Congrats on going full time! What do you think of a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor? Always attribute to malice what has gone on too long to be explained by stupidity.
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy. - Mz B Russel
Doing nothing is rational when the risks of doing something wrong are unacceptable. Less stupidity than self-preservation. Even better is to do something superficially virtuous but ineffective, the best of both worlds, as the author writes.
I think this piece reinforces my desire to read history books and to stay away from the news in general. Keeps my mind free of the noise and sharpens my discernment of the flaws in human nature (including my own).
“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore…immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press of his own age.”
Amen, Laurence. I stopped watching news years ago. I do listen to a few centrist/libertarian-ish free-thinker podcasts who comment on politics, but it's more for fun on my daily walks. I never watch actual news, though. I read books voraciously, like a madman.
Same for me in the podcast front. I have a long commute RT so I listen to a lot of podcasts during that and on my walks too. Probably read 2-3 hrs a day as well. It calms my brain at night and wakes it up in the morning.
Wonderful. Thanks for this! And congratulations on being able to focus full-time on your wonderful work here. I think you were the first Substack I ever followed! A much-needed salve for the probably far-too-online, but who remembers a pre-digital world and rather misses it.
If you want to know where to go next, one option is to use Cammarata's Razor, and imagine where you'd go if you had ten times more agency (or curiosity!)
Original Position Fallacy: A guy I knew went to a Society of Creative Anachronism event. He made himself simple, rough clothing from burlap. He smeared it lightly with dirt and even some stable muck. And he roughed up his hair, dressing it with a bit of oil and dust. He found the reactions from the other LARPers priceless. Virtually all were playing elites, princesses, kings, knights. To their offended complaints, he responded, "I am the 99%!"
On #12, the George Bailey Effect, I experienced this one in a direct way as a two-time cancer survivor. When I had Hodgkin's Disease at 31, my symptoms were severe enough that I was unable to run any distance because it exhausted me. Even though I had never run any sort of race, I missed the ability to run so badly that when I learned it was cancer, I promised my friends that I would beat the cancer and then run a marathon the following year. Sure enough, this happened. Post-cancer, I have finished 14 marathons and my wife and I have two healthy daughters.
This is why I often tell people, while cancer is horrible and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, I will never regret having had cancer myself, as surviving it has been one of the richest and most rewarding experiences of my life. The George Bailey Effect.
I’m so pleased to know you plan to be posting more, and have now jumped back into the paid subscriber group. I’ve learned much from you, and wish you all the very best.
That’s the only one I don’t like! Oxytocin is not empathy; that’s a mother’s protective love. Empathy is seeing others through their eyes. My mom will look at a handicapped kid who wrote a book on TV and say sympathetically: how terrible, poor guy! Someone with empathy will receive the kid and say wow he’s strong, he’s living his dream - good for him. Empathy is a momentary suppression of one’s own ego. It’s a combination part cognitive and part
re zombie theories: as i am not a neuroscientist, i can't say for certain, but i feel like the recent fraud unveiling of the person who popularized amyloid-ß plaques as being the cause of alzheimers being a total fabrication is an amazing example of this
I am not an anti-science anti-intellectual derpette. Given the pervasiveness of The, i understand why you would assume so, The data for the landmark study that influenced the ones after it was admitted by the scientist to have been faked.
That said, people started to be suspicious when therapeutic agents which were super effective at reducing beta amyloid plaques had little to no effects on disease state.
I wasn’t assuming anything, and wasn’t trying to sea lion you. I legitimately hadn’t heard that there was anything unethical about the amyloid theory, just that it was in error. But I’m curious about it
I didn’t realize there even was a big study, just the general observation that there are lots of myeloid plaques in Alzheimer’s brains. Yeah, it sure does suck none of the drugs that target amyloid do anything for dementia.
"People have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s the path to it, for it’s only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment."
I resonated with this one and something I've been thinking about especially with my recent trip to India.
I noticed there's a dependence culture in India where everything can be done via your phone - you can order good food at a low price, find someone to clean your home, find someone to cook your food, etc.
Look, convenience is great but you would think with having these necessities taken care of you'd be more content and/or have more time to spend towards creative stuff but no, I didn't see that.
The real question is how do you find happiness especially if you're not learning new things. The best part of life is knowing you didn't know how to make pasta and now you make dank pasta 😄 it can be anything! I wonder how/if these people find ways to have happiness and at the end, contentment with their lives 🤔 something I've been thinking about :)
It's true, man. Suffering and struggle do in the end lead to profound growth and spiritual satisfaction. When we remove that struggle in various ways...it seems harder to locate deep inner meaning.
