What I've Read Halfway into 2025

The Pathless Path - Paul Millerd

 

Normally this is a list of the books I’ve read in the order in which I have read them. This book is the lone exception to this rule because it had such a profound impact on me. I was first introduced to The Pathless Path by Jose Madrigal after seeing his Youtube video HR is Not Your Friend and reaching then out to him. I highly recommend giving his video a watch and also contacting him yourself if you feel so compelled.

Millerd’s book is about stepping away from conventional career paths and embracing a more meaningful, uncertain, and self-directed way of living. I know that sounds really self-help-y, but he really does dig into how careers are unfulfilling for many people, as having a career often means not being able to live a life that is authentic to oneself. He heavily cites his work and the personal experiences that he touches on in corporate America mirror my own. 

 

I was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true tI was initially skeptical of this book; in the second chapter he lays out life advice for people who I would frankly consider tools - people who act as though to seek approval on the outside - they’ve only done what they’ve done in their life so far for the money and prestige. The reality is that this book’s advice for people who feel stuck in the rat race despite trying their best to pursue their interests and struggle to stay true to themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.
o themselves in corporate America. That includes addressing tools from the ground floor.

The Puck Stops Here: My (Not So) Minor League Life - Bruce Landon 

 

Bruce Landon is the reason why professional hockey has remained in Springfield Massachusetts for almost 100 years. Most Americans may not know this, but ice hockey has been a staple of rust-belt American cities since the 1930s. The cult classic film Slapshot has a plot-line that details this, though it has not aged well in certain ways. Slapshot also details a hockey culture and game that no longer exists anymore, in a way, I’m lucky I guess to have witnessed what was left of that culture in the 90s: bench clearing brawls, goalie fights, and fistfights in the penalty box that broke out into the stands.

Bruce is well known by hockey fans who also can recall other greats such as Eddie Shore, Bobby Orr, and Frank Mathers. Landon was a NHL caliber goaltender, who by happenstance, ended up playing for the minor league hockey teams that have existed in Springfield. He went on to be the owner of the Springfield Falcons; keeping hockey in Springfield, and helped bring in a new franchise when the Falcons finally did move to Arizona in the 2010s, something we all knew was bound to happen since the mid-naughts. 

My family were Springfield Falcon season ticket holders, and to be frank, the team was awful and uninspiring. Games felt like watching teams run drills, completely indifferent of the score or game. Back then there were no nets behind the plexiglass, so you had to pay attention to the game for your own safety even if you were bored out of your mind. I hated and resented going to hockey games and having to pay attention to something so boring out of safety the whole time. In my lifetime I’ve been to hundreds of AHL games. Landon addresses all of this malfunction in the book. And despite all of this, and my disdain for the team, I saw Landon at the games in his suit addressing the fans’ concerns personally in the hall. I genuinely got the impression from him that he was someone in the org who cared and should be respected, even if I couldn’t stand going to the games with my family.

I think if you followed the news in The Springfield Republican at the time about what was going on in the franchise, there’s not much new here for you in this book. The book sort of validates what I already knew: the motley group of owners that Bruce was able to scrap together to keep hockey in Springfield meant that there were too many cooks in the kitchen who didn’t know enough about professional hockey. He does also fess up to his own mistakes he made. I also appreciate that Landon acknowledges how much of a shithole Springfield could be at times. To be frank, I don’t think there’s a lot of anything new in this autobiography. But nonetheless, Landon is a standup, honest person who should be celebrated for doing the best that he could and continues to do to swim upstream and keep quality professional hockey in Springfield. Thank you Bruce.

A Short Stay In Hell - Stephen Peck

This is a novella about a man who goes to hell, of which there are a handful of variations. The hell this man is sent to is that he’s tasked with finding the one book that holds his life story in a giant library that holds every variation of the letters of the alphabet put together possible. Finding a book with a word, never mind a sentence in it, is an achievement. There are also other people in this library looking for their life stories. The novella delves into themes of eternity, futility, and the human condition, and reflections on the nature of existence. The ending is not satisfying, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being in hell. I don’t want to get too in depth because it’s just a short story, nonetheless, check it out. 

