Adam Mastroianni is a psychologist who writes some of my favorite essays on the internet. His substack Experimental History just crossed 100K subscribers.
Adam’s writing is usually about science, culture, and what to do with your life. Reading his writing makes obscure ideas feel intuitive. If you’ve ever read an amazing essay on substack with a black & white photo at the top, it was probably Adam’s. A few favorites:
Face it: you’re a crazy person (aka, the coffee bean test)
I like ‘em thick (on “thick art”)
AND—Adam just announced his upcoming book, The Strangest Idea in the World! You can pre-order it now.
Available on twitter/x, Spotify, Apple, YouTube. Transcript here (created with a new tool I made myself thanks to Google Antigravity & Gemin 3.5 transcribe). Enjoy!
22 of my favorite lessons from the conversation below, too.
Dialectic 58: Adam Mastroianni - Let Me Be Useful
Description
Adam Mastroianni (Website, X) is an experimental psychologist and the writer of Experimental History. He earned his PhD in psychology at Harvard before leaving academia to pursue research and writing independently.
I first came across Adam through “Good conversations have lots of doorknobs,” which remains one of my favorite essays on Substack.
We talk about why psychology is stuck, why science needs people willing to look stupid, and how prestige can lead you toward a life you don’t want. From there, unpack Adam’s coffee bean test for figuring out what to do, getting “de-bogged,” and what improv teaches us about better conversations (or: create doorknobs). We also discuss writing that surprises its author, his upcoming book, The Strangest Idea in the World, and the prayer he says before publishing: “Let me be useful.”
I hope you leave a little more willing to question what seems obvious, risk looking stupid, and spend your time in ways you actually enjoy.
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This episode is supported by Google. Google Antigravity is Google’s agentic development platform. Describe what you want to build, and its agents can plan the work, write and run code, and test the result, with plans and changes you can review along the way.
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe turns audio into text with a choice of verbatim and Smart modes. Verbatim mode keeps fillers and false starts, and supports speaker labels and word-level timestamps to help you check the transcript against the recording. Smart mode removes filler words and repetitions and formats speech into readable text. I used Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe to build a Mac app for producing and reviewing Dialectic transcripts.
Timestamps
04:33 Start: Why Psychology is Stuck & The Focus of Adam’s Blog
14:43 The Scientific Virtues of Stupidity and Rebellion & Escaping the Prestige Trap
25:08 Patronage for Weirdos
33:53 Progress in Psychology
52:15 Figuring Out What to Do, The Coffee Bean Test, and Unpacking Adam’s Day-to-Day
01:03:22 Getting De-bogged and Making Ideas Land
01:14:11 Conversational Doorknobs: Giving and Taking
01:22:23 Blogging, Community, and Rules we Invent
01:28:35 Writing Advice, Thick Art, Giving The Reader an Egg to Crack
01:44:03 Adam’s First Book: The Strangest Idea in the World
01:53:23 Closing Questions
Let Me Be Useful: 22 Lessons from Adam on Weird Science, Writing A Blog, and the Freedom of Being Brave
Be yourself now. Later never comes. Adam heard the same advice at every stage, from an Oxford scholarship through a PhD and two postdocs: “Just don’t be yourself now. You can wait until later.” Eventually he left academia to write full-time because “if the princess is always going to be in another castle, I have to stop going into the castles.”
Don’t mistake the exception for the institution. Adam loved his PhD, his advisor, and his lab, which is what made leaving so hard: “I kept thinking, ‘Well, there’s a good version of this.’” It took time in other places to see how rare his advisor was, and that the good version “existed despite everything, not because of it.”
Effort isn’t evidence of desire. We learn what we like by watching what we do, so someone grinding out papers with Pomodoros and caffeine concludes, “I must really want to do it.” It’d be so “convenient if what I like is what I’m already doing, what is prestigious, and what other people would like me to do.” You can force yourself through the wrong work, “but not well.” Even the right work has suffering, but it’s “negative emotions in the service of something.”
Do you want the job, or the daydream? When academics tell Adam they want to open a coffee shop, he asks where they’d get the beans, which machine they’d buy, and how they’d upholster the chairs. If the details don’t interest you, you might be kidding yourself. “If you really wanted to do this, you would be googling this at night.” Unpack the thing you think you want.
Spend your resources on risk. A lot of money is sloshing around alternative science, and it keeps building “the same kind of institutions, just with a futuristic font.” What’s missing is “the appetite for reputational risk.” If you have a bunch of money, “shouldn’t you be able to buy yourself out of caring about looking like an idiot? That’s what the money’s for.”
