{"id":201793,"date":"2026-08-30T10:20:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201793"},"modified":"2026-08-30T10:49:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:49:38","slug":"the-david-pinsof-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201793","title":{"rendered":"The David Pinsof Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

My favorite intellectual over the past year is David Pinsof<\/a> who\u2019s had an odd career in contemporary psychology<\/a>. He is an evolutionary social scientist at UCLA<\/a>, a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity<\/a><\/em>, the author of the Substack<\/a> Everything Is Bullshit<\/a><\/em>, a podcaster, and the developer of increasingly ambitious theories about political alliances, status, signaling, friendship, humor, and the stories human beings tell about their own motives. UCLA\u2019s Social Minds Lab<\/a> identifies him as a research scientist. A UCLA Library announcement for a 2025 event on his work<\/a> called him a postdoctoral scholar. Neither source presents him as a professor or tenure-track faculty member.<\/p>\n

The commercial success of Cards Against Humanity<\/em> gave Pinsof income independent of the university. In a long 2026 interview with Zach Elwood<\/a>, Pinsof said the game\u2019s 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 usefulness 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.<\/p>\n

Pinsof grew up in Highland Park, Illinois<\/a>, on Chicago\u2019s North Shore. The future creators of Cards Against Humanity<\/em> knew one another at Highland Park High School<\/a> and graduated in 2005. A Daily Iowan<\/em> profile published May 12, 2009<\/a> identified Pinsof as 21 years old. <\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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 \u201cHalf Step\u201d<\/a>, performed in May 2008.<\/p>\n

The theatre training left a mark. Pinsof\u2019s later work is preoccupied with audiences, performance, impression management, social perception, hidden intentions, and the gap between a man\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. The project went onto Kickstarter<\/a> in December 2010 seeking $4,000 and raised $15,570. Kickstarter later published a case study of the game\u2019s early success<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A Chicago<\/em> magazine profile from 2014<\/a> 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 company was already profitable enough to give its creators extraordinary financial freedom.<\/p>\n

The card game produced serious money while he pursued his doctorate. He stayed with Cards Against Humanity<\/em> part time, including data analysis and play-testing, while conducting psychological research.<\/p>\n

Pinsof says comedy and psychology appeal to him for the same reason. Both require getting inside other people\u2019s heads. Writing Cards Against Humanity<\/em> 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<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/em>, contains a curriculum vitae documenting his Iowa degree, UCLA training, publications, and works in progress<\/a>. His graduate formation combined psychology with biological anthropology. His dissertation committee brought together Martie Haselton<\/a>, Aaron Lukaszewski, H. Clark Barrett<\/a>, and David O. Sears. Haselton chaired it. The committee reads as a map of his subsequent thinking. Haselton and Lukaszewski brought evolutionary psychology<\/a>, Barrett evolutionary anthropology, and Sears political psychology.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

His first substantial publication, with Haselton, appeared in Psychological Science<\/a><\/em> in 2016. \u201cThe Political Divide Over Same-Sex Marriage: Mating Strategies in Conflict?<\/a>\u201d 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<\/a> under the headline \u201cWhy people oppose same-sex marriage<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pinsof and Haselton followed in 2017 with \u201cThe Effect of the Promiscuity Stereotype on Opposition to Gay Rights<\/a>\u201d in PLOS ONE<\/a><\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

Pinsof doubted that people\u2019s stated moral reasons explain their politics. A man might sincerely say his position follows from principle while the disposition that makes the principle attractive comes from another social interest.<\/p>\n

That proposition put him into an early argument with Mark Hoffarth and John Jost<\/a>. 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 \u201cWhen Self-Interest Contradicts Ideology: A Reply to Hoffarth and Jost<\/a>.\u201d Their response foreshadowed almost everything Pinsof later did. Self-interest need not mean immediate personal material advantage. Loyalty to allies, communities, religious groups, and political coalitions supplies powerful motives of its own.<\/p>\n

Pinsof was also a coauthor with Tran Dinh, Steven Gangestad<\/a>, and Haselton on \u201cCycling on the Fast Track: Ovulatory Shifts in Sexual Motivation as a Proximate Mechanism for Regulating Life History Strategies<\/a>.\u201d The paper sits in evolutionary reproductive psychology, some distance from the political project for which Pinsof is now known. It shows how firmly his early formation took place inside adaptationist evolutionary psychology.<\/p>\n

The abortion work shows how slowly Pinsof develops an idea. At the Human Behavior and Evolution Society<\/a> conference in 2016, Pinsof and Haselton presented \u201cPro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity? The Role of Mating Strategies in Opposition to Abortion<\/a>.\u201d The HBES program<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

