproduct of alliances. It’s not a special category; it’s just what happens when you have a lot of allies who are loyal to you” (30:45), which is his answer to Ganzach’s claim that the Trump coalition is about one man’s personality: on the model, the man is what a coalition looks like from outside. And conformity “can be a defensive strategy in the simple majority game. If you want to prevent others from ganging up on you, it’s good to blend in” (27:15), with nostalgia proposed as a solution to the copycat problem because “you cannot change the past” (27:41), which he then ties to “Make America Great Again” (28:52).
Here is the answer to Ganzach. His objection was that Alliance Theory explains alliance by similarity without saying which similarities count, so values sneak back in. Pinsof says, at 23:03: “Does the model predict what specific types of similarity will lead to alliances? I think it does. We can say four things: similarity should be common knowledge, salient, categorical, and exclusive.” Height fails because it is continuous; “examples of categorical variables that are often used to form alliances include race: you have dark skin or light skin; residence: north or south; you wear the yarmulke or you don’t; you worship our god or you don’t; you vote for our party or you don’t” (26:04 to 26:26). Values, on this account, are poor coordination devices, since they are continuous, hard to make common knowledge, and easy to fake, while side-taking markers are what the strategy needs. One catch for Brandt and Cassario: the last item on his list is party, which is the identification problem stated as a feature.
The second half is Strange Bedfellows, with two things the paper lacks. First, a defense against the status-only reading, using Mark Brandt’s own data: Brandt’s ideology-only model “was three to six times more predictive than the status-only model” and “adding status as a variable added no additional predictive power” (45:22 to 45:36). That bears on Petersen and Marie’s commentary and gives Brandt a second role in the essay. Second, the anti-essentialism the Set section attributes to him, in his own words: after listing the American alliance structure, “what I want to argue is that the answer could easily be nothing. There doesn’t need to be a deeper pattern here. I think as scientists we should stop looking for one. Politics is not like Star Wars with the dark side and the light side. Politics is like Mean Girls, Game of Thrones, and Chimp Empire” (46:56 to 47:15). “The primary difference between liberals and conservatives is not what values they hold, but whom they view as their allies” (52:56).
The Pulse of the Nation data appear here as slides, which settles two things. The double-standards analysis he told you he never wrote up exists as a talk, with within-subjects Venn diagrams, and the sample discrepancy the other reviewer flagged is resolved: “800 participants per survey,” several surveys, “dial-in surveys, nationally representative samples,” restricted to self-identified liberals and conservatives (58:04 to 58:21). The items are the ones the Set essay and the stereotype paper rely on. Conservatives who agree that nobody deserves a handout and that the heartland needs help (58:32). Conservatives who want more respect for authority and want businesses to resist regulators, “nearly 100 percent” overlap (59:35 to 1:00:02). Conservatives who are suspicious of foreigners and trust Putin (1:00:30). Liberals who reject stereotypes by birthplace and think Southerners are racist (1:01:11). Liberals who hold Trump voters responsible for Charlottesville but not Muslims for terrorism (1:02:06). Liberals who back a woman’s right to her body and oppose selling a kidney, “given that women are people and kidneys are a part of the body” (1:03:14 to 1:03:35). Liberals who find CEO pay unfair and movie-star pay fair (1:03:42). He states the limitation himself: the published examples “are actually coming from different polls,” and “ideally we’d want within-subjects data” (57:44 to 57:50), which is why the Pulse items matter. Ganzach’s point stands in one respect and falls in another. Every item is Trump-era, and every item is within-subject, which is more than the paper offered.
The ending explains the reply’s title. The moral-values model has “a lot of weird loop-de-loops called epicycles” and Alliance Theory is the Copernican alternative, “a more elegant, parsimonious model where alliances are at the center of our political solar system” (1:05:06 to 1:05:27), though “I’m not arrogant enough to cast myself as the Copernicus of political psychology” (1:05:34). The parsimony value is the same one he used against the doomers ten months earlier, and the Lakatos section can note that the man who titled his reply “Strange Epicycles” thinks in Kuhn’s example and Lakatos’s terms.
Susanne Lohmann’s introduction calls him “the CEO of, uh, co-founder of Cards Against Humanity” (0:33), which is the university’s own uncertainty about what he is. And on why any of this matters: “our ancestors almost certainly played this game… you and I are likely to be descended from the winners, which means we have inherited their winning strategies” (36:40 to 37:11).
‘Examples of Good Evolutionary Psychology’ (July 1, 2025)
The setup is the “who said what” paradigm: people categorize by age, sex, and race automatically, race “usually black versus white” (30:19), and social psychology spent decades trying to reduce race categorization and could not (1:16:06). The alliance hypothesis of race says “there would not have been selection pressures on the mind for categorizing people by race. In contrast, there would have been selection pressures on the mind for tracking alliances” (47:48 to 48:01), race being a cue that alliance-tracking software picks up in a world where race predicts alliance. The test: show people two cooperative groups with equal numbers of Black and White members, and race categorization drops while sex and age do not (1:03:09 to 1:08:23), which rules out simple attention-shifting. Pinsof’s summary: “we run the test, humans categorize by alliance and not by race. We have eliminated the tendency to categorize by race… they called the paper, can race be erased? And of course the answer that the paper gave was yes, it can. I find this to be a really inspiring success story for the field” (1:06:52 to 1:07:23). Pietraszewski’s own finding, which he calls his contribution, is that race is “encoded but inhibited” rather than ignored, “promiscuously encode but selectively retrieve” (1:10:33 to 1:11:45), which he says he had not predicted because “I wasn’t even being adaptationist enough” (1:12:04).
Pinsof explains why a well-designed system would keep race available: “it would be very foolish to forget about race altogether. What you want to do is keep the information online, keep it available, but just suppress it because there’s a more relevant cue right now in this particular situation” (1:13:18 to 1:13:29). He offers the workplace example himself: a Black employee accuses the organization of discrimination, “these issues could easily crop up as they do in workplaces around the country” (1:13:06 to 1:13:18). That is a description of the mind’s handling of race on the alliance hypothesis, and it is also, word for word, a description of how Pinsof handles the subject in his work: encoded, available, and inhibited in favor of the alliance cue.
Pietraszewski: “weirdly, we’re not allowed to think there’s a system for categorization by race. It’s got to be a byproduct of another system, because of an evolutionary history where race was not present, and because we’re only allowed to stipulate that there would be software in the mind around adaptive problems” (1:16:25 to 1:16:46). “Not allowed” is a statement of theoretical discipline, that adaptations must answer to ancestral problems and race was not one, and it doubles as the rule that keeps the field on the species-typical side of the line. The two men frame the whole segment as “important socially relevant insight” (2:03) about “racial prejudice” (2:09), which is the register in which the field prefers to meet the subject.