I love this list you put out every year. I feel like I should study them all, maybe read and ponder one a day. Gurwinder's Useful Concepts Study and Support Group could be fun and interesting for your Substack. A combination of a confessional AA meeting and an academic seminar. Thanks for being so awesome.
Excellent points and reminders. I am especially going to focus on applying the George Bailey Effect. Also, while I have long been aware of the Paradox of Boredom, I need to do better at allowing myself to be bored rather than constantly being stimulated.
Really interesting. Thank you. The only one that didn't land for me is Sleepwalk Bias. The logic doesn't really hold up for me. The fact that Y2K didn't end the world hardly "proves" anything. The meteor that misses doesn't prove that meteor strikes aren't real.
And don't several of the other concepts suggest that social media, AI, and other modern "conveniences" are, in fact, weakening our capacities for attention, focus, and thus, resistance and the ability to make radical changes? It can't be coincidence that as these technologies become more powerful, our political systems grow weaker and less effective at making any meaningful changes in how we treat the climate or each other.
I don't think Sleepwalk Bias is to be interpreted as "don't worry about the future, future generations will handle it", but rather as a reminder that posterity are not puppets but agentic actors. Viewing them as having agency doesn't mean we should care less about them, but more, since the decisions they make to reshape the world will be influenced by the tools and philosophies we bequeath to them.
I certainly don't believe we should leave all future problems to future generations; I think the most important task for our generation is to ensure that future generations retain their attention spans and access to high quality information, and I'm doing my small part to address this as best I can!
Congrats on going full time! What do you think of a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor? Always attribute to malice what has gone on too long to be explained by stupidity.
Could be true in certain scenarios. But I think it vastly underestimates the longevity of stupidity...
As George Carlin said, think of how stupid the average person is and realise that half of people are stupider than that
A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. I would rather be reported by my bitterest enemy among philosophers than by a friend innocent of philosophy. - Mz B Russel
Yes, the stupidity of the group think crowd that rather not say anything than address issues.
These issues get swept under the rug.
It's just like an abusive household where everyone hides from the abuser but nobody addresses it.
Perhaps it's because they feel powerless?
Doing nothing is rational when the risks of doing something wrong are unacceptable. Less stupidity than self-preservation. Even better is to do something superficially virtuous but ineffective, the best of both worlds, as the author writes.
I think this piece reinforces my desire to read history books and to stay away from the news in general. Keeps my mind free of the noise and sharpens my discernment of the flaws in human nature (including my own).
“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore…immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press of his own age.”
—C. S. Lewis
"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust." Baudelaire
"The reality of the Tao lies in concern for the self. Concern for the state is irrelevant, and concern for the world is cowshit." Chuang Tzu
That B quote is good.
Amen, Laurence. I stopped watching news years ago. I do listen to a few centrist/libertarian-ish free-thinker podcasts who comment on politics, but it's more for fun on my daily walks. I never watch actual news, though. I read books voraciously, like a madman.
Same for me in the podcast front. I have a long commute RT so I listen to a lot of podcasts during that and on my walks too. Probably read 2-3 hrs a day as well. It calms my brain at night and wakes it up in the morning.
Wonderful. Thanks for this! And congratulations on being able to focus full-time on your wonderful work here. I think you were the first Substack I ever followed! A much-needed salve for the probably far-too-online, but who remembers a pre-digital world and rather misses it.
I was about to send this to you, Jenny! Salve, indeed. I'll return to this list a lot in the coming months.
God those were the good ole days!! Remember dial-up in the 90s!?
Thank you for another fantastic collection. I’m going all in on Pronoia. And the pluralist conviction that no one worldview is “correct.”
Don't go TOO far down the "no one worldview is correct" tunnel, though. Facts and "reality" have to structure our thinking somewhere.
Honestly, I have nowhere to go with this. Alarmed or comforted. Optimistic or the end is nigh.
On reflection, this is good, shouts a version of reality seldom aired.
Question is, what next?
If you want to know where to go next, one option is to use Cammarata's Razor, and imagine where you'd go if you had ten times more agency (or curiosity!)
Good steer. Agency is often underestimated – especially once people internalise the system’s limits rather than challenge them.
Original Position Fallacy: A guy I knew went to a Society of Creative Anachronism event. He made himself simple, rough clothing from burlap. He smeared it lightly with dirt and even some stable muck. And he roughed up his hair, dressing it with a bit of oil and dust. He found the reactions from the other LARPers priceless. Virtually all were playing elites, princesses, kings, knights. To their offended complaints, he responded, "I am the 99%!"
On #12, the George Bailey Effect, I experienced this one in a direct way as a two-time cancer survivor. When I had Hodgkin's Disease at 31, my symptoms were severe enough that I was unable to run any distance because it exhausted me. Even though I had never run any sort of race, I missed the ability to run so badly that when I learned it was cancer, I promised my friends that I would beat the cancer and then run a marathon the following year. Sure enough, this happened. Post-cancer, I have finished 14 marathons and my wife and I have two healthy daughters.
