58: Adam Mastroianni - Let Me Be Useful

Adam Mastroianni (0:00)

I'm a ghost that haunts parties and makes them worse for people.

Jackson Dahl (0:03)

See ya.

Adam Mastroianni (0:03)

And I float back into the wall.

Jackson Dahl (0:06)

I guess that's the peril of being a psychologist broadly.

Adam Mastroianni (0:09)

Yeah. There was a moment when I was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. It felt for a second like, you can do anything. And then you get there and the warden of Rhodes House was like, what you guys should really do after you go here is, you should work for McKinsey for a couple of years, and then you can do whatever you want. And I'm like, I thought we, I thought the doing, like, putting in our time was what we did when we get here. And now you're telling me there's another stage we gotta put in the time. And I know when I get to that stage you're gonna tell me I gotta put in some more time. And there's no one who's ever gonna tell me that my princess is in this castle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the princess is always gonna be in another castle, like, I have to stop going into the castles. And so this also happened in academia. Academics, a fair number of them don't want to do what they do. Or when you ask them what they like to do, they're often like, it'd be great to run a little coffee shop. If I'm feeling a little mischievous that day, I'm like, all right, where would you get the beans from? What kind of coffee maker do you want? Where would you locate it? And the point being that if you haven't thought about these things, if you don't enjoy thinking about these things, you're not serious about opening a coffee shop. Like this is a daydream. There's a lot of money sloshing around in like alternative science right now of like let's build alternative institutions. And it seems over and over again, what they end up doing is they build the same kind of institutions just with a futuristic font. And they're like, all right, what are we gonna do with like all of our cool money and our cool freedom? What if we like get some people from Stanford in here or not willing to be stupid enough? We are not willing to say, we don't really know anything. The mark of a good piece is that I didn't know the end of it when I started it and like that I didn't know most of it when I started it. I don't write from top to bottom. I write inside out. I write as if I am a tumor metastasizing inside a blank document. I am not a particularly religious person, but the prayer I say to myself every time before I hit that post button is, let me be useful.

Jackson Dahl (1:41)

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 58 with Adam Mastroianni. Adam is an experimental psychologist and writer of experimental history. His blog and Substack where he writes certainly about psychology, but also science, about figuring out your place in the world and what you should do with your life, and about a wide range of other ideas that motivate him to care enough to wade through the weeds and explain them to the rest of us. I came across Adam's work via one of my favorite essays of his, Good Conversations Have a Lot of Doorknobs, which I would highly recommend and we talk about in the episode, as well as his post on unpacking or more colloquially, The Coffee Bean Test, which we get into too. We talk plenty about psychology and science and how he has gradually moved away from academia and a lot of the stuffiness and process to doing more science and broad discovery out in the open. And finally, we talk a bit about Adam's upcoming book, The Strangest Idea in the World, which releases in early 2027

Adam just moved back to New York and I was waiting a long time for this one, so it was a true pleasure. I hope you are inspired not only to expand how you think about possibly intuitive things, but also to go read a bunch of Adam's incredible writing. And if you enjoy the episode, please share it with a friend. That is the best way for it to grow.

Before we get into things, I'd like to thank Notion, not only for presenting Dialectic, but also for hosting this conversation between me and Adam. We are here in their offices in New York. And Notion is a collaborative work space for your life's work that small startups all the way up to large organizations use not only to share context documents, collaboration and more, but increasingly to act as a hub for how they work with AI and agents. Despite all of the progress constantly being made around AI products, very little effort and intention has been put into working with AI alongside your collaborators, and that is where Notion truly shines. So every AI model, the day it releases, whether it's a frontier model or a cost-effective open weight model, is available in Notion, right in the documents where you and your collaborators work. Notion, the company is also growing fast. Akshay, one of Notion's co-founders recently told me that nearly 50 former founders now work at Notion, and if you are interested in working with them, please let me know. You can reach out to them directly or you can reach out to me at workatjacksondahl.com, and if it's a right fit, I am happy to put you in touch with the right people. If you're new to Notion or haven't used it in a while, you can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.