My favorite intellectual over the past year is David Pinsof who’s had an odd career in contemporary psychology. He is an evolutionary social scientist at UCLA, a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, the author of the Substack Everything Is Bullshit, a podcaster, a musician, and the developer of increasingly ambitious theories about political alliances, status, signaling, friendship, humor, and the stories we tell about our own motives. UCLA’s Social Minds Lab identifies him as a research scientist. A UCLA Library announcement for a 2025 event on his work called him a postdoctoral scholar.
Pinsof read a draft of this essay and answered by email on September 1, 2026, with corrections and updates that appear throughout.
The commercial success of Cards Against Humanity gave Pinsof income independent of the university. In a long 2026 interview with Zach Elwood, Pinsof said the game’s success freed him from the academic imperative to publish constantly, to optimize his work for obtaining a faculty position, and to choose projects according to their status on the academic labor market. He has acquired something like intellectual tenure without holding an academic tenure line. That explains both the freedom and the oddity of his oeuvre.
Pinsof grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, on Chicago’s North Shore. The future creators of Cards Against Humanity knew one another at Highland Park High School and graduated in 2005. A Daily Iowan profile published May 12, 2009 identified Pinsof as 21 years old.
Nothing in that 2009 profile suggests a young man who had decided to become an evolutionary psychologist. Pinsof was graduating from the University of Iowa with a double major in psychology and theatre arts. He was considering acting in Chicago or Los Angeles and mentioned theatre education. His undergraduate record holds another clue to the breadth of his interests. The University of Iowa Center for New Music lists a composition by David Pinsof called “Half Step”, performed in May 2008. Pinsof told me it was played at a composition seminar because his instructor’s girlfriend was a good enough pianist to perform it.
The music runs further back. In high school Pinsof played guitar in a band called Modus Operandi with Ben Hantoot and Eli Halpern, two of the friends who went on to create Cards Against Humanity with him. Their album Higher Shapes came out in 2005, the year they graduated, and a second, The Mourning After, followed in 2007. Pinsof later wrote the theme for Evolutionary Psychology (the Podcast) and scored short films made by his wife Annah Feinberg, who works in the entertainment industry. He has a body of unreleased music made with one of the bandmates that the two of them set aside for Cards Against Humanity, and he says a solo album sits on his bucket list. He doubts the music fits the story told here and calls it something he finds inherently enjoyable.
In 2007 Pinsof wrote a ten-minute comedy called “The Bond They Shared,” performed in Iowa’s undergraduate play festival and still sold by Heuer Publishing, about three men whose shared obsession with James Bond is failing to hold their friendship together. Two decades before he began using game theory to ask why friendships form, persist, and dissolve, he was writing comedy about three men trying to keep one alive. Pinsof’s later work is preoccupied with audiences, performance, impression management, social perception, hidden intentions, and the gap between a man’s presentation and the machinery underneath it. The young actor and the mature theorist were drawn to related problems years before Pinsof had the evolutionary vocabulary he would later use to describe them. He eventually said so. Looking back on two years of the blog in July 2025, he referred to “the no-bullshit character I play.” The acting student built a public character and delivered the theory through it.
The other formative institution was a group of high-school friends. Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern, Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, and Eliot Weinstein kept meeting during college vacations after leaving Highland Park. They developed a deliberately transgressive party game that became Cards Against Humanity. The project went onto Kickstarter in December 2010 seeking $4,000 and raised $15,570. Kickstarter later published a case study of the game’s early success.
A Chicago magazine profile from 2014 described the eight founders as equal participants who kept making decisions together while pursuing other careers. Pinsof was then in graduate school in Los Angeles. The article caught him joining the others remotely to brainstorm jokes.
The card game produced serious money while he pursued his doctorate. He stayed with Cards Against Humanity part time, including data analysis and play-testing, while conducting psychological research. The arrangement has persisted. Commercial comedy, academic research, and public writing have run as simultaneous occupations, and the game gave him a second institution from which the university could be optional.
Pinsof says comedy and psychology appeal to him for the same reason. Both require getting inside other people’s heads. Writing Cards Against Humanity also taught him a prose style. It rewarded short, provocative, cynical formulations that delivered an uncomfortable thought before the audience had time to protect itself from it. Years later he imported that voice into Everything Is Bullshit.
This helps explain why Pinsof does not sound like most research psychologists. The tone was developed commercially, in a game that requires one player to predict what another will find funny, transgressive, or surprising.
Pinsof entered UCLA and earned an M.A. in social psychology in 2015 and a Ph.D. in psychology in 2018. His dissertation, Evolutionary Origins of Political Ideology: Mating Strategies, Intergroup Conflict, and the Nature of Political Alliances, contains a curriculum vitae documenting his Iowa degree, UCLA training, publications, and works in progress. His graduate formation combined psychology with biological anthropology. His dissertation committee brought together Martie Haselton, Aaron Lukaszewski, H. Clark Barrett, and David O. Sears. Haselton chaired it. The committee reads as a map of his subsequent thinking. Haselton and Lukaszewski brought evolutionary psychology, Barrett evolutionary anthropology, and Sears political psychology.
The dissertation title captures a transition inside the work. Pinsof began with narrow questions about sexual politics and ended by asking whether political ideology had been misunderstood.
His first substantial publication, with Haselton, appeared in Psychological Science in 2016. “The Political Divide Over Same-Sex Marriage: Mating Strategies in Conflict?” proposed that opposition to same-sex marriage could partly reflect conflict between different sexual strategies. People averse to casual sex were likely to oppose same-sex marriage when they associated homosexuality with promiscuity. UCLA publicized the study under the headline “Why people oppose same-sex marriage.”
Pinsof and Haselton followed in 2017 with “The Effect of the Promiscuity Stereotype on Opposition to Gay Rights” in PLOS ONE. This time they varied what participants were told about gay male promiscuity. Among participants disinclined toward casual sex, information challenging the stereotype increased support for gay rights.
Pinsof doubted that people’s stated moral reasons explain their politics. A man might say his position follows from principle while the disposition that makes the principle attractive comes from another social interest.
That proposition put him into an early argument with Mark Hoffarth and John Jost. Hoffarth and Jost pointed to sexual minorities who opposed same-sex marriage as evidence that ideology can override apparent self-interest. Pinsof and Haselton answered in “When Self-Interest Contradicts Ideology: A Reply to Hoffarth and Jost.” The reply contains Alliance Theory in embryo. A conservative gay man, they suggested, might oppose same-sex marriage to show solidarity with fellow conservatives or Christians, to uphold principles that serve his group, or to conform to coalition norms. Where Jost saw ideology defeating self-interest, Pinsof moved the interest up a level, from the individual to the alliance. Everything he later built follows from that move. Self-interest need not mean immediate personal material advantage. Loyalty to allies, communities, religious groups, and political coalitions supplies powerful motives of its own.
Pinsof was also a coauthor with Tran Dinh, Steven Gangestad, and Haselton on “Cycling on the Fast Track: Ovulatory Shifts in Sexual Motivation as a Proximate Mechanism for Regulating Life History Strategies.”
The abortion work shows how slowly Pinsof develops an idea. At the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in 2016, Pinsof and Haselton presented “Pro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity? The Role of Mating Strategies in Opposition to Abortion.” The HBES program describes a study of 855 participants asking whether abortion opposition ran especially strong among people pursuing more restricted mating strategies when they believed abortion restrictions would discourage casual sex.
A descendant of that project did not surface as a major paper until 2026. Elias Acevedo, Pinsof, Jaimie Krems, and Haselton released the preprint “Concerns about Sexual Promiscuity Play an Underexplored Role in Opposition to Abortion,” now based on four studies and 3,631 participants, including data from before and after Dobbs and a nationally representative panel. It remains a preprint.
His dissertation shows that this long gestation is normal for him. Its vita listed several manuscripts then in preparation, including “Pro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity?”, “Why Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows,” and “Equality for All, or for My Allies?”
By 2018 Pinsof was presenting Alliance Theory in public. At that year’s Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting he presented “Double Standards of the Political Mind: Empirical Support for the Alliance Theory.” The conference program describes an analysis using polling data from 1,215 Americans. The data came from Pulse of the Nation, the survey project described below. Pinsof examined cases where Democrats and Republicans appeared willing to reverse general principles depending on which political coalition benefited from applying them.
The following year he presented “Equality for All, or for My Allies?” The 2019 HBES program records the presentation, while the dissertation gives the fuller analysis using the 2016 American National Election Studies sample of 4,271 respondents. The dissertation chapter pits Alliance Theory against accounts emphasizing egalitarianism, social dominance, moral foundations, and system justification.
There is a publication-history problem here. Neither the 1,215-person double-standards analysis nor the ANES study exists as a standalone peer-reviewed journal article. They appear in conference programs and, in the second case, the dissertation. Pinsof told me that some of the double-standards results reached the record through “Strange Bedfellows,” that he has never written a paper reviewing them, that he doubts they would fill one, and that he lacks the patience to try, though a few scholars have offered to take the lead. The ANES chapter has a better prospect. He is now working with Elias Acevedo, a doctoral student he co-advises with Jaimie Krems and Martie Haselton, to replicate and extend the findings for publication. Until that appears, some of Pinsof’s most pointed empirical attempts to separate the theory from competing explanations remain outside the ordinary journal literature.
The mature statement appeared with David O. Sears and Martie Haselton in Psychological Inquiry in 2023 as “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems.” The title Pinsof had listed among manuscripts in preparation in 2018 had taken about five more years to become the published article.
Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton argue that political belief systems are largely constructed from historically contingent alliances. Parties bring together groups whose interests do not derive from a single philosophy. Advocates then build narratives and moral principles that make the coalition’s positions look coherent. Change the alliance structure and the apparent ideological logic changes with it. The paper’s symmetry claim is narrower than its reputation. The authors posit a psychological equivalence between liberals and conservatives in alliance-serving cognition, reject any moral equivalence, since the same psychology does more harm when more vulnerable groups get classed as enemies, and allow that other psychological asymmetries between the sides may exist.
Psychological Inquiry was the right venue because it surrounds a target article with commentaries. The reactions exposed where the argument becomes controversial. Ariel Malka and Christopher Federico argued in “Political Belief Systems Are Not Singularly Rooted in Alliance Psychology” that political belief systems cannot be reduced to alliance psychology, that stable dispositions and values constrain which positions fit together, and that the theory needed a test in which alliances and dispositions compete. Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson argued in “It’s More Complicated Than That: Alliances Are One of Many Factors Shaping Political Belief Systems” that alliances constitute one causal influence among several. Yoav Ganzach and colleagues went further in “Political Ideology is Not Meaningfully Explained by Alliances and is Not Inconsistent with Attitudinal Inconsistencies.” The entire issue is a symposium on the scope and limits of Pinsof’s theory.
David Pietraszewski granted the premise and asked what follows. His commentary, “Seven Grand Challenges for Evolutionary Political Psychology or: Political Ideologies as Ad-Hoc Alliances… So What?”, posed seven challenges a predictive evolutionary political psychology would still have to meet once it accepted that ideologies are coalition bundles. The question goes past whether Pinsof has identified inconsistency and asks what the theory buys with the insight. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton wrote in reply that they found the seven challenges challenging. Peter DeScioli of Stony Brook agreed that alliances belong at the foundation of political psychology and then turned the claim around. In “The Dangers of Alliances Caused the Evolution of Moral Principles,” he argued that impartial moral rules evolved as a way to choose sides in conflicts without the hazards of choosing by alliance. Where Pinsof looks behind moral principles and finds coalitions, DeScioli looks behind them and finds machinery built to restrain coalitions. The two readings agree on the data and disagree on what morality is for, and the disagreement is the sharpest one the theory has drawn.
Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen were more sympathetic but argued that status competition deserved a larger role. Their commentary, “Speech Repression and Outrage from Orthodox Activists as Attempts to Mobilize Allies and Gain Status,” reads well in retrospect because status soon became central to Pinsof’s own public theory.
Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton answered the critics in “The Strange Epicycles of Political Psychology.” The reply offers something close to a falsification criterion: alliances and rivalries, measured independently of ideological labels, should strongly predict political beliefs and votes.