Pinsof on the just-so-story charge: it “can be a fair criticism of some bad evolutionary psychology” (16:24), but “what I find ironic about the just-so story idea is that it itself is often unfalsifiable. A lot of people will just lazily say that some idea I present is unfalsifiable, and then I’ll say, well, actually, no, here’s how you could falsify it… and what I sometimes get is, well, no, I don’t believe you. Which suggests to me that the idea that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable is itself unfalsifiable” (17:03 to 17:43). He adds that he has these arguments “in petty debates with people on the internet when I blog” (17:20). And the pair’s answer to why the just-so charge misses, which is the best short statement of the adaptationist method on the record: Pietraszewski’s eyeglasses example, that “a nose is not designed to hold eyeglasses well at all, it’s really eyeglasses that are well designed to stay on noses” (1:18:03 to 1:18:27), and Pinsof’s mantra, “form follows function,” with the claim that “evolution is the only source of anti-entropic functional organization we know of” (1:19:14 to 1:19:45). Whether a theory of function forbids anything about form is exactly the Meehl question, and the race-erasure result is the one case in this literature where it did.
Pietraszewski lists the domains where the approach has been tested, “the shame, the guilt work, the anger work, the racial categorization alliance work, Annie’s work on learning about food and plants in children” (1:27:13 to 1:27:21), and adds “David, your work on humor, another example” (1:20:33), which places the humor paper, then unwritten, inside the field’s canon of successes by its cohost. And he says the limiting problem is “not predictions, it’s not knowing what to look for, it’s actually having a community of people to start to test these ideas” (1:27:00 to 1:27:13), which is Boyer’s twenty-people point from the supply side.
‘This is Your Brain on Bullsh*t – David Pinsof’ (Aug. 14, 2025)
The happiness argument comes first and it is the weakest part. His regress runs like this: “If you need happiness to get us to want stuff, then how does evolution get us to want happiness? Does it have to give us happiness when we get happiness?” (1:42). The regress only bites if happiness is an object of desire. If happiness is the reinforcer, the signal that strengthens the behavior that produced it, no regress arises, and that is the standard reinforcement-learning picture. His positive account, that happiness is “a mechanism that evolved by natural selection” to “recalibrate our expectations and motivations when something turns out to be better than we expected” (3:38, 3:56), is reward prediction error, which Schultz and colleagues found in dopamine neurons in the 1990s. He is describing a settled literature as if it were his heresy. The addiction passage, “the addict wants the drug itself, not the high” (7:22), is Berridge and Robinson’s wanting-versus-liking distinction, thirty years old. Meehl would say the theory is fine and the claim to novelty is the bullshit.
An opinion, he says, is “a preference plus a set of judgments you make about the people who share your preferences and about the people who don’t” (15:52). Sharing one is trying “to change social norms such that people are praised when they eat at McDonald’s and condemned when they don’t” (17:19). So opinions are “battles over what social norms are going to prevail” (17:45), and their paradox is the one from the American Psychologist paper: “we have to fight over social norms while concealing the fact that we’re fighting over social norms” (22:14). The Shakespeare passage (19:51 to 21:49) is the stereotype-license argument in another costume. The norm of praising Shakespeare, he says, “benefits the people who have read Shakespeare, who can read Shakespeare, who are smarter, who are more well educated” (20:45), and anyone who has not read him has an interest in calling him overrated. Ask of any norm who it benefits, then swap the group. That is the method of the whole project, and here it is applied to taste, where nobody gets hurt.
Williamson supplies the phrase the essay has been missing. His improv rule, “don’t punk the game” (23:13), names why the reflexive move works and why calling out a status game is a status move. Pinsof takes it: “if pointing out someone’s status motive lowers their status and increases your status, well then that itself can be seen as a status tactic” (24:51), and when a game is called out “the hierarchy kind of gets inverted” and “everybody who is playing that game has a vested interest in keeping it stable” (25:32). That is the mechanism behind the cynicism arms race in the Set, in his own words.
The biographical fact is at 30:02. The replication crisis, he says, was a status game inverted: the people who first published failed replications “were called replication bullies, replication police, methodological terrorists. I know this because I was in grad school” (30:13). He was at UCLA from 2013 to 2018, the exact years, and his account of who lashed out, “the people who were high status in the field who had resumes padded with shitty studies” (30:38), is what he watched in his own department.
Then the prediction. Status games “are constantly collapsing and reemerging in antithetical forms” (33:50), and “it used to be that you got a lot of status for having quote unquote woke beliefs. I think that status game is starting to collapse and invert” (34:47).
The self-diagnosis he does not notice comes at the end. Williamson asks how much of a deepity’s appeal is “sounding profound without also risking status” (1:00:55), and Pinsof answers, “Yes, exactly. It’s a low-risk way of getting status from having a provocative, counterintuitive idea” (1:01:02). He then defines the motte and bailey: “put forward an extreme position” and, when challenged, “walk back to a much more moderate position” (59:36). His own titles are the case. “Everything Is Bullshit” is the bailey; “some things are more functional than they look” is the motte. He has described the structure of his own brand.
The consciousness talk he gave at HBES in 2026 is seeded at 39:55: “I need to have a model of how you see me so that I can adjust how you see me… I think that is largely what our sense of self is about. It’s a kind of selfie cam that is installed into our brains” (40:18, 40:29). Note it as the origin, then ask him whether the HBES paper is the same claim with a model attached.
The “autistic-adjacent people” passage (51:33) says people who bring restaurant-choosing rationality into politics “get frustrated that nobody is sharing their way of thinking,” and adds “I myself have made it a lot of times” (52:26). That is the rationalist audience he lost with the AI essay, described in advance and with himself in it. And the claim that his comment section is the rare place of good-faith debate, “maybe I scare away bullshitters” (50:25), is the one moment in the hour where he flatters his own coalition.
‘Belief with Dan Williams’ (Sep. 23, 2025)
Asked whether understanding the social causes of belief helps in life, Williams says his mother would not benefit from “an understanding of socially adaptive beliefs” and “it might even be disadvantageous,” but “in the scientific project we’re trying to understand the way that the world really is,” and that matters “when it comes to stepping back and thinking about society, thinking about social organization, thinking about the kinds of political projects that are likely to work, thinking more reflectively about the human condition” (1:08:55 to 1:09:48). Pinsof: “That was really well put, Dan. I agree with 100 percent of it, and I’m inclined to say the exact same things” (1:10:06 to 1:10:18). The claim that accurate knowledge of human nature matters for designing institutions and political projects is the core of “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment.” Pinsof endorsed it in full ten weeks before writing the essay that Williams read as denying it. The Lakatos section’s list of reversals gets its cleanest entry, and the fair reading is the one Williams himself later offered: the two men agree about the machinery and disagree about how much the understanders can do with it.
Pietraszewski has been describing Bacon’s idols as an informal catalog of coalitional adaptations. Pinsof: “So I think Jordan Peterson is full of shit, right? But I haven’t done my homework. It’s a totally unjustified belief. I haven’t actually read the guy” (53:57 to 54:13). Then: “it’s so deeply uncool in my cultural social group to be into Jordan Peterson, and that uncoolness has infected my epistemology. I truly believe that he’s full of shit, but I don’t think I have legitimate reasons other than that I just feel that he’s so deeply uncool in my group” (54:32 to 54:55). Williams’s answer is generous and is also the Mercier point: you may have “higher-order evidence” from “the people who you trust,” and distinguishing belief formed for social benefit from belief formed by relying on a trusted network is “often quite difficult to tease apart” (55:46 to 56:49). Pinsof’s own verdict is that it is “a weird schizophrenia in myself” (55:41). That exchange belongs in Pinsof on Pinsof, and it is a better version of the point than anything I wrote there, because he supplies the badge, the coalition, and the admission that the reasons came afterward.