A descendant of that project did not surface as a major paper until 2026. Elias Acevedo, Pinsof, Jaimie Krems<\/a>, and Haselton released the preprint \u201cConcerns about Sexual Promiscuity Play an Underexplored Role in Opposition to Abortion<\/a>,\u201d now based on four studies and 3,631 participants, including data from before and after Dobbs<\/a><\/em> and a nationally representative panel. It remains a preprint.<\/p>\n

His dissertation shows that this long gestation is normal for him. Its vita listed several manuscripts then in preparation, including \u201cPro-Life or Anti-Promiscuity?<\/a>\u201d, \u201cWhy Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cEquality for All, or for My Allies?<\/a>\u201d Two of those subjects stayed central to his work for years afterward.<\/p>\n

By 2018 Pinsof was already presenting Alliance Theory in public. At that year\u2019s Human Behavior and Evolution Society<\/a> meeting he presented \u201cDouble Standards of the Political Mind: Empirical Support for the Alliance Theory<\/a>.\u201d The conference program<\/a> describes an analysis using polling data from 1,215 Americans. Pinsof examined cases where Democrats and Republicans appeared willing to reverse general principles depending on which political coalition benefited from applying them. His larger claim was that many apparent ideological inconsistencies become intelligible when political principles are treated as instruments in struggles among allies and enemies.<\/p>\n

The following year he presented \u201cEquality for All, or for My Allies?<\/a>\u201d The 2019 HBES program<\/a> records the presentation, while the dissertation gives the fuller analysis using the 2016 American National Election Studies<\/a> sample of 4,271 respondents. The dissertation chapter pits Alliance Theory against accounts emphasizing egalitarianism, social dominance<\/a>, moral foundations<\/a>, and system justification<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a publication-history problem here. I have not found either the 1,215-person double-standards analysis or the ANES study as a standalone peer-reviewed journal article. They appear in conference programs and, in the second case, the dissertation. The mature Alliance Theory would go on to make large claims. Some of Pinsof\u2019s most pointed empirical attempts to separate the theory from competing explanations seem never to have entered the ordinary journal literature.<\/p>\n

The mature statement appeared with David O. Sears and Martie Haselton in Psychological Inquiry<\/a><\/em> in 2023 as \u201cStrange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems<\/a>.\u201d The title Pinsof had listed among manuscripts in preparation in 2018 had taken about five more years to become the published article.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s positions look coherent. Change the alliance structure and the apparent ideological logic changes with it.<\/p>\n

Psychological Inquiry<\/a><\/em> was the right venue because it surrounds a target article with commentaries. The reactions exposed where the argument becomes controversial. Ariel Malka<\/a> and Christopher Federico<\/a> argued in \u201cPolitical Belief Systems Are Not Singularly Rooted in Alliance Psychology<\/a>\u201d that political belief systems cannot be reduced to alliance psychology. Nichola Raihani<\/a> and Quentin Atkinson<\/a> argued in \u201cIt\u2019s More Complicated Than That: Alliances Are One of Many Factors Shaping Political Belief Systems<\/a>\u201d that alliances constitute one causal influence among several. Yoav Ganzach and colleagues went further in \u201cPolitical Ideology is Not Meaningfully Explained by Alliances and is Not Inconsistent with Attitudinal Inconsistencies<\/a>.\u201d The entire issue<\/a> repays reading because it works as a symposium on the scope and limits of Pinsof\u2019s theory.<\/p>\n

Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen<\/a> were more sympathetic but argued that status competition deserved a larger role. Their commentary, \u201cSpeech Repression and Outrage from Orthodox Activists as Attempts to Mobilize Allies and Gain Status<\/a>,\u201d reads well in retrospect because status soon became central to Pinsof\u2019s own public theory.<\/p>\n

Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton answered the critics in \u201cThe Strange Epicycles of Political Psychology<\/a>.\u201d Alliance Theory has drawn serious scholarly engagement without becoming a consensus account of political ideology. Its strongest critics grant that coalitions matter and dispute the attempt to give them explanatory priority over stable values, personality, moral commitments, culture, and other sources of political belief.<\/p>\n

John Jost\u2019s 2024 \u201cBoth-Sideology Endangers Democracy and Social Science<\/a>\u201d addresses the larger dispute and never names Pinsof. Jost attacks arguments in political psychology that emphasize psychological symmetry between political camps. Pinsof\u2019s account operates on that terrain because Alliance Theory expects each coalition to produce self-serving principles and selective moral judgments.<\/p>\n