The Teenage Brain - Frances Jensen

 

 

This ended up being just another pop psychology book with the first few chapters being things that you would expect to learn in a psych 100 class; it is absolutely geared more towards parents and not academics. It could be a good NeruoSci refresher for psych students, though some of the information in this book is dated. In addition, at times Jensen takes liberties to make claims without citation, claiming that marijuana is a gateway drug for example, or providing parenting advice that seems completely removed from academic literature; such that parents should know all the passwords that their teenagers have. The book also claims that “kids can get started early on a path to addiction through free-to-play gambling apps available through iTunes”. She uses the term “marijuana cigarettes”... While these claims may have some substance, a citation is still needed and the information can be presented in a more modern way that's less dated than the wired headphones on the cover. In the same paragraph about free-to-play apps the author claims that “various studies indicate that anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of all teenagers have tried online gambling at least once” without citing any one of these studies. She does say that for teenagers, school can sometimes be analogous to the cage in a rat experiment - so she gets points for that.

Jensen argues that teens respond better to psychiatric medication than adults. While she does acknowledge the increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in teens, she fails to fully grapple with the implications of that risk and largely brushes over it. At another point she attributes the tragic cases of teenagers who, after drinking, will hide from those searching for them, sometimes resulting in death from exposure; she attributes this to their underdeveloped brains rather than questioning the role of our punitive legal system. This feels especially inconsistent given that later in the book, she critiques how the juvenile justice system often denies teenagers due process.
 

There were things I did like about this book. I do appreciate that the author says the reason teenagers like to smoke is because it reduces stress. And that there is a whole chapter on stress, acknowledging school is incredibly stressful for teenagers and that there is an anxiety epidemic now, especially with teens. She does go into how juveniles outgrow their antisocial behaviors.

Something I found interesting and learned from this book is that, while the neural tube develops from front to back in the womb, the brain develops in the opposite direction, from back to front throughout childhood and into the teenage years. There is a correlation of gray matter to IQ. Also, teenagers don’t necessarily have poor reasoning skills, but rather, their reward centers are more sensitive, which is one reason why they are more prone to sensation stimulation. There is also research that is referenced suggesting that anticipation, but not the reward is the most stimulating part of an experience, which which relates to a Ted Bundy quote: “The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself”. I also learned that nicotine in cigarettes change the number of cannabinoid receptors in the brain and makes brains more sensitive to the effects of marijuana.

There is a chapter on gender matters which demonstrates brain imaging studies differentiate between male and female children's brains. I was wondering how these studies would account for genderqueer or non-binary children Unfortunately, the research on brain imaging and gender, particularly in relation to genderqueer or non-binary children is still emerging and not as extensive as studies on cisgender boys and girls. I wasn’t able to find any studies in this regard. 

High Conflict - Amanda Ripley

A lot of the books on this list came from this Youtube video on online discourse which came with a list of cited books at the end. This is the first book in this list from the video.

High Conflict feels like it was written for aliens on how to communicate. I’m not sure who this books is for, because you have to want to listen from the other person when you’re in conflict if you actually want to get out of it. As a result, this book is like an oxymoron, the people who need to read it never will. Even the book calls out that if people want to revel in contempt, righteousness, want to dominate, and stay in a state of high conflict; they well. Furthermore, if you bring these people to the negotiation table, you open up the other party to physical and emotional abuse. That tends to be the limit of this book, and it offers no resolve for dealing with those that act this way, probably because it would have to resort calling for violence. The book specifically calls out that most people don’t want to solve climate change, for example, because they want to use climate change as a way to change the world into something they’d like to see. The author says the same thing about Israeli officers in relation to the Gaza Strip.

Chapters three, four, and onward feel like a This American Life extended episode on Chicago gang violence. I did learn from this book that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams loathed the concept of political parties, and that George Washington also warned that political parties could be used by an individual to usurp democracy. So that’s cool.

Unlearning Shame - Devon Price

Unlearning shame has also been one of the most influential books that I have read recently. I could probably write a whole article on this book itself. If fact, it was highly influential in regards to my last post on the crisis of credibility in scientific research today. The author Devon Price centers this book around Systemic Shame - the self loathing belief that says you are to blame for the circumstances you’re living in, and the only way to overcome those problems is through individual goodness and grit. Systemic Shame holds marginalized people responsible for solving the problem of their own oppression and that the only way meaningful change can ever occur is if individual people put in a ton of effort and always make the right decisions; that systemic issues are individual issues and need to be solved as such - keeping people in place; that gun violence is caused by mentally ill individuals, that every purchase is a moral decision, that global pandemics are caused by selfish people and not corporate cruelty and government negligence, etc, etc. Genuinely, without trying to sound disingenuous, this book is the closest I’ve seen someone get to Ted Kyzinsky’s theory of over-socialization while also building on it, which breaks out into all sorts of mind blowing directions. 