On handling hostility: “the fact that I almost kind of play a character on Everything Is Bullshit, I think that gives me some cover, that people know that it’s kind of tongue in cheek, and I get less backlash because of that. I found that that’s a pretty good strategy in terms of avoiding backlash, just to be playful about it and find the humor in it… helping the medicine of this message go down” (1:17:13 to 1:17:40). He adds that writing beats speaking because “I don’t have to deal with people’s facial expressions” (1:17:46 to 1:17:58), that “hostility against evolution, hostility against cynicism, and when you combine them, you get double hostility” (1:18:13), and that “part of me kind of likes the thrill of pushing back against the conventional wisdom” (1:18:26 to 1:18:33). The character is a buried signal, as he told Colin Campbell about the card game; here it is a shield, and he says so.
The theory, he says, “makes me less surprised by things happening in the world,” which is “a good way of checking whether your world model is accurate” (1:11:28 to 1:11:43). Then the example: Republicans reversing on tariffs, “first the tariffs are great and you don’t have to worry about prices increasing, well, consumerism is really just a bad thing,” and “people have come to me like, wow, isn’t this such amazing evidence for Alliance Theory? I’m like, oh yeah, I barely noticed it, it just kind of was part of the background radiation of my life” (1:11:54 to 1:12:37). He catches the problem himself: “maybe that’s a bad thing, like maybe I should be more surprised by this” (1:12:45). Meehl would say a theory that removes surprise from every outcome has stopped taking risks, and Pinsof half says it for him. The tariff reversal is also a post-2020 double standard, which is one answer to Ganzach’s dating complaint, delivered in passing.
Williams says the failure to see strategic social motives behind belief is not “an ordinary theoretical omission”; there are “interesting things to say about why it is that it’s often a little bit awkward to acknowledge the role of things like status competition and reputation management and propaganda” (12:29 to 13:07), and that even the cynical traditions, the Freudian and the motivated-reasoning ones, stop at “protecting your ego” and “believing things that make you feel good” and will not go “one step further” to “winning these social games, it’s propaganda, it’s advocacy” (16:10 to 16:41). Pinsof’s reply is the concealment thesis: “the social games we play have to be played in the cover of darkness, or at least without becoming common knowledge among the players,” which “might explain why it has taken so long for us to realize the social games we’re playing” (13:45 to 14:06). And Williams on misinformation research: the field is skewed left, “your prior should be that if you’ve got an entire field where people share political allegiances, that’s going to influence” what they study and how (1:21:09 to 1:21:32); when he pointed this out, Time magazine cited him as “defending the authoritarian agenda,” which “for anyone who knows anything about my political views” is “absolutely absurd” (1:22:11 to 1:22:37), and the lesson is the with-us-or-against-us inference, “so destructive to science” because science’s standing rests on its claim to escape “familiar forms of coalitional politics” (1:22:44 to 1:23:44). That is the academy paper’s thesis with a case attached, spoken by the man the essay calls Pinsof’s sparring partner, and the two of them are on the same side of it.
Pietraszewski credits the idea that “argument is a service for coalitional entrepreneurship,” that a good argument is intrinsically “a coalitional opportunity,” as “more of a David Pinsof idea” (49:46 to 50:33). Pinsof’s pseudo-belief account appears here in the form he gave Mercier three months later, with the butterfly-mimicry analogy: “the goal is to make it difficult to tell the difference between real belief and fake belief, and that is why it’s so hard for psychologists to tell the difference, because that difficulty is by design” (36:10 to 36:29). And Williams’s closing counsel: “you should embrace a kind of skepticism, but what are you going to do with that? You have to participate in this game of life,” make the best case “in a relatively humble way,” and skip the fifty-thousand-word blog post of qualifications (1:29:53 to 1:31:08).
‘Reasoning and Epistemic Vigilance with Hugo Mercier’ (Dec. 9, 2025)
Pinsof pitches three of his own ideas to the scholar he cites most, and Mercier declines two of them and trims the third.
The first pitch is cooperative bullshitting. After Mercier says confabulated justifications survive only when they suit everyone, Pinsof extends it: in political groups “you get a kind of cooperative bullshitting where we come up with a story that justifies the agenda of our group, maybe we spin a utopian narrative that if we pursue this objective it’s going to create a utopia on earth” (22:28 to 22:41). Mercier agrees and then removes the causal arrow: these cultural productions “are not really causally efficacious. People want to do something in the first place and then they’re going to confabulate some justification that everybody’s happy to accept… it’s not as if someone convinces them that witches exist and then they start seeing witches everywhere” (23:00 to 23:24). That is Ganzach’s “interests to ideology” abbreviation stated by a friend: the propaganda in Strange Bedfellows is downstream of the alliance and does no work of its own. Pinsof does not dispute it, and the essay can note that the theory’s most sympathetic reader treats its narratives as epiphenomena.
The second pitch is the design-feature account of self-blindness. “Do you think the inability of us to detect our own biases is itself a design feature of this system?” (26:29). The witch hunt is the example: if I know I am accusing this man to avoid helping him, “that’s going to really lower my chances of successfully accusing that guy,” so awareness “might leak out and it might make our arguments less convincing,” and “I have an incentive to frame my arguing and reasoning as a kind of disinterested, dispassionate truth-seeking” (26:42 to 27:34). Mercier says no. “I don’t think you need anything specifically designed to not do something that is cognitively tremendously hard in the first place… there’s no pressure for that mechanism to evolve, and so it doesn’t evolve. Its absence doesn’t need an explanation” (27:40 to 28:04); we have theory of mind for others and do not turn it on ourselves because “understanding it isn’t going to help you by default” (28:37 to 28:43). This matters for the Procel-episode correction. In April 2025 Pinsof had abandoned Trivers’s self-deception for the rehearsal account; here, eight months later, he floats a design-feature version again, and Mercier gives him the byproduct answer that the rehearsal account already implied. The Lakatos section can record both moves: an auxiliary hypothesis dropped, then half-revived, then declined by the man whose work prompted the dropping.
The third pitch is the one that comes from “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes,” and it is the best statement on record of how Pinsof thinks beliefs become badges. “As soon as you have a cue-based inference where everyone in a society is drawing an inference, if X then Y, that creates a social incentive for everyone to transform that cue into a signal. If I start drawing the inference about you that if you believe that fetuses are people, therefore you are a loyal Republican, that gives you an incentive to conspicuously signal that you believe fetuses are people” (1:14:38 to 1:15:09). Reflective beliefs are thus “pseudo beliefs”: “I’m trying to mimic the superficial properties of belief in order to get you to think certain things about me… a pseudo belief in the same way that pseudoscience is a mimicry of science” (1:15:46 to 1:16:12). Mercier accepts it as “part of the answer” and adds the constraint: “people still have to have some motivation for accepting it as well,” the belief “still has to pass at least a minimum threshold of epistemic vigilance,” the popular conspiracy theories are the plausible ones, and “you can’t just decide, well, now we’re all going to signal that we believe the moon is made of cheese, because the thing is not going to spread in the first place” (1:16:24 to 1:17:53). That is a boundary condition Alliance Theory needs and does not state: coalition badges must be credible to someone before they can be worn.
