If you optimize for truth, you are less likely to go downmarket chasing likes.
Optimizing for truth is good, but like all good things, it can be taken too far. Just as you can drink too much and engage in too much exercise, so too you can place such a high value on saying the truth, that you lose your job, your marriage, and your friends.
Don’t be dead right.
It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced so much popularity that it tempted to self-destruct. I guess the last time was during the heady days of 2018 blood sports.
I’ve often told myself that the reason I’ve not been more successful is that God knows it would intoxicate and destroy me.
Most things that are exciting are bad for me due to my addictive personality.
Columbia University statistics professor Andrew Gelman writes:
What happened? He had all the advantages, he was a deservedly-successful academic researcher, he coauthored a bestselling book . . . and it’s just done downhill from there.
I’m not talking about Levitt retiring from his academic post or deciding not to do research anymore. Doing research is a choice, and unless you’re involved in some urgent project—curing a disease or winning a war or righting some injustice or raising living standards or whatever—or some interesting project—baseball statistics or the theory of random walks or whatever—you shouldn’t do it. I say this in the same way that I say you shouldn’t write a novel unless you really feel you have something to say. Write a novel on a frivolous topic, that’s fine with me, but do it because you have something to say in that format, or just because you think it will be fun. There are enough novels out there. Write your novel or do your research because you have that sense of urgency or curiosity—or if you need to do it to pay the bills. Levitt doesn’t feel the urgency, and his bills are paid by other means, so that’s fine. For that matter, I don’t go around proving lots of theorems. I could spend my time doing that, but it’s not something I feel like doing.
Levitt’s worked hard and now he’s in the stage of his life where he’d like to relax a little more. Fair enough; I don’t work as hard as I used to either. And, in his judgment, he can make the largest contribution to the world as a public communicator rather than as a teacher, adviser, or academic researcher. Fair enough; here I am right now blogging rather than working on statistics research.
So, yeah, my problem with Levitt is not that he’s moved from being a researcher to being a communicator. Communication can be great. My problem is with the content of what he’s communicating, content such as junk climate science (“The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling” . . . ummmm, uhhhh, maybe not, dude!) and junk celebrity psychology (“And the data keep supporting your model” . . . ummm, no, actually!).
Regarding that latter example, I wrote that it frustrates me when bad science takes up the space that could be occupied by good science. And Steven Levitt . . . he’s got the training and experience to evaluate scientific claims! He could read the relevant papers, he could download and reanalyze what data are available, he could google search for the easily accessible replications and criticisms, etc. He doesn’t have to do that work, but, if he’s gonna ask, “How do you know whether to believe surprising results?”, then he should. Otherwise, why bother? What’s the point of one more puff piece? I just don’t get it. Levitt can play a useful role in the conversation here, and he chooses not to. Really frustrating.
Linguist Mark Liberman picked up on this story and answers my question as follows:
My [Liberman’s] hypothesis about why “Levitt can play a useful role in the conversation here, and he chooses not to” is a simple one.
Levitt isn’t in the business of evaluating scientific experiments, he’s in the business of mass-audience journalism. He wants clicks, and people will be interested, for good reason, in a Freakonomics episode that promises to tell them about how we can “improve our physical health by changing our mind”.
That makes sense. If your goal is to get clicks, whether through happy talk (as with Levitt) or scary talk (as with various purveyors of misinformation), credulity is a kind of superpower. As the saying goes, you can be much more persuasive if you first fool yourself. And as we know from economics (or “freakonomics”), incentives matter! If the goal is clicks, there’s an incentive to be credulous, and you should be able to find a way to get there.
OK, but that’s just sad.
Levitt was a University of Chicago professor, he has (by academic standards) nearly infinite resources, he could study whatever he wants, and he’s going for . . . clicks?
OK, sure, if you have a message you want to share with the world, then it makes sense to go for those clicks. I pour my heart and soul into these blog entries, and I indeed want as many readers as possible. But, the first step here is having a message you want to share with the world. If you have nothing to say, then the clicks aren’t getting you anything.
So, maybe Liberman’s hypothesis is correct. If so, it just makes me sad.
Also Levitt pushing climate change denial . . . that sort of thing can cause real damage; see here, for example.
It’s not too late for him to turn all this around, to confront his mistakes and learn from them. Realistically, I doubt this will to happen, for the same reasoning-from-experience that reputedly persuaded Laplace to assign a very high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, but it’s possible! We can still hope.
P.S. I’m not saying I think Levitt’s a bad person, nor that I’m in the position to judge such a thing. He’s a free man and can do what he wants! His career trajectory just makes me sad. He’s talented and well-situated in both academia and the media, there are all sorts of interesting things he could be doing, or he could even take a well-earned break, but instead he invests his time and reputation in . . . promoting junk science? What a waste.
