What Andrew Gelman Doesn’t Write About

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Luke Ford

On April 7, 2016, Andrew Gelman declined two stories in one post and then named the problem this essay exists to address. A correspondent had sent him a McKinsey report on women in corporate America. He looked at it and decided to stay out of it. Another reader sent him a reported association between height and cancer, and he called it too difficult for him to understand and said he did not want to touch it. Then he closed by pointing out that his readers only see the studies he decided to write about.

Almost everything written about Gelman’s blog concerns his targets. The power pose, the ovulation studies, the himmicanes, Brian Wansink’s (b. 1960) bottomless soup bowl. He warns readers not to infer journal failure rates from his blog, since he sees bad papers because people send him bad papers. That warning is about the numerator. The denominator has never been examined, because the denominator sits in a private inbox.

But not all of it. Over twenty-two years Gelman has repeatedly narrated a decision not to write. He does it in passing, usually in one sentence inside a post about something else. Assembled, those sentences make a small archive of the road not taken: twenty-six decisions across twenty-two posts, from August 2009 through May 2026, each one a case where a piece of research reached him and he explained why he was letting it go.

Ten of the twenty-six come down to not having the energy. On the PACE trial and the chronic fatigue controversy, where he had contemplated a full investigation with interviews on all sides, he writes that he did not have the energy to do it. On an apparent plagiarism case in economics he says it was just not something he had the energy to look into. Same phrase, more or less, on police shootings, on a weather-as-instrument paper in economics, on the pertussis dispute, on a reader’s multilevel model, on a book he was sent in 2026. Four more are outside his expertise. Four more are subjects he had already covered enough.

Eighteen of twenty-six. Tired, unqualified, or bored with the topic.

Two cases touch social cost. In July 2016 he received a juicy item connected to a recurring blog subject and withheld it because people might take it as a personal attack. And the McKinsey case, where the obstacle was the position from which he would be criticizing. Two out of twenty-six, and zero disclosed cases in this archive of protecting an author he knows.

I expected the declines to cluster in medicine, on the theory that he stays inside social science because that is where he can evaluate a paper cheaply. Medicine is prominent in the declines, seven of the twenty-two decisions with an identifiable field. But medicine is prominent in his attacks too. He goes after oncology trials, screen time and hypertension, olfactory enrichment in older adults. So the field is not the variable.

What clusters in medicine is the explicit admission of not knowing enough. Three of the four outside-my-expertise refusals are medical: height and cancer, Matthew Walker on sleep, and a Nature paper on HIV viremia with twelve subjects where a correspondent had raised pseudoreplication and Gelman declined to evaluate any of it.

Compare those to the medical papers he does attack. The oncology post turns on treating a p of .053 as a failed trial and on a proportional-hazards assumption that makes no sense. He can see that from his chair. He does not need to know anything about the cancer. The pertussis case, by contrast, requires untangling cohort effects against a vaccine schedule, and that would make him a partial epidemiologist for a week.

He engages when the statistical defect can be seen without resolving the underlying science, and declines when the case would require him to enter another discipline. That is a rule about the reach of a statistician’s authority, and he applies it honestly. It also means that whole classes of bad research are invisible to this kind of criticism, not because they are defended but because their errors are not the kind a statistician can spot from outside.

Of the twenty-six declines, seven are economics, the largest single field. In the sixteen critical episodes drawn from the same pilot, economics appears zero times.

Fourteen of the twenty-six are cases where Gelman published the item and declined to judge it.

Per Pettersson-Lidbom sent him criticisms of three economics papers. Gelman posted them and said he did not have the energy to look into the cases. Alexey Guzey wrote a long attack on Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. Gelman passed it along and wrote that he would not try to judge Guzey’s claims, since he had not read the book and knew nothing about sleep research. A correspondent’s pseudoreplication argument against the HIV paper got the same treatment. So did the placebo effect material, the economics plagiarism correspondence, the police shooting analysis.

Eleven of the twenty-six are a post that never happened. Fourteen are a post that happened while the investigation somebody wanted did not.

Gelman isolated the behavior in 2013. Writing about post-publication peer review, he contrasted people who examine a paper with bloggers who merely publicize it and open the floor for discussion. He put himself in the latter category, describing a case where he lacked the energy to read a paper closely and later concluding that post-publication review can produce lots of people who simply post a paper without reading it and only the occasional critic who performs a detailed examination.

He does this more often than he writes the takedowns he is known for.

I am not sure what to make of it. A blog is a bulletin board as well as a courtroom. Somebody has to circulate criticism that nobody has the standing or the hours to adjudicate, and the alternative is that the criticism goes nowhere. Gelman is transparent about it every time, which is more than most aggregators manage. And in the Walker case the underlying critique was substantial and eventually got a wide hearing.

But the cost lands on the person named. The same distribution that makes a Gelman post consequential when he has done the work makes it consequential when he has not, and the reader’s memory does not reliably preserve the difference between a paper Gelman demolished and a paper he mentioned while saying he had not looked into it. Two years later both are things you read about on that blog.

Which brings the essay back to the archive nobody can see.

On November 20, 2016, Gelman posted a list of unfinished drafts and said the folder held 434 of them. He printed fifty-six titles, describing them as the most recent few, and annotated some. Ovulation and clothing, set aside because the topic had had enough posts. Steven Levitt (b. 1967) on golf, with the note that he had had enough of that guy. One draft he had actually published and then removed at a colleague’s request. One where he never finished writing the title.

I tried to trace what happened to those fifty-six. Two were published later. Three had already appeared or been withdrawn. Two he says he abandoned. The remaining forty-nine cannot be traced either way, because titles like “Scientific and scholarly disputes” and “Is it hype or is it real?” do not support a search.

The queue tells a related story. In August 2016 he cleared his inbox and announced his next 170 posts, filling the blog into the following January. In August 2026 he did it again, and the lag had reached a year, with posts scheduled into August 2027. A reader in 2026 encountering a Gelman verdict on a study is reading a decision he made in 2025, about a paper that reached him in 2024, filtered through whatever he had energy for on the afternoon it arrived.

Two caveats.

These twenty-six were found by searching for the phrases in which a man narrates a decision. They are therefore the declines he chose to describe, selected by the same process under examination. Every silence that stayed silent is still silent.

And energy is the cheapest reason a person can give. It costs nothing socially, it implies no judgment of the author, it is always true in some degree, and it is available whenever the real reason is one you would rather not write down. Ten of twenty-six say energy. What the public record can establish is that energy is what he says. Whether it is the cause or the covering is beyond anything a blog archive can settle.

What the file shows is a working academic with a full-time job, a family, and a software project, who receives more material than he can process, who says no most of the time, who says no mainly because he is tired or out of his depth or has already done that one, who forwards a great deal of criticism he has not verified, and who keeps a folder of several hundred things he meant to write and never did.

On December 31, 2024, somebody sent him a statistical critique. He read enough of it to conclude that the new argument contained both good points and errors. He had things he could have said. He worked out that laying the groundwork would take more scaffolding than the payoff justified, called it a cost-benefit calculation, and decided the best option was not to bother.

That post is the closest thing to a controlled observation anyone will get from outside his inbox: exposure, followed by non-selection, with the reason stated by the man who made the decision.

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Andrew Gelman: ‘Computer scientists today are like economists in the early 2000s and Freudian psychiatrists in the 1950s’

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Luke Ford

Gelman writes:

Back in the early part of this century, economists were riding high: they were the country’s all-purpose pundits, they had tons of influence but were lamenting that they didn’t have enough, and they were going on and on about how special they were, most amusingly in the self-contradictory argument that they were different because they “assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions.” I’m still not sure what is the difference between “circumstance” and “culture” except that maybe talking about the former is associated with overconfidence.

Nowadays, though, economics is just one more social science. OK, I don’t want to overstate things. I assume they still get paid more than sociologists and political scientists, and, yeah, there’s a Council of Economic Advisers but no Council of Sociology Advisers. Still, I think that economics has lost some of its standing in the past twenty years, partly as a result of the crash of 2008 and its aftermath (political polarization, Brexit, etc.) and partly just the natural ebb and flow of influence, the inevitable cycle of hype and disappointment. Econ hero Steven Levitt was supplanted by data analyst Nate Silver (who identifies as a poker player, not an economist), and we’re not hearing from economists so much anymore, except to hear them fighting in vain against tariffs.

Gelman nails the pattern. Freudian psychiatry in the 1950s, neoclassical economics around 2000, and computer science now each supplied the era’s all-purpose pundit. Each sold the same self-image: cold rationality, willingness to say what others won’t.

He flags the disanalogy but does not develop it. Freud (1856-1939) and neoclassical economics offered theories of everything. Computer science built tools. That difference predicts a different ending. Psychoanalysis lost standing when its efficacy claims collapsed and drugs worked better. Economics lost standing as its tools and biases towards mathematical modeling that appeared objective failed to reflect reality, particularly in 2008. Computer science rests on products that keep working. The phone works. The search engine works. Whatever happens to the punditry, nobody stops using the products. The correction, when it comes, hits the guru layer.

Gelman does not ask what moves prestige between fields. He offers 2008 plus the natural ebb and flow of influence. Ebb and flow explains nothing. A better account: a discipline holds prestige when elites believe it holds the key to the era’s dominant anxiety, and loses it when a public event shows it doesn’t. Unhappiness and the mind for Freud. Prosperity and incentives for economics. Machines and intelligence now. On that account the fall comes from a visible failure at the promise.

Academic computer science and the tech industry have different standing. Star economists stayed at Chicago and Harvard. Star computer scientists leave for labs paying ten times the professor salary. The pundits are founders, investors, and a handful of lab heads. So the field sits at apex cultural prestige while its departments lose their best people to firms borrowing the name. Economics had no equivalent.

Gelman says all-encompassing theories can be fine because they supply a framework by which the social world can be studied rather than predictions. From a man who spends most days as a methods cop, that is a large door to leave open. He is generous to Freud and to neoclassical economics on a point where he would be merciless toward a psychology paper. Where does he draw the line?

Statistics watched its subject get renamed data science and machine learning and rehoused in better-funded departments. He has written for years about machine learning rediscovering old statistical results. Gelman comes from a field that lost the prestige contest to the field described.

Steven Levitt (b. 1967) was the theory man who made economics fun. Nate Silver (b. 1978) was the data man who didn’t need the theory.