John Jost’s 2024 “Both-Sideology Endangers Democracy and Social Science” addresses the larger dispute and never names Pinsof. Jost attacks arguments in political psychology that emphasize psychological symmetry between political camps. Pinsof’s account operates on that terrain because Alliance Theory expects each coalition to produce self-serving principles and selective moral judgments.
Social psychologist Mark Brandt responds to my email on Sep. 3, 2026:
Generally speaking, the challenge is separating alliances from shared worldviews. It is likely the case that we develop alliances because we share worldviews and we might also develop our worldviews because we share alliances. This is the case for an individual and their psychology, but also as a society and political system. In a more immediate way, we also infer worldviews from people’s alliances and we infer alliances from people’s worldviews.
That means that a successful experiment would find ways to pull these things apart, or to identify where they conflict with each other. I think this is challenging, but is in principle possible. As a quick example, one might investigate what happens when a person or group who typically shares both alliance and worldview stops sharing one of those factors (but keeps the other). It might also be possible to create minimal groups (i.e. they share no history/information) and see if people are more positive about those they share an alliance with vs their worldviews. In both of these examples, the devil is in the details.
The network ideas find that people’s identification with political parties and labels (e.g., “liberal”) are most central on average. This might be supportive of alliance theory. At the same time, issue positions relevant to groups (e.g., immigration policy) are not necessarily the most central on average, which might speak against alliance theory. A lot hinges on what constructs alliance theory believes measure alliances.
Lastly, I’m not sure I’d say that I personally disagree or not with David and alliance theory. The theory might well be right. My points are more about what other perspectives might predict and whether they are distinguished from alliance theory. We’ll see what the data from the Toronto study says.
I email Yoav Ganzach:
Your 2023 commentary was the most categorical in the Psychological Inquiry issue. Two questions. What empirical result would persuade you that Pinsof is right about the priority of alliances over dispositions? And has anything published since 2023, including the reply to commentaries, moved you in either direction? Pinsof tells me a preregistered study pitting alliances against dispositions is underway at the University of Toronto; I would welcome your view on what such a study would need to show.
He responds:
My critique of Pinsoff theory is not that it is incorrect. It is that it is dull.
First, roughly speaking, the model underlying the theory is: interests–>alliances–>ideology, which can be abbreviated as: interests–>ideology. But what’s new in that? (see for example Marlxist theory or rational choice theory and even dissonance theory).
Second, Alliance also explain alliance by “similarity”. However, since people may be similar in many ways, in order to be meaningful, Alliance theory must make a distinction between significant and insignificant similarities, and this is something it does not do. In fact, the most natural types of similarities that may lead to alliances are similarities in values and beliefs (i.e., dispositions).
I would very much like to hear your view about this critique.
I reply:
That is sharper than the commentary title let on, and “dull rather than wrong” is the objection I most wanted someone to make, because it is the one a theory cannot answer by adding studies.
On your first point, here is where I land. I agree that interests to ideology is old. What I think Pinsof adds is the middle term, and it does work only if you keep it. Marx’s coalitions were supposed to follow from class and did not. Rational choice cannot get anyone to the polls. Pinsof’s coalitions are contingent, and the theory predicts that when a coalition realigns, its members reverse principles within a few years without any change in interests or personality. The trade, Russia, and free-speech reversals since 2016 look like that prediction coming true. Marx would not expect a principle to flip in four years, and dissonance theory has nothing to say about which behavior a coalition demands. So I think the abbreviation drops the part that predicts. Whether Pinsof has done enough with that part is a fair question, and I would put it to him.
On your second point I think you are right, and I would like to represent it as the strongest objection the theory has drawn. If allies are picked by similarity and the theory does not say which similarities count, values are the obvious candidate and dispositions come back through the side door. The only escape I can see is for Pinsof to commit to the evolutionary version: the similarities that matter are the ones that predict side-taking in a conflict, kinship, proximity, cheap and hard-to-fake markers, and a record of past loyalty, with values downstream. Pietraszewski’s work on race as a coalition cue would be his evidence. That commits him to a prediction, that alliances built on side-taking markers reshape values while alliances built on shared values fail when the markers pull the other way. If he will not commit to it, your objection stands and the theory has no independent variable.
Two questions, if you have time. Would you accept “similarities that predict side-taking” as a repair, or do you think it still smuggles values in? And Pinsof tells me a preregistered study at the University of Toronto will pit alliances against dispositions; if alliance were measured by network and demography rather than by values, would you regard the result as bearing on your critique?
Pinsof has kept trying to give the alliance idea more formal structure. At HBES in 2025 he presented “Whose Side Are You On? The Evolutionary Game Theory of Alliances.” The conference program shows him moving from verbal descriptions of partisan inconsistency toward evolutionary game theory and the formal problem of alliance formation. The talk sat in a session on theory building alongside Daniel Conroy-Beam’s “We Need to Formalize Theory in Evolutionary Psychology,” so the turn is a movement inside the field as well as inside one man. This may decide the future of the project. A theory that generates mathematical predictions stands in a stronger scientific position than a theory that redescribes political behavior after it occurs.
Another institution connected Pinsof’s commercial and scholarly lives. Cards Against Humanity created Pulse of the Nation, a project conducting nationally representative surveys of American opinion. The project says twelve polls were conducted in 2017 and 2018 using scientific sampling through Survey Sampling International, with data and cross-tabs released publicly. Pinsof served as its director and wrote the questions. He says the poll’s one requirement was that the questions be funny, and since double standards are funny, he used the slot to test predictions from the Alliance Theory he was then developing. It is almost a caricature of his peculiar career: a party-game company financing public-opinion research supervised by one of its founders, who was at the same time developing a theory of political belief, and who smuggled his hypotheses into the field under cover of a joke.
The company went through a serious workplace controversy in 2020 centered on allegations about cofounder Max Temkin and the company’s internal culture. Temkin stepped down. The company acknowledged failures and announced changes. One contemporary account is available here.
The decisive year in Pinsof’s development was 2023.
A preprint of what became “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” was circulating that year. Its preprint history lets us trace the paper before journal publication. That same March Pinsof began Everything Is Bullshit. “Strange Bedfellows” was circulating in the same period before journal publication. The academic work and the public philosophy developed together.
Pinsof has said that Everything Is Bullshit grew out of emails he wrote to himself arguing against claims that seemed obviously true to everyone else. UCLA later profiled him in a piece on academics who had migrated to Substack and described the audience around him as a “global gathering of Darwinist cynics.” The UCLA profile shows the university recognizing the Substack as part of Pinsof’s intellectual identity.
The blog contained twenty posts in 2023, twelve in 2024, ten in 2025, and six through August 18, 2026. The annual archives are available for 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026. Forty-eight essays in under three and a half years make an oeuvre, and the falling rate has a stated cause. In his second-anniversary post Pinsof wrote that the blog had been a passion project on which he had taken no money, that he had lately felt demotivated, and that it was hard to justify the time when he had more serious work to do. He opened paid subscriptions with that post. Sidestack lists the newsletter at more than seven thousand free subscribers.
The early titles establish the territory at once: “Happiness Is Bullshit,” “The Meaning of Life Is Bullshit,” “What Are Ideologies All About?”, “Psychologizing Psychologists,” “Status Is Weird,” “Opinions Are Bullshit,” and “Your Fear of Mortality Is Bullshit.” The common move is a search for function. Pinsof starts with the explanation people consciously give for a behavior and asks what evolved social function might sit underneath it.
“Status Is Weird” is a key text. Humans seek status, Pinsof argues, but seeking it in the open discredits the seeker. Effective status competition has to disguise itself. Humility, authenticity, moral conviction, independence, and professed indifference to status all become ways of gaining status. The most effective competitor may experience himself as a man who is not competing.
Pinsof suggests that successful social signaling may require the motive to be hidden from the man doing the signaling. The conscious story need not be a deliberate fraud. That idea has a pedigree running through Robert Trivers on self-deception and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.
The same idea became the backbone of “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes,” published online by American Psychologist in February 2026 after several years as a preprint. Pinsof examines paradoxical signals such as humility, conspicuous disregard for norms, and anonymous generosity. His central engine is recursive social inference. A signal can lose value when observers know the sender intended it as a signal. That creates incentives to communicate desirable qualities while concealing the signaling intention. UCLA had already hosted Pinsof discussing the theory in a 2024 colloquium.
Pinsof did not discover concealed signaling. Nick Feltovich, Rick Harbaugh, and Ted To modeled countersignaling in 2002, the rich man who dresses down and the expert who skips his credentials, and Moshe Hoffman, Christian Hilbe, and Martin Nowak modeled anonymous giving and modesty as signal burying in 2018. Pinsof cites both. His claim is recursive. Once observers can infer the intention to advertise a trait as well as the trait, the intention becomes damaging information, and signals turn into cues, cues expose motives, and motives have to go underground again. The economists’ models are stable when everyone knows the game. Pinsof’s paradoxes collapse when the game becomes common knowledge. That is the difference, and it is his.
Pinsof’s distinctive territory lies in the recursion. We compete to demonstrate that we are not competitive. We seek approval by displaying indifference to approval. We signal that we are not signaling. A man can gain status by making the status game disappear from view.
That recursive structure explains why the theatre student, the card-game designer, and the psychologist increasingly look like the same person. Each occupation depends on understanding what one mind thinks another mind thinks about it.
Pinsof is now trying to write the recursion down as mathematics. He shared with me the abstract of a paper in progress, tentatively titled “Human Status-Seeking as 4D Chess,” that models how each level of mindreading changes the game of status competition. At the first level, caring about others gets inferred and rewarded. At the second, status-seekers anticipate the inference and pretend to care. At the third, observers see through the pretending and penalize it. At the fourth, the seekers anticipate the penalty and pretend to be unpretentious, which produces the social paradoxes of the American Psychologist paper. The result is an arms race between pretentious signalers and cynical audiences. Pinsof argues the pretenders won, because fifth-order mindreading is too expensive to run and because being charmed by a skilled mindreader who is about to rise in status pays for itself. The paper promises accounts of charisma, authenticity, humility, performativity, and sacred values, and closes by adapting Dobzhansky: nothing in status psychology makes sense except in light of recursive mindreading. The 2023 preprint already invoked recursive mentalizing and common knowledge, so the mathematics is a reconstruction of an argument three years old, and the test of the formalism is whether it forced him to narrow anything. Whether the model survives reviewers remains to be seen. Pinsof says the humor paper carried heavy formalism too and that reviewer comments are pushing much of it into an appendix or out of the paper.
By 2024 the blog was acquiring its own conceptual vocabulary. “30 Useful Concepts about Bullshit” defined ideas such as “Darwinian cynicism,” self-bullshitting, confabulation, and Alliance Theory. Pinsof was no longer writing provocative essays one at a time. He was building a general interpretive framework. He later converted much of the essay into an extended X thread, preserved by Thread Reader.
The framework kept expanding. Political ideology became coalitional strategy. Morality became a possible signaling technology. Authenticity became useful because manufactured authenticity fails. Happiness became an evolved regulatory signal. Utilitarianism became another intellectual system requiring psychological explanation. Arguments became social acts. AI doom became a case study in mistaken folk intuitions about intelligence. Democracy became an incentive system producing coalition behavior.
The titles run more extreme than the essays. “Democracy Is Bullshit” does not advocate abolishing democracy. Pinsof argues that democratic systems generate tribalism, rent-seeking, and perverse incentives while still producing outcomes preferable to autocracy. The rhetoric stays maximalist because maximalism is part of the Cards Against Humanity inheritance. The argument underneath has grown more qualified.
“Happiness Is Bullshit” offers a case study in both Pinsof’s ingenuity and his scientific vulnerability. His later “Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited” acknowledges that the original essay was among his most controversial. He develops the idea that happiness functions as something like a positive prediction-error signal, telling an organism that circumstances are improving relative to expectation.