For example, consider how systemic shame politicizes everyone’s choices, with marginalized people especially placed under the microscope. This is why any action taken by a marginalized person is often viewed as representative of their entire group. Another example is how the author demonstrates that online dogpiling, slacktivism, virtue signaling, and the moral licensing effect are all rooted in shame. In one case, she uses Construal Level Theory to argue that the only people who truly benefit from this kind of toxic online engagement are advertisers. Price also explores the history of shame, giving examples of how it is tied to social class, and how in more interdependent and egalitarian societies, fewer behaviors such as nudity, sex, or not contributing to the broader group are seen as shameful. (Though this point seems heavily borrowed Peter Stearns' book Shame: A Brief History.)

I found how systemic shame gets weaponized against workers in the workplace to be particularly insightful. Price points out that individuals are expected to take on more responsibilities and behave more perfectly than the powerful institutions that surround them. If you company’s CEO cuts your hours or reduced your team’s headcount, you as an employee are still on the hook for completing all of your duties. Companies essentially force employees to out themselves by including their pronouns in emails, which potentially can make things worse for them and their clients. When the author presented to their HR team that keyloggers and surveillance tools harm autistic workers during a presentation on neurodivergent people in the workplace, HR ended the talk early and deleted all employee complaints. The author calls out something I have always been suspicious of, that the only thing companies want from Employee Resource Groups is platitudes and praise. A further example for universities is given on page 87: Loyloa University had called the police on student protestors and then issued public statements on its commitment to anti-racism and suggested people take workshops on personal racial biases (bringing a systemic issue back to personal responsibility). Furthermore the workshops also provide the institutions with a legal shield against accusations of racism. Price goes on to detail how employers and universities will NEVER suggest collectively organizing for larger change and that if HR was really on the workers' side they would be advocating for them to organize. And this is the direction of where the end of the book goes: that coalition and community building and organizing as individuals are the best ways we can overcome systemic issues in our society; this is where I will be focusing my free time the rest of this year Price then points to the gay movement of the 80s that started with the Stonewall Riots to show how this coalition building can be done. He says that nearly everyone interviewed for the book said that they were only able to heal from shame through their relationships to others, because shame is intrinsically tied to social rejection. 

There are a handful of failings I did find with this book. For one, the ideas in the book are not very well organized, throughout the book Price comes back to all the ways that companies have used systemic shame to shame consumers. I think this might be a way for him to hammer away his point, but I don’t really see why these examples couldn't have just all been grouped all together rather than sprinkled throughout the book. There’s one part of the book that talks about the Protestant Work Ethic scale being a measure of Puritanical attitudes in 19 questions. My copy of the book only has 18 of the questions. 

At times, he also seems to take the liberties of pop psychology books with the statements he’s making:

• Price claims that you can tie bureaucracy to shame because public records came to exist. Public records existing are evidence of public records existing. Without any further clarification or sources, I’m not really sure how his editor didn’t underline this. 
• On page 63 of the book, without citation, Price says that the Columbine shooters’ white supremacist sympathies should have been investigated, as if that was a thing. The reality is that was a very early on direction investigators went in and it lead them nowhere.
• Price claims that nearly half of mentally ill people experience a violent crime once in their lives. I went ahead and researched this claim and found that Americans have at least a 50% chance of experiencing some form of violent crime and that approximately 83% will be victims of violent crimes (including rape, robbery, and assault), either 'completed' or attempted, at least once during their lives. I got this information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and  the Bureau of Justice Statistics titled "Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization":
  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
  https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/llv.pdf
• Social class is the biggest determiner of success in America before race, sexual orientation, and gender. There is also a level of shame and expected behavior tied to everyone’s social class in America, however the author does not even mention the word class until about halfway into the book. 