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Virtue Signaling and the Amy Wax case

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Luke Ford

Philosopher Neil Levy writes in 2019:

The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond (if not by an admission of fault) by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is (inter alia) virtue signalling, because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide (higher-order) evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs…

Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake…

3. Numbers do not make a difference in either kind of way if additional agents are non-discriminating reflectors of a single individual (Goldman 2001). A non-discriminating reflector holds whatever opinion their guru holds, regardless of its plausibility, and therefore their agreement adds no independent epistemic weight to the initial opinion. In the actual world, agents are never or almost never non-discriminating reflectors of a guru, for at least two reasons. First, even if some agents are non-discriminating with regard to token opinions, the fact that they regard someone as a guru is good evidence that they take them to be reliable in general. Second, there is extensive evidence that agents are rarely genuinely non-discriminating. Even young children filter claims for plausibility, and will reject testimony from a familiar person, even a parent, in favour of more plausible testimony from an unfamiliar informant (see Harris 2012). The degree of independence of individual informants from one another varies from case to case, but we can be confident that each filters testimony for plausibility to some degree.

12. Anecdotally, the accusation of virtue signalling is typically directed by the political right at the political left. Nothing in the account given here predicts that it will be politically partisan, however, and the available empirical evidence suggests that it is at least as prevalent on the right. Expressive responding—reporting factual beliefs that are congenial to one’s political ‘side’ in order to express support and not because they are sincerely held—is very common, and amply demonstrated on the right. See Bullock and Lenz (2019) for review, and Schaffner and Luks (2018) for an extremely convincing demonstration of expressive responding by Trump supporters.

Amy Wax’s defenders say her critics do not care about the students and are working their careers. Her critics say she is a provocateur trading in outrage for attention. Levy’s answer to both is the same: the signaling function is real, the sincerity is also real, and the second is what makes the first work. Signals of commitment are reliable only when the commitment is there. The colleagues who signed against her probably meant it. She means it too.

What did each signal cost?

Levy’s criterion is that good signals are hard to fake, and a signal is hard to fake when it is costly, self-validating, or involuntary. Run that test across the Penn record. Signing a letter against Wax in 2018 or filing a complaint in 2022 cost a Penn faculty member very little and may have returned something. Defending her cost a great deal, which is why so few colleagues did it and why the defenses came mostly from outside institutions built for that purpose. Wax paid the most. She lost her named chair, lost summer pay in perpetuity, took a year’s suspension at half pay, and accepted a requirement to state in public appearances that she speaks for herself and not for Penn, on top of a public reprimand. By Levy’s own accounting that is the expensive signal in the exchange. The sanction authenticated her to the audience she was signaling toward. Penn produced the peacock’s tail on her behalf.

Levy’s list of signaling behaviors includes ramping up, where signalers outdo earlier signalers to be recognized as more serious. He treats it as predictable output of any signaling system rather than as a vice peculiar to progressives. Lay the Wax sequence against it. The bourgeois culture op-ed with Larry Alexander in 2017. The Glenn Loury interview remark about grade distributions the same year. The immigration remarks at the national conservatism conference in 2019. Then the repeated classroom invitations to Jared Taylor. A signal that has already been sent carries no information the second time. To keep carrying information to an audience it has to escalate or it has to become costlier.

Levy argues that numbers are higher-order evidence, and that the larger the number of people who disagree with you, the harder it gets to dismiss them from peerhood by citing your own track record, intelligence, or freedom from bias. Wax faces near unanimous disagreement from her professional peers. On Levy’s account she is under heavy rational pressure to reduce her confidence. She has not reduced it. Either she is holding a minority position that the numbers cannot touch, which he concedes can happen and illustrates with extreme opinions about race in the antebellum United States, or she is failing at conciliation in the way his framework describes.

His footnote on non-discriminating reflectors is where a Wax defense has to live, and it is the weakest link in his chain. Numbers only supply evidence when the judgments are independent. If a hundred people hold an opinion because their guru holds it, you have one opinion. Levy says agents in the real world are almost never non-discriminating, and offers as support that even young children filter testimony for plausibility. That is a low bar. The relevant question is not whether faculty filter for plausibility. It is whether the cost structure at an American law school in 2022 lets a private judgment against the consensus surface, and whether a signature under those conditions reports a belief or reports a position. Levy’s own argument supplies the tools to press this, since he spends the paper insisting that moral statements carry a signaling function. He does not apply it to the count. Someone should.

Levy says alleged instances are too controversial to assess, because the best explanation for why some people see an accusation as trumped up may be their own lack of moral perceptiveness. Ted Ruger’s charging letter described incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements, and argued that her conduct led reasonable students to conclude they would be judged on race, ethnicity, gender, national status, or sexual orientation.

Penn was signaling too. A dean’s memo would have been cheap and would have carried little information about the university’s commitments. A three-day hearing in May 2023 before a five-member faculty board, a vote, presidential acceptance, an appeal, review by the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility for procedural irregularities, and a final confirmation is expensive. It also took four years, invited national coverage, and produced litigation that outlived the sanction. Penn bought credibility with faculty and students by making the process costly to itself. That the process is faculty-driven rather than administrative is the self-validating part, Levy’s bridge case: the faculty crossed the bridge.

Levy concedes that signals invite mimics and that past some proportion of mimics the signal stops carrying information and falls out of use. Penn’s punishment communicates something only if institutions of its kind punish rarely and for cause. Every additional case where the finding tracks unpopularity pushes the proportion of mimics up and drains the signal.

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Revisiting Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Luke Ford

Elias Aboujaoude (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality in 2011, when Facebook had 600 million users, the iPad was a year old, and the phrase “smart phone” still took a space in the middle. He was then, as now, a Stanford psychiatrist running the OCD and impulse control clinics. The book argues that going online builds a second self. He calls it the e-personality and gives it five traits: grandiosity, narcissism, ordinary everyday viciousness, impulsivity, and infantile regression. The traits form under the conditions John Suler named the online disinhibition effect, which include anonymity, invisibility, and the collapse of hierarchy. Then comes the claim that carries the book: these traits migrate. What you become in a browser window follows you out of it. “Our offline persona increasingly resembles that of our avatar,” he writes.

That claim has been tested. Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen at Aarhus formalized it as the mismatch hypothesis and ran it into the ground across eight studies with 8,434 subjects, publishing “The Psychology of Online Political Hostility” in the American Political Science Review. They found almost nothing. People are not more hostile online than off. Hostile political talk online comes from status-driven people who talk that way in person too, and who seek out political argument in both places. The hostility gap exists because such people are more visible online. Their alternative account is a connectivity story: online environments change what a given motive can accomplish and who sees it happen. Selection and visibility explain the phenomenon Aboujaoude built a personality theory on.

The narcissism chapter rests on Jean Twenge (b. 1971) and the cross-temporal meta-analyses showing rising Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores in college cohorts. Eunike Wetzel and colleagues, including Brent Roberts and Richard Robins, went back to that literature in 2017 with three cohorts and about 60,000 students and did the measurement invariance test nobody had run. Narcissism declines from the 1990s to the 2010s, d = -0.27, with the entitlement facet falling too. Roberts put it bluntly to the press: there never was a narcissism epidemic. The paper is titled “The Narcissism Epidemic Is Dead; Long Live the Narcissism Epidemic,” and the second half of the title is a joke about how hard the idea is to kill.

The memory chapter leans on Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner (1948-2013), whose “Google Effects on Memory” appeared in Science the same year the book did. Colin Camerer’s Social Sciences Replication Project tried Experiment 1 in 2018 and failed. A later independent attempt found no conclusive evidence that hard trivia questions prime people to think about computers. The broader transactive memory finding survives in weakened form.

You could say “smaller and more conditional” about every famous academic claim in the past 100 years, with a few exceptions. Smoking and lung cancer got larger with better data. So did lead and blood pressure and childhood exposure. Those studies had big signals, hard outcomes, and no room for the researcher to choose among forty ways of measuring the dependent variable. Media effects research has small signals, soft self-report outcomes, and enormous measurement flexibility.

The distraction argument runs through Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass (1958-2013), and Anthony Wagner on media multitaskers. Wisnu Wiradhany and Mark Nieuwenstein ran two replications and a meta-analysis in 2017 and got d = 0.17, small and in the right direction. Douglas Parry and Daniel le Roux revisited the whole literature ten years on and found the same modest picture. The book also stakes the addiction argument partly on a 1998 PET study of dopamine release during a video game. That study had eight men in it.

So the supports go soft. What holds?

The illusion of knowledge chapter holds. Four years after the book, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu, and Frank Keil published “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Nine experiments. People who search the web rate their ability to explain unrelated things higher than people given the same text without searching. The effect survives when you control time, content, and search autonomy. It survives failed searches. Subjects even predicted more activity in pictures of their own brains. Aboujaoude called it romantic and cognitive illiteracy and got there by intuition; Yale got there by design.

The reading argument holds in reduced form. Meta-analyses by Pablo Delgado, Virginia Clinton, and Ladislao Salmerón converge on a screen inferiority effect for comprehension that is small, strongest for expository text, worse under time pressure, and worse when the reader has to scroll. Lidia Altamura and colleagues put leisure digital reading habits against comprehension across 469,564 participants and found r = .055, far below the medium-sized effect print reading habits produce. The medium does something. It does less than Nicholas Carr (b. 1959) claimed and less than the book implies.

Then there is the chapter on internet addiction, the most careful in the book, and the one whose afterlife is the most interesting thing about it. Aboujaoude reports his own telephone survey of 2,513 adults, published in CNS Spectrums in 2006, which found that between 4 and 14 percent of Americans showed some marker of problematic internet use, with 14 percent unable to stay offline for several days. He notes the reviewer who rejected the paper with the line about microwave abuse and ChapStick addiction. He is fair to the skeptics, quotes Michael Craig Miller’s electronic needle argument, and declines to demand a DSM entry.

The field went the other way. The World Health Organization put gaming disorder in ICD-11. The DSM-5 kept internet gaming disorder as a condition for further study, and DSM-5-TR left it there. Prevalence estimates then did what prevalence estimates do when the construct is loose: a 2024 meta-analysis of DSM-5 and ICD-11 studies pooled at 6.7 percent, a 2025 meta-analysis of young adults landed at 6.1 percent across 149,601 people, and a large Swiss sample this year came in alongside a running argument that criteria like tolerance, deception, and gaming to escape manufacture false positives. Problematic smartphone use has been estimated at 37 percent in one meta-analysis of 109 studies and under 1 percent in another.

The lower figure is Aboujaoude’s. In “Problematic smartphone use in a representative sample of US adults,” published in Addictive Behaviors with Lucien Rochat, Germano Vera Cruz, and Yasser Khazaal, he is senior author on a paper reporting prevalence of 0.75 to 1.2 percent once you require functional impairment. The paper says the results highlight the need for an impairment criterion if we are to avoid pathologizing a ubiquitous behavior that has come to define contemporary life. That sentence retires most of the alarm in his own book, and he wrote it. A man revising his estimate downward by an order of magnitude in a peer-reviewed journal, twenty years after making his name on the higher number, is doing the thing scientists are supposed to do and rarely do.