The difficulty is that evolutionary function and conscious motive sit at different explanatory levels. Explaining why natural selection built a capacity for happiness does not show that a man cannot desire happiness. An ultimate evolutionary explanation can coexist with a proximate psychological one. Pinsof sometimes moves too fast from “this system evolved because it performed function X” to “the reason people say they pursue Y is bullshit.”
That belongs to a larger scientific problem. Pinsof is good at generating hidden-motive explanations. A framework that can accommodate every possible observation tells us less.
A person boasts. Status seeking.
A person acts humble. Concealed status seeking.
A person follows the crowd. Coalition maintenance.
A person rebels against the crowd. Status through independence.
A person admits craving status. Strategic candor.
A person denies craving status. Successful concealment.
Constructing a plausible evolutionary story for each behavior is easy. The challenge is specifying an observation that would show the story is wrong.
“The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” counts partly because Pinsof begins doing this. Instead of declaring humility a hidden status strategy, he tries to specify the information conditions under which concealed signals should work and fail. His evolutionary game-theory work on alliances is another attempt to produce constraints.
Pinsof is alert to the reflexive problem. If intellectuals are status seekers constructing flattering rationalizations, then the man becoming famous for exposing them is an intellectual seeking status. Everything Is Bullshit cannot exempt its author from its own theory.
That is why “A Big Misunderstanding,” published in December 2025, ranks with “Status Is Weird.” Pinsof argues that intellectuals exaggerate how much social dysfunction results from ignorance, misinformation, bias, and misunderstanding. That diagnosis conveniently makes the people who manufacture knowledge indispensable. Pinsof wants us to look harder at incentives, status, alliances, competition, and institutional structure.
The essay drew a serious response from Dan Williams titled “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment.” Williams agreed with much of Pinsof’s incentive-centered picture but argued that evolutionary mismatch, technological novelty, and human ignorance give knowledge-producing institutions a much larger role than Pinsof allows. Modern humans confront problems of nuclear weapons, financial markets, pandemics, and artificial intelligence that ancestral intuitions were not designed to solve. Sometimes misunderstanding is the problem.
Pinsof responded in Williams’s newsletter with “What Kind of Apes Are We?” The exchange is one of the best windows into Pinsof because the swagger falls away. He treated Williams as a serious good-faith interlocutor, acknowledged substantial agreement, and pushed back mainly on how far evolutionary mismatch should be taken. He also acknowledged his own attraction to Enlightenment ideals and the desire to understand the world better. The nihilistic reading of Pinsof does not survive contact with this side of his work.
His 2025 essay “AI Doomerism Is Bullshit” supplied another stress test. Pinsof tried to identify a chain of assumptions behind catastrophic AI arguments and attacked them using an evolutionary conception of intelligence as a collection of specialized adaptive capacities instead of one generalized substance. The piece drew heavy resistance from readers who argued that AI-risk theories do not require all of Pinsof’s assumptions. Pinsof later wrote that of everything he had published it provoked the most backlash and bad faith, which surprised him, since claims that ideologies are propaganda and that nobody cares about improving the world had drawn nods and shrugs. The episode illustrates both his strength and his weakness. He can detect assumptions hidden inside apparently rigorous arguments, and he can also construct a target narrower than the strongest opposing case.
In 2026, “Everything Is Signaling” placed Pinsof in a lineage running through Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler, whose The Elephant in the Brain made the hidden-motive essay a genre. Much signaling, Pinsof argues, is defensive. Human beings spend much of their social effort avoiding signals that would let others classify them as stupid, disloyal, desperate, immoral, or incompetent.
Erving Goffman, impression-management research, reputation theories of personality, and linguistic pragmatics explored related territory long before Everything Is Bullshit. Pinsof’s claim to originality lies in connecting impression management to evolved signaling systems, recursion, and concealed intentions.
His public intellectual environment has expanded alongside the Substack. In 2025 he began cohosting Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast) with David Pietraszewski, the critic who had asked what Alliance Theory buys with its insight. Pinsof did not solve the problem by defining the critic out of his circle. He brought him inside it. The show brings in researchers from across evolutionary behavioral science and discusses current work and the intellectual history of the field.
Pinsof has also moved through the podcast ecosystem around evolutionary psychology, rationalist-adjacent writing, signaling theory, and heterodox social science. He appeared on Infinite Loops, where the conversation touched on books including Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, Edward Bernays’s Propaganda, Robert Cialdini’s Influence, Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, Will Storr’s The Status Game, Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. He has also appeared on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom.
He sits at an angle to rationalism. Much of his work runs against the rationalist habit of treating articulate reasons as privileged evidence about why people believe things. His “Utilitarianism Is Bullshit” turns the same explanatory suspicion on a philosophical tradition influential in effective-altruist and rationalist circles, and opens by admitting he used to be a utilitarian. His criticisms of AI doom, political ideology, and intellectualism reflect a deeper suspicion that explicit reasoning serves social functions with little relation to discovering truth.
His current UCLA work is widening again. The Social Minds Lab says Pinsof studies political attitudes, mating strategies, status, and signaling while using mathematical models to investigate alliance formation. The lab also describes him as leading work on the psychology of humor. Pinsof told me of three further papers. One, under review, tests Alliance Theory predictions about which groups people perceive as more discriminated against. A second, under review with Acevedo, offers an evolutionary functionalist account of awe. A third is a large preregistered study with a group at the University of Toronto that pits alliances against dispositions as predictors of political views.
The discrimination paper enters contested ground. In March 2026 Jake Womick, Kurt Gray, and nine colleagues published “Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, twelve studies arguing that much of the moral disagreement between left and right comes from different assumptions about who is vulnerable to harm. Liberals see vulnerability as concentrated in groups; conservatives see it as spread across individuals. Those assumptions predicted moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable giving, and could be manipulated. Alliance Theory can generate a similar surface result by a different route: allies get perceived as victims and rivals as perpetrators because the perception serves the coalition. Showing that partisans disagree about who is discriminated against will therefore prove little. The test is whether independently measured alliances predict the perceptions after vulnerability beliefs are allowed to compete.
The Toronto study is the answer to Malka and Federico. They asked for a contest between alliances and dispositions; Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton wrote in reply that independently measured alliances should strongly predict beliefs or the theory is in trouble; the preregistered study is that contest, with the predictions committed before the data arrive. If alliances outpredict personality and values, Alliance Theory moves from a redescription to a rival. If they do not, Pinsof will have run the study that showed it.
A 2025 UCLA profile of friendship research describes Pinsof’s emerging conception of friendship as an alliance problem. He asks why humans form, maintain, and terminate friendships and uses game theory to think about those decisions. Humor enters as a device that can cement friendship while marking insiders off from outsiders.
His 2026 preprint “All Mixed Up: A Solution to the Evolutionary Mystery of Humor” attempts an evolutionary account. Pinsof proposes that humor helps humans handle “mix-ups” in coordination. Misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, and awkward violations can threaten social coordination. Shared laughter can establish common knowledge that both parties recognized the disruption and help defuse its costs. The ability to produce humor can therefore signal value as a coordination partner. The paper went through three public versions between February and April 2026 and grew from an intuition about awkwardness into a model with three linked adaptations, humor detection, mutual laughter, and partner choice, and a formal statement of when they could be favored. The revision history shows the direction of travel. Pinsof is trying to turn the sentence that makes you laugh into the account that says when you should. The humor work is also the one paper that joins his two careers. He has said it attracted him because it let him unite the comedy side and the psychology side of his life.
Pinsof is also working with Jaimie Krems and Daniel Sznycer on a UCLA Initiative to Study Hate project called “Tests of an Engineering Perspective of Hatred Towards Jews.” The project approaches hatred in functional terms by asking what psychological inputs activate hostile responses and what conditions alter them. That fits his preference for asking what a psychological system does before judging whether its output is morally desirable.
His publication record stays odd. ResearchGate’s Pinsof profile aggregates his papers, preprints, and related outputs, but his peer-reviewed corpus runs considerably smaller than his public intellectual footprint. His projects take five, eight, or ten years to mature. Alliance Theory appeared at conferences years before its target article. The abortion hypothesis returned a decade after its first presentation. “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” circulated for several years before American Psychologist published it. He is now trying to formalize alliances, humor, and status itself, and says he thinks all science should move in that direction. Pinsof’s natural unit of work may be the research program.
Most young academics cannot spend years thinking about one theory while publishing little. Pinsof can. Cards Against Humanity removed a strong selection pressure on academic research.
The arrangement gives Pinsof permission to pursue large questions other researchers avoid because they do not yield rapid publications. It lets him combine political psychology, evolutionary theory, game theory, humor, philosophy, and internet writing without worrying whether a hiring committee will see a coherent specialization. It also removes some of the external constraints that make scholars narrow their claims. The same freedom that allows an original theory to develop can allow a favored explanation to expand until it covers everything.
His intellectual trajectory runs in widening concentric circles. The first circle is mating strategy. Why do people hold political positions on same-sex marriage and abortion? The second is alliance. Why do political coalitions endorse inconsistent bundles of principles? The third is status and signaling. Why do humans hide the motives underlying their public behavior? The fourth is bullshit. Why do conscious explanations so often fail to identify the forces producing behavior? The fifth is recursive social cognition. How do people signal that they are not signaling and compete while concealing the competition? The newest circle is coordination. How do alliances, friendships, humor, and political institutions let highly social animals organize themselves around common interests and conflicts?
Across all of them runs one question. Do people do things for the reasons they say they do? The young Pinsof asked whether people opposed same-sex marriage for the moral reasons they supplied. Alliance Theory asked whether political ideologies came from the values their adherents invoked. “Status Is Weird” asked whether noble conduct could conceal competition. “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” asked how that concealment could become an evolved signaling strategy. “A Big Misunderstanding” asked whether intellectuals’ explanations of society conveniently magnify the importance of intellectuals. His happiness writing asks whether people understand the goals they believe they pursue.
Pinsof has spent a decade removing the object from his original question. What began as “Do people oppose this political policy for the reasons they say they do?” has become something close to “Does anybody do anything for the reasons they say they do?” That enlargement is the attraction of the project and its greatest vulnerability.
He has identified forces that exist. Human beings form alliances. They seek status. They manage impressions. They rationalize. They signal. They have incentives to hide unattractive motives. They apply their principles selectively. Their accounts of themselves are incomplete. The unresolved question is how much these forces explain.
If Alliance Theory says coalitions influence political ideology, it persuades. If it says values are largely post hoc coalition propaganda, the evidentiary burden grows much heavier. If status theory says people sometimes disguise status seeking, it names a familiar phenomenon. If every act of humility, rebellion, generosity, authenticity, and indifference can be recoded as hidden status competition, it becomes hard to say what evidence could count against the theory.
Pinsof is at his most scientifically valuable when he disciplines his own cynicism. The formal treatment of concealed signals beats declaring everything a status game. Mathematical alliance models beat collecting partisan inconsistencies. A testable coordination theory of humor beats saying jokes help people bond. The movement from aphorism to model may decide whether Pinsof is remembered as a clever public intellectual or as the architect of a durable research program.
The popular persona conceals another feature of him. He enjoys explanation. He remains invested in doing science. He runs experiments and mathematical models, revises theories, engages serious critics, produces a research podcast, and keeps working inside UCLA with the money to walk away from it. His cynicism concerns human self-description.
That makes the title Everything Is Bullshit misleading. Pinsof believes that much of what human beings say about why they think, choose, and value what they do is psychologically superficial. His project is to uncover the machinery underneath.
The biography helped make that project possible. An actor-in-training became a social psychologist. A group of high-school friends produced a vulgar card game. The game became a fortune. The fortune freed one of its creators from the ordinary career structure of academia. The game taught him to compress uncomfortable observations into memorable sentences. Evolutionary psychology taught him to ask what those uncomfortable behaviors were designed to accomplish. Political psychology supplied the first cases. The internet supplied an audience on which to test ever broader versions of the theory.
He is an experiment in what happens when an evolutionary psychologist acquires tenure-like independence without tenure and then follows one explanatory instinct for more than a decade. The experiment now has a result to wait for. The theory that began by explaining away other people’s reasons is being made to compete against another explanation under rules announced in advance.