Mercier’s pushback on the thesis itself, before any pitch: “I don’t think it’s that unreliable… if you gave people a motive that had nothing to do with your actual motives, most people would call you up on it, and most of the justifications we give are actually decent justifications” (16:05 to 16:38). And the joke that is the Set’s reflexivity move in one line. Pinsof: the reason “we’re starting this podcast is because we’re interested in reaching the truth and spreading truth to the masses. That might be a kind of confabulation.” Pietraszewski: “the exception, though, is that it’s true in our case, but in everyone else’s case it’s not” (14:28 to 14:46).
Pietraszewski, arguing with Mercier about advertising, sugar subsidies, and choice architecture, takes the structural side, that people are “stuck at this one equilibrium” because of “lobbying and ads” (1:27:10 to 1:27:44), and Mercier answers that “a lot of people just like SUVs” and that ads work only within a category of identical products (1:26:32, 1:29:19). Pinsof stays out of it. Of the two hosts, the one who reaches for structure is Pietraszewski.
‘The Origins of Evolutionary Psychology with Martin Daly’ (March 31, 2026)
Daly has been describing the link between inequality and homicide, and Pinsof adds a mechanism: “the more that resources become captured by the political process, the more resources turn into a zero-sum game, because competition for political power is zero-sum, whereas in theory you could have a win-win relationship where we both get richer by exchanging and creating wealth together. But if how much wealth you have depends on your connections, and there are limited opportunities for win-win gains and for social mobility, then it may be that violence becomes a more rational strategy” (1:09:43 to 1:10:23). Daly agrees that both games run at once and concedes the point in Pinsof’s favor: “the idea of gains from trade isn’t just propaganda from some free trader. It really exists” (1:10:35 to 1:10:49). The founder had just said, a few minutes earlier, that resistance to his inequality findings is “partly funded by the people who are beneficiaries of extreme inequality,” and mocked the view that “if we give even more money to Jeff Bezos then no one will be poor” (1:02:01 to 1:02:32). Pinsof’s reframing moves the problem from inequality to political capture, which is the free-market reading of Daly’s data, and Daly lets it stand. That is worth a sentence in the Four Questions.
“Everybody’s a pretty good intuitive evolutionary psychologist… they get that men value status and compete with one another, and that being dissed is a problem to which men often react, and that they don’t like the alienation of their wives either” (58:24 to 58:55). Pietraszewski asks whether the work reminds people of what they know; the answer, in the hosts’ framing, is that the evolutionary approach “licenses us to re-see with clarity what we might otherwise want to attribute to some highfalutin ideology. It’s sort of the self-report thing” (59:40 to 59:52), and Daly adds that “a lot of people have been conned into believing that somehow having been raised in a particular place made them care about all the things that everybody everywhere cares about” (1:00:18 to 1:00:31). That is the Pinsof thesis, that stated reasons cover universal motives, endorsed by the man who measured it in homicide records for forty years.
Daly says Cosmides has been emailing him to remind him “how much flak the evolution and human behavior approach used to get and the hostility of the Goulds and Lewontins,” and answers that he “never felt like we were that besieged” because evolutionary biology “was in our corner” (13:07 to 14:06). But he marvels that there “were and are” biologists for whom “the minute you talk about Homo sapiens, you’re obviously some kind of fascist” (20:12 to 20:31). And on the academy now: it “nurtures or squashes courage of the sort you’re talking about, and I think it’s in a little bit more of a squashing than nurturing kind of state now” (1:37:51 to 1:38:08). Pietraszewski’s gloss is the sharper one: senior people say “I could have never gotten a job now,” which is a compliment and also an admission that “we’ve created a selective regime that’s selecting out the rebellious, subversive-minded folks” in favor of “conformity to existing approaches” (1:38:16 to 1:39:00). He also gives the reason he chose Tooby and Cosmides, that “it takes a certain amount of courage” (1:37:07 to 1:37:26). Tooby’s joke, relayed by Pietraszewski, that the grant system “was evidence that aliens were trying to prevent science from happening” (1:43:13 to 1:43:26), appears here as well as in the Boyer episode, so it is a fixed piece of the set’s lore.
Religions that hold “evolution is evil and wrong” are “in the USA too, and some of them may even have influence over the future of educational policy in the US in the near future. That’s terrifying and disappointing and crazy” (1:25:34 to 1:25:54). Neither host responds.
Daly’s test for success: “the day we know we’ve succeeded is the day you just drop the evolutionary from the label. You’re doing psychology” (1:26:48 to 1:26:54). And his old grievance, useful for the Meehl section, that social psychology was “the social psychology of strangers for decades,” when “most of what the social psyche is about is acquaintances and relatives and friends and enemies,” which he calls “a dumb way to investigate fundamental social processes” (1:36:16 to 1:36:47). Pinsof’s theory is about allies and enemies and his data come from online strangers, which is a tension Daly names.
‘Founding Evolutionary Psychology with Leda Cosmides’ (April 7, 2026)
Pinsof brings up Dawkins’s regret at titling The Selfish Gene: “I actually think he’s wrong. I think it’s correct to call it the selfish gene… you cannot judge the utility of a metaphor or framing based on the misunderstandings of people. You have to judge it by its clarity and its insight among the people who do understand it” (1:53:13 to 1:53:39). Then the confession: “you’re making me think that, yeah, I sometimes regret using the term propaganda, or propagandistic bias, in my paper on political belief systems” (1:53:44 to 1:53:50). Cosmides: “I disagree with that, David. I think it’s great. I think propaganda should be called out when it is” (1:53:50 to 1:53:56). Pinsof: “you’re making me think that maybe I shouldn’t regret that… it’s kind of a harsh way of putting it, but I also think it’s an insightful way of putting it” (1:53:56 to 1:54:08). The harshest word in Strange Bedfellows, the one Ganzach and Jost would seize on, was a word its author had second thoughts about, and the founder of his field told him to keep it.
Defending the critique of the standard social science model against the charge that it was harsh, Cosmides says it was “a very sympathetic rendering of why people would go in that direction, a desire to not be racist, to not be sexist. It’s just that they were wrong that the alternative implies that you will be racist… The people were not understanding the difference between causes of individual differences and universal aspects of human nature” (1:51:14 to 1:51:42). That is the species-typical versus individual-difference distinction as the founders drew it, and it is the distinction the Set essay says the discipline’s standing rests on. She adds that behavior geneticists were angry at the universality paper “because they said we’re saying they’re just studying noise” (1:52:21 to 1:52:35). Nobody on the episode extends the point to group differences; the line is stated and left there.
“When you ask questions in a talk of somebody, it should never be hostile… when you’re writing a review, there’s no call for being angry” (1:55:43 to 1:56:02). “It’s important for science to be polite, because in science people have to be willing to acknowledge when they were wrong about something, and if you make this about them as a human being, that you’re destroying them as a person, they will never admit when they’re wrong… it’s mean, but more than that, it’s bad for science” (1:56:15 to 1:56:36). Her model is the British seminar where people tear each other apart and drink together after: “we’re just all stuck on this island, so we have to get along” (1:56:55 to 1:57:13). Pietraszewski turns the Symons-Brown bet into a rule, “the pitcher-of-beer litmus test” (1:57:19 to 1:57:25). The Set essay describes a cynicism arms race with no ceiling; the founder’s norm is a ceiling, and Pinsof’s actual conduct, with Williams and with Pietraszewski, follows her rather than the set.
