The Decline of Deviance

Are people getting more boring? One psychologist thinks the data says yes — and that it explains more than you'd expect.

We're all getting normal

Adam Mastroianni published The Decline of Deviance on Experimental History, and the data is striking: across nearly every metric — crime, drug use, risky behavior, sexual activity, cultural nonconformity — people today are significantly less weird than previous generations. Mastroianni's explanation: safer, wealthier lives make us more risk-averse. When the floor is higher, the cost of deviating from the norm feels steeper. The post avoids moralizing about whether this is good or bad, which makes it more interesting — it's a structural observation about what prosperity does to a species that evolved for scarcity.

The $20K question

Erik Hoel published a post on The Intrinsic Perspective about turning down $20,000 to participate in an AI-generated book club based on his work. His reasoning: creators who let AI scale their content are participating in their own replacement, and the short-term money isn't worth the long-term precedent. Whether you agree with his position or not, the post does something valuable — it makes the cost of the decision concrete rather than abstract. Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money for a writer. Saying no to it for a principle is the kind of thing that separates genuine conviction from performative concern.

Thinking like the machine

Ethan Mollick's Thinking Like an AI is his 100th Substack post, and it's the one to start with if you've never read him. He breaks down how LLMs actually work — next-token prediction, training data patterns, limited memory — and argues that understanding these mechanics changes how effectively you can use them. The key insight: AI systems aren't thinking. They're doing something that resembles thinking closely enough to be useful, but the gaps between "resembles" and "is" determine when the tools fail. Most people using AI daily have never thought about this distinction.

The thread

Declining deviance, a writer's stand against AI, and a guide to thinking like a machine: each piece is about the boundary between human judgment and the systems — economic, technological, cultural — that increasingly shape it. The question isn't whether to use these systems. It's whether to let them use you.