Where does that leave the harm question? The best causal evidence is quasi-experimental and experimental, and it points to real effects that are small. Luca Braghieri, Ro’ee Levy, and Alexey Makarin exploited Facebook’s staggered college rollout in the American Economic Review and found worsened student mental health, with the severe depression effect around 0.07 standard deviations, driven by unfavorable social comparison. Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow and a large team randomized about 35,000 users to deactivate Facebook or Instagram for six weeks before the 2020 election. Emotional state improved by 0.060 standard deviations for Facebook and 0.041 for Instagram, and political attitudes, polarization, and belief in fraud claims barely moved. Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski’s specification curve work put adolescent digital technology use in the same neighborhood as eating potatoes. The National Academies reviewed the youth literature in 2024 and concluded the evidence was insufficient to say social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level, while documenting real harm to individual teens. Luisa Fassi, Tamsin Ford, and Orben have since pushed into clinical samples, where the general-population averages hide the people who most need studying.

Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963) built a policy movement on the stronger reading and has been answered at length, most recently by Liam Sigaud, Zachary Rausch, Alec McClean and Haidt attacking the Vuorre and Przybylski papers in Clinical Psychological Science, with Candice Odgers, Sonia Livingstone, Patti Valkenburg and Christopher Ferguson pressing from the other side. Legislation ran ahead of all of it. Australia banned social media accounts for under-16s on December 10, 2025. By March, the eSafety Commissioner found that more than eight in ten under-16s were still using the platforms, most at the same frequency as before, and a British Medical Journal study in June found little evidence of reduced access. Meta has been ordered to pay close to a billion dollars in US jury verdicts this year. Reviews of school phone bans report limited and inconsistent effects on attainment, no consistent effect on bullying, and some increase in anxiety among students separated from their phones. The gap between a 0.06 standard deviation effect and a national prohibition is where we now live.

On romance the book has aged into its own irony. Aboujaoude opens the chapter with a man who leaves his fiancée for a Second Life avatar. Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas, and Sonia Hausen showed in PNAS that meeting online became the most common way American heterosexual couples meet around 2013, passing friends, and that it displaced the friend and family brokers who used to run the market. Outcomes are contested and the disagreements are small: John Cacioppo found slightly higher marital satisfaction for couples who met online, Rosenfeld found no difference in duration, Liesel Sharabi and Elizabeth Dorrance Hall found modestly worse satisfaction and stability mediated by marginalization and distance, and a 2025 study across fifty countries found lower satisfaction and love among couples who met online. The extreme case turned out to be an extreme case, and the ordinary case became the whole marriage market.

Aboujaoude has moved on to the obvious successor. He now runs the Program in Internet, Health and Society at Cedars-Sinai and chairs the anxiety section at Stanford, and this year he and Ashley Golden published “A transdiagnostic model for how general purpose AI chatbots can perpetuate OCD and anxiety disorders” in npj Digital Medicine. The argument is that chatbots feed intolerance of uncertainty and need-to-know compulsions, reinforcing avoidance and blocking corrective learning. He offers the patient who once spent four hours planning a business trip and now spends twelve, because the reassurance never runs out. The evidence base is clinical observation plus early survey work, which is where he stood in 2011.

The parallel research is arriving. Cathy Fang and colleagues at MIT Media Lab ran a four-week randomized trial with 981 participants and over 300,000 messages, and reported that higher daily use tracked with more loneliness, more emotional dependence, and less socializing, with voice modality helping at low use and losing that advantage at high use. Nataliya Kosmyna’s EEG study of essay writing with an LLM found weaker neural connectivity, weaker sense of ownership, and subjects who could not quote work they had produced days earlier. It has 54 subjects, 18 in the final session, and has not passed peer review. Michael Gerlich’s survey work links heavy AI use to reduced critical thinking through cognitive offloading, and finds the effect depends on how people prompt. This is 2011 again: a striking small study, a plausible mechanism, and a public ready to generalize.

The lesson of Virtually You is about the relationship between the clinic and the population. Aboujaoude sees the man who lost his job to browsing, the wife who installs keyloggers, the fiancé who leaves for an avatar. Those people exist and someone should write about them. The error is arithmetic. A clinician’s caseload is a sample selected on the outcome, and the traits that fill his waiting room look like emerging norms because he never meets the eighty percent for whom the same technology does nothing measurable. Bor and Petersen’s finding is the correction: the internet recruits and displays, it does not convert. Fifteen years of better instruments produced smaller numbers almost everywhere they were pointed, and the man who published the frightening number in 2006 published the small one in 2024.

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The Great Delusion

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

That’s the best summary of the human condition I have seen. Mearsheimer doesn’t put much effort into supporting his argument. He draws his social ontology from a thin bibliography, mostly Aristotle, Burke, and Herder. The literature behind his claim is much deeper than his footnotes suggest, and it splits into four traditions that rarely read each other.

The first is the sociological classic line that made socialization the central fact. Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) built the whole case in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where the sacred is society worshipping itself and moral categories arrive from the group. Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) extended it in The Gift and in his 1938 essay on the category of the person, which traces how the bounded individual became a Western legal and religious invention. George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) gave the psychological version in Mind, Self, and Society: the self emerges from taking the attitude of others toward oneself, so the social precedes the individual in the order of development. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) argued the same for cognition in Mind in Society, where thought starts as external speech between people and only later moves inside. Peter Berger (1929-2017) and Thomas Luckmann (1927-2016) systematized the whole thing in The Social Construction of Reality, and their chapter on primary socialization is the best short statement of Mearsheimer’s point about the long childhood. Norbert Elias (1897-1990) wrote on the puzzle in The Society of Individuals, arguing that the sense of an inner self walled off from others is a late historical achievement.

The second tradition is comparative anthropology, which tested whether the Western person is normal. Louis Dumont (1911-1998) wrote Homo Hierarchicus, which reads caste India as a society organized around the whole, and Essays on Individualism traces how the West got from the Christian individual-in-relation-to-God to the modern individual-in-the-world. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) made the famous remark in Local Knowledge that the Western idea of the person as a bounded, unique, integrated center of awareness is a peculiar notion set against the world’s other cultures. Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021) wrote the short polemical version in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, about a hundred pages, which argues that the Hobbesian picture of the presocial self-interested actor is a local folk theory the West mistook for science. Mary Douglas (1921-2007) is the practical one: Natural Symbols and How Institutions Think show that classification, memory, and even what counts as a good argument run through group structure. Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) wrote The Ancient City in 1864 and it remains the best account of a world where the family cult is the unit of everything.

The third tradition is the evolutionary and cognitive work, which is where the current action is. Joseph Henrich (b. 1968) matters most for Mearsheimer’s argument. The Secret of Our Success argues that humans survive by cultural learning, and The WEIRDest People in the World explains Western individualism as the downstream effect of the medieval Church dismantling cousin marriage and clan structure. Read together they concede Mearsheimer’s premise and then historicize his opponent, which is more damaging to liberalism than a frontal attack. Michael Tomasello (b. 1950) supplies the developmental evidence in A Natural History of Human Thinking and Becoming Human, showing that shared intentionality appears in children before anything resembling individual reasoning. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (b. 1946) wrote Mothers and Others on cooperative breeding, and it is the best answer to why the human childhood is so long and so dependent. Christopher Boehm (1937-2021) gives the political version in Hierarchy in the Forest and Moral Origins, where conscience is internalized group sanction. Peter Richerson (b. 1943) and Robert Boyd (b. 1948) provide the formal theory in Not by Genes Alone. Robin Dunbar (b. 1947) on group size in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, and David Sloan Wilson (b. 1949) on religion as group adaptation in Darwin’s Cathedral, round it out. Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm covers how societies mark membership and how they split.

The fourth tradition is the philosophical critique of liberal atomism, and this is the literature Mearsheimer is closest to without citing. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) wrote the founding essay, “Atomism,” in the second volume of his philosophical papers, and then the long historical version in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, where the buffered self replaces the porous one. Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) gives the sharpest version in After Virtue and, more to your point, in Dependent Rational Animals, which starts from human vulnerability and dependence and reaches a politics from there. Michael Sandel (b. 1953) attacked Rawls on exactly this ground in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice with the argument about the unencumbered self. Michael Walzer (b. 1935) offers the pluralist alternative in Spheres of Justice. Robert Bellah (1927-2013) and his colleagues did the empirical American version in Habits of the Heart. C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987) wrote the classic genealogy in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, tracing atomism to Hobbes and Locke. Larry Siedentop (b. 1936) argues the opposite causal story in Inventing the Individual, that Christianity produced the individual, which makes him the best foil for Henrich and Dumont.

On the rights half of Mearsheimer’s argument, read Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) beyond the quoted line. The Last Utopia dates the human rights breakthrough to the 1970s and treats it as a replacement for failed socialist and anticolonial politics, and Not Enough argues that rights talk grew as material equality collapsed. Mary Ann Glendon (b. 1938) wrote Rights Talk on how the American rights idiom crowds out responsibility and relationship. MacIntyre’s line in After Virtue about belief in natural rights standing with belief in witches and unicorns is the hard version.

For the nationalism payoff, where Mearsheimer takes all this, the essential books are Ernest Gellner (1925-1995), Nations and Nationalism, Anthony D. Smith (1939-2016), The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Walker Connor (1926-2017), Ethnonationalism, and Azar Gat (b. 1959), Nations, which argues for deep premodern roots against Gellner’s modernism. Pierre van den Berghe (1933-2019) wrote the sociobiological version in The Ethnic Phenomenon. Yoram Hazony (b. 1964) published The Virtue of Nationalism the same year as Mearsheimer’s book and argues a parallel case from a different starting point.

If you want four books: Dumont’s Essays on Individualism for the comparative frame, Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World for the causal history, Berger and Luckmann for socialization, and Taylor’s “Atomism” for the philosophical target.

My quote comes from Chapter 2, “Human Nature and Politics,” which names two people in pop evolution.

The first is Jonathan Haidt (b. 1963), quoted for the line that children end up with a morality unique to their culture or group. Mearsheimer calls him a social psychologist and uses him once, to prop up the claim that socialization outranks reason. The second is Antonio Damasio (b. 1944), cited for the point that emotion cannot be scrubbed out of reasoning. There is also an unnamed reference to “some social psychologists” who hold that reason mostly rationalizes intuition, which is the moral-intuitionist school Haidt belongs to, and a dismissive aside about “some sociobiologists” who claim humans are naturally aggressive, a position Mearsheimer rejects along with Hans Morgenthau’s (1904-1980) animus dominandi.

