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Brian Moon
@perigean
CTO | @NDMAssn | @VAusability
Darwin's People: How Naturalists Explain Our Behavior & The Plot Thinkens @
Virginia, USA
Joined February 2014
5.8K Following
2.1K Followers
6.9K Posts
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📣 Now Available: Darwin's People: How Naturalists Explain Our Behavior. Links 👇
I wrote this book because I'm weary of all the pseudo-social-science that courses through social and traditional media, academic journals, and casual conversation.
Our explanations of people and their behavior informs how we set up our systems and institutions, many of which are failing us in spectacular ways.
Team Naturalism offers strong explanations that can improve our situations, but we have been drowned out by all the nonsense. We need louder voices.
My hope is that the book plays a role in course correcting by inspiring reflection, bolstering valid arguments, and pointing to promising directions that others can follow.
Looking forward to the engagement!
👏
Two weeks ago I finished what I think will be Commoncog's most significant contribution to the AI discourse, at least for this year. (God forbid!)
This was the Sensemaking Series — which is a short, 3-essay series about how to make sense of AI.
Some of its ideas are surprising.
@ConjectureInst “Quantum theory also entails, for instance, the existence of multiple universes…” is interpretation-dependent, not a consequence of quantum theory simpliciter.
Who to follow
The Naturalistic Decision Making Association
@NDMAssn
Follow us to learn about Naturalistic Decision Making and how it can help improve learning and performance in your organization.
Jako Olivier
@jakoli4
Adviser Higher Education at the Commonwealth of Learning, Canada.
🇿🇦 South African interested in open and distance learning, OER and self-directed learning.
Zach Mercurio
@ZachMercurio
Author: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 & 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳
Researcher/PhD. Speaks & writes on purpose, meaning, & mattering.
Overcorrection.
Ten years ago, I published Grit. In those pages, I wrote down everything I’d discovered about world-class achievers and how passion and perseverance set them apart.
Since then I’ve been studying the situations that make world-class achievement possible.
My research shows that the situation shapes you—but you have the power to shape it first. How?
1. Set up your personal space.
2. Pick your peers.
3. Attract mentors.
4. Choose your culture.
Getting situated means finding the people and places that bring out your best.
Grit is great, but to realize your potential, you also need to get situated.
Pre-order Situated. Out September 1st.
https://t.co/8zIG684hvY
@daniel_dsj2110 Little one in here: https://t.co/mINWtY2VlI
My review of @GadSaad's Suicidal Empathy (which would be more appropriately subtitled as: Dying to Be Relevant):
Saad’s central error is not that he identifies genuine institutional failures.
Many of the phenomena he points to are plainly real:
✅ asymmetrical norm enforcement,
✅elite moral exhibitionism,
✅policies insulated from downstream consequences,
✅institutional reluctance to maintain boundaries even when their erosion becomes visible, and
✅a widening gap between symbolic moral language and operational reality.
The problem is deeper. He misidentifies the level at which these phenomena become intelligible.
Suicidal Empathy treats social breakdown primarily as a pathology of sentiment. Empathy supposedly becomes excessive, detached from reality, and therefore socially self-destructive.
The book’s explanatory core is ultimately psychological: elites pursue status through compassion signaling, institutions become captured by caregiving heuristics, moral prestige accrues to symbolic inclusion, and societies lose the capacity for reciprocal boundary maintenance. Political dysfunction is interpreted as the aggregated consequence of miscalibrated emotional dispositions.
That framework is not incidental to Saad’s argument. It reflects his academic lineage. Saad emerges from the intellectual tradition of heuristics and biases, evolutionary psychology, behavioral signaling theory, and adaptationist accounts of culture. (Yet still resides in the marketing department... 🤨)
That tradition has achieved some moderate explanatory successes by showing how many apparently moral or ideological behaviors become intelligible once viewed through reproductive incentives, coalition signaling, prestige competition, and evolved cognitive heuristics. Saad’s earlier work on symbolic consumption and ideological signaling belongs squarely within this inheritance.
The problem is that this explanatory tradition carries a severe characteristic reductionism: large-scale social phenomena are treated as downstream expressions of local psychological mechanisms.
✖️Culture becomes extended psychology.
✖️ Institutions become stabilized aggregates of incentives and heuristics.
✖️ Civilizational dysfunction becomes maladaptive emotional calibration.
That framework tolerably begins to account for certain domains of behavior: mating competition, prestige signaling, tribal cognition, symbolic consumption, moral display.
But once extended to institutional and civilizational analysis, its limitations become severe.
Saad still operates within the modern assumption that societies are assembled from local motivations aggregated upward. Individuals possess psychological tendencies; aggregated tendencies produce institutional outcomes.
If elites become excessively empathic, institutions become excessively permissive. If status competition rewards compassion signaling, societies lose deterrence capacity. The explanatory center remains fundamentally local.