My biggest qualm with the book is that Devon Price writes that Questionable Research Protocols are a systemic problem. QRPs are when you invalidate the scientific method by essentially putting you thumb on the scale to make sure that your research results will be shown as statistically significant, showing your hypothesis to be true. The author then gets into the history of the replication crisis in social psychology where it came to light, that frankly speaking, a lot of psychological researchers were just making shit up. He then gets into how he was taught these techniques such as “fishing” for only statistically significant data as a doctoral student. I don’t know where Devon Price got his degrees, but when I went to college I was required to take a year of statistics and research methodologies before I was allowed to take any 300-level courses in the Psychology department. I’d argue that a decent dose of shame and self-reflection for not understanding basic statistical methodology as a doctoral student is relatively healthy.

 

Nevertheless, despite these failings, I want to be clear that this is a great book and I highly recommend it. There’s so much more that this book contains (as well with points that I really don’t agree with or are uncited claims that are pretty out there) but I’ve already written about two pages on this book. Again, nevertheless, I highly recommend reading Unlearning Shame. 

Cheap Speech - Richard Hasen

The title of this book comes from a 1995 scientific journal article titled “Cheap Speech and What it Will Do” which, in a way, predicted the current state of technology. Much of this book is just an overview of the 2016 election leading up to Trump’s first candidacy as well as Trump’s first term as president. Going over these chapters reminded me of the Reddit post where a user talks about the collapse of his country being like that of a frog boiling in water: it’s just more and more bad news that you can’t keep up with… and being reminded of all the scandles one after the other I forgot about that have happened in almost the past ten years now... something I think worth calling out in the book is that the “glitches’ we saw in the 2024 election, with Democrats’ content not showing up on social media also occurred in the 2020 election (page 20) and that claims of fake news swinging the 2016 election from Hilary to Trump are unproven and unlikely (page 38). Page 50 is an example of a  local Democrat candidate using fake news in his campaign. I also love how this book uses Reddit as a literal example of fake news and amplifying fake news, an accusation which if made on Reddit itself will usually cause users to go reeling. The book points out that in 2016 Russia spent about $100k on Facebook ads as opposed to Clinton spending $768k and Trump spending $398k. This broke the common rule that whoever spends the most on advertising in a US presidential race usually wins; Trump likely did a much better job at utilizing micro targeted ads on Facebook.

The Hot Zone - Richard Preston

When I was a kid, my mom had The Hot Zone on audio cassette and would listen to it in the car with me in the back seat. Given the cover of the book, and its contents, I grew up thinking that it was a horror novel. The book explores the origins and outbreaks of viral fevers, particularly the Ebola virus; specifically a 1989 incident at a primate quarantine facility in Virginia near the capital where a strain of Ebola virus was discovered among imported monkeys. Preston examines the potential dangers of emerging viruses, the response, and the thin line between humanity and a global pandemic. Given the news in February about a “mystery disease” spreading in the Congo likely being linked to children eating a bat, I figured that this book was relevant reading. The book is incredibly captivating and well written, I can see how it was a bestseller. It’s also incredibly short and only took a few days to read. 

Jacked - David Kushner

I was hoping that this book would be about the development of Grand Theft Auto 3, especially given how the cover specifically seems to reference that era of the series, however it is about the history of the DMA games, eventually Rockstar North, and mostly the history of the controversy of the GTA series. Whole sections of the book focus on Jack Thompon, the disgraced evangelical, now disbarred, Florida attorney who tried to fight the video game industry in the 2000s. In fact, he is where the title of the book comes from. Like Cheap Speech, I was reading an account of events that I remembered living through in most of the book. I was a huge fan of Rockstar as an early teen and followed the GTA controversy closely in the news.

A few things I learned from this book is that Sam Houser, current president of Rockstar games and co-founder, gave a chat-based interview that was posted to the a day before the 9/11 attacks saying that planes would not be in GTA3. This contradicts a longstanding rumor that planes were removed from the game due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. While it’s also never outright states by the book, I do believe after finishing this book that Houser knew that the mod community would eventually find the content that lead to the Hot Coffee debacle in 2004. It was his ultimate goal to release this content potentially as a paid add-on for the PC release at least. I believe he was intent of releasing this content one way or another and potentially purposefully left the content on the console game disks for the mod community to find and release.

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levins

The 70s film adaption of the Stepford Wives always at the top of my recommended films to rent from Netflix back when they had an unparalleled recommendation algorithm and I still got DVDs in the mail from them. Netflix got rid of that algo when they started producing their own content and their own algo was ranking their content as the worst content available on the platform...
Anyways, this book hits a lot of the beats that Rosemary’s Baby does - that there is a broader conspiracy that builds up from a slow burn paranoia, there’s an socially isolated protagonist, trust is weaponized against the protagonist, and ordinary settings hide horror. My copy didn’t say on the cover that this was the same author as Rosemary’s Baby,  ome to find out the same author that wrote Rosemary’s Baby wrote The Stepford Wives. The book is a good quick read and social commentary, but I wish it leaned more into the science fiction aspect of the book.