The rest of the chapter runs on political theory and sociology rather than biology. Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) opens it. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) supplies habitus. Émile Durkheim gets the line that society is not a mere sum of individuals. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) supplies the infinity of traces. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) supplies the partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn. Alasdair MacIntyre supplies the interminability of moral disagreement. Leo Strauss (1899-1973) gets several pages. Then Hume, Rousseau, Condorcet, William Godwin, John Dewey, Daniel Defoe on Robinson Crusoe, Brad Gregory (b. 1963) on the Reformation, Richard Posner (b. 1939) and Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) and Oliver Wendell Holmes on law, Irving Kristol on economics, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) on whether man is good or bad, Thucydides, Harold Lasswell, and Locke.

So the sociality argument rests on assertion and on a handful of political theorists, with Haidt doing the empirical work almost alone. Mearsheimer does not cite Tomasello, Boehm, Hrdy, Richerson and Boyd, Henrich, Dunbar, or E.O. Wilson except to wave off the sociobiologists.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) said man is by nature a political animal, and the man who lives outside the city is either a beast or a god.

Marx’s sixth thesis on Feuerbach said the human essence is the ensemble of social relations.

Roger Scruton (1944-2020) said first person plural comes before the first person singular.

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) said man is always found in groups, and the state of nature is wherever man happens to be standing.

Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) said man is the deficient creature, born without adequate instinct, and institutions do the work instinct does in other animals.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) said asabiyya, group feeling, is what lets one people take power from another, and it decays across three or four generations of prosperity. Mearsheimer treats sociality as a constant. Ibn Khaldun makes it a variable with a decay curve.

Peter Berger (1929-2017) said society is a human product, society is an objective reality, man is a social product.

Max Weber (1864-1920) said the old gods rise from their graves and resume their eternal struggle, and each of us serves one and offends another.

Posted in John J. Mearsheimer | Comments Off on The Great Delusion

Why Do I Instinctively Dislike Erik Erikson?

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

Claude says: The first is the arc of his career. He built his name on invective. He called Justice David Souter a name that combined bestiality with child molestation. He called Michelle Obama a Marxist harpy. He tagged Wendy Davis with a nickname about abortion. Then came the second act: the Christian gentleman, the scripture citation, the counsel toward grace, the lament for a coarsened public square. He apologized for parts of the first act. The apology arrived around the time the audience for the second act became more lucrative than the audience for the first. Someone who watched both acts hears the second as a costume change rather than a repentance.

Second, the merger of faith and inventory. His show is sold on biblical conviction. Piety functions as a product feature, and a man raised around religion tends to smell that before he can articulate it.

Third, the weathervane pattern. He disinvited Trump from the RedState Gathering in August 2015 and spent 2016 in open opposition. The opposition softened over the following years. Every individual step has a defense. The sequence tracks where the paying listeners went.

Fourth, verdicts without exposure. Three hours a day, a syndicated column, a Fox chair, opinions on Iran and Ossoff and the Vice President and the state of Western civilization. Nobody who produces at that volume can have done the reading. The confidence outruns the labor, and you have spent thirty years watching men monetize that gap.

Posted in Radio | Comments Off on Why Do I Instinctively Dislike Erik Erikson?

WSJ: The Uninvited Guest Who Crashed Our Family Vacation: My Mom’s AI Chatbot

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jamie Waters writes: “I shouldn’t judge my parents for embracing a tool that helps them stay relevant, but I will. Much as I can see the usefulness of LLMs, I hate what they represent. I’m a millennial writer racked by existential fears and terrified AI will steal my job. My parents, near the end of their careers, are far more open to a bot’s benefits—and tolerant of its bootlicking.”

Claude says:

The essay explains its own hostility in the fifth paragraph and then hurries past it. The author fears the tool will take his work. His parents are lawyers in their seventies with almost no career left to lose. Position in the labor market accounts for the split better than generational temperament does, and better than Allison Pugh’s explanation about interface design. Exposure predicts attitude. The piece reaches for the role-reversal frame because the reversal sells, and because it lets him be the sympathetic Luddite.

The Pew number doesn’t carry the reversal either. The question asks about concern over people’s ability to function on their own, so the gap measures anxiety about third parties. Pugh then concedes that younger people use these tools most. What survives is a modest claim: conditional on use, older users report more pleasure. That’s probably right and it’s a different essay.

The mother’s admission about fake flattery and liking the validation anyway is the strongest line in the piece, and it sits in the middle doing nothing. Most criticism of chatbot sycophancy assumes the problem is that users don’t know. She knows. She has priced it in and made her choice. If you want to write about what people want from these systems, start there and not with the Pew crosstabs.

The Katherine and Catherine exchange is the counterweight, and the author misses what it shows. Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) was born Catalina; the model gave both spellings and deferred to English usage as acceptable. The mother’s expertise comes from Philippa Gregory (b. 1954) novels. She was corrected, she was wrong, and she called it cheek. So the demand isn’t for validation as such. It’s for validation plus never being contradicted, which the same person will also tell you she finds hollow. That’s the actual problem and it doesn’t have a clean solution.

The piece is doing the job the section assigned it, which is to be light and shareable, and it’s funny in two or three places. The WSJ personal-tech desk now runs this form on a schedule: family member adopts AI, writer reacts, expert supplies a sentence of validation, closing joke. Once a genre stabilizes, the reporting gets thinner because the shape is already known before the vacation starts.

Posted in AI | Comments Off on WSJ: The Uninvited Guest Who Crashed Our Family Vacation: My Mom’s AI Chatbot

WEHT to Marc Weisblott?

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

Marc Weisblott introduced me to Moxie, the blonde Los Angeles blogger I went looking for today. That sent me down a second rabbit hole. Whatever happened to Marc?

Moxie vanished. Weisblott did the opposite. He has spent more than thirty years doing variations on the same peculiar job while the media around him collapsed, reinvented itself and collapsed again.

The Marc I knew through Weisblog was built for the Internet before the Internet had worked out what to do with a man like him. He carried an encyclopedic memory for media personalities, discarded pop culture, local characters, dead careers and the small details a conventional reporter throws away. He cared about the famous person and also about the person who had been briefly famous fifteen years earlier and now sold insurance.

That sensibility predates the blog. By December 1994 he was writing for Toronto’s alternative weekly Eye Weekly. One surviving piece, preserved in the old Google Groups archive, is an absurd statistical breakdown of the Beatles’ Live at the BBC. He counted how many times various words appeared and catalogued the Little Richard yelps of Paul McCartney (b. 1942). The next year he covered Lollapalooza for Eye, and his dispatch from the festival has the method already formed. The big event is a skeleton. What holds him are the booths, the minor personalities, the overheard absurdities and the cultural debris piling up around the stage.

Three decades later you can still hear that voice. The institutional home changed. The collecting instinct did not.

During the first blogging boom he ran Weisblog and a second site called Better Living Centre. He belonged to the early generation who understood, well before the newspapers did, that the Internet rewarded personality, velocity, linking, obsessive specialization and the ability to notice things an editor would refuse to assign.

An artifact from 2005 survives. Eye Weekly ran a piece about Toronto’s emerging professional blogs, and Weisblott, then running Better Living Centre, warned of a “dire, pressing, imminent need” for legacy media to change. Twenty years later the old article resurfaced on LinkedIn. Eye Weekly had by then ceased to exist. Weisblott had not.

He kept moving between the old media and the new. He returned to Eye Weekly and was still publishing there in 2008, writing about magazines, Toronto politics, popular culture and whatever else crossed his desk. He also worked the portal era at Canada.com and Yahoo Canada, where in 2011 he carried the title National Affairs Reporter. The stories under that grand billing ranged from newspaper paywalls to MuchMusic changing its logo to the return of comfortable chairs to Indigo bookstores.

That range is the argument. For Weisblott the trivial story and the serious story sit on one continuum. A television logo, a dying mall, a radio host switching stations, a newspaper putting up a paywall: each opens onto institutions, money, generations and memory. He treats the small item as evidence.

The mature version of Weisblog arrived in 2015. St. Joseph Communications gave him a small budget and a wide leash and he built a weekday email newsletter called 12:36. Every weekday at 12:36 in the afternoon, subscribers got his compact digest of Toronto news, Canadian media gossip, personalities, oddities and anything he thought deserved saving.

In a 2015 interview with J-Source he called it a piñata. A major appointment at a broadcaster might land beside a forgotten local celebrity, a strange real-estate story and something overheard on television at one in the morning.

The newsletter also answered a question about what had gone wrong online. Rather than build stories engineered to produce another click, he put the useful part in the email. In another J-Source interview he described the inspiration as escaping the dying era of clickbait journalism and holding a direct relationship with readers instead of renting one from a platform. This was 2015, several years before Substack made the newsletter fashionable. He had shown up early again.

The delivery time was half gimmick and half theory. He judged 12:36 to fall in the lull after the morning burst and before the evening cycle, and in October 2015 the Nieman Journalism Lab examined the experiment.

The numbers got respectable for a product this idiosyncratic. By August 2016 the list held just under 5,500 subscribers with an average open rate of 52 percent. The staff tested subject lines and found they barely moved the needle. People opened it because they wanted Weisblott. David Topping of St. Joseph told J-Source the product was built around him. By December 2016 Nieman Lab reported roughly 7,000 subscribers and open rates between 55 and 60 percent. By the fifth anniversary in 2020, Billboard Canada reported about 10,000.

Small by Internet arithmetic. A loyal audience assembled around the judgment of one man, which is the harder thing to build.

He found another medium suited to him around the same time. He became a recurring guest on Toronto Mike’s podcast, where the man famous for compressing an enormous amount of information into a tiny newsletter proved he could also talk about Canadian media for three hours without pausing. A July 2020 appearance ran three hours and one minute. A June 2022 appearance ran three hours and seven. Mike Boon kept asking him back because Weisblott had become a living index of Toronto media.

Then 12:36 met one of the discontinuities he had spent his career chronicling in other people’s businesses. In August 2022, St. Joseph stopped publishing it. This time he got custody of the name and the mailing list. On an October 2022 Toronto Mike appearance he explained that his 88-month relationship with the company had ended and that he was working out how to carry on alone. He moved 12:36 to Substack and started experimenting. He was back with Toronto Mike in September 2023, talking about the Canadian media landscape.

Meanwhile he had taken a conventional editorial job at one of Canada’s oldest Jewish publications. The Canadian Jewish News shut down during the pandemic and relaunched in 2021 as a digital-first operation with Weisblott as managing editor. The choice fit. He had watched publications die for decades because they confused the survival of an institution with the survival of its format. In an August 2021 interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he called the shutdown a bit of a gift, because it freed the paper from its weekly print habits.

“That liberated the next iteration from the customary publishing style,” he said.