The Set
Start with the room. Every summer the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meets in a hotel with bad carpet, and for four days a few hundred people argue about what the mind was built to do. The 2025 program runs to talks on alliance formation, mating strategy, coalitional cognition, disgust, gossip, and hatred. David Pinsof gave one called “Whose Side Are You On? The Evolutionary Game Theory of Alliances.” In the audience sit the people who can evaluate it. There are not many of them. Randall Collins observed in The Sociology of Philosophies that intellectual fields sustain only three to six live positions at a time, because attention is the scarce good and the network cannot hold more. The Pinsof set is a field of that size. Its members can be named, and most of them appear in the citations of one journal issue and the guest list of one podcast.
The inner ring is a laboratory lineage. Martie Haselton chaired his dissertation and has coauthored with him since 2016. David O. Sears supplied the political psychology and stands as senior author on the Alliance Theory papers. Aaron Lukaszewski and H. Clark Barrett sat on the committee. Jaimie Krems runs the Social Minds Lab where he now works. Daniel Sznycer joins him and Krems on the UCLA engineering-of-hatred project. Elias Acevedo, whom Pinsof co-advises with Krems and Haselton, carries the abortion paper, the awe paper, and the replication of the equality-for-all study. Tran Dinh and Steven Gangestad appear on the ovulatory-shift work. Behind all of them stand Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, whose Santa Barbara program supplies the grammar every one of these people speaks, along with Robert Trivers on self-deception, Amotz Zahavi on costly signals, Robert Kurzban on the modular and hypocritical mind, and Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier on reasoning as an argumentative tool.
The second ring is the ring of worthy opponents, and a set of this size cannot function without them. Most of them wrote for the 2023 issue of Psychological Inquiry. David Pietraszewski made the most dangerous concession. Suppose Alliance Theory is right, he asked in a commentary subtitled “Political Ideologies as Ad-Hoc Alliances… So What?”, and then posed seven problems a predictive evolutionary political psychology would still have to solve. Two years later he became Pinsof’s podcast cohost. Peter DeScioli agreed that alliances belong at the foundation of political psychology and then turned the claim around: in “The Dangers of Alliances Caused the Evolution of Moral Principles” he argued that impartial moral rules evolved as a way to choose sides without the hazards of choosing by alliance. Where Pinsof looks behind principles and finds coalitions, DeScioli looks behind principles and finds machinery built to restrain coalitions. Michael Bang Petersen and Antoine Marie argued in their commentary that status deserved more room than Alliance Theory gave it. Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson said alliances are one factor among many. Ariel Malka and Christopher Federico said belief systems have other roots and asked for a study that would let dispositions and alliances compete. Yoav Ganzach said the theory explains little. Mark Hoffarth and John Jost were the first to push back in print, in 2017, and Jost’s later attack on both-sideology, which never names Pinsof, is the strongest statement of the position the set defines itself against in the wider argument over ideological symmetry. The Toronto collaboration that pits alliances against dispositions is the study Malka and Federico asked for, and it will give this ring something to shoot at.
The third ring is the public one, joined by traffic. Dan Williams of Conspicuous Cognition is the closest thing Pinsof has to a sparring partner of equal weight. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias and Kevin Simler at Melting Asphalt wrote The Elephant in the Brain and made the hidden-motive essay a genre. Will Storr wrote The Status Game. Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History runs the same operation on psychology’s own institutions. Rob Henderson at his newsletter, Steve Stewart-Williams, Coltan Scrivner, Diana Fleischman, Geoffrey Miller, and Richard Hanania occupy adjacent stalls in the same market. Zach Elwood, Chris Williamson, and Jim O’Shaughnessy supply the microphones. Behind them stand the dead: La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, Adam Smith of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Nietzsche, Veblen, Goffman, and Harry Frankfurt, whose On Bullshit gave the set its title word.
What do they value? Function first. The question they ask of any behavior, belief, institution, or emotion is what it was built to accomplish, and they hold that the honest answer will rarely match the answer the actor gives. They value parsimony, and they value nerve. They value a man who can hold an unflattering hypothesis in his hand without dropping it. They value wit, and they treat a good joke as evidence, since a joke that lands proves that the audience recognized the hidden thing. They have started to value formal models more than they used to, which is why Pinsof’s move toward game theory reads as a bid for standing inside the field as well as a scientific step. He now says all science should go that way.
The immortality project: A true account of human nature that other people still use in fifty years. That is why the set treats popularization with suspicion even as it lives on Substack, and why the members who have crossed over keep insisting they are still doing science.
The status games follow from the hero system. The first is the cynicism arms race. If seeing through is the virtue, then the man who sees through one layer further wins the exchange. Hanson says medicine is not about health. Pinsof says the humble man is competing. The next man says the confession of competing is itself a competitive move. The game has no ceiling, which is a problem the set half-recognizes and half-enjoys. Pinsof’s “4D Chess” paper is an attempt to give the ceiling a number: the fifth order costs more than it pays.
The second is the reflexivity trump card. Admitting that your own essay is a status play cannot be answered, since any objection you raise afterward can be recoded as the play. Mary Douglas would recognize the structure. The confession functions as a purification rite, and once performed it licenses the polluting act. This is how a man can write about status seeking for three years while accumulating status and never appear to have contradicted himself.
The third is the freedom display. Pinsof has money from a card game and says so. Hanson has tenure. Mastroianni left. In a set that theorizes incentives, being visibly unbought is the highest form of capital. Robert Merton called disinterestedness a norm of science and noted that scientists have to perform it. Here the performance has been specialized: independence from career pressure is displayed, and it functions as a warrant. Trust me, I have nothing riding on this.
The fourth is hospitality to critics. When Dan Williams answered Pinsof with “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment,” Pinsof replied in Williams’s own newsletter, conceded ground, and kept the disagreement narrow. Taking your strongest opponent seriously in his own house is a status move of a high order, and making a former critic your podcast cohost, as Pinsof did with Pietraszewski, is a higher one.
The fifth is boundary work. The set defines itself against three neighbors it can be seen arguing with. Against mainstream social psychology, which it regards as a machine for producing flattering findings about the researchers’ own coalition, and whose position Jost states most sharply. Against the rationalists and effective altruists, whose faith in articulate reasoning Pinsof attacks in “Utilitarianism Is Bullshit” and “AI Doomerism Is Bullshit.” And against the pop-evolutionary content business, the alpha-male podcast economy, which sells the same words with none of the discipline. Each boundary is patrolled by tone as much as by argument. You signal which side you are on by what you find funny.
Now the claims. The set writes as if it had no normative commitments and has several. Truth beats comfort, held with something close to religious force. Incentives beat exhortation, so the way to fix an institution is to change what it pays for. The symmetry claim is narrower than the rhetoric suggests. In “Strange Bedfellows” Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton posit a psychological equivalence between liberals and conservatives in alliance-serving cognition, reject any moral equivalence, since the same psychology produces different harms depending on who gets classed as an enemy, and allow that other psychological asymmetries between left and right may exist. The symmetry is architectural: belonging to the morally better coalition exempts no one from coalitional cognition. That is still a moral doctrine, and Jost is right to treat the symmetry posture as one, though he is wrong to think naming it settles anything. Sanctimony is the cardinal sin. And beneath the cynicism runs a meliorism the set rarely admits, since a man who did not think understanding could improve things would not run studies, build models, or publish weekly. Pinsof conceded as much to Williams when he acknowledged his own attraction to Enlightenment ideals.
The adaptationist commitments: The set holds that a species-typical psychological architecture exists, that it has content, and that the content can be discovered. It holds that psychological systems have functions, and that a function is a real property of a trait. It holds that motives are real objects that exist below awareness and can be wrong about themselves. Those are strong commitments, and the set makes them at the level of the species. At the level of the group it makes almost none: Alliance Theory’s point is that coalitions are historically contingent and that no party owns a timeless ideological essence. The set is fixed about human nature and fluid about human groups, and it holds both at once. In the AI argument Pinsof pushes the second habit further and denies that intelligence is a single substance, treating it as a bundle of special-purpose capacities. The set treats as machinery what rationalists treat as a quantity, and as contingent what political psychology treats as a trait.
The moral grammar: Sanctimony is the sin. Mood affiliation is the sin. Believing your own press is the sin. Boring is a sin, which is unusual for a scholarly community and traces to the card game. The virtues are candor about one’s own motives, updating in public, engaging the strongest version of an opponent, and taking a joke at one’s own expense. There is a confession, the reflexive admission, and it grants absolution. There is an excommunication, reserved for those caught moralizing without irony or defending a sacred cow. And there is a sacrament of controlled defilement. Cards Against Humanity is a liturgy in which a group of friends touch the forbidden together and prove by laughing that no one present is fragile. Douglas would say the game handles pollution the way rituals always do, by staging it under rules. The Substack performs the same office with moral material instead of scatological. The essays that end in “Status Is Weird” and “A Big Misunderstanding” invite the reader to handle a thought about himself that he would rather not touch, and the reward for handling it is membership.
A hero system that rewards nerve will reward the boldest claim over the best-supported one. A moral grammar built on confession lets the confessor buy indulgences. A set that defines itself by seeing through everything has trouble specifying what it could fail to see through. Pinsof’s answer, so far, has been to reach for formal models, since “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” tries to say when concealed signals should fail and the Toronto study tries to say when alliances should lose to dispositions. DeScioli’s answer is older: the thing the set cannot see through may be the moral rule itself, which on his account evolved because alliances are dangerous and people needed a way to choose sides without them. Whether the set follows Pinsof into models, or takes DeScioli’s point that some principles are not coalition propaganda, will determine whether it becomes a research program or remains a style.
Annah Feinberg
Annah Feinberg is a playwright turned dramaturg turned screenwriter turned cartoonist turned graphic novelist, and the through-line in her work runs so close to her husband’s that the two of them look, from a distance, like a single project pursued by two methods.
Feinberg grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, the next town over from Pinsof’s Highland Park on Chicago’s North Shore. She took a BFA in theatre studies from the University of Illinois in 2009, the year Pinsof graduated from Iowa, and then an MFA in dramaturgy from Columbia. Her HowlRound biography says that graduate school was where she had the debt-riddled realization that she did not want to be a dramaturg. She had by then written plays. The Beautiful Beautiful Sea Next Door, a dark comedy that reworks the Medusa myth as a family drama with cellphones, was produced in New York in 2012. Numismatics, about a woman who returns to her dead mother’s house to organize a coin collection as a defense against a larger chaos, was a finalist for a Clubbed Thumb commission. The Ivories concerns an elephant invasion of the Midwest and a seventy-two-year-old woman who sets out to become a YouTube pop star to avenge her daughter’s murder. Doollee lists the plays as unpublished, and I have not found the scripts.
She wrote for HowlRound in those years, and two essays there show the mind before the comedy. “Confessions of a Serial Intern” describes seven theatre internships that she found useful and that also trained her, she wrote, to accept exploitation, apologize constantly, and be grateful for scraps. “Antipermanence,” from 2014, argues that nonprofit theatres profess missions built on experiment and community while their budgets, buildings, and jobs push them toward one goal, which is to keep existing. She surveyed staff at dozens of theatres to measure the gap between what the institutions said they were for and what they did. That is the question her husband would make a career of, put to an institution she knew from inside, three years before he defended his dissertation.
Feinberg moved to Los Angeles in 2013. There she was one of the founding members of the Kilroys, the collective of women in theatre that began publishing an annual list of unproduced plays by women and trans writers to answer the industry’s claim that it could not find them. Her account of the problem, in a 2014 Backstage interview, was that theatres sincerely believed in equality and kept producing the same men, and that the cause was habit and structure. She then, as her own biography puts it, ditched the theatre to become a screenwriter and cartoonist.
The Hollywood years were an apprenticeship. She was an assistant on Veep, a writers’ assistant on Arrested Development, and a script coordinator on I Love Dick. In April 2019 Variety reported that Showtime was developing her half-hour animated comedy Multifarious Maris, with ShadowMachine, the studio behind BoJack Horseman, attached. The premise is a compact statement of her subject. On the night of her thirtieth birthday Maris discovers that after one glass of wine too many she can travel into the lives she would have lived had she chosen differently, and she spends the series hopping between them in search of the one where she is living her best life. The joke is on the phrase. Feinberg has since developed adult animation for AMC as well, and her website lists two live-action features and a second graphic novel in progress.