Every frontier needs an apostle to the normies. Academics already think Adam is crazy, and his reaction is “There’s a whole level crazier than this.” For example: the pseudonymous bloggers Slime Mold Time Mold. He’s legible enough to talk to one side and close enough to the edge to see the other. That gives him a useful role: helping people with resources recognize unconventional thinkers they might otherwise dismiss.
Naming something isn’t understanding it. We call our propensity to make things “creativity.” Psychology rates creativity on scales and tests whether heat or sleepiness changes it, often without trying to understand the core drive. That’s like explaining a car by saying, “Well, the engine has propulsion. We know the engine makes going. It makes a go-force.”
Progress is a miracle, not a default. Humans have been around for 300,000 years, yet most of what surrounds us comes from the last 500. Adam’s book The Strangest Idea in the World argues that our minds weren’t built to discover things, which makes it “miraculous we can do it at all.”
You can leave a party lonely. Nobody leaves an all-you-can-eat buffet hungry. But loneliness doesn’t push so hard. Adam suspects our drive for company evolved when we were rarely alone, so it “didn’t have to be that strong,” and modern life has put us in “a situation that we don’t have the drives to get ourselves out of.”
Rule out hunger before your existential crisis. Hedgehogging is Adam’s word for ignoring the obvious insight of the people around you. Sometimes Adam’s sense that everything is wrong turns out to be simpler: “Oh, I wasn’t listening to my wife when she said, ‘You’re hungry.’”
Taking the spotlight can be generous. Adam’s ‘conversational doorknobs’ idea, rooted in improv: givers ask questions, and takers make statements. Taking isn’t selfish by default: “taking focus can be a supportive move and not just a selfish move.” Some of his favorite friends ask him zero meaningful questions, but “they give me something to respond to.”
Write to find out, not to declare. “The mark of a good piece is that I didn’t know the end of it when I started it.” Adam writes “from the inside out,” growing paragraphs around a single idea or line until they connect. “Often the thesis is what gives you the reason to leave home in the first place, and it’s not the thesis that you come back home with.”
Most of the work never shows up on the page. Adam will spend 90 minutes on a paragraph and throw it away, or 45 minutes tracking down an example that turns out to be wrong. None of it appears in the post, yet the published work “could not exist if I didn’t waste all this time.”
Go where the machines aren’t. Adam looks for ideas in “old stuff. Stuff other people aren’t reading,” and experiences that never get fully captured in writing or on film, like improv: “Being there, I’m getting fed data that the machines can’t get fed yet.”
Most writing is a battering ram. Good writing finds the right angle. Watching videos of ants and humans steering a T-shaped object through a maze, Adam thought, “That’s exactly what writing is.” The job is angling an idea through the folds of someone’s mind, starting with one question: “Why would someone be different at the end than they were at the beginning?”
True advice can be useless if you don’t feel it. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is true but useless, because “if I thought it was small, I wouldn’t sweat it.” You can’t make tea by just dunking the bag, which is why Adam spends a lot of time laying tracks with his writing. Per his telling, that’s why he’s never managed to write “the short, good piece.”
The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn’t about wolves. We read novels instead of the dictionary, which holds far more information, because life is fuzzy and fuzzy situations need fuzzy lenses. A great story or essay hands you “a fuzzy thing that represents something much, much larger than itself.”
Give your idea a handle. Adam’s goal is to take something fuzzy and make it legible and portable. He knows it worked when readers feel like “you put words to something that I’ve been saying.” He is “bolting a handle onto an idea so you can move it around the world.”
Embarrass yourself in the love of something. Every emotion is useful for writing except bitterness, so Adam checks his archive for too many “complain-y posts in a row,” counting how often he’s hit “This is a wrong thing, let’s fix it” versus “This is a right thing, let’s preserve it.” He loses trust in writers who are all criticism, because “if I can’t see you loving something, how do I know you can?”
Cowardice is squirming. Courage is relief. Not knowing what’s right feels different from knowing and hoping you won’t have to do it. Dodging confrontation feels like squirreling around, “just really hoping that you will not be asked to be brave.” Accept the consequences, and the freedom is startling: “Oh, nothing can hurt me. I’ve already decided to die. That’s it. It’s easy from here.”
The offer to sell out never expires. Asked what he still has to lose after leaving academia, Adam named his integrity, because “there will never be a lack of opportunities to trade in your values for something else.”
Pray to be useful. Useful might mean handing someone a new schema, getting them unstuck, or nudging them toward living by their values instead of selling out. Before publishing each post, he says the same prayer: “Let me be useful.”