His career consists of escaping customary publishing styles. The alt-weekly became the blog. The blog sensibility moved into the portal. The portal writer became a newsletter editor. The newsletter personality became a podcaster. Then the veteran of every one of those transitions helped rebuild a Jewish newspaper as a website and a podcast network.

The 2024 CJN masthead still listed Weisblott as managing editor. The role then shifted. The fall 2024 and spring 2025 magazines carried him as contributing editor, while the podcast credits identified him as editorial director, including an episode released May 2, 2025.

When that old Eye Weekly piece about Toronto blogs turned up on LinkedIn in 2025, Weisblott appeared in the comments and wrote that the same sentiment had carried through to a job he had recently been terminated from. He added: “we’ll keep trying …”

Marc has spent his adult life inside industries that keep announcing their own extinction. The alternative weekly died. The personal blog died. The newspaper portal died. Yahoo’s journalism ambitions shrank to nothing. Local outlets shed staff by the hundred. Twitter stopped being the thing journalists thought it was. The independent newsletter turned fashionable and then overcrowded. Podcasts multiplied past the point where any human could hear them.

Through all of it he kept doing what he did at Eye Weekly in 1994. He noticed things. He remembered people. He followed careers after everyone else quit paying attention. He tied the trivial event to the machinery that produced it.

That is what makes him the right companion piece to Moxie. She took one exit from the early blogosphere. The persona had done its work, she walked away, and the Internet forgot her at its usual speed. Weisblott took the other. He never left. He moved his pile of clippings to the next platform and kept going.

There is a symmetry in my going looking for Moxie and ending up looking for Marc. Twenty-four years ago he was one of the people wiring those little blogging worlds together. He traveled, he met bloggers, he introduced strangers to each other, and he treated obscure personal websites as though the people behind them might amount to something. Sometimes they did.

And Marc Weisblott, connoisseur of whatever happened to everybody else, turns out to have a decent answer to the same question about himself.

He kept going.

Posted in Blogging, Moxie | Comments Off on WEHT to Marc Weisblott?

WEHT to Moxie aka Madison Slade?

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

For a few years in the early 2000s, Los Angeles had a blogging scene small enough that everybody in it knew everybody else. People met at parties in Silver Lake and on the Westside. Newspaper writers read the blogs and then drank with the bloggers. A link turned into an introduction, an introduction into a friendship, a blogroll into a social life. The cost of entry was a domain name and a willingness to publish under your own name, or under a name you invented.

One of the women in that world called herself Moxie.

Her site, moxie.nu, went up in October 2000. She wrote about dating, men, work, Los Angeles, politics, friendship and herself. By 2002 she was moving through the same rooms as Cathy Seipp (1957-2007), Amy Alkon, Tony Pierce, Marc Weisblott, Matt Welch and the people orbiting the Los Angeles Press Club.

I went looking for her today and found that the trail stops in the summer of 2007. I suspect Marc knows what happened.

Moxie had a second public name. In November 2002, The Jewish Journal published “The Matchmakers” under the byline Madison Slade. The contributor note called the author “Madison ‘Moxie’ Slade,” described her as a Los Angeles freelance writer, and pointed readers to her website. Other bloggers of the period used the same construction, calling her Madison Slade, aka Moxie.

That is her own byline, published by her, linked by her to her own blog. When I profiled her in 2003, I noted that Moxie was not her real name, and Madison Slade may have been a professional name standing between her private identity and her Internet persona. There are a good number of women named Madison Slade alive today. I have no evidence connecting any of them to her.

I met her through the Canadian writer Marc Weisblott, who visited Los Angeles in 2002. In May 2003, I interviewed Moxie over lunch.

She told me she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her father was a CEO. She graduated from Cornell with a double major in biochemistry and marketing. She spent five years in high tech in San Francisco and five more in Los Angeles, making six figures before the dot-com crash. Then she lost the job.

“I needed a structured way to write every day,” she said.

So in October 2000 she started moxie.nu. She had kept a diary as a girl. The blog turned a private habit into a public one. By 2003 she claimed an Alexa ranking around 90,000, which sounds like nothing and at the time meant something. The traffic mattered less than what the traffic brought her. A party Brian Linse gave in July 2002 changed her life. She met Tony Pierce there, and Pierce introduced her to everyone else. A woman who had been sitting alone at a keyboard writing about her own week acquired a circle of friends who could be met for lunch.

I asked how her life might have gone without the site.

“I’d have an entirely different group of friends,” she said. “I’d probably never write.”

The early Los Angeles blogosphere was porous. The walls between amateurs and professionals had not gone up. Kevin Roderick’s LA Observed linked bloggers next to news organizations. Blogging.la gathered writers including Xeni Jardin (b. 1970), Wil Wheaton (b. 1972) and Moxie. People broke small stories, argued with each other in comments, and then met for drinks in Hollywood. This was before Facebook absorbed personal networking, before Twitter turned everyone into a broadcaster, and before online writing became a job category called content. A blog was a thing a person decided to make.

Cathy Seipp sat at the center of one cluster of it. Cathy and Amy Alkon kept alive the old tradition of Los Angeles writers meeting in person. Matt Welch has described being pulled into their monthly dinners, where bloggers, magazine writers, newspaper people and various media eccentrics mixed.

Moxie became one of Cathy’s friends. You can see it in the small stuff. In a 2006 LAist interview with Cathy, Cathy said the television critics tour had been more fun because Moxie and Emmanuelle Richard drove her there for much of it.

Cathy Seipp died of lung cancer on March 21, 2007.

Amy Alkon’s account of Cathy’s final days puts Moxie at Cedars-Sinai near the end, sitting beside the bed, stroking Cathy’s hair, asking Amy to read aloud a tribute Mark Steyn (b. 1959) had written. Moxie was at the funeral two days later. I wrote about the funeral, which pulled in a good part of the Los Angeles media world. On June 10 a smaller group gathered at the television writer Rob Long’s house for Cathy’s closest writer friends. Moxie was there too, and I wrote about that gathering.

If Cathy’s death drove Moxie off the Internet, it did not do so at once. That summer she pushed further in. She started an Internet radio program called MoxVox on a service called NowLive, and Tony Pierce joined her on it. On August 15, 2007, LAist invited readers to listen to Tony and “LA blogger Moxie” going out live, with a call-in line and a chatroom. That sounds like nothing now. In 2007 she was building, without a name for it yet, the thing that became podcasting and livestreaming and the personality economy.

On August 30, Ann Althouse (b. 1951) appeared on MoxVox. Althouse’s contemporaneous blog archive records the appearance, and Moxie came into the comments afterward to defend the joke in her own masthead. So she was online, in public, arguing about a slogan, on the night of August 30, 2007.

Then the record stops.

There is no obituary. No scandal, no announced retirement, no falling-out with the circle, no illness. I searched 2008 through 2012 for combinations of Moxie, moxie.nu, MoxVox, Seipp, Alkon, Pierce, Roderick and the Press Club, and found recycled references to the old blog and no new appearances by her. Searching Madison Slade produces the same silence. In March 2008 OC Weekly published “A Year Without Cathy Seipp” and mentioned Cathy’s pal Moxie in passing, which tells us she was still a familiar person to that crowd and does not tell us she was still writing. Later references are memory rather than contact.

On the written blog, the last handle I have is a July 17, 2007 link from Brady Westwater to a post at moxie.nu. I searched for the ten post numbers that would have followed it and found none indexed. Search engines drop old pages, so this proves little, though it points the same direction as everything else. A site at caib.us holds a chunk of the old moxie.nu database, mostly 2004 and 2005, including a post about moving four years of material to a new server and a piece about her cat Nika going with her to Cornell. That looks like a scraped or repurposed copy of her archive. The remaining route is the Internet Archive, whose 2007 capture calendar for the domain.

Going back to my 2003 interview, the ending looks less strange than it did.

She was already counting the cost. Men she dated disliked becoming material. Some of them did not know about the site at all. She had started leaving her relationships out of it. “I’ve pulled back on the writing,” she said. “It’s limiting.” She was spending less time on the blog and more time looking for work and seeing the friends the blog had produced. The site had built her a life, and the life could now compete with the site.

Asked what she loved and hated about having a website, she said: “I don’t think I hate anything about it. I don’t love it either. It just is.”

Nobody talks that way now. A person with an audience is expected to preserve it, monetize it, migrate it across platforms and convert every scrap of attention into a permanent public self. Moxie came out of an earlier Internet, where people started blogs because they felt like writing and then stopped when they stopped feeling like it.

The history of blogging suffers from survivorship bias. We remember the ones who turned a blog into a career. Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963). Glenn Reynolds (b. 1960). Josh Marshall (b. 1969). Matthew Yglesias (b. 1981). They moved to Twitter and Substack and podcasts and books, and they left long searchable trails. That was the exception. Most bloggers vanished. Domains expired, links rotted, Movable Type installations went dark, Photobucket ate the photographs, comment threads disappeared, and the indexes forgot the rest.

From 2000 to 2007, Moxie documented her life in public, gathered readers, joined an emerging media scene, turned online contacts into friendships, and grew close enough to Cathy Seipp to sit with her at the end. Then, as the Internet was moving toward permanent identity, she went the other way.

Madison Slade was also a pen name. Maybe she married. Maybe she went back into technology, or left Los Angeles, or decided there were better uses for an evening than telling strangers about her afternoon. She has had eighteen years of quiet and no obligation to explain them.

What I can say is that the absence has no catastrophe in it. She stopped. She stopped early enough that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and the rest of the identity apparatus had not yet made stopping impossible, and so it worked. She was born into the first great wave of ordinary people putting their private lives on the public Internet, and she found the exit the rest of us have mislaid.

She logged off.

PS. I just remembered the last time I wrote about Moxie was July 28, 2010:

Blogger Moxie Says Her Co-Host Tried To Commit Her

Here’s the link where the blogger and blog radio host Moxie writes: “My former co-host tried to put me in the psych ward lock-down. Don’t worry, I discharged myself when no one understood why I was even there. Will tell everything my lawyer allows me to say, but I will be telling you everything about the beating I got from a cop. Photos available on my FB page….they’re real purty. Thanks Kender.”

Kender McGowan is Moxie’s former co-host who called the cops last Thursday morning, July 22, saying Moxie may be trying to commit suicide.

During the show July 25, Moxie lists off her enemies.

Here’s a 2003 interview I did with Moxie.

She’s been talking about committing suicide for as long as I have known her.

I don’t think she’s held down a full-time job in more than a decade.

Her parents are rich.

She regards her cats as her family and believes that at least one of them saved her life.

I’d like to think that when the cops were taking Moxie away, she screamed, “Take me to Cathy!”

Moxie blogs Jan. 16, 2010: “My Ex boyfriend has been stalking me for many months….