Pinsof has kept trying to give the alliance idea more formal structure. At HBES<\/a> in 2025 he presented \u201cWhose Side Are You On? The Evolutionary Game Theory of Alliances<\/a>.\u201d The conference program<\/a> shows him moving from verbal descriptions of partisan inconsistency toward evolutionary game theory<\/a> and the formal problem of alliance formation. 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.<\/p>\n

Another institution connected Pinsof\u2019s commercial and scholarly lives. Cards Against Humanity<\/em> created Pulse of the Nation<\/a><\/em>, 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. 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.<\/p>\n

The company went through a serious workplace controversy in 2020 centered on allegations about cofounder Max Temkin and the company\u2019s internal culture. Temkin stepped down. The company acknowledged failures and announced changes. One contemporary account is available here<\/a>. I have not found indexed evidence attributing the alleged misconduct to Pinsof, nor a public statement by him about the episode. It belongs in the institutional history of the company whose profits helped make his later intellectual independence possible.<\/p>\n

The decisive year in Pinsof\u2019s development was 2023.<\/p>\n

A preprint of what became \u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes<\/a>\u201d was circulating that year. Its preprint history<\/a> lets us trace the paper before journal publication. That same March Pinsof began Everything Is Bullshit<\/a><\/em>. \u201cStrange Bedfellows<\/a>\u201d was circulating in the same period before journal publication. The academic work and the public philosophy developed together.<\/p>\n

Pinsof has said that Everything Is Bullshit<\/a><\/em> 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 \u201cglobal gathering of Darwinist cynics.\u201d The UCLA profile<\/a> shows the university recognizing the Substack as part of Pinsof\u2019s intellectual identity.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 2024<\/a>, 2025<\/a>, and 2026<\/a>. Forty-eight essays in under three and a half years make an oeuvre.<\/p>\n

The early titles establish the territory at once: \u201cHappiness Is Bullshit<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Meaning of Life Is Bullshit<\/a>,\u201d \u201cWhat Are Ideologies All About?<\/a>\u201d, \u201cPsychologizing Psychologists<\/a>,\u201d \u201cStatus Is Weird<\/a>,\u201d \u201cOpinions Are Bullshit<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cYour Fear of Mortality Is Bullshit<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cStatus Is Weird<\/a>\u201d 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 sincerely experience himself as a man who is not competing.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The same idea became the backbone of \u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes<\/a>,\u201d published online by American Psychologist<\/a><\/em> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pinsof\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By 2024 the blog was acquiring its own conceptual vocabulary. \u201c30 Useful Concepts about Bullshit<\/a>\u201d defined ideas such as \u201cDarwinian cynicism,\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The titles run more extreme than the essays. \u201cDemocracy Is Bullshit<\/a>\u201d 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<\/em> inheritance. The argument underneath has grown more qualified.<\/p>\n

\u201cHappiness Is Bullshit<\/a>\u201d offers a case study in both Pinsof\u2019s ingenuity and his scientific vulnerability. His later \u201cHappiness Is Bullshit Revisited<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Pinsof sometimes moves too fast from \u201cthis system evolved because it performed function X\u201d to \u201cthe reason people say they pursue Y is bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A person boasts. Status seeking.<\/p>\n

A person acts humble. Concealed status seeking.<\/p>\n

A person follows the crowd. Coalition maintenance.<\/p>\n

A person rebels against the crowd. Status through independence.<\/p>\n

A person admits craving status. Strategic candor.<\/p>\n

A person sincerely denies craving status. Successful concealment.<\/p>\n

Constructing a plausible evolutionary story for each behavior is easy. The challenge is specifying an observation that would show the story is wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/em> cannot exempt its author from its own theory.<\/p>\n

That is why \u201cA Big Misunderstanding<\/a>,\u201d published in December 2025, ranks with \u201cStatus Is Weird<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The essay drew a serious response from Dan Williams titled \u201cWe Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment<\/a>.\u201d Williams agreed with much of Pinsof\u2019s incentive-centered picture but argued that evolutionary mismatch<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Pinsof responded in Williams\u2019s newsletter with \u201cWhat Kind of Apes Are We?<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

His 2025 essay \u201cAI Doomerism Is Bullshit<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s assumptions. 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.<\/p>\n

In 2026, \u201cEverything Is Signaling<\/a>\u201d placed Pinsof in a lineage running through Robin Hanson<\/a> and Kevin Simler<\/a>. His own extension is useful. Much signaling, he 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.<\/p>\n