Her humor writing is where most readers meet her. She has published in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Bon Appétit, and The Hairpin, and the New Yorker pieces make a small anthology of one comic method. “Millennials Are the First Generation in History to Inspire Think Pieces About Millennials” has a narrator who clicks on an article because it is about her personally and then recites the article’s list of generational experiences back as proof of her individuality. “But I Can’t Complain” keeps one rule fixed, that others have it worse, while the circumstances around it escalate from backache to a toddler who kills the neighbors’ pets to nuclear war. “What I Know About You Based on How Many of Your Friends Are Becoming Therapists,” from this spring, builds a diagnostic taxonomy out of a number and closes by sending the reader to therapy. “From Napkin to Notoriety” is about the insufferable literary wunderkind, a figure she has watched from inside theatre, graduate school, writers’ rooms, and magazines. “Why Women’s Bodies Are Bad for Women,” at McSweeney’s, takes the wellness-culture separation of self from body so literally that the solution becomes leaving the body altogether.
Her debut graphic novel, Goodbye, Dolly!, came out in 2025. It is narrated from beyond the grave by Dolly the cloned sheep, whose six adult children, the nepo lambs, wander the Scottish countryside after her death trying to work out what a second-generation clone is for. The Deerfield Public Library, her hometown library, had her on its podcast, and she said there that Dolly had made her uneasy at age ten and that she was drawn to the gap between an epochal scientific breakthrough and the speed with which the world stopped caring about it. Comic Book Herald singled out her method of drawing the sheep by hand and setting them against photographs of Edinburgh and the Scottish hills. A neurotic cartoon consciousness in the middle of a licensed stock landscape is a fair picture of her whole comic world.
Feinberg typically begins with a real human predicament, a dead mother, a murdered daughter, adult disappointment, a body, and then supplies the character with an absurd system for managing it: coin collecting, YouTube fame, gratitude practice, therapy vocabulary, generational sociology, a multiverse. The character follows the system with total seriousness. Feinberg then lets the system run until it consumes the person. The coins get organized; the mother stays dead. The narrator cannot complain; the house burns down. The emotion in these pieces is never fake. The grief is grief, the anxiety is anxiety, the wanting is real. What is wrong is the script the culture hands the person for handling it. Her subject is that misfit, and her characters are ridiculous without being frauds.
Set that beside her husband. Pinsof’s blog is called Everything Is Bullshit, and his method is to take a respectable explanation and replace it with the less respectable machinery underneath: incentives, alliances, status, signaling, confabulation. He decomposes. Feinberg takes the same respectable explanation and lets it keep talking until it incriminates itself. She literalizes. Pinsof writes that your egalitarian principle may be serving a coalition. Feinberg invents a woman so egalitarian she has ranked all her friends by how psychologically evolved they are. He explains the contradiction. She stages it. Both of them are after the distance between the story a sophisticated person tells about himself and the less dignified thing visibly going on underneath, and both trained in theatre, in neighboring suburbs, in the same year, before either had a name for the subject.
“Antipermanence” and the Kilroys came before Pinsof’s public work, and her comic architecture is visible in a 2012 play. What the record does show is collaboration. In 2014 Feinberg wrote and directed a short called Gretch & Tim, about idealistic twins who fail to save their town library and decide to steal it back, and the credits list the original music as David Pinsof’s. In 2018 he composed for her Balloon Room, a short musical in which Stacy Osei-Kuffour played Hillary Clinton. Her later shorts, The Workplace and Fetus Monster, credit other composers. So the music Pinsof told me he finds inherently enjoyable was, for several years, the medium through which the two of them made things together, and it began a year after she arrived in Los Angeles and four years before his dissertation. I have found no public account of how they met.
Feinberg appears in Pinsof’s writing more than he appears in hers, and when she does she tends to mark the limit of his persona. In “Money Is Bullshit” he reduces exchange to its social functions and then reaches marriage and stops reducing. His wife, he writes, is irreplaceable, because her interests have become intertwined with his own, and a man who withheld help from her because she could not repay it would be a bad husband. He uses the phrase without irony. In “Deep Bullshit” he describes leaving a restaurant with his pregnant wife when an older woman stopped them and announced that their baby would change the world. Feinberg teared up and later agreed the prophecy was bullshit. Pinsof admits he was moved too, while diagnosing why the line worked. In “Bullshit Is a Choice” he calls himself a softie who sings the Barney song to his daughter. And in this August’s “The Correct Answer to Every Philosophical Question” he says his belief that life has no inherent meaning survived fatherhood while the feeling behind it did not. The man who explains why our deepest stories are bullshit has a family life in which understanding the machinery leaves the feeling in place.
Feinberg keeps him offstage. Her Bon Appétit essay on the weeks after her daughter’s birth is personal and names no husband. The Deerfield interview ranges across childhood, parenthood, existential dread, and sheep, and never mentions him. That tells you nothing about the marriage and something about the two writers. He brings his household into his essays because it supplies cases for the theory. She writes from inside her own head and leaves the rest of the house alone.
If Pinsof’s question is what the machinery underneath us produces, Feinberg’s is what it looks like from inside. His answer is a model. Hers is a sheep in a stock photograph of Scotland, sincerely grieving, wondering who she is, and reaching for the wrong tool.
Pinsof on Pinsof
David Pinsof’s theory says that stated reasons are rarely causes, that opinions are coalition badges, that status seeking must hide itself to work, and that intellectuals exaggerate the problems that make intellectuals necessary. He has applied every one of those claims to other people and some of them to himself. “Psychologizing Psychologists” turned the method on his field. The reflexive admission runs through the blog: yes, this essay is a status play too. What he has not done is run the theory on the machine that publishes him. The machine is Substack, and it has incentives, an audience, and a coalition of its own. His theory predicts what those will do to a writer. The prediction can be checked against the writer.
Start with the titles, since the title is the unit Substack pays for. A post travels as a headline in an email, a link on X, a screenshot in a group chat. The argument arrives later, if at all. Pinsof’s titles read as a list of executions: “Happiness Is Bullshit,” “The Meaning of Life Is Bullshit,” “Utilitarianism Is Bullshit,” “Democracy Is Bullshit,” “AI Doomerism Is Bullshit.” The arguments under them are qualified. “Democracy Is Bullshit” concludes that democracy beats the alternatives. “Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited” reworks the original into a claim about prediction-error signals that most psychologists could sign. The gap between title and argument is a fact about the corpus, and Pinsof’s theory has a name for it. In “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” he describes signals that deliver a benefit while concealing that a signal is being sent. The maximal title delivers the status benefit of nerve, the cardinal virtue of his set, and the qualified argument supplies deniability when the nerve is challenged. The title says everything is bullshit. The essay says some things are more functional than they look. A reader who objects to the title is pointed to the essay. A reader who finds the essay tame is pointed to the title. The pair works the way his theory says paradoxical signals work: it collects the reward for boldness while retaining the ability to disclaim boldness.
His own “Opinions Are Bullshit” supplies the second lens. Opinions, on that account, function as badges of coalition membership. They are held, displayed, and defended for what they signal about whose side you are on. Apply that to the blog’s targets. Pinsof attacks happiness research, the search for meaning, utilitarianism, rationalist AI doom, mainstream political psychology, and the intellectual class’s faith in its own necessity. Every one of those targets sits inside or next to the audience that reads him. UCLA’s profile of its Substack academics called his readership a global gathering of Darwinist cynics, and that gathering overlaps with the rationalist and effective-altruist worlds he keeps attacking. Alliance Theory predicts this pattern. The cheapest status inside a coalition comes from defeating the nearest rival coalition on shared ground. Attacking utilitarianism in front of people who have read too much utilitarianism wins more than attacking, say, astrology, which no one in the room defends. His targets are the badges his audience is half-ashamed of wearing. The essays let readers take them off in public and put on a better one.
The theory also predicts what he will leave alone. In the bio I noted that the set defines itself against the hereditarian right, which shares its evolutionary vocabulary. Pinsof does not write “Egalitarianism Is Bullshit” or “Race Is Not Bullshit.” On his own account of coalitional caution there is no need to ask whether he holds views on those questions. The point of Alliance Theory is that positions are set by who you can afford to lose. A Darwinist cynic who ran the method on group differences would lose the part of his audience that keeps him respectable, and his theory says the essay that costs a coalition does not get written. That is a prediction his theory makes about him, and the blog’s table of contents matches it.
Next take the freedom display. Pinsof told Zach Elwood that Cards Against Humanity freed him from the incentives of an academic career, and he has said so often enough that the fact has become part of his public identity. “Status Is Weird” argues that displayed independence from status is itself a status strategy, one of the best. By his own logic the repeated mention of his financial freedom is a signal that says trust me, I have nothing riding on this, and it earns him the deference that an unbought man gets in a set that theorizes incentives. The signal happens to be true. His theory does not care whether it is true. It cares what it does, and what it does is exempt him from the suspicion he directs at everyone else. The money freed him from one incentive structure and put him inside another. Substack rewards frequency, provocation, and a recognizable voice, and it rewards them in attention, which for a man who does not need the subscriptions is the currency that remains. His theory says attention is the currency that was always at stake.
Now the numbers. The blog ran twenty posts in 2023, twelve in 2024, ten in 2025, and six through August 2026. The annual archives show the decline. Over the same years he published in American Psychologist, presented evolutionary game theory at HBES, started a research podcast with David Pietraszewski, and began writing models with Greek letters in them. He told me all science should move toward formalism and his work is no exception. That is a stated reason. His theory says stated reasons are rarely causes and that the cause is usually a move in a status game. The move here is legible in the “4D Chess” abstract he sent me. At the fourth order, status-seekers who have been caught pretending learn to pretend to be unpretentious. A man who has gained standing as a cynic by seeing through everyone eventually has to signal that he is not merely a cynic gaining standing, and in his set the surest way to do that is to become boring on purpose. Mathematics is the costly signal. It cannot be screenshotted. It does not travel by email. It says: I was never in this for the titles. The formal turn is, by Pinsof’s own account of the fourth order, the unpretentious pose that a pretentious signaler adopts once the audience has learned to see through pretension. The pose may also be science. The theory says both can be true, and that the man executing it will believe only the second.
In “A Big Misunderstanding,” Pinsof argues that intellectuals inflate the role of misunderstanding in social dysfunction because a world full of misunderstanding needs intellectuals to correct it. Invert the argument and aim it at the blog. A Darwinist cynic inflates the role of hidden motive in social life because a world full of hidden motives needs Darwinist cynics to expose it. Everything Is Bullshit is a brand, and a brand called Everything Is Bullshit has a commercial and coalitional interest in everything continuing to be bullshit. The essays that qualify the title, that concede democracy works and happiness might be a real signal and Dan Williams might have a point, are the essays that threaten the brand, and they are also the best essays. The tension I called the central one in his career, between a favored explanation and the evidence that would limit it, is on this reading a tension between the writer and the masthead. His theory predicts the masthead will win more often than the writer would like.
Dan Williams answered “A Big Misunderstanding” with “We Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment,” and Pinsof replied in Williams’s own newsletter with “What Kind of Apes Are We?” I read that exchange in the bio as the place where the swagger falls away. Under Pinsof’s theory it reads as something else as well. Replying in the rival’s house, conceding ground, narrowing the disagreement: these are the moves “Status Is Weird” identifies as the highest-yield status plays available, the ones that gain by appearing to give. The concession was sincere. His theory says the sincerity is what makes it work, and that the man making it need not know what it is doing for him. Making Pietraszewski, a critic of Alliance Theory, his podcast cohost belongs to the same family. A former enemy on your payroll is the alliance move that looks least like one.