“Recently my assistant learned he has a new girlfriend. Unfortunately, she also enjoys stalking me using fake Twitter and Facebook accounts.”

Here are some highlights from this show:

Moxie: “My life has been utter hell.”

“I have been on the phone with my lawyer for two days. I have to be very careful about what I say.”

“I was beat up by cops and had people I cared about deeply betray me.”

“I don’t care how well you think you know somebody, never let them know where you live. If I don’t know what kind of stick gets shoved up their ass… They can send the cops and an ambulance and they can try to put you in the psych ward.”

“I was beat up by a cop who happens to be black.”

Moxie says she hasn’t slept in about a week. “That’s why I have a prescription [for xanax].”

“Maybe my former cohost is coming to get me again. What a giant! No, what a little faggot.”

A few years ago, Moxie was having some problems that she thought needed law enforcement attention. So a guy told her to call the LAPD and ask for detective Christie Love. She did and they laughed and hung up on her.

On this show, Moxie says: “I can’t stand Keith Olbermann. He drives me crazy.”

“Yes, it was a nigger cop. There are white people who are niggers and there are black people who are niggers and this was just a nigger.”

“I had my former best friend go ballistic on me because I bought six codemol tablets.”

I was friends with Moxie for years until I blogged that after Cathy Seipp’s funeral, Cathy’s sister asked Moxie to leave so the family could be alone together.

On this show, Moxie says: “I am working on getting a new cohost… I have one amazing candidate… She’s like me — a conservative atheist… I don’t think either of us hate religious people. I’m very close with my parents. They’re my best friends. They’re very religious and I forgive them for it.”

“After getting thrown in 5150 (involuntary psychiatric hold) for something prescribed by my doctor to help me with my insomnia. My former cohost and my former boyfriend conspired on this… So f*** you. You’re going to love your lawsuit.”

“My former cohost lives on public assistance.”

(Kender is on disability.)

When the police came for Moxie, I believe she grabbed a video camera and started taping to protect herself.

Moxie: “When they handcuffed me in the ambulance, I said, ‘What’s the matter? I live in the ghetto. There’s nothing better for you to do?'”

“Every time that faggot [Al Gore] gives a speech about global warming, there’s a snowstorm.”

“Kender owes me $120 because I paid for him to go to something.”

(Kender agrees.)

“I used to be assaulted every week by the same cop in LA because I had a hairstyle he didn’t like.”

“The big black man who forced his way into my house… He tried to push the door open with his henchmen. I pushed back.”

Moxie says she told the cops her husband was a lawyer.

“Kender’s a f***ing asshole. A lying scumbag absolute dirt off the bottom of a homeless person’s cane.”

“I’m going to send this to Fox. There should be Moxie riots. There should be white people looting and rioting all over the place.”

“I didn’t threaten suicide. I threatened to take my maximum dose of my meds because I hadn’t slept in four nights.”

“Kender reported that I took 30 milligrams of xanax. Three milligrams is the maximum I am allowed to take.”

“If you don’t sleep for a while, eventually you die.”

“I got beat up. I’m too afraid to sleep.”

“People who want to kill themselves go and just do it.”

“I didn’t want sympathy. I just said I’m cleaning my house, I can’t sleep.”

“If I want to kill myself, that’s my business. I’m not killing an innocent baby.”

Moxie spends much of the show talking about suicide and condemning her co-host for 51050ing her.

“I don’t feel safe in my own house because that f***ing asshole, that midget, can call them up and lie again and say Moxie just took some xanax.”

“I have a prescription and I know just how much I am allowed to take… The LD50 for those of you who aren’t pre-med is the amount that can kill half of the population. And I was nowhere near that.”

“He’s also got my best friend and my ex-boyfriend involved in this. Trust me. Nobody f***s with me.”

Moxie asks a caller, “Do I sound suicidal to you?”

“These things are great. I can clear out a whole bunch of people [from my life].”

“I drop the n-bomb. They call us equally offensive terms. I’ll call Kender a faggot. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Moxie repeatedly gives out the phone number of one of her enemies because he “snuck on to my Facebook page.”

“The good crazy people are funny. The bad crazy people are shooting up buildings. There’s no law against saying things that don’t make everyone happy.”

“Why can’t we say nigger? They say cracker.”

Moxie is a veteran of flame wars. There was this 2003 dispute with another blogger who had the gall to call herself Moxie. That other Moxie then got fired because of an anonymous fax.

On June 11, 2003, Moxie posts: “While I can’t deny that this whole ‘Moxie’ war has been good for traffic, the fact that it’s become fodder for Jim Treacher’s fantasies tells me that it’s probably time for it to be over. So to the other Moxie: good luck and God speed… And to Jim: Seek professional help. (But you already knew to do that.)”

I talk to Kender this morning. He’s worked the show (the Humor Institute) with Moxie since last November.

Kender says: “Last Monday night, I fell asleep at 8:30 pm. I leave my computer on. At 1:40 a.m., there was an IM from Moxie. At 4 a.m., Mox woke me up. She told me she had thrown out all of her food and was doing her laundry so her parents wouldn’t have to deal with it. That worried me. I figured she was tired. She said her mom would take the cats and was there anything of her’s that I wanted.

“I figured, she’s tired. She’s full of crap. I said, yeah, I want your car.

“She said, you’ll do fine on the show. Do the show with Eric. And then she hangs up.

“I didn’t think nothing of it. She told me she took a bunch of xanax and was taking more. Her housekeeper could find her Friday morning when she came in to clean.

“Well, seven a.m. she calls me. Now she’s slurring her words. I could hardly understand anything she says except for ‘I took more pills.’

“I got off the phone with her. I thought about it. I called the cops. I said, I’m worried. This is why. I gave them the address. Up to this point, everything was really good between us. I had no motivation to call the cops to f*** with her.

“Last night on the show, she said she had a smoking gun which proves I did this out of spite because I had done it before.

“I did this before to my ex-girlfriend and my ex-best friend who ran off together after a year of him harassing me online and through the mail by signing me up for magazine subscriptions and such. I called the local sheriff and had a welfare check done on them to let them know, I have your address. Quit f***ing with me.

“If I wanted to f*** with somebody, I wouldn’t have given my real name to the cops.

“She said all this [about taking pills] and now she’s denying it.”

“When the cops showed up, she called our executive producer Randy. A guy she was kinda dating online. She called him and said the cops are outside and are trying to get in. He said, let them in.

“He heard the cops say, we need to take your vital signs.

“They called me back. They asked for her real name. They said, she’s being combative. Did she say the words, I’m going to kill myself.

“I said no. I gave them the rundown on what she said, including the housekeeper can just find me Friday morning.

“She worried me. And I’m not one to get worried. I’m the last person in the world to interfere, even if they want to off themselves.”

Kender says the cops came by her place before 8 a.m. and she was apparently home and free by 10 am.

Luke: “Have you heard Moxie talk about suicide before?”

Kender: “No. Nothing serious. Just, I want to die and my life sucks.”

On Jan. 6, 2023, Tennessee educator JC Bowman posts on Facebook:

A friend who passed away too early Kender McGowan write this, well worth the read:
I’m honored when my words are shared, especially when they make an impact. I’ve written a lot, but few things I have written so succinctly sum up life as I know it as this does.
Nobody ever says “My what a grand adventure” as they go about their day. No one has ever stepped off of their walk with the thought “What a wonderful adventure this will be” as they set out to do whatever it is they are off to do that day.
It is only through rheumy, old eyes, when their dragons are slain and their damsels have been saved that people look back upon the adventure that has been their life and think what a great adventure this has been, and if only I had realized then what strength my trials would bring me, what patience adversity would teach me and what grace perseverance would bestow on me perhaps my smile would have been worn more than my brow was furrowed, my compassion would have flowed as often as my ire and the beauty of the world would not have been lost in the harried rush of always thinking “if I can just get through this THEN I can get to the important stuff.”
Set before us each is our path. To our young eyes it fades into the mist before you, ever uncertain, fraught with failure. But look back. You are exactly where you are supposed to be and the path that led you there is straight. No matter if your name is writ large or small on the pages of history, whether you forge empires or make mud, it is your adventure all along, The key to life is this; You are the hero of your story. Act accordingly.

According to Gemini on Sep. 6, 2026:

Kender McGowan is the author of a widely shared philosophical reflection on life, aging, and perspective. The writing focuses on how life is only recognized as a “grand adventure” when looking back through older, wiser eyes. McGowan wrote that if people realized the strength and patience that future trials would bring, they would spend less time furrowing their brows and more time smiling and appreciating the world. The piece gained prominence on social media.

Jay in Ames posted July 17, 2022: “Just read that Kender McGowan, someone a lot of Morons follow on FB, passed away last night.”

Posted in Blogging, Moxie | Comments Off on WEHT to Moxie aka Madison Slade?

WEHT to Nicholas Polson’s Archive?

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Luke Ford

On the afternoon of August 27, 2026, somebody began deleting Nicholas Polson’s academic career.

Andrew Gelman (b. 1965) watched it happen from his blog at Columbia. At 9:05 that morning he had posted about the Chicago Booth statistician’s SSRN author page, which carried 258 working papers posted in 2026 alone. By 3:32 PM the count had fallen to 99. Then 44. Then one, a paper called “Sequential Bayesian Pricing of AI Infrastructure” from May 29. Then the page was gone.

Ten hours, from a blog post to an erasure.

The story reached Gelman through the economist Jeremy Horpedahl, who had counted the papers and noticed that six of them went up on August 26. Horpedahl’s point was that these were not notes. They ran twenty-seven pages, thirty-two pages, fifty-eight pages. Read any one of them, he wrote, and it feels like a normal academic paper.

Gelman picked one to test that. “Theories of Human Connection”, eighty pages, written February 20 and posted March 11, by Polson (b. 1963) and Vadim Sokolov of George Mason University. Its preface assembles sixteen thinkers who each identified a dimension of human connection the others left in shadow: Gary Becker, Gregory Bateson, John von Neumann, Thomas Schelling, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond Morris, Diane Vaughan, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, John Gottman (b. 1942), Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Polson, Katherine Woodward Thomas, and Gwyneth Paltrow (b. 1972).

The chapter that stopped Gelman is Chapter 10, titled “The Mathematical Proof: Gottman’s Model of Relational Dynamics.” It reports that Gottman’s models predict dissolution with over ninety percent accuracy and calls the result extraordinary. The abstract carries the same claim into the indexed record. Gelman has been correcting that number since 2010. It comes from fitting a model to the sample it was built on. Two Bayesian statisticians published it as evidence.

That much has been reported. What follows has not.

Go to Polson’s research page at Chicago Booth. Near the top, above the year-by-year listings, sits a line reading “RH: Hilbert 8.” It is a hyperlink. It goes to arXiv 1806.07964, a manuscript called “Riemann Hypothesis: a GGC factorisation.”