Something I found fascinating about this book is that one of the antagonists in the books formally worked as an engineer at Disney making animatronics. The Youtube channel DefunctLand by Kevin Perjur recently released a video talking about how animatronics captured the imagination of Americans when they first came out. And in a way, I think this book kind of pulls you into that headspace of the time when it comes to this new tenchnology that facsinated and even scared people.

Unwinding Anxiety - Judson Brewer

I don’t think that the premise of this book had to be book length. Brewer outlines a three-step process designed to manage anxiety by disrupting the habit loops that fuel it:

Awareness: Recognize and clearly identify anxious feelings and behaviors without judgment or avoidance. Observe when anxiety arises and what triggers it.

Curiosity: Instead of immediately reacting or resisting anxiety, approach it with curiosity, exploring how it feels physically and mentally. This curiosity reduces emotional charge and helps dismantle automatic responses.

Mindful Replacement: Shift focus to healthier, mindful behaviors. Substitute anxiety-driven actions with calming, mindful activities, gradually creating new habits that weaken the anxiety cycle.

The author emphasizes mindfulness-based practices to help individuals break habitual anxiety patterns, and breaks down what mindfulness is and can be rather than suggesting over and over that you be mindful or practice meditation. The author spreads this three step process out over the length of the book instead of just coming out with it, and he is also guilty of repeatedly citing the results of studies despite only one study allegedly being performed. At times the book feels like an advertisement for their app and at one point the book even starts to show screenshots of the app on the latest model iPhone for the revision of the book I had.

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

My friend ended up with an extra copy of this book and lent it to me after I told her about A Short Stay in Hell. In this book an Irish woman has the opportunity to relive any of her unlived lives after she takes her own life - her unlived lives being represented by a vast library that seemingly goes on forever. This is a very good book and a quick read, I actually put it in a little library in my neighborhood with a sticky note on the cover that says exactly that and it was gone the next day. Ultimately this is the Jungian exercise of imagining your unlived lives put to a novel and done pretty well (this specifically is an exercise Robert Johnson recommends in his book Inner Work). I will say that I thought the ending could have been better, but I also was not sure how a book like this could end.

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I had initially read this back in 2020 right before the US federal election. I am still struck by how sharply relevant King's words still are. Reading his own words is such a great way to challenge the “Disney-fied” version of the man and his ideas that we were taught in public school. This wasn’t the sanitized, feel-good version of MLK but rather the radical, direct, and deeply critical of American capitalism and militarism MLK. King challenges the entire economic and social system that allows inequality to persist. What stood out most to me was his emphasis on genuine equality, not just legal rights but economic justice too, including ideas like a guaranteed basic income fixed to the middle class and that scales with the country’s income.

It shouldn’t be surprising but King is an eloquent writer, and his writing invokes the philosophies of Martin Bueber and Hegel in such a compelling way. This book is hauntingly relevant almost 60 years later and should be required reading in schools rather than the literal cartoons they showed us instead. King was not concerned about just race, but class and poverty, and it’s not unintentional that the latter have attempted to be erased from American history and textbooks. 

Science for Sale: The Crisis of Credibility

I am as much of a secular rationalist as they come. Once I learned about the scientific method in middle school, I saw it as the most trustworthy tool humans have for understanding the world; something solid that stood in place of unquestioning faith and, hitherto, the best tool for us to navigate reality. While that all may be true in the physical sciences, the unfortunate reality is that we are not at such a place in the realm of social psychology. My disenchantment with academia began in college, during my pursuit of a career in research psychology, as I discovered it surpasses even corporate America in its politics, nepotism, and dishonesty.