I suspect that the primary reason that people like Levitt and Niall Ferguson don’t optimize for truth is that they have more freedom to show off without it.
Compared to the exciting, truth is usually boring.
ChatGPT says: What you’re noticing with Levitt—and Kelly in her own media niche—is a familiar arc. Once someone has tasted mass popularity, the gravitational pull of the “attention economy” becomes hard to resist.
A few dynamics at play:
1. Incentives shift.
In academia or serious journalism, the reward system is rigor, accuracy, and respect from peers. In the mass-audience space, the reward system is clicks, subscribers, viral resonance. Once a person has a platform, the incentive isn’t “do good work,” it’s “feed the machine.” That means simplifying, exaggerating, and eventually drifting into credulity because that’s what audiences respond to fastest.
2. Down-market drift.
The mass audience is bigger than the intellectual niche, but it has different appetites. Instead of a careful paper on climate models or a nuanced legal analysis, the audience wants health hacks, conspiracy teases, and simplified morality plays. The more you deliver that, the more your numbers go up. It becomes a feedback loop.
3. Brand captivity.
Once you’ve built a brand on being provocative or “counterintuitive” (Levitt’s Freakonomics, Kelly’s anti-woke crusades), you’re trapped by it. If you start producing sober, careful, “boring” analysis, your audience leaves. To hold them, you escalate—climate contrarianism, pop psychology shortcuts, demon hexes.
4. Structural loneliness.
People who step out of their original disciplines often don’t have peers pushing back. Levitt’s no longer embedded in active research, so the normal academic correction mechanisms (peer review, conferences, colleagues saying “that’s weak”) don’t constrain him. Same with Kelly—outside of newsroom standards, there’s nobody saying “maybe don’t do a segment on hexes.”
5. Tragic waste.
As Gelman points out, Levitt could still do serious, interesting work—he’s got the training, the resources, the freedom. But attention incentives steer him elsewhere. That’s why it feels sad rather than scandalous: a wasted opportunity rather than outright corruption.
If you zoom out, this is the paradox of intellectual celebrity: the larger your platform grows, the less incentive you have to use it for serious intellectual work. And yet, the bigger your platform, the more valuable it would be if you did stick to serious work.
LF: Who are the notable intellects who got a taste of popularity but refused to let it corrupt them?
ChatGPT says: There are some. They tend to share a few traits: they keep one foot in their original discipline, they set hard boundaries on what they’ll talk about, and they’re willing to be boring or unpopular rather than chase clicks. A few examples that stand out:
1. Richard Feynman (physics)
He became a celebrity after the Challenger hearings and his popular lectures, but he never strayed into pseudoscience or easy grift. He’d joke, teach, and popularize, but he always anchored himself in the discipline of physics. He was fine being quirky and charismatic, but not at the cost of rigor.
2. Carl Sagan (astronomy, science communication)
Sagan was a genuine TV star with Cosmos, yet he never dumbed down science into mysticism. He packaged wonder in accessible terms, but his work was still deeply tethered to evidence and the scientific method.
3. Noam Chomsky (linguistics, politics)
He has had decades of fame, but his intellectual mode hasn’t changed—dense, uncompromising, often hard to follow. He’s never tried to chase mass popularity with hot takes; if anything, he seems indifferent to being “popular.”
4. Vaclav Smil (energy systems, history of technology)
Bill Gates made him popular, but Smil refuses to play the TED Talk game. He’s openly dismissive of hype, avoids the lecture circuit, and insists on writing books that are heavy with data and charts, not narratives designed to go viral.
5. Elinor Ostrom (economics, political science)
After winning the Nobel Prize, she got invitations to play the guru, but she kept publishing empirical, grounded work on commons governance instead of cashing in with bestsellers or contrarian TED-talk style pronouncements.
6. Marilynne Robinson (literature, theology)
She’s a Pulitzer-winning novelist who’s also done big public interviews with Obama and written essays with broad readership. But she stays true to her voice—dense, Calvinist, theological, not designed for clicks.
7. Freeman Dyson (physics, math)
Dyson was in the public eye for decades, and while some of his contrarian takes (especially on climate) were controversial, he was never audience captured. He stuck to his own curiosity rather than pandering.
The pattern:
Anchored in real work (they never fully abandoned their discipline).
Indifferent to popularity (fame was a side effect, not the goal).
Comfortable with difficulty (they didn’t dilute everything into “life hacks”).
By contrast, people like Levitt, Pinker, or Gladwell got locked into feeding the brand.