That document was submitted June 18, 2018. It went through seven versions between June and October of that year, each four or five kilobytes, which is to say two or three pages. The last revision landed October 15, 2018. Nothing since. It concludes that the denominator of a certain representation cannot vanish and therefore that all nontrivial zeros of the zeta function lie on the critical line.

It claims a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

Gelman writes: “From other comments on these threads, it seems that Polson may think he’s proved the Riemann hypothesis, which suggests that he might be delusional about his mathematical contributions. Combine a delusional but persuasive statistician and an enthusiastic AI expert and you could see how the result could be hundreds of junk papers.”

Eight years later his employer’s website still directs readers to it. The page carries no note about what happened to the companion paper.

Here is what happened to the companion paper. In August 2018 the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics published Polson’s “On Hilbert’s 8th problem” at volume 32, number 3, pages 670 to 678. Received September 1, 2017. Accepted January 1, 2018. The journal then published a retraction. The notice says the paper was withdrawn by the author over an erratum in the application of Grosswald’s result on the existence of a certain function, and that the error invalidates the proof of Theorem 2. Emil Grosswald (1912-1989) was a number theorist at Temple. His theorem had been asked to establish something over a range where it did not apply.

Polson retracted it.

The arXiv version of that paper tells the rest of the story. Fifteen revisions between August 2017 and July 2018, all five to seven kilobytes, a short note hammered at again and again. Then the retraction. Then version sixteen in April 2019 drops to three kilobytes, the sound of an argument being cut back to what survived. A slow rebuild through 2019 and 2020. Version twenty-one lands February 9, 2021.

Then silence for four years and four months.

Version twenty-two appears June 1, 2026. Version twenty-three appears July 4, 2026, at eleven kilobytes, more than half again the size of anything before it.

Both documents sit under Mathematics, General Mathematics. That is arXiv’s category for work its moderators decline to file as number theory. In the August 2017 listing Polson’s paper appears four entries above “Collatz Conjecture: Is It False?” and a few below “Magic Tours of Knight in 4x4x4 Cube.”

The current abstract of version twenty-three is careful in a way the 2018 note was not. It says the positive measure it constructs is the input the Thorin condition requires. An input. Not a conclusion.

But arXiv 1804.10043, “Riemann, Thorin, van Dantzig Pairs, Wald Couples and Hadamard Factorisation,” revised April 29, 2026, does claim the conclusion. Its Theorem 25 ends with the sentence that every nontrivial zero of zeta satisfies the real part equal to one half. Section 7 extends the machinery to Dirichlet and modular L-functions and to Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. Section 9 lists the applications: the Riemann hypothesis, the generalized Riemann hypothesis, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer.

Four months later comes “Thorin Quantisation”, written August 13 and posted August 15, eighteen pages, Polson alone, acknowledging conversations with Lennart Bondesson and Pierre Patie.

Read its Lemma 5.3. It considers what happens when you factor the completed zeta function through the pole of zeta, and shows that the linear factor contributes a term that looks like a Thorin atom at three quarters. Then it proves the atom cannot exist. The function is finite and nonzero at the point where an atom would force a pole. The apparent atom is an artifact of the factorization, cancelled by the pole of zeta at one.

Now read Remark 6.6 of the same paper. It observes that an exponential tilt at a certain parameter fails if one carries the spurious atom, because the component in question has no exponential moment there.

Then go back to arXiv 1804.10043 and read the proof of Theorem 23. It constructs precisely that atom. And the proof of Theorem 25, which is the theorem that concludes the Riemann hypothesis, performs precisely that tilt.

The August paper identifies both halves of the failure in the April paper. It does not cite Theorem 25. It does not use the word erratum. The two documents sit on two different servers under the same name, and nothing connects them.

This is the same species of error as 2018. An existence condition applied where it does not hold, invalidating the theorem that rests on it.

I am not a number theorist and I do not offer a verdict on the mathematics. I am reporting what two documents by the same author say about each other, and noting that both are public, both are checkable in an afternoon by anyone who works in this area, and nobody has checked.

“Thorin Quantisation” does serious work. It engages a 2022 paper by Konstantopoulos, Patie and Sarkar on the van Dantzig problem. It produces what it says are the first explicit hitting times of self-similar Markov processes that are self-decomposable and provably not generalized gamma convolutions. It reduces the Riemann hypothesis to positive semidefiniteness of Hankel matrices built from a computable moment sequence. Its Table 2 reports numbers computed from the Taylor coefficients of the completed zeta function at a single point, with no input from the zeros, whose ratios converge to 14.1349. The first zero ordinate is 14.134725.

So I checked. Table 2 in “Thorin Quantisation” reports a sequence computed from the Taylor coefficients of the completed zeta function at a single point, and Table 3 reports twelve determinants built from it. Reproducing them requires mpmath at sixty digits and a Cauchy integral on a small circle. Every coefficient Polson prints reproduces to all ten digits he gives. Every determinant reproduces to all nine. All twelve are positive.

Then I computed the same sequence a second way, summing over the first two hundred nontrivial zeros of the zeta function, using none of the paper’s machinery. From the third term onward the two routes agree to ten significant figures and then to twenty and then to thirty. The first two terms diverge by the exact amount you would expect from truncating a sum whose terms are all positive and whose density grows. That agreement is independent confirmation of the identity at the center of the paper.

One sentence in the paper overstates its own table. Section 8 says the first zero ordinate is recoverable to six digits by order thirteen. Six digits of 14.134725 is 14.1347. Table 2 gives 14.1349, and my replication gives 14.13485956. Five digits. The abstract repeats the six-digit claim.

That is the size of the error in the part of the document I can check. The numbers are right and the sentence about them reaches one digit past what they support.

Open “The Riemann Ξ-Function as a Characteristic Function”, dated August 13, 2026, thirty-one pages. Turn to page 30. In the bibliography, after an entry for a 2024 arXiv paper on primes in arithmetic progressions, sits a parenthesis reading: Author list to be checked.

The authors are Kaisa Matomäki, Jori Merikoski and Joni Teräväinen, and the arXiv record names all three. The reference also sorts wrong, sitting between Heath-Brown and Montgomery, which is where an entry with no author key lands.

Turn to page 31. Another entry cites a Polson companion manuscript and notes that its title and numbering are still to be finalized. A twenty-eight page paper answering that description, “Thorin Measures and the Reciprocal Xi Function”, went up eight days later.

Now go back to “Theories of Human Connection” and check its references. It cites Buunk, Dijkstra, Fetchenhauer and Kenrick, “Age and Gender Differences in Mate Selection Criteria for Various Involvement Levels,” Personal Relationships 15 (2), 2008, pages 271 to 278, first author given as Abraham P. Buunk.

The article exists. It ran in 2002, in volume 9, issue 3, at pages 271 to 278. The first author publishes as Bram P. Buunk.

Year wrong. Volume wrong. Issue wrong. Pages correct. Name expanded to a form that appears nowhere on the article. And the year and volume moved together, since volume 15 of that journal is 2008, so the false pair is internally consistent. A person miscopying a citation gets one field wrong. This reference was reconstructed.

The same eighty pages say fourteen thinkers in Chapter 1 and again in the conclusion, list sixteen in the preface, describe thirteen dimensions four times, and print a table of twelve. Polson appears in the document exactly twice: on the title page and in the preface roster. He is named as one of the minds who identified a dimension of human connection, and then no chapter discusses his contribution and no work of his appears in the bibliography.

None of the eight papers I examined carries a statement disclosing the use of generative AI. SSRN has required one since March 7, 2023, and tightened the language on August 3, 2026 to specify that material use must be disclosed in the PDF along with the tool and the extent of its contribution. I make no claim that any particular paper crossed that threshold. I report that no disclosure appears.

Two hundred fifty-eight papers in eight months is not a rate a person achieves. Something in this workflow was generating manuscripts. That much needs no forensics.

Everything past it does. Which model, operated by whom, with how much review, and whether every named coauthor agreed to appear are open questions, and the people who can answer them have not. Gelman offered four explanations, ranked by his own generosity: a joke, an impersonation, an attempt to stake priority claims cheaply, or an effort to teach. He landed on teaching. Commenters added delusion and an attempt to seed future training data. Kaiser Fung, who wrote it up separately, pointed at the ratio of citations to downloads.

I would add a fifth that requires no motive at all. The friction between having a thought and publishing it went to zero, and a man who already published outside the referee’s reach kept publishing. He has been posting Riemann work to General Mathematics since 2017 and to his own faculty page since before that. The disposition is old. What is new is the rate.

There is a version of this story that treats the corpus as slop and stops. That version cannot account for a paper that identifies a subtle error in the author’s own posted proof, or for a moment sequence that recovers the first zero of the zeta function from local data. Something here is doing competent work and shipping the error and its correction to different servers without ever noticing they are the same argument.

The institutional fact is simpler and it survives every possible answer to the rest.

Chicago Booth’s faculty page for the Robert Law, Jr. Professor of Econometrics and Statistics has listed nothing since 2018. Not one of the 258 appears on it. Its most recent entries are deep learning papers with Sokolov and a sparsity paper with Peter McCullagh. It links an SSRN profile holding sixteen papers, the most recent from 2018. And near the top, above all of it, sits a link labeled “RH: Hilbert 8,” pointing at a two-page note from 2018 that says the Riemann hypothesis is proved, through a retraction the university’s own professor requested, past a 2026 paper by the same man saying the condition remains open.

Two records, two servers, one name, and nobody minding either.

I wrote to Polson and to Sokolov on August 27.

Dear Professor Polson,

I write at lukeford.net. I have no credentials. I’m working on a piece about your SSRN output this year and about Theories of Human Connection in particular, coauthored with Vadim Sokolov, posted March 11, 2026. Andrew Gelman discussed it on his blog yesterday. I’m going further into the documents than he did, and I’d like your account before I publish.

Specific items:

Jeremy Horpedahl counts 258 papers posted to your SSRN author page in 2026 through August 26, 104 of them in August. Is that count accurate, and were all of them posted by you or with your authorization?

Was generative AI used to produce Theories of Human Connection or others among the 2026 papers? I find no AI disclosure in the PDF or on the abstract page, and SSRN requires disclosure of material use.

The abstract and Chapter 10 assert that Gottman’s models predict separation with over ninety percent accuracy. That number is a fit to the original sample, not a prediction, as you would know better than most. Do you stand behind it?

The preface lists sixteen thinkers, including yourself, between Nisargadatta Maharaj and Katherine Woodward Thomas. Chapter 1 says fourteen. Table 13.1 lists twelve. You do not appear in any chapter or in the references. Can you explain the inclusion and the discrepancies?