On Haidt’s moral dumbfounding, she agrees it happens, then argues that political and moral argument changes minds “because you’re seeing that there’s a part of the issue that you just had not considered before” (1:37:42 to 1:38:06), with the drafted-versus-volunteer soldier as the example (1:38:43 to 1:39:33), and she rejects the economists’ fixed utility function in favor of ones “generated on the fly in response to situations” (1:40:17 to 1:40:31). That is a founder saying reasons do work in political disagreement, and it sits closer to Williams than to “A Big Misunderstanding.” It is also worth recording that the field began in meliorism: the Vietnam-era suburb where “everybody just seemed angry all the time” and the thought that “there has to be a better way for people to live,” which required knowing human nature, and Walden Two read twice in tenth grade (5:05 to 6:16).
Pinsof tells Cosmides that what she and Tooby did was work as “a contemporary historian of science,” which “is surprisingly rare… because there are status games and it takes courage to speak up when the real flesh and blood stuff is happening” (1:27:10 to 1:27:45). Her reply is the charity principle: “it’s always better to assume that people aren’t idiots… if they’re making assumptions that are different than the ones that you’re making, they probably have reasons” (1:28:15 to 1:28:54). And on the difficulty of thinking about minds as machines: “I sometimes have a hard time doing that. It’s hard to let go of the fact that I’m a little homunculus that’s seeking mental substances of good vibes and bad vibes” (1:01:30 to 1:01:37). The author of “Happiness Is Bullshit” admits he cannot feel the theory from inside, and Cosmides answers that she teaches “entirely from the artifact module point of view” (1:01:43).
Pietraszewski says he did not realize how rare it was to respect what is true “until I continued in the academy,” and that “there really is a difference between academics and scientists” (1:58:18 to 1:58:36). Cosmides: “that human nature thing sometimes gets in the way.” Pinsof: “There’s a lot of strong selection pressures to not be a scientist” (1:59:02 to 1:59:07).
Pinsof says Cosmides’s account of the theory-crisis reception of her Wason work will be used by “some future historian of science” (59:57), which is what your essay is. And on merch, black with white type: “it has a very Cards Against Humanity aesthetic, actually. It wasn’t what I was going for,” and it is “kind of crazy that we were able to lock in black and white Helvetica” as a brand (2:01:56 to 2:02:21).
‘Your Best Values Are Status Games in Disguise | David Pinsof on Human Nature’ (May 19, 2026)
After Frankfurt’s definition, bullshit as “a reckless disregard for what is true” (0:05), he offers a variant of Hanlon: “We should never attribute to lying that which can be attributed to bullshitting” (1:33). Bullshit beats lying because “if you get caught lying, no one could ever trust you again, but if you get caught bullshitting, people might get annoyed” (0:52). That is the whole blog’s charity principle. His targets are never liars.
The charisma passage (36:16 to 40:02) is the social-paradox list read aloud and then applied. “We bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us. We don’t care what other people think and we want them to think that. We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else. We show humility to prove that we’re morally superior. We consume anti-consumerism” (36:45 to 37:14). The common thread is “a social signal that is concealed from both the signaller and the recipient” (37:26), and the paradox is that “the act of concealing my virtue signaling is itself a signal” (38:15). Charisma is then “a person who is good at playing these social games” (39:05), whose magnetism “is kind of mysterious because we don’t know how they achieved it” (39:41), and who “can manipulate you without being manipulative” (41:45). He adds that charismatic people are “the opposite” of authentic, having “carefully manicured their affectations” (40:47), and that they carry “tools for becoming a cult leader” (42:09). The “Charisma Is Bullshit” post and the abstract’s promise of a charisma account both come from here.
Then the new idea. The host asks why we fall for charisma, and Pinsof answers that “the biggest resource to us is social” (43:24), that “if I’m the one person in the tribe who sees through the manipulation… my genes are fucked” (44:21 to 44:35), and that charisma is therefore “a kind of symbiotic deception in which the deceiver and the deceived are both benefiting” (44:52). “We might have been selected to fall for the charismatic performer insofar as we can expect other people to fall for that performance as well” (45:12). He calls it “an underexplored idea in evolutionary psychology,” says “as far as I’m aware, no one has had this insight before,” and says it “deserves mathematical modeling” (46:48 to 47:06). That is the charm clause of the 4D Chess abstract, dated. Two notes for the essay. First, it answers the Dunbar objection in advance: the pretenders win by recruitment, and this is where he said so. Second, the novelty claim needs checking. Deferring to whoever the crowd defers to is prestige-biased transmission in Henrich and Boyd, and the argument that gullibility can be adaptive when it buys coordination is close to what Mercier argues against in “Not Born Yesterday.” His version, that the deceived benefit because the deceiver will have allies, is sharper than either, but “no one has had this insight” is the kind of sentence the countersignaling section exists to test.
Cynicism, he says, should be “consistent, genuine cynicism that applies to yourself just as much as everyone else” (53:16), and most cynics “are cynical about everyone but themselves, or about their political opponents but not their political allies” (53:27). Then the boundary: “it’s good to be cynical about humanity in general, and it’s good to be cynical about institutions… but when you’re thinking about individual people, that is when cynicism is less valuable” (54:27 to 54:48), because “some humans are real psychopaths and some humans are really wonderful. There’s some real saints out there” (55:00). And the personal-life version: seeing through bullshit is good “when pursuing the intellectual life, but when it comes to one’s personal life, I might set that goal aside” (1:13:07). The bio’s line that his cynicism concerns human self-description is right and can now be his: the target is institutions and the species, and the exemption for individuals and for home is stated policy rather than inconsistency. He also sides with Mary Douglas. A world with no concealment “would be the seventh circle of hell” (1:10:01); politeness exists because “if truth emerged, it would destroy our relationships” (1:10:58).
He implicates himself twice. After explaining that losers adopt cynicism to make the game collapse, citing Petersen’s need-for-chaos research (58:17), he adds: “that just might be my own self-interested strategy as someone who’s winning a status game and who doesn’t want it to be torn down by losers” (59:06). And asked which taught him more about human nature, the card game or the PhD, he says “the PhD in evolutionary psychology,” that from the company “I’ve learned a lot about comedy, about business and branding,” but “in terms of insights about human nature, it’s no comparison” (1:00:33 to 1:00:49).
Inspiration, he suggests, is “partly gauging the stability of the status game and whether it’s worth our time and energy to invest in it” (8:28), which is a new functional claim and not in the papers. Effective altruism appears as “a positive status game” (13:03) minutes before utilitarianism is called “the culmination of the worst parts of Western culture” (35:02); the two are consistent on his terms, the institution is good and the stated motive is bullshit. And his positive moral view is named: “a kind of particularism where what’s right depends on the particulars of the situation and not on some overall maximizing principle” (27:41), with the admission “I used to be a utilitarian myself” (18:33).
The humor section (1:02:51 to 1:09:13) is the preprint explained: laughter descends from the play signal in chimpanzees, a joke is “a mix-up in a coordination game” (1:05:13), and laughter “creates common knowledge that there has been a mix-up” and that “we’re not treating this as actual communication” (1:08:30, 1:08:59). The “hooked up with my mother” example (1:08:09) is the theory in one line.