The audience, for its part, is doing what Alliance Theory says audiences do. Readers who share the badges he sells become a coalition, and the coalition pulls the writer toward what it rewards. The phrase for that is audience capture, and it is an Alliance Theory story with the writer as the captured party. The evidence of capture in Pinsof’s case is mixed. The titles stayed maximal while the arguments grew careful, which suggests he gave the audience the headline and kept the essay for himself. The posting rate fell as the formal work rose, which suggests the academic coalition began outbidding the Substack one. The AI doom essay drew the heaviest resistance from his own readers, and he did not retreat, which suggests either that he is less captured than the theory predicts or that the rationalist part of his audience is the part he can afford to lose. His theory does not let him claim the first without earning it, and the second is the alliance reading.
There is one more party the theory applies to, and I am it. A long biography of a Darwinist cynic, published by a writer who has adopted the cynic’s concepts and run them on Orthodox Jewish communal life, on academics, and on public intellectuals, is a bid for standing inside the cynic’s set. The essay signals membership by fluency. It signals nerve by criticizing the subject. It signals humility by criticizing the subject gently and by ending with the concession that he might be right. Pinsof answered the draft by calling me the closest thing he has to a biographer. On his theory that sentence is the coalition admitting a member, and the warmth I felt reading it is the reward the coalition pays. On his theory I should distrust the warmth and keep writing. On his theory he should distrust the biography and keep reading. Neither of us will, and the theory explains that too, which is the thing about it that his critics find hardest to forgive.
A Robin Dunbar Frame
The paper David Pinsof described to me under the title “Human Status-Seeking as 4D Chess” ends its arms race at a specific rung. Status-seekers pretend to care, audiences see through the pretending, the seekers then pretend to be unpretentious, and there the recursion stops, because, in his words, fifth-order mindreading makes cognitive demands that most people cannot meet. The pretenders win, on this account, partly because nobody can afford to catch them at the next level up. That is a claim about a number, and the number comes from a laboratory. Whether the number has held is a question the model has to answer before the game theory can start.
The laboratory belongs to Robin Dunbar, the Oxford evolutionary psychologist better known for the number 150. Dunbar’s larger project is the social brain hypothesis: primate brains grew to manage social complexity, and the human neocortex is the size it is because human groups are the size they are. Inside that project sits a smaller literature on what Dunbar calls orders of intentionality, borrowing Daniel Dennett’s term. First-order intentionality is having a belief. Second-order is believing something about another’s belief, which is ordinary theory of mind, the thing children acquire around age four. Third-order is believing that you think that I believe. Each further embedding adds a clause. Dunbar’s question was how many clauses an adult can track before the structure falls apart.
The first answer came in 1998, in a paper by Peter Kinderman, Dunbar, and Richard Bentall that gave adults short stories and asked questions of increasing embedding. Performance stayed high through the fourth order and dropped sharply at the fifth. Dunbar has repeated the result across several studies since. In 2007 James Stiller and Dunbar reported that the mean adult ceiling sits around the fourth to fifth order, that individuals range from about three to about seven, and that the ceiling predicts the size of a person’s social network. Later imaging work from the same group tied intentionality competence to the volume of orbital prefrontal cortex. Dunbar has built a good deal on the fifth-order limit. He argues that religion requires it, since a believer must hold that God intends that we believe that He wants us to act as He intends. He argues that Shakespeare’s audiences worked at the fourth order and Shakespeare at the fifth or sixth, and that this is why the plays are hard.
Set that beside Pinsof’s ladder. His first level is caring about others being inferred and rewarded, which in Dunbar’s counting is second-order: I believe you care. His second level, the seeker anticipating the inference and pretending, is Dunbar’s third: I believe that you believe that I care. His third level, seeing through the pretending, is Dunbar’s fourth. His fourth level, pretending to be unpretentious, is Dunbar’s fifth. And the fifth level he says nobody can run, the one that would catch the unpretentious pose, is Dunbar’s sixth. If that mapping is right, the model stops one rung past where Dunbar’s data say most adults stop, and the stopping rule is better supported than Pinsof’s own phrasing suggests, since Dunbar found the wall at five and the model needs people to fail at six. If Pinsof counts the way Dunbar counts and means the fifth order in Dunbar’s sense, then his fourth level, the crucial one where humility gets faked, is already at the ceiling for the average adult, and the model has to explain how the average status-seeker executes a strategy the average brain can barely represent. The paper will need to say which count it uses. The difference is one rung, and one rung is the argument.
The larger difficulty is that Dunbar’s wall has been fought over for a decade, and the fight is unresolved. In 2015 Cathleen O’Grady, Christian Kliesch, Kenny Smith, and Thomas Scott-Phillips published “The Ease and Extent of Recursive Mindreading, Across Implicit and Explicit Tasks” in Evolution and Human Behavior. They argued that the earlier tests were flawed: the stories broke their own conceptual chains, some questions could be answered by simple substitution, and some had no correct answer. With cleaner stimuli they found adults tracking mental states to at least seven levels of embedding, both when the states were described in words and when they were shown in filmed interactions. They also found the implicit version easier than the explicit one. Watching people is easier than reading about them. Nathan Oesch and Dunbar answered in 2017 with five objections. Then in 2023 Ross Wilson, Ales Hruby, Daniel Perez-Zapata, Sanne van der Kleij, and Ian Apperly published “Is Recursive ‘Mindreading’ Really an Exception to Limitations on Recursive Thinking?” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. They rebuilt the tasks again, this time to close the shortcuts they found in O’Grady’s stimuli, and fifth-order performance fell from 80 percent on the original tasks to 17 percent on the revised ones. A second study got 15 percent. Only large bonuses, unlimited time, and coaching on a strategy raised it to 45 percent. Their conclusion was that recursive mindreading is effortful and limited like recursion in every other domain. A 2024 study by Cameron Jones, Sean Trott, and Benjamin Bergen at UC San Diego then replicated O’Grady’s seven-level result with text-only stimuli and ruled out the answer-format shortcuts. So the literature in 2026 holds two results that contradict each other, and which one you get depends on how the stories are written. Pinsof’s model borrows its central parameter from the side of a dispute that has not been settled.
That matters for the arms race in four ways.
First, the implicit finding cuts against Pinsof in the setting his model cares about most. Status competition does not happen in short stories. It happens in rooms, over months, among people who watch each other. O’Grady and her coauthors found that the deep embeddings were easier when the observer watched a social scene than when he read a description. If that holds, the cynical audience Pinsof needs to be exhausted at the fifth order is operating in the condition where fifth-order tracking is cheapest. The model’s stopping rule assumes the hardest case and applies it to the easiest. Wilson and Apperly give him a way back: their subjects could reach the fifth order when paid enough and given time, which is what a status competition offers an audience that has months to watch and something at stake. The two findings together suggest the ceiling is a cost curve, and a cost curve is what a formal model needs. Pinsof should model the price of the fifth order.
Second, the variation Dunbar found is a prediction Pinsof has not yet made. If individuals range from three to seven orders, and the range tracks network size and prefrontal volume, then the arms race does not stop at the same rung for everyone. Some audiences run the fifth and sixth orders without strain. Those audiences should catch the unpretentious pose, and in front of them the pretenders should lose. That yields something testable. Pretension should thrive where audiences are large, anonymous, and cannot spend the fifth order on each performer, and it should die in small dense groups where every member has the capacity and the time to run it. The essayist with seven thousand subscribers faces a different mindreading budget per reader than the man in a twelve-person lab, and the model should say that the essayist can afford poses the lab member cannot. Dunbar’s own linkage of mindreading capacity to network size supports the inference, since the people with the highest ceilings are the ones with the most relationships to spend it on.
Third, the same variation makes Pinsof’s second reason for the pretenders’ victory do more of the work. His abstract gives two. One is the cost of the fifth order. The other is that being charmed by a talented mindreader pays, because talented mindreaders are likely to rise and it is worth being on their side. That second reason survives O’Grady and Jones. It does not depend on a ceiling. It says that even an audience capable of seeing through the pose has a reason not to, since the person executing the pose is displaying the skill that predicts future status, and the display is itself information. On that reading the pretenders win by recruitment. Dunbar supplies a warrant here too. If mindreading competence predicts network size, then the skilled pretender is not merely charming; he has more allies, and joining him is the better bet. If the cost argument falls, the charm argument can hold the model up on its own, and Pinsof would do well to say so before a reviewer who has read O’Grady says it for him.
Fourth, the explicit task may be the right one for part of Pinsof’s problem. Seeing through a pose in the moment is implicit. Explaining to a third party why the pose was a pose is explicit; it requires putting the embedded clauses into words, and that is where O’Grady found the going harder and where Wilson found it hardest. Much of what Pinsof calls the collapse of a status game under common knowledge happens through talk. Someone has to say, out loud, that the humble man is competing, and say it in a way that others can follow. If the explicit ceiling sits lower than the implicit one, then a room might contain many people who privately see through a pose and few who can articulate it, and the pose survives as a public fact while dying as a private one. That is a richer version of Pinsof’s thesis than the one in his abstract, and the explicit-task data point straight at it.
The question of whether the ceiling varies by culture, training, or intelligence is where the literature is thinnest and where Pinsof’s model is most exposed. Dunbar’s samples were British undergraduates and adults. Stiller and Dunbar found the competence measure only loosely related to general intelligence, and there is little cross-cultural work at the higher orders. Wilson’s coaching result says the ceiling moves with strategy, at least in the laboratory. If it can be raised by practice, and the professions that practice it include lawyers, diplomats, novelists, actors, and comedy writers, then those groups should be the cynical audiences that break the equilibrium. Pinsof trained as an actor and wrote a game about predicting what would make friends laugh. If anyone has a raised ceiling, he does, and the model predicts he should be unusually hard to charm. If training does not raise the ceiling, then the arms race is fixed by biology and the pretenders won once, at the species level, which is the stronger and stranger claim. The model as he described it to me leaves the choice open.
The 4D Chess model has put an empirical parameter at its center and borrowed the value from a literature that is split down the middle. Pinsof told me he thinks all science should move toward formalism and that his work is no exception. Formalism has a cost he has now incurred: a verbal theory can say that people eventually lose track, and nobody can object, but a model that says they lose track at five has to defend the five. Dunbar, Oesch, Wilson, and Apperly would defend it. O’Grady, Scott-Phillips, Jones, Trott, and Bergen would not. The paper that settles Pinsof’s arms race may turn out to be one of theirs.
Countersignaling
In 2002 three economists published a paper whose title could serve as a chapter heading in Everything Is Bullshit. Nick Feltovich, Rick Harbaugh, and Ted To called it “Too Cool for School? Signalling and Countersignalling,” and it appeared in the RAND Journal of Economics. Its subject was the rich man who dresses down, the Nobel laureate who introduces himself by first name, the top student who skips the honors seal, the old-money family that finds display vulgar. Each of these people declines a signal that economics since Michael Spence said he should send. The paper explained why, and it explained it with a model, an equilibrium, and a laboratory experiment. Twenty-one years later David Pinsof posted “Status Is Weird” and asked why humility, indifference to status, and refusal to signal so often win the status they disclaim. The question is whether he was answering a question the economists had already closed.
He was not, and he knew the literature. The preprint of “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” cites Feltovich and Harbaugh for the observation that we gain status by not caring about status, and it cites Moshe Hoffman, Christian Hilbe, and Martin Nowak’s 2018 paper “The Signal-Burying Game Can Explain Why We Obscure Positive Traits and Good Deeds,” which modeled anonymous charity and the modest genius in the same tradition. So the rediscovery charge fails. The better question is what a psychologist adds to a problem economists formalized, and the answer turns on a difference the citation hides.
Start with what countersignaling says. Spence’s original model has two types, high and low, and a costly signal the high type can afford and the low type cannot. Education, in Spence’s example, tells employers nothing except that the student could bear its cost. Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To added two things. They added a third type in the middle, and they gave the receiver a second, noisy source of information about the sender, something like reputation, track record, or the way a man carries himself. With that extra channel the model produces an equilibrium the two-type model cannot. Medium types signal, to separate themselves from the low types they might be confused with. High types do not signal, because the noisy channel already separates them from the low types most of the time, and because sending the signal would lump them with the striving mediums. As the authors put it, countersignaling is itself a signal of confidence. Their laboratory subjects learned to do it within a few rounds.