Psychological research, particularly social psychology research, is often ineffective and unreliable due to weak statistical standards, a replication crisis, cultural pressures like "publish or perish," and deeper methodological flaws. Capitalism, not rationalism, primarily drives which research gets done and why. Money and ego undermine the very fabric of the scientific method, making it nearly impossible to conduct impartial research within any academic institution. Research is often published not for the sake of understanding the world, but to serve the needs of capital. The consequences have included the widespread dissemination of misleading findings, the marginalization of important but unprofitable lines of inquiry, and the reinforcement of existing power structures. Studies that might challenge dominant economic or social paradigms are underfunded or ignored, while research that aligns with the interests of industry, tech, or pharmaceutical giants is prioritized. This results in a distorted intellectual landscape where knowledge is commodified and public trust in science erodes. Over time, the ideal of science as an objective, truth-seeking endeavor is replaced by a performative shell that mirrors the market forces it is supposed to critically examine.  

 

For this reason, I have a great deal of compassion for the “do your own research" crowd even while wholeheartedly disagreeing with them. The layman should not have to navigate multiple paywalled scientific journals to come to their own conclusions.

In the hard sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry, hypothesis testing often requires a p-value of 0.01 or lower to claim statistical significance (A p-value is a statistical measurement of the probability that the results of a study occurred by random chance. A p-value of $0.01$ means there is only a 1% probability that researcher landed on their findings by random chance.). However, in the social sciences, a p-value of 0.05 is the norm, meaning 1 in 20 "significant" findings could simply be random chance. As a result, a neuroscience lab (which for all intents and purposes IS biochemistry), you have a much lower burden of proof to demonstrate your findings than the biochem lab. In fact, something that nobody in your university’s Psychology Department will tell you is that many research labs prefer biochem degree holders over those in their own programs! 

The p-value of 0.05 was first introduced by Ronald Fisher in his 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers. He suggested it as a convenient cutoff, but he never intended it to become a hard rule. He described it as a flexible guideline for when an experimental result might warrant further investigation. Over time, what became a suggestion for what might be publishable, became instead a hard rule of what demonstrates statistical significance. Psychology academics enshrined and adopted this methodology during a period when the field was desperately trying to be seen as a "hard science” - otherwise very few academics would have had anything worth publishing. 

This issue becomes more problematic when you compound that in 2008, an event known as the Replication Crisis occurred. In a landmark effort, a large team of researchers called the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 published psychology studies from top journals. These studies mostly came from the fields of social psychology and cognitive psychology. While 97% of the original studies had reported statistically significant results, only about 36% of the replications produced statistically significant results. The effect sizes for these studies (the strength of the findings) were, on average, about half as large in the replications, with many replicated results were weaker, inconsistent, or with the effect outright disappeared. This crisis included work by a researcher you might be familiar with, Amy Cuddy who went viral with her Ted Talk on doing power poses in front of the mirror to increase confidence. 

I want to point out that groups like The Open Science Collaboration may exist to challenge the exact issue I am describing; they are still entangled in the same ecosystem as everyone else. Their funding sources include the US federal government and a Mark Zuckerburg 501c. If a study seriously undermined a major funder's interests, it’s plausible that the OSC would deprioritize it, slow-walk its dissemination, or fail to champion it. Not from malice, but from institutional survival instinct. This is the very paradox that the OSC tries to solve, but also cannot fully escape under capitalist conditions.

In Amy Cuddy’s case, the issue with her research was more than just that of replication. She was found to have used “questionable research practices” (QRPs) meaning she cherry-picked data to achieve statistical significance while ignoring results that didn't fit her narrative. I first heard about this situation in Devon Price’s book Unlearning Shame. In his book, Price explains how he was taught to use QRPs during his own upper-grad research training. I would argue that the fact that these methods are called "questionable research practices" instead of something more definite such as lying, cheating, or fraud says everything that a layperson needs to know about how research is conducted in the field of psychology.

Price writes that Questionable Research Protocols are a systemic problem. He recounts the history of the replication crisis, where it came to light that, and that frankly, many psychological researchers were just "making shit up." I don't know where Price earned his degrees, but as an undergraduate, I was required to take a full year of 200-level statistics and research methods courses before I could even enroll in upper-level psychology courses. Perhaps a dose of shame for a doctoral student not understanding basic statistical methodology isn’t entirely unhealthy.

This problem extends to popular science. Many books, including those by PhD holders like Judson Brewer (Unwinding Anxiety), the above Unlearning Shame, or authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), often state that a single study has "proven" a hypothesis. This is something I was taught never to do in my 200-level classes. These are not necessarily bad books, but the way these authors discuss their findings is a product of the academic culture they inhabit; a culture they, in turn, help perpetuate. If there is no room for genuinely critical minds in psychological research, and if researchers who try to do the right thing are dragged down by their peers, what is the point? 