‘Pathogens with Josh Ackerman’ (June 2, 2026)
Pinsof: in a world with many false positives, “where people are assumed to be unclean or unhygienic or impure or contamination risk for whatever reason even though they’re perfectly fine, that itself can become a selection pressure… you might have to actively perform certain rituals or send certain signals to minimize that risk that you’re going to be excluded and ganged up on or treated as a pariah, and you might want to incur lots of costs to really signal to people that you’re not a contamination risk” (1:21:47 to 1:22:29). Ackerman: “that’s an excellent point, David, we didn’t set this up in advance, but that’s sort of the direction that some of my work is going in these days” (1:22:35 to 1:22:41). It is “Everything Is Signaling” applied to disease, defensive signaling against a classification, and it is the purity half of Mary Douglas.
Pinsof predicts that people hide illness to avoid “eliciting other people’s anger, sort of like I’m getting away with a transgression of putting people at risk,” since knowingly exposing others “could signal that I have a low welfare trade-off ratio toward other people” (1:26:08 to 1:26:43). Ackerman has the numbers: about 75 percent of people hide contagious illness, over 50 percent among hospital workers during COVID (1:30:36 to 1:30:56); asked why, only 20 percent cite other people’s reactions, 5 percent cite lack of sick leave, and the majority give a mix of not wanting to burden colleagues and, “equally as strongly,” what he calls FOMO, “they are just prioritizing their own goal” (1:27:14 to 1:28:27). Ackerman adds that this is “at least in terms of their top-of-mind explanations” (1:29:00), which is the caveat Pinsof’s whole program rests on, and Pietraszewski jokes that the subset who excuse themselves should “sit down with David” for an intervention (1:30:24). Pinsof’s own moment of taking self-report as informative comes earlier, on the COVID distinction between disgust and worry: “during COVID I wasn’t really feeling a lot of disgust or being grossed out by things, I was just worried about getting COVID,” citing Tybur’s data that disgust did not move during the pandemic (1:08:31 to 1:08:43).
“Disgust and disease fears can be very profitably mobilized by political entrepreneurs and used to generate opposition to a particular group” (1:17:03 to 1:17:15), with Ackerman adding the long history of “using language to trigger disgust” against other groups (1:17:15 to 1:17:20). That is the demonization-narrative material from the Sugiyama episode in the vocabulary of the behavioral immune system, and it is the second time on the podcast that the hatred grant’s subject comes up without the grant being named.
On niche selection, Pietraszewski: “this is also David’s point about choosing a status scheme” (37:40). On the chef who works with a cold: “it’s a common knowledge problem. David, this is another thing you got to get on, common knowledge pathogen avoidance” (1:37:21). Nobody knocks the chef, Pietraszewski says, because “there’s not common knowledge” of a norm that he should mask (1:37:38 to 1:37:44). Status schemes and common knowledge are the two tools Pinsof brings to every episode, and his cohost names them as his.
Pietraszewski asks the name of the theme. “It’s Manafort,” Pinsof says; “it was totally random, I think I might have been watching a documentary where Paul Manafort was mentioned and it was just on my head and I needed a title” (1:41:38 to 1:41:50). So the podcast’s theme is called “Manafort” for no reason, which is the kind of fact a biography exists to record. The outro also settles the show’s economics: the Patreon has brought in, by their count, “ten cents” (1:42:33), which they propose to spend on a Snickers bar.
Pinsof spends the episode urging listeners to watch Survivor, “the psychology of alliances, it’s just one big alliance game… there’s no better source of data for how humans make alliance decisions than just watching Survivor” (49:15 to 49:28), and Pietraszewski declares the episode “sponsored by Survivor” (2:24). Ackerman, it turns out, once consulted for The Bachelor on friendship coalitions (50:48 to 51:05). The Alliance Theorist’s preferred dataset is a reality show.
‘Cooperation in the field with Kris Smith’ (June 9, 2026)
Pinsof, who told me all science should move toward mathematics, says here: “I feel like I’ve learned more from just the anecdotes that anthropologists have told me about life in the field and with these people. I’ve just learned more and developed better intuitions about it than with any particular data point” (1:02:59 to 1:03:11), and calls “straight up ethnography, just people living in a community and just writing qualitatively about their experiences,” “tremendously valuable and underrated” (1:01:44 to 1:01:57). That is the same man who wants a formal model of status and who, in the Ross episode, agreed that explanation requires control. He opens the episode saying Smith’s fieldwork “changed my mind about a few things in the evolutionary psychology of cooperation” (6:57), which is a sentence worth having on the record for the Lakatos section.
Smith reports that Hadza attribute good acts to character and bad acts to circumstance, the reverse of the Western fundamental attribution error (43:26 to 44:05). Pinsof reads it through his own program: “people have attributional biases contingent on group membership or alliances. If a fellow group member or ally does something bad, I’m going to attribute it to the situation, but if an outgroup or rival does something bad, I’m going to attribute it to their personality,” and in a community where “everyone views every other member as a crucial ally,” the bias should run one way (46:59 to 47:48). He proposes the test, whether Hadza switch the bias for a neighboring group, and Smith agrees it would be “super fascinating” (48:07 to 48:33). That is the Strange Bedfellows perpetrator bias offered as a cross-cultural prediction, and it is the kind of non-American test Ganzach asked for.
On the man everyone knows murdered his wife and who still receives an equal share (24:04 to 25:55), Pinsof’s account is that “each member is so integral to the community and so interdependent that the costs of inflicting any kind of exclusion or punishment” are too high (33:44 to 34:19), and that in the West “the cost of excluding someone from my social network to me is extremely low, I could easily replace them,” so “if someone murders their wife, I could say fine, put them away in prison forever, what do I care” (35:21 to 36:07). Smith complicates it with the relational-mobility literature and the point that Western institutions, banks and insurance, replace friends as risk buffers (37:15 to 37:39). Pinsof’s summary line is quotable: “everyone is very replaceable in the western world, whereas in the Hadza basically everyone is irreplaceable” (37:51). It is the same word he used for his wife in “Money Is Bullshit,” and the two uses belong side by side.
Pinsof suggests that Western questionnaires depend on “the level of abstraction and hypotheticality that we’re accustomed to,” produced by “this education system that we’re put through where we’re forced to decouple things from their concrete reality,” while Hadza “are thinking about the concrete realities” and take the task literally (53:39 to 54:43). Smith agrees that schooling is visible in how people handle tasks (55:08). That bears on the recursive-mindreading dispute in the Dunbar section, where the story tasks are exactly this kind of decoupled hypothetical, and on Pietraszewski’s recurring point, repeated here, that in psychology “the measure becomes the data becomes the theory” (57:23).
The outro is the composer talking. He misses “film scores that have a damn melody,” says “everything is just drones and completely devoid of melody these days,” and names Jurassic Park and John Williams (1:32:54 to 1:33:22). “Thank you for your service,” said to every anthropologist and finally to the listener, is the show’s running joke and a fair description of how he treats fieldworkers.