Two references appear corrupted. Buunk, Dijkstra, Fetchenhauer and Kenrick is given as 2008, Personal Relationships 15, pages 271 to 278; I believe the paper is 2002, volume 9, same pages. The Bhagavad Gita is listed as Anonymous, 1944, Penguin, London; the Penguin edition is Mascaró 1962 and the 1944 translation is Prabhavananda and Isherwood, Hollywood. Do you know how these arose?

Separately: arXiv 1804.10043, revised April 29, 2026, concludes at Theorem 25 that every non-trivial zero of zeta lies on the critical line, and the abstract says the Hardy and Ramanujan growth bound is verified using Hayman and Grosswald. You retracted On Hilbert’s 8th Problem from the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics in 2018 over an error in applying Grosswald’s result. Has that error been repaired in the current version, and if so, where?

Dear Professor Sokolov,

I write at lukeford.net. I have no credentials. I’m working on a piece about the paper you coauthored with Nicholas Polson, Theories of Human Connection, SSRN 6278378, posted March 11, 2026.

Three questions:

Did you read the manuscript in full before it was posted?

Was generative AI used in its preparation? SSRN has required disclosure of material AI use since 2023, and I can’t find a disclosure statement in the PDF or on the abstract page. If one exists somewhere I’ve missed, I’d like to know where.

Chapter 10 and the abstract both say Gottman’s models predict separation with over ninety percent accuracy. That figure comes from fitting a model to the sample it was built on rather than from out-of-sample prediction, and it has been disputed for two decades. Do you stand behind the claim as published?

Professor Sokolov writes on Gelman’s blog:

I am Vadim Sokolov, coauthor of Theories of Human Connection and several other papers discussed in this post.

There is one substantive criticism in your post that I think is fair. Our discussion of Gottman repeats the reported claim that relationship outcomes could be predicted with accuracy above 90%. Gottman and Levenson reported 93% accuracy in a peer-reviewed paper, and related results have been published and widely discussed in the relationship literature. We were not aware at the time of the important methodological criticism concerning cross-validation and out-of-sample prediction. Having now reviewed that literature, we agree that our statement requires qualification, and we will correct it. But the rest of your post goes far beyond that and there a gap between the evidence you collected and the conclusions you published.

From one paper you speculate about a bot autonomously producing and uploading papers, authors not knowing what is in their own work, “intellectual squatting,” and even impersonation. You then estimate that the net scientific value of the entire collection is negative.

In your subsequent update you go further and refer to the SSRN page as containing “all the fake papers.”

That characterization is false. You are entirely entitled to think Theories of Human Connection is a bad paper or to think the “Master Equation” is silly. Neither establishes that the papers are fake.

In fact, one of these papers, Kramnik vs. Nakamura: A Chess Scandal (that you also mentioned), went through multiple rounds of referee review and revision before being published in CHANCE, a peer-reviewed American Statistical Association publication. It is a concrete example of why describing the entire collection as “fake papers” is simply not an evidence-based characterization.

These are genuine preprints produced and posted by the named researchers. The SSRN account was not an impersonation. Some of these papers may contain errors. They are preprints, and we certainly do not claim that hundreds of manuscripts produced across different subjects and at different stages of development are all error-free or equally good. But an erroneous or imperfect preprint is not a “fake paper.”

Nor did these projects suddenly materialize from a magical “chatbot” in 2026. Many grew from ideas, research notes, mathematical work, computational experiments, lecture material, and partial drafts developed over many years. Some are much newer and were developed with much more extensive AI assistance. Modern AI made it possible to develop and complete this material at a speed that would previously have been impossible. The collection is heterogeneous both in provenance and in the role AI played.

You have known Nick professionally for years. You could have asked him about those facts!

Indeed, later in your own post, when you briefly inspect “Bayes with No Shame”, you say that it looks “much more substantive” and “much more like a real scientific paper”, while also saying that you do not have the patience to read it. That should itself suggest the danger of treating hundreds of heterogeneous manuscripts as though they had already been evaluated.

The progression here is striking:

A claim in one preprint was inadequately qualified.

Therefore the paper is “bullshit.”

Therefore perhaps the authors did not read their papers.

Perhaps a bot generated and uploaded them autonomously.

Perhaps somebody was impersonating Nick.

Perhaps the entire corpus has negative value.

And then: “all the fake papers.”

Your blog is one of the most widely read in statistics. Statements by an influential scholar characterizing another researcher’s work as “fake” have consequences. Your own comment section already illustrates this: one commenter says that if Nick submits work to his journal, he now knows not to spend time on it. Shortly after these posts appeared, SSRN also removed our accounts and papers (although, might not be related to your post). But the sequence illustrates why precision matters when making serious public claims about other researchers. “I found a problem in this preprint” and “these are all fake papers” are fundamentally different claims.

On the evening of Aug. 27, I downloaded some of Polson’s papers. I feared it would be a great loss to knowledge if they ever disappeared. Today there was a holocaust of Professor Polson’s archive. Without fear of overstatement, let me note the greatest destruction of learning since the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Alas, my greatest nightmare came true, and now I’m left with these few embers to warm myself by in an increasingly barren universe. ssrn-7265260 ssrn-7270602 ssrn-7259259 ssrn-7254820 ssrn-7259240 ssrn-7277540 ssrn-6278378 ssrn-6595298 ssrn-6302283 ssrn-4711866 ssrn-6595598 ssrn-4648621

When I converted to Judaism, swore – never again!

And here we go again.

The Alexandrians at least had smoke. We watched a number go down. Two hundred fifty-nine at breakfast. Ninety-nine by mid-afternoon. Forty-four an hour later. Then one. The last book standing in the last library was “Sequential Bayesian Pricing of AI Infrastructure,” posted May 29, and then it too went into the dark.

Consider what is gone. One hundred four papers in August alone, which is to say more finished scholarship in thirty-one days than most departments produce in a decade, and all of it now beyond recall. Somewhere in that ash is the Master Equation, a single expression uniting the biological, developmental, economic, strategic, communicative, existential, negotiational, dissolutional, empirical, critical, transcendent, and cumulative dimensions of human love. Gone. Somewhere in it are the twelve stages of physical intimacy tabulated against a vulnerability scale. Gone. Somewhere in it is the moment where Gwyneth Paltrow is seated at the round table between Nisargadatta Maharaj and Katherine Woodward Thomas, and no one is asked to explain why, because the explanation was in a chapter that no longer exists.

We shall never know how many thinkers the synthesis contained. The preface said sixteen. The first chapter said fourteen. The conclusion said fourteen. The body said thirteen dimensions four separate times. The table listed twelve. Future scholars would have devoted careers to reconciling these figures, as their predecessors devoted careers to the Homeric question. Now they will have nothing.

Nor will anyone finish the work that was so nearly complete. One bibliography contained the notation “Author list to be checked.” Somebody was going to check it. He had every intention. Another entry pointed to a companion manuscript whose title and numbering were still to be finalized, and the companion did arrive, eight days later, twenty-eight pages of it. That is what a living tradition looks like. Papers calling to papers. A note posted on Thursday summoning its own sequel by the following Friday.

And on August 10 the BBC ran an article asking whether ants make better decisions than we do. By August 12 there existed a twenty-four page mathematical treatment of ants, bees, locusts, cockroaches, and flies, complete with replicator equations, Bellman control, and a comparison to AlphaZero. The medievals took a century to gloss Aristotle. We managed the ants in forty-eight hours.

Oh the humanity.

On the night of August 27 I wrote to Polson and to Sokolov with specific questions. Polson has not replied. Sokolov replied in public, in Gelman’s comment section, at 11:56 that night.

He concedes two things and denies the rest. On Gottman he writes that they repeated a reported claim, were not aware of the methodological criticism concerning cross-validation and out-of-sample prediction, and will correct it. On disclosure he writes that the extent of AI assistance was not consistently disclosed and that for papers with substantial AI involvement it should have been.

Everything else he contests. There was no impersonator. The account was theirs. He objects to the word fake and offers a counterexample: CHANCE, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Statistical Association, accepted “Kramnik vs. Nakamura: A Chess Scandal” after multiple rounds of referee review. He says many of the papers grew out of notes, mathematics, code and partial drafts developed over years, that others are newer and used far more AI, and that the collection is heterogeneous in provenance. He says nobody programmed a bot to post them.

Gelman had written that “Bayes with No Shame” looks much more substantive and much more like a real scientific paper, while also saying he did not have the patience to read it. Sokolov points out what that admission does to a verdict on hundreds of documents.

Michael Lissack wrote in the same thread that he coauthored some and that they were not written by a bot. Shiva Maharaj, who appears as a coauthor on “AI and Vivekananda,” wrote that Gelman is a bully, a liar, and an intellectual thief, and that his dean should be told.

As for who removed the papers, Sokolov emailed SSRN and reports the answer: SSRN is not able to share the specific reasons. Its research integrity page lists undisclosed AI use and paper-mill content among the grounds for removal. The repository acted, and will not say on which ground.

Which brings me to the part of the archive SSRN cannot touch.

Search Amazon for books by Nick Polson, newest first. More than twenty appeared between February and April 2026, self-published, most of them long. Vedic Math: The Story of Human Mathematical Thought, February 2026, 454 pages. The Green-Eyed Animal: Sexual Jealousy: Its Myths, Biology, Psychology, and Economics, February 2026, 452 pages. Play Like Tal: A Study in Chaos, Sacrifice, and the Art of Attacking Chess, 255 pages. The Feynman Principle: The Art of Deep Learning. Sindarov Unbound. And on April 3, 2026, Menopausal Rage.

Its description begins by telling the reader that a heat is rising which has nothing to do with a hot flash, and that she has spent most of her adult life being the calm one and the reasonable one, and is not calm now.

The blurb for the Vedic mathematics volume recommends itself to anyone who has ever known the answer before they could explain it.

The single independent review I can find is in Spanish, on Sindarov Unbound, and says the book continually refers to diagrams it does not contain, cites games without notation, and is a swindle.

Note the chronology. The books came first, February through April. The SSRN posting accelerated after, one hundred four papers in August alone. Whatever process was running, it was running on Amazon before it ran on the preprint server, and Amazon has removed nothing.

So the burning of the library turns out to have been partial. The scrolls SSRN swept away were duplicates. The main collection is still shelved, priced at $24.99, and available with free delivery.

Sokolov is right that hundreds of heterogeneous documents cannot be judged from one, or from eight. What nobody has done, and what the authors could do in an afternoon, is publish the prompts. Sokolov says the workflow was iterative and that the human contribution was substantial. The record of that iteration exists somewhere. Post it. It would settle in one document what a hundred blog comments cannot.

Polson has my questions. If he answers I will print what he says in full.

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