❌ But large social orders do not function merely as scaled-up psychologies.
The deeper problem is not simply that aggregation is incomplete. Aggregation itself changes the nature of the phenomenon being explained. Once legal systems, bureaucracies, educational institutions, labor markets, media infrastructures, demographic pressures, fiscal systems, technological systems, and legitimacy structures interact across millions of agents over long temporal horizons, the relevant explanatory object ceases to be reducible to motivational microfoundations.
Stable societies are not held together primarily by correctly balanced emotions. They are held together by globally coherent structures of obligation, reciprocity, legitimacy, institutional compatibility, and role coordination.
What matters is not whether actors “feel too much empathy,” but whether the total arrangement remains internally sustainable across all its interacting commitments simultaneously.
This is precisely where Suicidal Empathy becomes analytically weak.
Take immigration, one of Saad’s recurring examples. He frames the issue primarily as a failure of emotional boundary maintenance: elites care more about displaying compassion than preserving social cohesion.
❌ But the instability of immigration regimes in advanced liberal democracies cannot be adequately explained through empathy heuristics.
The relevant dynamics involve labor market demands, demographic aging, constitutional universalism, international legal obligations, business incentives, administrative inertia, urban economic concentration, media narratives, educational credential structures, and geopolitical strategy.
Compassion rhetoric may help justify these arrangements, but it does not constitute their explanatory core.
The instability emerges when obligations distributed across the system cease to remain mutually compatible. The issue is structural incoherence, not emotional excess.
This distinction matters because Saad’s framework cannot adequately distinguish between:
❔ generosity that remains institutionally sustainable,
❔ generosity that destabilizes institutions,
❔ harshness that stabilizes legitimacy, and
❔ and harshness that corrodes legitimacy.
Everything becomes compressed into the moral category of “too much empathy.” That compression is rhetorically effective but conceptually imprecise.
The same problem appears in his treatment of elite moral signaling. Evolutionary psychology naturally interprets public moral discourse as prestige competition under coalition conditions. There is a modicum of truth in this.
But once moral signaling becomes institutionally embedded through universities, HR bureaucracies, media systems, legal liability structures, accreditation mechanisms, philanthropic networks, and algorithmic attention systems, the dynamics cease to be intelligible merely as signaling behavior.
Entire systems of role coordination emerge whose stability conditions cannot be reconstructed simply by describing the motives of participants.
Saad repeatedly writes as though institutions are transparent expressions of individual psychology. If actors become sentimental, institutions become sentimental.
But institutions frequently persist in forms none of their participants fully endorse, understand, or control. Actors operate inside structures whose compatibility conditions exceed local intentionality.
This is why contemporary societies often display apparently contradictory tendencies simultaneously:
⁉️ punitive bureaucracies alongside permissive rhetoric,
⁉️ moral universalism alongside intense social atomization,
⁉️ therapeutic discourse alongside declining interpersonal trust,
⁉️ symbolic inclusion alongside material exclusion, and
⁉️ expanding rights language alongside weakening institutional capacity.
These are not merely emotional inconsistencies. They are signs of increasingly incompatible institutional commitments operating within the same social order.
Saad notices many of these contradictions. In fact, his most useful observations often exceed his own explanatory framework. He repeatedly identifies:
✔️ selective enforcement asymmetries,
✔️ institutional paralysis,
✔️ elite insulation from consequences,
✔️ fragmentation of shared legitimacy,
✔️ contradictory obligation structures,
✔️ symbolic moral inflation detached from operational capacity, and
✔️ collapsing norm coordination.
❌ But these are not fundamentally failures of empathy.
They are failures of systemic coherence.
By interpreting them primarily through maladaptive caregiving instincts and prestige signaling, Saad personalizes structural incompatibility.
He transforms failures of institutional organization into failures of moral sentiment.
That makes the diagnosis seem psychologically intuitive and politically resonant, because human beings naturally prefer agent-centered narratives. We want civilizations to fail because people became weak, decadent, cowardly, sentimental, or corrupt.
❌ But large societies rarely become unstable through a single moral trait.
They become unstable when too many institutional commitments cease to remain jointly sustainable across the entire social order simultaneously.
This is the central mistake of Suicidal Empathy. It perceives visible contradictions in contemporary liberal societies but explains them through an overly psychologized framework inherited from evolutionary-adaptationist thinking.
The result is a rhetorical cultural diagnosis fitting of a marketer that mistakes symptomatic emotional patterns for the deeper structural conditions governing whether a society can remain internally coherent at all.
Thus, it's hardly surprising to see @elonmusk and @michaelshermer front and center of the endorsements.
Marketers' gotta market. 🤑
“How do we cultivate the tiny minority who insist on thinking in its presence?”