In fact, there are examples of researchers outside of psych who were outright shunned for findings that we now accept to be true. Take for example Dr. Kilmer McCully, a Harvard-trained physician and researcher. In the late 1960s, McCully published research suggesting that elevated levels of the amino acid homocysteine, not just cholesterol, could lead to cardiovascular disease. This was a departure from the prevailing cholesterol-centric view of heart disease at the time. His research was not well received by the medical establishment. Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was employed, did not renew his research grant, and he was forced to leave his position, costing him any chance at tenure. McCully eventually found a position at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence where he continued his research. Over time, subsequent studies validated his findings. Today, the role of homocysteine in cardiovascular health is widely acknowledged with McCully credited as pioneering this field of study.

Nevertheless, there was a systemic attempt to stop his research for daring to use the scientific method for its intended purpose: to pursue truth, regardless of political or institutional consequences. his brings me to some open questions in relation to Price's work on shame. At what point should the gatekeepers of such a system feel genuine shame? When does their complicity demand more than a quiet retraction or a pivot to a new grant cycle? What would it mean for them to truly rectify the damage: intellectually, ethically, even personally before they allow themselves the luxury of moving on or forgiving themselves?

More pressingly: if data is being manipulated to fit agendas, if replication is avoided because the incentives reward novelty over reliability, and if entire academic careers are built on shaky, unreplicated findings, then are we actually advancing knowledge at all? Or are we just creating an elaborate theater of credibility? At what point can we even say strides are being made in social psychology, or are we simply becoming more efficient at justifying our own biases in increasingly scientific-sounding ways? If this is how people want to operate, what is the point of anything at all? Do words even have meaning? I’m genuinely sincere in these questions.

Imagine we could travel back 2,500 years and converse with Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates. If we tried to explain modern physics: quantum mechanics, relativity, germ theory, or even basic chemistry - they would likely be bewildered. These concepts would be completely foreign to them, built on centuries of empirical discovery, mathematical modeling, and experimental replication that simply didn’t exist in their time. But if we shifted the conversation to human psychology: virtue, motivation, desire, or the divided self; they might understand us surprisingly well. In fact, many of the psychological insights we consider cutting-edge today were already being explored in their dialogues.

These issues are not just limited to the US. Consider David Nutt in the UK, he performed Multi‑criteria decision analysis where he ranked alcohol and tobacco as more harmful than LSD, MDMA, or cannabis (Lancet 2007; F test p < 0.001). He published his findings and stated that horseback riding caused more brain injury than ecstasy, the Home Secretary fired him and ministries withdrew related research contracts.

Academic incentives prioritize novel, flashy findings over careful, incremental science or simply trying to see if it’s possible to replicate the findings of a particular researcher. This is one reason why QBRs are such an issue in research. Journals favor "positive” results over null findings, creating strong bias toward publishing studies that find something, even if it's not real! Career advancement hinges on publication count, not research quality. This creates perverse incentives to manipulate data until statistical significance is found. Consider the example of a pharmaceutical company trying to release a new drug. Due to the high stakes and potential liabilities, they're required to have multiple independent auditors and trials to confirm the drug's effects. There are institutional checks: FDA oversight, liability law, and third-party replication; that make publishing unreliable or irreproducible findings incredibly risky. Ironically, this means that even in an industry driven by profit, there's often more methodological accountability than in academic social psychology. The absence of real-world consequences for failed replications or methodological shortcuts makes it easy for bad science to flourish in academia specifically.

Even when studies find an impact, the subjects are almost always college psychology students participating in studies conducted by their own professors for extra credit and are aware of the exact studies that they are performing in. There’s even an acronym for this over reliance on particular research participants, WEIRD:  Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. For example, when I attended UMASS I would often participate in game theory studies that the Economics department would have. In order to achieve significant results in game theory, subjects have to play with real money; people act and behave differently when you give them fake money; think chips at a casino. The studies would fill up fast as a result of them potentially paying well and the only real reliable way to sign up was to have a smart phone so that as soon as the email went out you could get the notification and sign up. This was the early 2010s when not everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, again creating another layer of class abstraction when it came to study subjects. In fact, this scenario was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me personally when it came to transitioning to a smart phone. The money was too good to pass up. When I did sign up for the studies, I made sure to do a literature review of whatever I thought that the professor was trying to research. I wanted to win the game and make as much money as possible because I was broke. I’ve often been told that I was an outlier in this case by other students, but was I? I consider myself a bright guy, but at UMass I wasn’t a big fish in a little bowl. I wasn't even a business student and was average by UMass academic standards. How many other students were doing something similar? 