‘Health and the Shuar Project with Josh Snodgrass’ (June 16, 2026)
Snodgrass reports that remote communities entering market economies show rising chronic psychosocial stress, that children’s picture of a good life shifts from “clean water and trees” to “a cell phone and a TV” (28:34 to 28:50), and that the difference is inequality made visible: “in a group of fifty people… most people can meet that,” while in a market center of ten thousand “inequality is going to play out big time” (29:02 to 29:27). Pinsof restates it as the relative-fitness argument from his intergenerational theory: “fitness is a relative thing… when I’m deciding what I should strive for as an organism it makes sense for me to evaluate that striving relative to my competitors,” and a community entering a market economy is “not moving right into the top of the economic stratum of that society, they’re moving into the bottom” (49:42 to 51:40). Snodgrass agrees: “in some ways we’re just not designed to deal with the levels of inequality” (51:54). It is the “eat the rich” ESS and the deaths-of-despair claim with a field site behind them, and it is the closest he comes to citing evidence for the intergenerational competition idea.
On individual versus structural explanations of health he takes the middle: putting it all on individual behavior means “you’re putting it all on you when in many cases people are just making the best out of the situation,” while putting it all on structure “leads to a certain kind of helplessness,” so “we have to find some middle ground where we can both do things as an individual and start to think about how we can maybe design society differently” (1:16:07 to 1:17:02). Pietraszewski’s answer, “groups of face-to-face people” as the workable scale (1:17:04), and the joke that “we’ve become an anarchist podcast” (1:15:56), are the show’s temperament.
‘Producing Belief with Pascal Boyer’ (June 23, 2026)
Pascal Boyer, one of the founders of the field, endorses Alliance Theory at 48:14. Boyer has written “a little book” on the psychology of politics, and the chapter on strange alliances, “some party deciding that they’re all absolutely for women but really not for mothers, or for poor people but only if they’re in cities,” is, he says, “pure sort of Pinsof kind of stuff,” and the alliance framework is “obviously the best way to approach” it (48:20 to 49:10). Earlier he had said that the vehemence of political argument is explained by “some kind of alliance model,” since what is at stake is “who are you with and who are you against and how many people can I recruit to this or that coalition” (18:54 to 19:21), and that politics “really is an illusion in the sense that most political discussions are not about their real point, they’re about coalitional alignment and fine-grained calibration of where you stand” (47:13 to 47:44). That is the theory’s reception inside the set, stated by its most senior member, and it belongs in the bio next to the Psychological Inquiry commentaries as the counterweight.
Then Boyer does what a good elder does and asks the question. Thomas Sowell’s two visions, constrained and unconstrained, “really are different visions,” “there’s a lot of evidence that political attitudes are largely heritable,” so “maybe there is something, a sort of disposition to be an unconstrained person or a constrained person. So my question is how do we square that with an alliance theory? Because the alliance theory, if we leave it there, would say, well, it’s all up for grabs” (49:22 to 51:56). That is Ganzach’s objection and Malka and Federico’s, put by a friend.
Pinsof’s answer (52:09 to 56:12) has three parts. First, the identification problem, in his own words: “we got to make sure that our measurements actually are good and not indirectly measuring the thing that we’re trying to predict, which is I think a big problem in political psychology where the outcome variable is often baked into the predictor variable.” Second, the empirical doubt: he is “personally skeptical” that the visions “will be held consistently across a variety of concrete instances” and “strongly predictive of coalitional alignment,” with counterexamples on both sides, liberals who think the wealthy must be reined in by incentives and Christians who think people can be remade in God’s image, and he adds, “I’m involved in a few studies right now that are attempting to run such tests,” which is the Toronto project described in June 2026. Third, and this is the move the Lakatos section should quote, the accommodation: “That isn’t to say that there aren’t heritable dispositions or psychological traits that matter politically, but I think if we want to understand how and why they matter, we have to understand them as things that predispose one toward aligning with a particular coalition.” Education is his example. Openness and curiosity lead a person out of a small town to a university, the university puts him in the Democratic coalition, and the analysis then shows a correlation between openness and liberalism “but what we’re missing is that there’s this big thing in between, which is education, and how that fits into the political alliance structure” (54:36 to 55:37). Dispositions “matter indirectly via the sorts of groups that you join or leave.” That is the protective belt exactly: dispositions are admitted, and routed through alliance. Whether that is a Neptune or a Vulcan depends on whether it predicts something the dispositional program does not, and the prediction is there if he wants it: the disposition-to-politics correlation should vanish when group membership is held constant. Boyer accepts it as “very plausible” (56:12) and pushes further, that the real computations may run in “some sort of language of coalitional thought that has its own logic” not expressible in folk vocabulary (58:56 to 59:03), which is Pietraszewski’s project.
Boyer’s own production-side turn is Alliance Theory arriving from a different door. Cultural evolution, he says, treated ideas as if “every morning we start with a completely random set of ideas and by four p.m. we’ve settled on religions,” which imported the randomness of mutation from genetics and ignored “the fitness interests that lead certain people to try and push these things on others” (10:07 to 13:09). His examples, shamanism as a bid for political influence, divination as “a description of the situation that was not attributed to any person in particular,” which “makes consensus building much easier because you have consensus without allying with one particular coalition” (29:43 to 30:00), are the theory of sacred values told from the producer’s side. Pietraszewski’s restatement, that a divination verdict works because “there’s an army behind the stuffed animal” and “none of us incur the cost of telling Lita what to do directly” (44:04 to 45:46), is the best short account of what a sacred value does that anyone in this set has given, and Boyer says so: “someone re-explains them in a way that’s actually much clearer” (46:04). Boyer also cites Fitouchi’s puritanical-morality model as production-side reasoning about who has “something important at stake in making you behave” (16:25 to 17:25), which is the bridge to DeScioli.
Three things for the Set. Boyer names its size: “let’s face it, we often are twenty people talking to another sort of bunch of ten people and deciding that we’re massively more on the right side than they are. But if we’re described as a school… it all gives us a layer of solidity” (14:53 to 15:12), and he lists the schools, Santa Barbara, Paris, “the LA school.” Boyer reports Tooby’s dinner remark that “if anyone wanted to stop scientific progress they would design modern science exactly the way it is,” followed by twenty minutes dissecting “graduate training, publications, grants” (1:22:52 to 1:23:28), and Tooby’s Tycho Brahe point that a cosmology “that offends no one in particular” wins because it sits between two camps (1:07:31 to 1:08:12). And Pinsof gives the freedom display its cheerful form: “I’m more collectively pessimistic but personally optimistic… I’m a kid in a candy store, I have all this low-hanging fruit that I get to pluck, nobody else is plucking it… if science were better, then I would be in a crowded market and I would have nothing to contribute” (1:31:07 to 1:31:55). Pietraszewski’s gloss, “the reward for doing it is nobody listens to you” (1:32:08), and his Buddhist line, “life is social suffering in this sense as a scientist” (1:32:53), are the set’s hero system in two sentences.
Pinsof’s economists-versus-voters argument, that economists override folk economics because “they have professional and career incentives for doing that” while a voter has “a one in sixty million chance” of deciding an election and “potentially big costs if they fail to fit in” (1:03:13 to 1:04:54), is Caplan’s rational irrationality with the incentive framing he uses everywhere, and Boyer immediately turns it back on science: “how do you create an incentive to get things a bit more right that overrides the incentive to be in the right coalition” (1:07:00). And Boyer’s confession at the end, that in this trade “you end up doubting your own motives” and “I had tremendous fun and then you have this suspicion, I was talking about 95 percent of the time” (1:45:20 to 1:45:32), is the reflexive move performed by the guest rather than the host.