Three features of that model matter for Pinsof. First, the countersignaler knows what he is doing and so does the audience. The old-money heir who wears a frayed sweater is understood by everyone present to be sending a message, and the message works because it is understood. Nothing is concealed. The equilibrium is a common-knowledge equilibrium in the ordinary game-theoretic sense; everyone knows the strategies, everyone knows everyone knows, and the strategies remain stable. Second, the model requires the extra channel. Take away the receiver’s noisy independent information and countersignaling collapses, since a high type who declines the signal now looks like a low type. Third, the model predicts a shape. Signaling effort should rise with quality up to a point and then fall, so that the people signaling hardest sit in the middle of the distribution. That prediction is the reason the paper counts as science. It forbids a monotonic world.
Now read Pinsof against it. His definition of a social paradox is a signal designed to conceal, from both sender and receiver, that a signal is being sent. The virtue signaler does not believe he is virtue signaling, and the person who rewards him does not believe it either; if either did, the paper says, the reward would be withheld. That is a different animal from countersignaling. The countersignaler’s refusal to signal succeeds because the audience reads it. Pinsof’s humble man succeeds only if the audience does not read it. His central claim is that status games can collapse when the players acquire common knowledge that they are playing one. Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To describe a game that is stable under common knowledge. Pinsof describes one that is unstable under it. The two accounts agree on the surface behavior, the modest display, and disagree on what holds it up.
That disagreement is Pinsof’s contribution, and it is a psychologist’s contribution. The economists modeled agents with beliefs about types. Pinsof models agents with beliefs about intentions, and beliefs about others’ beliefs about their intentions, and so on up. He derives the paradox from two cognitive capacities, cue-based inference and recursive mentalizing, and argues that once a signal of a good trait can be recognized as intended, the intention itself becomes a cue of a bad trait, the trait of wanting to be seen as good. The signal then has to go underground. Countersignaling has no mechanism for that. In the economists’ model, wanting to be seen as high type carries no penalty; it is simply the game. In Pinsof’s model, wanting to be seen is the thing the audience punishes, which is why humility is rewarded and why the reward vanishes the moment humility is seen as a bid for it.
The second thing Pinsof adds is self-concealment. Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To have no place for a sender who does not know he is sending. Pinsof’s paradoxes are, by his definition, hidden from the sender as much as from the receiver. That moves the problem from economics into the territory of Robert Trivers on self-deception, and it makes an empirical claim countersignaling does not make: that the effective humble man will sincerely report no status motive, and that the sincerity is part of what makes the signal work. That is testable. The countersignaling model predicts that the old-money heir, asked in private, will say he dresses down so as not to look like a striver. Pinsof’s model predicts the effective version of that man will say he just likes the sweater and will pass a lie detector.
The third addition is scope. Countersignaling explains a few behaviors around display and credentials. Pinsof takes the same structure and runs it through intergroup conflict, moralistic pretexts, sacred values, and the stability of political belief systems. His argument is that a coalition pursuing dominance can coordinate only if its dominance seeking stays out of common knowledge, since open acknowledgment would draw the moral disapproval that breaks coordination. Sacred values, on this reading, are the coalition’s social paradox: the thing you cannot admit is a strategy because admitting it would end its usefulness. Whether that extension survives is a separate question. It is not in the 2002 paper and could not be derived from it.
Against those additions, the economists hold two advantages.
The first is the shape prediction. Countersignaling forbids a monotonic relation between quality and display and predicts a peak in the middle. The prediction has been tested in laboratories and in field data on things like the use of honorifics and the pricing of luxury goods. Pinsof’s social-paradox account, as published, makes no shape prediction of comparable sharpness. It says concealed signals should fail when concealment fails. That is correct and hard to falsify. The countersignaling result is a template for what a sharp version would look like: a prediction that humility should be rewarded most among people whose status is already established by an independent channel, least among those whose status is in doubt, and that the middle of the distribution should be where the visible striving concentrates. If Pinsof’s model predicts that too, he should say so, because it would tie his psychology to a result economists have already found. If it predicts something different, the difference is the experiment.
The second advantage is the extra channel. Countersignaling works because the receiver has other information. That condition explains why the strategy is available to some people and not others, and why the rich can dress down while the poor cannot. Pinsof’s account does not specify the equivalent condition. When can a man afford to hide his signal? The economists answer: when something else is already carrying it. That is a resource constraint, and it predicts that concealed signaling should be a strategy of the secure and overt signaling a strategy of the insecure. Pinsof’s reading of humility as concealed competition would gain discipline from adopting it. Without it, his framework says every humble man might be competing; with it, his framework says which humble men are.
There is a fourth relative in this family worth naming, since Pinsof’s paper sits between its two parents. Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole’s 2006 “Incentives and Prosocial Behavior” in the American Economic Review showed that paying people for good deeds can reduce the deeds, because the payment spoils the signal: once there is a material reason to give, giving no longer proves you are the giving type. That is the economics of the contaminated signal, and it is the closest formal ancestor of Pinsof’s claim that recognized intent destroys the value of a display. Bénabou and Tirole had audiences who know the incentive exists. Pinsof’s move is to make the contaminating factor the audience’s knowledge of intent itself, which pushes the model one level up the recursion.
So the ledger reads like this. Countersignaling got there first on the behavior, twenty-one years before the blog and with a model and an experiment. Signal burying got there on anonymous charity in 2018. Bénabou and Tirole got there on spoiled signals in 2006. Pinsof cites the first two and builds on all three. What he adds is the intention as a cue, the self-deceived sender, the instability under common knowledge, and the extension to coalitions and sacred values. What he has not yet added is the thing the economists had from the start: a prediction that forbids a shape, and a stated condition under which the strategy is available.
The paper he described to me under the title “Human Status-Seeking as 4D Chess” is the place to look for that. Its abstract models each level of mindreading as a stage in an arms race between pretentious signalers and cynical audiences and concludes that the pretenders won because the fifth order costs too much to run. That is a stopping rule, which countersignaling never needed because its agents never climbed past the first level. If the model also says at which level the audience’s independent information enters and how much of it a signaler needs before he can afford to go quiet, Pinsof will have joined his psychology to the economists’ result and improved on it. If it stays at the level of who pretends and who sees through, the economists will still hold the one prediction in this area that has been tested and has held.
A Paul Meehl Frame
Paul Meehl spent the last third of his life explaining why soft psychology does not get anywhere. His answer bears on David Pinsof more than on most psychologists, because Pinsof has picked a fight about explanation in a field where, by Meehl’s account, almost nothing can be refuted and almost everything can be confirmed. Meehl was the psychologist who did clinical prediction, philosophy of science, and the genetics of schizophrenia, and the University of Minnesota keeps his papers online. Three of them matter here. “Theory-Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox” from 1967, “Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology” from 1978, and “Why Summaries of Research on Psychological Theories Are Often Uninterpretable” from 1990. Read together they supply a test for what Pinsof has done and a specification for what he is about to do.
The paradox in the 1967 paper runs like this. In physics a theory predicts a number, and better instruments make the prediction harder to confirm because they narrow the band of results that count as a hit. In psychology a theory predicts a direction, and better methods make the prediction easier to confirm because larger samples reject the null more easily, and the null is almost always false. Meehl called the reason the crud factor. In the social world everything correlates with everything. He later reported a Minnesota study of 57,000 high-school students on 45 variables, from birth order to church attendance to what they liked to read, in which 92 percent of the pairwise correlations reached significance. None of those correlations was predicted by any theory. They were the background noise of a connected world. A theory that says X will correlate with Y in a soft domain has therefore taken a risk close to zero. It had a coin-flip chance of getting the direction right by accident, and the coin was loaded, because the theorist picked the direction after looking at the world.
From that Meehl drew a rule that Wesley Salmon had named the damn strange coincidence. A theory earns credit when it predicts something that would be a strange coincidence if the theory were false. Direction is never strange. A point value is strange. A specified ordering of several groups is strange. An interaction that reverses sign under stated conditions is strange. A predicted null, where the crud factor and every rival say there should be an effect, is the strangest of all, because the crud factor is fighting on the other side. Meehl’s word for the space of outcomes a theory tolerates was the Spielraum. The narrower the Spielraum, the riskier the prediction, and only risky predictions move a field.
Now sort Pinsof.
The first published work passes. The 2016 Psychological Science paper “The Political Divide Over Same-Sex Marriage” did not say that sexual attitudes correlate with political ones. Meehl would have yawned. It predicted an interaction: opposition should rise among people with a restricted sociosexual orientation only when they believe gay men are promiscuous, and the effect of the stereotype should be absent or reversed among the unrestricted. That is a sign prediction under stated conditions, and it narrows the Spielraum. The 2017 PLOS ONE paper “The Effect of the Promiscuity Stereotype on Opposition to Gay Rights” did better still. It manipulated the stereotype and predicted that support would move among the restricted and stay put among the unrestricted. A predicted null in one cell and a predicted effect in another is Meehl’s strange coincidence in miniature. Rival accounts that say opposition comes from religiosity, authoritarianism, or disgust sensitivity had no reason to expect that pattern.
The abortion line passes the same test. The 2016 HBES abstract “Pro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity?” predicted that opposition should concentrate among the restricted only when they believe abortion access encourages casual sex. The 2026 preprint “Concerns about Sexual Promiscuity Play an Underexplored Role in Opposition to Abortion” reports the moderation across four studies. Meehl would want to know the size of the effect and whether it survives the controls the rivals demand, but he would grant that the shape of the prediction was risky.
The double-standards work is the most Meehlian thing Pinsof has done and the least available. Alliance Theory predicts a reversal: the same respondent should endorse a principle when it helps his coalition and reject it when it hurts, and the reversal should run at a similar rate in both parties. That symmetry claim is a risk. The dispositional program, and John Jost in particular, expects asymmetry. Pinsof wrote the Pulse of the Nation questions to catch the reversals before the data came in. That is prediction preceding observation, which is the only order Meehl credited. But the analysis reached the literature as citations inside “Strange Bedfellows” and as a 2018 conference abstract. Meehl’s 1990 paper lists ten reasons research summaries are uninterpretable, and two of them are selective submission and selective publication. A risky prediction that was made, tested, and never written up is uninterpretable for a reason Meehl did not list: no one can read it.
Then comes the part of Pinsof’s corpus Meehl would have marked down. The blog essays make claims with an unbounded Spielraum. “Status Is Weird” says humility, authenticity, and independence can serve as status strategies. Can is not a prediction. The essay does not say when humility should pay and when it should cost, or how much, or for whom. “Everything Is Signaling” has the title of a theory that forbids nothing. Meehl’s complaint about soft psychology was that its theories are stated so loosely that any correlation confirms them and no correlation embarrasses them, and the crud factor guarantees a steady supply of confirming correlations. The blog is that complaint in a readable form. Pinsof knows it, which is why the same years produced “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes,” a paper that tries to say when a concealed signal should work and when it should fail. That is a Spielraum getting narrower under its author’s own pressure.
The commentaries on “Strange Bedfellows” read differently through Meehl. Raihani and Atkinson said alliances are one factor among many. Malka and Federico said belief systems have other roots. Both are true and both are what Meehl predicted the field would say, because in a crud-factor world every factor is one factor among many and every theory is a little bit right. That is the slow progress he mourned. Ganzach argued that alliances do not meaningfully explain ideology, which is an effect-size claim. Meehl would say effect size alone settles nothing when the competing theories all predict a positive coefficient. The question is who predicted the pattern, and pattern here means which issues, which respondents, which direction, and which nulls.