This is why I often tell people, while cancer is horrible and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, I will never regret having had cancer myself, as surviving it has been one of the richest and most rewarding experiences of my life. The George Bailey Effect.
What an inspiring story! Thanks for sharing.
I’m so pleased to know you plan to be posting more, and have now jumped back into the paid subscriber group. I’ve learned much from you, and wish you all the very best.
I will do the same.
The Oxytocin Paradox really had my bells ringing and head nodding. Yup, yup, yup.
That’s the only one I don’t like! Oxytocin is not empathy; that’s a mother’s protective love. Empathy is seeing others through their eyes. My mom will look at a handicapped kid who wrote a book on TV and say sympathetically: how terrible, poor guy! Someone with empathy will receive the kid and say wow he’s strong, he’s living his dream - good for him. Empathy is a momentary suppression of one’s own ego. It’s a combination part cognitive and part
emotional.
Oxytocin's potential negative effects have been studied.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-love-hate-relationship/
I was waiting for this. thank you Gurwinder.
re zombie theories: as i am not a neuroscientist, i can't say for certain, but i feel like the recent fraud unveiling of the person who popularized amyloid-ß plaques as being the cause of alzheimers being a total fabrication is an amazing example of this
I 100% agree with you on this.
That was fraud? And not just assuming correlation to be causation (in good faith) because that’s all we knew?
I am not an anti-science anti-intellectual derpette. Given the pervasiveness of The, i understand why you would assume so, The data for the landmark study that influenced the ones after it was admitted by the scientist to have been faked.
That said, people started to be suspicious when therapeutic agents which were super effective at reducing beta amyloid plaques had little to no effects on disease state.
I wasn’t assuming anything, and wasn’t trying to sea lion you. I legitimately hadn’t heard that there was anything unethical about the amyloid theory, just that it was in error. But I’m curious about it
I didn’t realize there even was a big study, just the general observation that there are lots of myeloid plaques in Alzheimer’s brains. Yeah, it sure does suck none of the drugs that target amyloid do anything for dementia.
ty @gurwinder
"People have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s the path to it, for it’s only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment."
I resonated with this one and something I've been thinking about especially with my recent trip to India.
I noticed there's a dependence culture in India where everything can be done via your phone - you can order good food at a low price, find someone to clean your home, find someone to cook your food, etc.
Look, convenience is great but you would think with having these necessities taken care of you'd be more content and/or have more time to spend towards creative stuff but no, I didn't see that.
The real question is how do you find happiness especially if you're not learning new things. The best part of life is knowing you didn't know how to make pasta and now you make dank pasta 😄 it can be anything! I wonder how/if these people find ways to have happiness and at the end, contentment with their lives 🤔 something I've been thinking about :)
It's true, man. Suffering and struggle do in the end lead to profound growth and spiritual satisfaction. When we remove that struggle in various ways...it seems harder to locate deep inner meaning.
I love this list you put out every year. I feel like I should study them all, maybe read and ponder one a day. Gurwinder's Useful Concepts Study and Support Group could be fun and interesting for your Substack. A combination of a confessional AA meeting and an academic seminar. Thanks for being so awesome.
Thanks for the pearls of wisdom! Particulary love Pronoia and Cammarata's Razor.
Looking forward to 2026, HNY!
(this comment isn't AI either)
Excellent points and reminders. I am especially going to focus on applying the George Bailey Effect. Also, while I have long been aware of the Paradox of Boredom, I need to do better at allowing myself to be bored rather than constantly being stimulated.
Really interesting. Thank you. The only one that didn't land for me is Sleepwalk Bias. The logic doesn't really hold up for me. The fact that Y2K didn't end the world hardly "proves" anything. The meteor that misses doesn't prove that meteor strikes aren't real.
And don't several of the other concepts suggest that social media, AI, and other modern "conveniences" are, in fact, weakening our capacities for attention, focus, and thus, resistance and the ability to make radical changes? It can't be coincidence that as these technologies become more powerful, our political systems grow weaker and less effective at making any meaningful changes in how we treat the climate or each other.
I don't think Sleepwalk Bias is to be interpreted as "don't worry about the future, future generations will handle it", but rather as a reminder that posterity are not puppets but agentic actors. Viewing them as having agency doesn't mean we should care less about them, but more, since the decisions they make to reshape the world will be influenced by the tools and philosophies we bequeath to them.
I certainly don't believe we should leave all future problems to future generations; I think the most important task for our generation is to ensure that future generations retain their attention spans and access to high quality information, and I'm doing my small part to address this as best I can!