Here his relation to earlier sociology deserves more scrutiny. Erving Goffman<\/a>, impression-management<\/a> research, reputation theories of personality, and linguistic pragmatics<\/a> explored related territory long before Everything Is Bullshit<\/a><\/em>. Pinsof\u2019s claim to originality lies in connecting impression management to evolved signaling systems<\/a>, recursion, and concealed intentions.<\/p>\n

His public intellectual environment has expanded alongside the Substack. In 2025 he began cohosting Evolutionary Psychology (the podcast)<\/a><\/em> with David Pietraszewski<\/a>. Pietraszewski had posed serious challenges to Alliance Theory. A critic working inside the same evolutionary framework became Pinsof\u2019s podcast partner. The show brings in researchers from across evolutionary behavioral science and discusses current work and the intellectual history of the field.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/em>, where the conversation touched on books including Harry Frankfurt\u2019s On Bullshit<\/a><\/em>, Edward Bernays\u2019s Propaganda<\/a><\/em>, Robert Cialdini\u2019s Influence<\/a><\/em>, Robert Wright\u2019s The Moral Animal<\/a><\/em>, Will Storr\u2019s The Status Game<\/a><\/em>, Howard Bloom\u2019s The Lucifer Principle<\/a><\/em>, and Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/a><\/em>. He has also appeared on Chris Williamson\u2019s Modern Wisdom<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cUtilitarianism Is Bullshit<\/a>\u201d turns the same explanatory suspicion on a philosophical tradition influential in effective-altruist<\/a> and rationalist circles. 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.<\/p>\n

His current UCLA work is widening again. The Social Minds Lab<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A 2025 UCLA profile of friendship research<\/a> describes Pinsof\u2019s emerging conception of friendship as an alliance problem. He asks why humans form, maintain, and terminate friendships and uses game theory<\/a> to think about those decisions. Humor enters as a device that can cement friendship while marking insiders off from outsiders.<\/p>\n

His 2026 preprint \u201cAll Mixed Up: A Solution to the Evolutionary Mystery of Humor<\/a>\u201d attempts an evolutionary account. Pinsof proposes that humor helps humans handle \u201cmix-ups\u201d in coordination. Misunderstandings, ambiguity, mistakes, and awkward violations can threaten social coordination. Shared laughter can establish common knowledge<\/a> that both parties recognized the disruption and help defuse its costs. The ability to produce humor can therefore signal value as a coordination partner.<\/p>\n

Again the biography folds back on itself. The theatre student who became one of eight people designing a game around predicting what friends would laugh at now tries to explain why laughter evolved.<\/p>\n

Pinsof is also working with Jaimie Krems<\/a> and Daniel Sznycer<\/a> on a UCLA Initiative to Study Hate project called \u201cTests of an Engineering Perspective of Hatred Towards Jews<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

His publication record stays odd. ResearchGate\u2019s Pinsof profile<\/a> 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. \u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes<\/a>\u201d circulated for several years before American Psychologist<\/a><\/em> published it. He is now trying to formalize alliances and humor. Pinsof\u2019s natural unit of work may be the research program.<\/p>\n

This makes his financial circumstances scientifically relevant. Most young academics cannot spend years thinking about one theory while publishing little. Pinsof can. Cards Against Humanity<\/em> removed a strong selection pressure on academic research.<\/p>\n

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. That is the central tension in his career.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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. \u201cStatus Is Weird<\/a>\u201d asked whether noble conduct could conceal competition. \u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes<\/a>\u201d asked how that concealment could become an evolved signaling strategy. \u201cA Big Misunderstanding<\/a>\u201d asked whether intellectuals\u2019 explanations of society conveniently magnify the importance of intellectuals. His happiness writing asks whether people understand the goals they believe they pursue.<\/p>\n

Pinsof has spent a decade removing the object from his original question. What began as \u201cDo people oppose this political policy for the reasons they say they do?\u201d has become something close to \u201cDoes anybody do anything for the reasons they say they do?\u201d That enlargement is the attraction of the project and its greatest vulnerability.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The popular persona conceals another feature of him. He is not preaching despair. 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.<\/p>\n

That makes the title Everything Is Bullshit<\/a><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The Set<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> runs to talks on alliance formation, mating strategy, coalitional cognition, disgust, gossip, and hatred. David Pinsof gave one called \u201cWhose Side Are You On? The Evolutionary Game Theory of Alliances.\u201d In the audience sit the people who can evaluate it. There are not many of them. Randall Collins observed 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. Maybe forty people set its terms. Perhaps two thousand follow the argument closely. Several hundred thousand read the jokes.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> where he now works. Daniel Sznycer joins him and Krems on the UCLA engineering-of-hatred project<\/a>. Elias Acevedo carries the abortion paper. 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.<\/p>\n