That is the specification for the Toronto study. Pinsof told me he is joining a group at the University of Toronto on a large preregistered paper that pits alliances against dispositions as predictors of political views. Meehl gives four demands. First, the preregistration must say in advance which issues alliances should win and which dispositions should win. Alliance Theory has a natural answer: on issues that have recently changed coalitional sides, trade, Russia, vaccines, free speech, alliance measures should predict positions and dispositional measures should fail, because the disposition did not move when the issue did. On issues tied to stable threat and disgust responses, dispositions might hold their ground. If the theory says that before the data come in, it has taken a risk. Second, the study should predict nulls. The most damaging result for the dispositional program is a set of items on which personality explains nothing once alliance is in the model, and the most damaging for Pinsof is the reverse. Both should be named. Third, the study should predict an ordering, at least, and an interval if the formal work permits it. Alliances should outpredict dispositions by more on switched issues than on stable ones. That ordering has a small Spielraum. Fourth, the study must survive Meehl’s auxiliary problem. If alliance is measured by party identification and party identification is itself the product of disposition, the head-to-head is rigged in a way neither side can see. Measuring alliance in a way that is independent of the outcome is the hardest part, and Meehl would say the paper stands or falls on it.
If the Toronto paper reports only that alliance measures add incremental variance to political views, Meehl’s verdict is that nothing happened. The crud factor supplies incremental variance for free. If it reports the pattern, the field will have a strange coincidence to reckon with, whichever way it goes.
This is also the Meehlian reading of Pinsof’s turn to mathematics. He told me he thinks all science should move toward formalism and that his work is no exception. Meehl agreed with the aim and doubted the shortcut. Equations narrow the Spielraum only when their parameters are fixed by something other than the data being explained. A model with three free parameters fitted to the same survey it predicts is a verbal theory in symbols. Meehl argued that soft psychology should aim for what he called consistency tests, where a theory predicts a numerical relation between quantities it did not use to build itself. The evolutionary game theory of alliances Pinsof presented in 2025 has that potential. So does the recursive mindreading model he described to me under the title “Human Status-Seeking as 4D Chess.” That model’s central claim, that fifth-order mindreading is too expensive and so the pretenders win, is a risky prediction, since it forbids a world where cynical audiences get the upper hand. The question Meehl would ask is whether the model fixes the cost of each order from outside, from the mindreading literature, or tunes it to fit the observed level of pretension. The first is physics. The second is crud with Greek letters.
There is a countersignaling test waiting in the same model. The economic theory of countersignaling predicts a non-monotonic relation between quality and display: the middle signals hardest, the top and bottom stay quiet. A U-shape is a Meehlian prediction, since direction cannot deliver it and the crud factor supplies straight lines. If Pinsof’s social-paradox account predicts a U and finds one, that is a strange coincidence. If it predicts a straight line and dresses it up in recursion, it is not.
One more of Meehl’s observations lands on Pinsof’s reviewers. He wrote that theories in soft psychology do not die by refutation. They fade as people lose interest. One reason is that the field’s conventions strip risk out of papers before publication. Pinsof told me the humor paper carried heavy formalism and that reviewer comments are pushing much of it into an appendix or out. Meehl would recognize the move. The formalism is where the risky predictions live. Moving it to an appendix leaves the verbal claim, which the crud factor will confirm.
Pinsof has written an essay called “Psychologizing Psychologists” that accuses his field of producing findings that serve its own coalition. Meehl’s accusation was different and older. He said the field produces findings that serve no one, because the tests are too weak to tell a true theory from a false one, and so the true ones never win. Pinsof’s early work took real risks and survived them. His public work takes none. His next work, if it does what he says, might be the first head-to-head in political psychology that Meehl would have counted as a test.
An Imre Lakatos Frame
When David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton answered their critics in Psychological Inquiry, they titled the reply “The Strange Epicycles of Political Psychology.” The word is a charge. An epicycle is a circle added to a circle so that a theory of the heavens can keep the earth at the center while the planets refuse to cooperate. To call a rival’s hypotheses epicycles is to say the rival’s theory is dying and does not know it. The critics had said something close to the reverse. Yoav Ganzach argued that Alliance Theory explains little. Ariel Malka and Christopher Federico argued that it could not be the single root of political belief. Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson said the world was more complicated than that. Underneath the exchange both sides were accusing each other of the same thing: a theory that can accommodate anything and therefore forbids nothing. Neither side used the vocabulary built for that accusation. Imre Lakatos built it in 1970, and it sorts Pinsof’s career better than the vocabulary of falsification he and his critics reach for.
Lakatos’s essay “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes” began from an observation that embarrassed Popper. Scientists do not abandon theories when an experiment goes wrong. They blame the instrument, the sample, the auxiliary assumption, and they keep going, and often they are right to. Newton’s theory survived the anomalous orbit of Uranus by positing Neptune. The same theory later survived the anomalous orbit of Mercury for decades by positing Vulcan, a planet that did not exist. The difference between the two cases is the difference Lakatos wanted to name. So he replaced the theory with the research program as the unit of appraisal. A program has a hard core, the claims its adherents refuse to give up. It has a negative heuristic, the rule that says redirect every refutation away from the core. It has a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses that take the hits. And it has a positive heuristic, a plan for what to build next. Programs are never refuted by a fact. They are outgrown. A program is progressive when its adjustments predict new facts that later turn up, and degenerating when its adjustments only explain away what has already gone wrong. Neptune was progressive. Vulcan was degenerating. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry sets out the apparatus in full.
The first move is to find Pinsof’s hard core. He has two programs that share a foundation. The alliance program holds that political belief systems are built from coalitions and that principles are instruments coalitions pick up and put down. The signaling program holds that status competition must disguise itself and that recursive mindreading drives the disguise. Beneath both sits a claim his whole oeuvre refuses to surrender: the reasons people give for what they do are not the causes of what they do, and the causes are functions that natural selection built. That is the core. The negative heuristic follows from it. Never accept a stated reason as an explanation. When a man says he opposes abortion on principle, look for the mating strategy. When a party says it stands for free speech, look for the coalition that benefits. When a man acts humble, look for the concealed bid. The heuristic is what makes Pinsof readable at a glance, and it is what his critics mean when they say he can explain anything.
Lakatos would say that complaint misfires. Every core can explain anything, because that is what cores are for. The dispositional program in political psychology has one too: political attitudes express stable traits, values, and needs, and John Jost’s system justification account, which Pinsof’s dissertation tested against, holds that people are motivated to defend the arrangements they live under. Confronted with a partisan who reverses his principle when the other side benefits, the dispositional program does not fold. It posits a trait that predicts the reversal, or a measurement problem, or a difference between elites and the mass public. Those are its Neptunes and its Vulcans. The question for both programs is the same. Which adjustments have predicted something new?
Sorted that way, Pinsof’s output falls into two piles.
The progressive pile starts early. The 2016 Psychological Science paper “The Political Divide Over Same-Sex Marriage: Mating Strategies in Conflict?” generated a prediction the rival program did not: that opposition would concentrate among people averse to casual sex who linked homosexuality with promiscuity. The 2017 PLOS ONE follow-up, “The Effect of the Promiscuity Stereotype on Opposition to Gay Rights,” did what Lakatos asks: it derived a novel consequence, that correcting the stereotype should shift support among the sexually restricted and only among them, and then manipulated the stereotype and found the shift. The abortion work follows the same path. The 2016 HBES presentation “Pro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity?” made the prediction. The 2026 preprint “Concerns about Sexual Promiscuity Play an Underexplored Role in Opposition to Abortion” tests it on 3,631 people with data from before and after Dobbs. A prediction made in 2016 and confirmed on data that did not exist until 2022 is a novel fact in the strictest sense.
The double-standards work belongs in the same pile, and its history shows why the publication record matters for a Lakatosian audit. Pinsof told me he wrote the questions for Pulse of the Nation to test Alliance Theory predictions he was then developing. The predictions preceded the data. That is the sequence Lakatos rewards. But the analysis reached the record only in fragments cited inside “Strange Bedfellows” and in a 2018 conference program. An outside reader cannot verify which reversals were predicted in advance and which were noticed afterward. A program can be progressive in fact and look degenerating on paper when its predictions live in an unpublished poll.
The most progressive move is the one that has not happened yet. Pinsof is joining a group at the University of Toronto on a large preregistered study that pits alliances against dispositions as predictors of political views. Lakatos was skeptical of crucial experiments in the moment; he thought they were recognized as crucial only in hindsight, once one program had absorbed the result and the other had not. But a preregistered head-to-head is as close as social science gets to forcing the issue. It commits both programs to predictions before the data arrive. Whichever program has to add a Vulcan afterward will have been caught doing it in public.
The signaling program has its own progressive entries. “The Evolution of Social Paradoxes” does the work Lakatos would want, since it specifies the information conditions under which a concealed signal should succeed and under which it should collapse. The humor preprint “All Mixed Up” predicts that laughter should track coordination failures and that the ability to produce it should read as partner value. The “Human Status-Seeking as 4D Chess” paper he described to me tries to derive charisma, authenticity, humility, and sacred values from a single recursive model. Each of these is content-increasing. Each says something that could turn out to be false about a domain the program had not yet touched. And the positive heuristic is visible. Pinsof knows what he will build next, which Lakatos took as the mark of a program still alive: mating, then alliances, then status, then humor, then friendship, then the formal model that is supposed to hold them together.
The degenerating pile is smaller, and it lives mostly on the blog. The list in my earlier essay is the standard exhibit. A man boasts, status seeking; a man acts humble, concealed status seeking; a man admits craving status, strategic candor; a man denies it, successful concealment. In Lakatos’s terms each line is an ad hoc adjustment of the worst kind, what he called ad hoc3: a hypothesis added to save the appearances that predicts nothing beyond the case it was invented for. “Happiness Is Bullshit Revisited” sits near the line. Pinsof reformulated after criticism, which is allowed; the test is whether the reformulation, happiness as a prediction-error signal, forecasts anything the original did not. “Everything Is Signaling” widens the core to cover defensive signaling, the avoidance of being classified as stupid, disloyal, or desperate. That could be progressive if it specifies which signals get avoided and by whom. As written it reads more like an extension of the belt to cover behaviors the original signaling story had missed.
“AI Doomerism Is Bullshit” raises a different Lakatosian problem. The core says intelligence is a bundle of specialized adaptations. Applied to AI, that core generated a prediction, that general intelligence of the kind doomers fear cannot arise from scaling. Readers pointed out that the strongest doom arguments do not need the assumption Pinsof attacked. That is what an anomaly looks like from inside a program. The question is how he handles it. If the answer is that the critics have misunderstood, the program has bought itself a Vulcan. If the answer narrows the claim to something testable about what scaled systems can and cannot do, the program has bought itself a Neptune.
Now the title of the reply. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton accuse dispositional political psychology of epicycles. The charge has content. Each new inconsistency in ideology gets a new construct: authoritarianism, then need for closure, then moral foundations, then a dozen scales, each fitted to the anomaly that produced it. That is the shape of a degenerating belt, and Pinsof is right that a theory which starts from coalitions predicts the inconsistencies in advance instead of naming them afterward. But the charge cuts both ways, and Lakatos would insist on saying so. A program that treats every stable value as post hoc coalition propaganda has its own epicycle waiting whenever a value survives a realignment. When a group keeps a principle after its coalition drops it, the alliance program must explain why, and the easy answer, that the group has a different alliance in view, is an epicycle by any other name. Which side owns the epicycles will be settled by which side can go longest without adding one. That is what the Toronto study is for.
Lakatos had one more thing to say that bears on Pinsof. He denied that it is irrational to keep working on a degenerating program. Prout’s hypothesis that atomic weights were integer multiples of hydrogen looked dead for a century and then came back with isotopes. Copernicus took a long time to outpredict Ptolemy. What stops most scientists from persisting is cost, in grants, jobs, and standing. Pinsof told Zach Elwood that Cards Against Humanity removed those costs for him. In Lakatos’s frame that changes nothing about whether his program is progressive and everything about how long he can afford to find out. The same money that lets a Prout wait out the century lets a Vulcan hunter keep hunting. The difference between the two is visible only in the ledger of predictions, and Pinsof’s ledger, for the moment, runs progressive. The abortion result came in. The Dobbs data cooperated. The concealed-signal conditions were stated before they were tested. The head-to-head is preregistered. What would tip the ledger is a run of misses each followed by a new hidden motive. So far he has been reaching for a model instead.