When these students are tested, oftentimes the constructs used to measure results are vague and poorly-defined. Constructs such as such as "grit," "mindsets," "priming", "brain power" without clear operational definitions. For example, when I was doing research, we were primarily interested in the N400. The N400 is part of the normal brain response to words and other meaningful (or potentially meaningful) stimuli, including visual and auditory words, sign language signs, pictures, faces, environmental sounds, and smells… so what does it actually mean when an N400 response gets triggered? Well, that’s non-concrete and rather fuzzy. The N400 is primarily associated with semantic processing, that is, how the brain understands meaning. When a word fits well into a sentence or context, the N400 is smaller. When a word is unexpected, incongruent, or hard to integrate, the N400 is larger. The normal sentence: “She spread the warm bread with butter.” results in a Small N400 because the word makes sense. However, the incongruent sentence “She spread the warm bread with socks. Results in a large N400 response.

Why is this important? As a researcher I would tell you that the N400 shows that the brain automatically and rapidly processes meaning, even when you’re not actively trying to. It's one of the clearest examples of how neuroelectric signals reflect real-time cognitive processing. Now why is THAT important? You tell me… What I see is that absence of strong underlying theories makes replication and extension difficult and that the field of psychology, in general, often prioritizes interesting phenomena over solid, predictive models.

This over-reliance on a specific type of human subject points to a much deeper, more foundational problem. We’ve only been industrialized for less than 300 years, and we're arguably already in a post-industrial age. This brief, historically bizarre period of human existence created a new kind of person, way of thinking, and in a way... a new science to manage them. The question isn't just whether the research is relevant, but whether the entire discipline of psychology, as we know it, is a temporary tool for a temporary way of life. This is a central theme in the work of documentarian Adam Curtis. In The Century of the Self, Curtis argues that modern psychology, particularly the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud, was co-opted by corporate and political power structures. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, used these insights to invent the field of public relations, pioneering techniques to manage the irrational desires of the masses and channel them into consumerism. In this view, psychology didn’t just seek to understand the modern self; it helped to construct it - a self defined by perpetual anxiety and a constant need for fulfillment through purchasing.

This argument is reinforced by scholars like Philip Cushman in books such as Constructing the Self, Constructing America. Cushman posits that post-WWII American society cultivated an "empty self" a person disconnected from community, tradition, and shared meaning. Both psychotherapy and advertising rushed in to fill this void, promising wholeness through therapeutic intervention or the accumulation of goods. If psychology’s primary role has been to diagnose and service this historically specific, empty, consumer self, then its findings are not timeless truths about the "human mind." Instead, they are maintenance instructions for the engine of capitalism. This context makes the field's current replication crisis and subservience to market forces seem less like a recent failure and more like the inevitable outcome of its own origin story...

So where does this all leave us? If power poses work for you, then they are good enough. And while I am not a religious person, maybe not be so critical of others’ belief systems that might be a little more un-rational than your own. I think an understanding of how rationalism has been co-opted by capitalism can teach us why we should understand where the “do your own research” crowd is coming from, even if we hold them in contempt. Ultimately as it stands today, the very system of integrity has failed all of us. I think that also this helps us understand where Donald Trump is coming from when he said “If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any.” in relation to the Coivd pandemic in June of 2020. When everything is for sale, people getting tested for Covid rates is no different than paying a consultant to prove what you already believe, or for experts in the legal system who always find in favor of the person that hired them. 

As laypeople, what can we do? We can follow a few rules of thumb. Never trust any single person, author, or publication claiming one study "proves" anything. We should only have evidence-based faith in science, this is taught in elementary school but bares repeating: only after many studies from many different sources should we ever consider that research might be valid. It's absolutely appropriate to always be skeptical of any science. That's the point. If you're so inclined, find the original scientific article that should be well cited. Ask: Has this research been replicated by anyone without a financial incentive? What was the p-value? What perverse incentives might influence these individuals and institutions?

Ultimately, I think our culture places too much value on material wealth, fame, and ego. This problem will not get better until the institutions and societal constructs around us fundamentally change to serve something other than capital.