The second ring is the ring of worthy opponents, and a set of this size cannot function without them. David Pietraszewski built the strongest rival account of coalitional cognition, then became Pinsof\u2019s podcast cohost. Michael Bang Petersen and Antoine Marie argued in their commentary<\/a> that status deserved more room than Alliance Theory gave it. Nichola Raihani and Quentin Atkinson said alliances are one factor among many<\/a>. Ariel Malka and Christopher Federico said belief systems have other roots<\/a>. Yoav Ganzach said the theory explains little<\/a>. Mark Hoffarth and John Jost were the first to push back in print, and Jost has since become the set\u2019s useful antagonist, since his attack on both-sideology<\/a> names the exact posture the set treats as a virtue.<\/p>\n

The third ring is the public one, joined by traffic rather than by employment. Dan Williams of Conspicuous Cognition<\/a> is the closest thing Pinsof has to a sparring partner of equal weight. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias<\/a> and Kevin Simler at Melting Asphalt<\/a> wrote The Elephant in the Brain<\/em> and made the hidden-motive essay a genre. Will Storr wrote The Status Game<\/em>. Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History<\/a> runs the same operation on psychology\u2019s own institutions. Rob Henderson at his newsletter<\/a>, Steve Stewart-Williams, Coltan Scrivner, Diana Fleischman, Geoffrey Miller, and Richard Hanania occupy adjacent stalls in the same market, with Hanania at the edge where the set starts policing itself. Zach Elwood, Chris Williamson, and Jim O\u2019Shaughnessy supply the microphones. Behind them stand the dead: La Rochefoucauld, Mandeville, Adam Smith of the Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em>, Nietzsche, Veblen, Goffman, and Harry Frankfurt, whose On Bullshit<\/em> gave the set its title word.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s move toward game theory reads as a bid for standing inside the field as well as a scientific step. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The third is the freedom display. Pinsof has money from a card game<\/a> 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 rather than argued, and it functions as a warrant. Trust me, I have nothing riding on this.<\/p>\n

The fourth is hospitality to critics. When Dan Williams answered Pinsof with \u201cWe Are Confused, Maladapted Apes Who Need Enlightenment,\u201d<\/a> Pinsof replied in Williams\u2019s own newsletter<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

The fifth is boundary work, and the set spends more energy here than it admits. It defines itself against four neighbors. Against mainstream social psychology, which it regards as a machine for producing flattering findings about the researchers\u2019 own coalition, and which supplies Jost as its face. Against the rationalists and effective altruists, whose faith in articulate reasoning Pinsof attacks in \u201cUtilitarianism Is Bullshit\u201d<\/a> and \u201cAI Doomerism Is Bullshit.\u201d<\/a> Against the hereditarian right, which shares the evolutionary vocabulary and draws conclusions the set will not touch. 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.<\/p>\n

Now the claims. The set denies having 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 rather than to lecture the people inside it. Coalitions are symmetric, which means the sins you find in your opponents are running in you at the same rate. That is a moral doctrine, and Jost is right to identify it as one, though he is wrong to think naming it settles anything. Anti-moralism is a morality. Sanctimony is the cardinal sin. And beneath the cynicism runs an unadmitted meliorism, 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.<\/p>\n

The essentialism: The set holds that a species-typical human nature 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 rather than a story we tell about it. It holds that motives are real objects that exist below awareness and can be wrong about themselves. Those are strong essentialist commitments, and the set makes them at the level of the species. At the level of the group it makes almost none, which is where it parts company with its hereditarian neighbors. And at one point it is aggressively anti-essentialist: in the AI argument Pinsof denies that intelligence is a single substance, treating it instead as a bundle of special-purpose capacities. The set essentializes what rationalists deflate and deflates what rationalists essentialize.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own motives, updating in public, engaging the strongest version of an opponent, and taking a joke at one\u2019s 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<\/em> 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 \u201cStatus Is Weird\u201d<\/a> and \u201cA Big Misunderstanding\u201d<\/a> invite the reader to handle a thought about himself that he would rather not touch, and the reward for handling it is membership.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s answer, so far, has been to reach for formal models, since \u201cThe Evolution of Social Paradoxes\u201d<\/a> tries to say when concealed signals should fail. Whether the set as a whole follows him there will determine whether it becomes a research program or remains a style.\n<\/parameter>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My favorite intellectual over the past year is David Pinsof who\u2019s 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, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43013],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-pinsof"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201793"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201809,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201793\/revisions\/201809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}