‘Mechanism, Function, and Philosophy of Science with Lauren Ross’ (June 30, 2026)
The criterion, at 1:04:14: he judges an explanation “in terms of the ratio of what it assumes to what it successfully predicts or explains,” with Darwin as the ideal, “a few assumptions about variation, heritability, differential reproduction,” rock-solid ones, that buy “an enormous explanatory and predictive boon” (1:04:51 to 1:05:54). “That’s what I strive for” and “how I try to evaluate theoretical frameworks”: count the assumptions, ask how many are implicit and unstated, judge their plausibility, and set that against “what it’s buying us in terms of successful predictions and explanations” (1:06:01 to 1:06:29). That is the parsimony standard he used against the doomers and the Copernican close of the Marschak talk, stated as a formula. Ross accepts it with two amendments. Plausibility should replace count, since “suppose I only have one assumption but it’s really not plausible” (1:06:44 to 1:07:08). And prediction is not enough, “because sometimes we can get predictions from stuff we think isn’t explanatory,” so the criterion should ask for “information about hypothetical changes or hypothetical control” (1:07:16 to 1:07:59). He takes both: “I totally buy both of those amendments” (1:08:01), and adds that explanatory power is “a prediction of something that we already know is true” (1:08:35). Ross’s second amendment is Woodward’s interventionist standard, and it is the same demand Meehl and Lakatos make in other words: correlation is not explanation, and a theory earns credit by saying what would change if you moved something. Pinsof agreeing to it on his own podcast is worth a sentence in the Meehl section, since it commits him to the Toronto design in principle.
The second exchange is about reduction, and it shows where his adaptationism sits. He defends “a more limited version of the how low can you go thesis”: you need not go to the floor, but you must go “at least one level below you” and be able to “pass the baton,” so a psychological theory must be “compatible with what we know about how natural selection works or with how information processing structures work” (1:29:17 to 1:30:45). What frustrates him and Pietraszewski is “theories in psychology that are actually pretty incompatible with things we know about how evolution works,” where “if you go through and do the game theory, the strategy would be defeated by this other strategy” (1:31:08 to 1:31:37). His example is the happiness homunculus again, a system “engineered to seek out a substance within itself,” which “makes almost no sense at all” (1:31:51 to 1:32:28). Ross resists the general form: “we don’t want to just assume that successful explanations in those domains need to be compatible with lower level physics unless there’s a good reason,” and “I’m just more non-reductive” (1:33:59 to 1:35:53). He narrows: chemists must answer to physicists, “I don’t think that psychologists necessarily need to be beholden to physicists,” but they do need to answer to biology and evolution (1:36:57 to 1:37:38). Pietraszewski then supplies the counterexample from history, that the chemists said no molecule could copy itself and were wrong about DNA, so “sometimes what changed was physics and not the chemistry” (1:39:11 to 1:40:07), and Pinsof concedes with a joke: “I would love for psychology to be at the place where we could contradict something in biology… but I don’t think we’re anywhere close,” and “Daryl Bem almost had us being psychic” (1:40:38 to 1:40:51). This is the hard core of the Lakatos section spoken aloud, with its author saying what would license an exception.
Pietraszewski describes the theory crisis as one where “constructs are redescriptions of the data” (59:39), and gives his own project as the example: “if I say I think there’s a system that tracks alliances and there’s 75 ways to measure it and they all get at it indirectly, that’s words on a page” (1:01:06 to 1:01:18). That is Brandt and Cassario’s identification problem, and Ganzach’s, stated by Pinsof’s cohost as the vulnerability of their shared program. And his account of why the design stance loses to the intentional stance in psychology, that a postulated function “we don’t even know how to look for yet” looks speculative “if your currency is data” (56:07 to 56:27), explains why Alliance Theory reads as redescription to critics who want a measure.
On philosophy: “I find that they have really precise ways of communicating ideas and a really good handle on concepts and distinctions that I think is sorely lacking in the social sciences” (0:42), and philosophy is “essentially working out the implications of various premises” (35:56), which is a fair description of what “Strange Bedfellows” is. And on his field’s standing, in the outro: being an evolutionary psychologist “is a concealable stigma… unlike being a member of a racial minority or a physical deformity,” so “we got to be patient about revealing it in the right setting” (1:49:25 to 1:49:57). Pietraszewski adds that he would not wear the shirt because “that guy’s a jerk cuz he’s an evolutionary psychologist” (1:49:14). The Set essay’s claim that the discipline’s standing depends on a line held is confirmed from inside, in the register of a joke about face tattoos as costly signals (1:50:15).
‘Stories with Michelle Sugiyama’ (July 7, 2026)
Discussing enemy groups, he says: “it’s in your interest to have an accurate assessment of the formidability of the groups around you… but it’s not necessarily in your interest to have an accurate view of the moral character of your enemy, because that could prevent an attack from being mobilized. If people knew that they’re just normal people like us, then no one would join the collective action” (1:16:02 to 1:16:37). Accuracy where prediction pays, distortion where mobilization pays, in one breath. It belongs in the stereotype extension as his own statement of the utility principle.
The second is the attention-as-greed passage, which is “You Will Find This Interesting” and “Everything Is Signaling” restated as a resource economy: attention “is a limited resource,” and “if I’m taking too much of the communal resource of attention without providing any offsetting benefits to other people, I could be viewed as a greedy, selfish person,” which is why “we have all sorts of pejorative terms for people who take too much attention” (44:08 to 45:08). He offers it as the reason people fear public speaking, and Pietraszewski calls the underlying idea “a very David Pinsofian point, it’s coordination” (42:15), which tells you what his cohost thinks his contribution is.
Sugiyama tells the Blackfoot trickster story in which Old Man dives for berries reflected in the water and ends up beating the bush above him, “and that’s how Napi taught us how to harvest berries” (50:13 to 50:57). Pinsof: “it’s consistent with my model of what humor is, which is it’s about mix-ups between two things that are costly for the person who mixed them up… and we laugh to signal that there’s been a mix-up and that I know that you know that there’s been a mix-up… so we can diffuse its costs” (51:57 to 52:28). Sugiyama adds that trickster ridicule is “a leveling mechanism” against those who get “too high an opinion of themselves” (53:02 to 53:19), which is the status theory arriving from the ethnographic side. He also says “I’m not that good of a storyteller” (0:46), and the episode opens with a botched recording and the word “whoopsies” (0:00), which is the mix-up theory performed.
Asking about coalitional storytelling, he lists the atrocity rumors that mobilize violence: “they’re eating cats and dogs… using the blood of Christian babies and baking it into their matzah” (1:08:52 to 1:08:58), and cites Donald Horowitz on rumors that precipitate ethnic riots (1:09:04). It is the blood libel named as a case in a taxonomy, in the flat register the hatred grant uses, and it is the only time on tape that he brings the subject up himself. He then supplies the collective-action logic: demonizing narratives work “insofar as we all have common knowledge of that narrative and we expect other people to expect other people to endorse the narrative” (1:16:44).
His producer-side question, what the storyteller gains (36:00), is the Alliance Theory habit applied to cultural evolution: ask what the sender gets, then what the receiver gets, then who selects whom. Sugiyama’s answer is cooperation and reputation; his follow-up is signaling of memory and relevance, “a more useful conversation partner,” which she accepts as “an alliance member” (37:47). The frame travels with him even when the vocabulary does not.