1. preserve encounters where judgment cannot be outsourced because the criteria themselves remain unstable, contested, or reality-bound
2. increasingly place them in situations where they must commit under uncertainty and then confront consequences
3. protect slowness without romanticizing inefficiency
4. create circumstances that evoke hesitation, qualification, reorientation, or conceptual discomfort
5. model intellectual seriousness as intrinsically valuable rather than instrumentally useful
6. reward sustained inquiry, error correction, conceptual risk, and responsibility for claims
My review of @GadSaad's Suicidal Empathy (which would be more appropriately subtitled as: Dying to Be Relevant):
Saad’s central error is not that he identifies genuine institutional failures.
Many of the phenomena he points to are plainly real:
✅ asymmetrical norm enforcement,
✅elite moral exhibitionism,
✅policies insulated from downstream consequences,
✅institutional reluctance to maintain boundaries even when their erosion becomes visible, and
✅a widening gap between symbolic moral language and operational reality.
The problem is deeper. He misidentifies the level at which these phenomena become intelligible.
Suicidal Empathy treats social breakdown primarily as a pathology of sentiment. Empathy supposedly becomes excessive, detached from reality, and therefore socially self-destructive.
The book’s explanatory core is ultimately psychological: elites pursue status through compassion signaling, institutions become captured by caregiving heuristics, moral prestige accrues to symbolic inclusion, and societies lose the capacity for reciprocal boundary maintenance. Political dysfunction is interpreted as the aggregated consequence of miscalibrated emotional dispositions.
That framework is not incidental to Saad’s argument. It reflects his academic lineage. Saad emerges from the intellectual tradition of heuristics and biases, evolutionary psychology, behavioral signaling theory, and adaptationist accounts of culture. (Yet still resides in the marketing department... 🤨)
That tradition has achieved some moderate explanatory successes by showing how many apparently moral or ideological behaviors become intelligible once viewed through reproductive incentives, coalition signaling, prestige competition, and evolved cognitive heuristics. Saad’s earlier work on symbolic consumption and ideological signaling belongs squarely within this inheritance.
The problem is that this explanatory tradition carries a severe characteristic reductionism: large-scale social phenomena are treated as downstream expressions of local psychological mechanisms.
✖️Culture becomes extended psychology.
✖️ Institutions become stabilized aggregates of incentives and heuristics.
✖️ Civilizational dysfunction becomes maladaptive emotional calibration.
That framework tolerably begins to account for certain domains of behavior: mating competition, prestige signaling, tribal cognition, symbolic consumption, moral display.
But once extended to institutional and civilizational analysis, its limitations become severe.
Saad still operates within the modern assumption that societies are assembled from local motivations aggregated upward. Individuals possess psychological tendencies; aggregated tendencies produce institutional outcomes.
If elites become excessively empathic, institutions become excessively permissive. If status competition rewards compassion signaling, societies lose deterrence capacity. The explanatory center remains fundamentally local.
❌ But large social orders do not function merely as scaled-up psychologies.
The deeper problem is not simply that aggregation is incomplete. Aggregation itself changes the nature of the phenomenon being explained. Once legal systems, bureaucracies, educational institutions, labor markets, media infrastructures, demographic pressures, fiscal systems, technological systems, and legitimacy structures interact across millions of agents over long temporal horizons, the relevant explanatory object ceases to be reducible to motivational microfoundations.
Stable societies are not held together primarily by correctly balanced emotions. They are held together by globally coherent structures of obligation, reciprocity, legitimacy, institutional compatibility, and role coordination.
What matters is not whether actors “feel too much empathy,” but whether the total arrangement remains internally sustainable across all its interacting commitments simultaneously.
This is precisely where Suicidal Empathy becomes analytically weak.
Take immigration, one of Saad’s recurring examples. He frames the issue primarily as a failure of emotional boundary maintenance: elites care more about displaying compassion than preserving social cohesion.
❌ But the instability of immigration regimes in advanced liberal democracies cannot be adequately explained through empathy heuristics.
The relevant dynamics involve labor market demands, demographic aging, constitutional universalism, international legal obligations, business incentives, administrative inertia, urban economic concentration, media narratives, educational credential structures, and geopolitical strategy.
Compassion rhetoric may help justify these arrangements, but it does not constitute their explanatory core.
The instability emerges when obligations distributed across the system cease to remain mutually compatible. The issue is structural incoherence, not emotional excess.
This distinction matters because Saad’s framework cannot adequately distinguish between:
❔ generosity that remains institutionally sustainable,
❔ generosity that destabilizes institutions,
❔ harshness that stabilizes legitimacy, and
❔ and harshness that corrodes legitimacy.
Everything becomes compressed into the moral category of “too much empathy.” That compression is rhetorically effective but conceptually imprecise.
The same problem appears in his treatment of elite moral signaling. Evolutionary psychology naturally interprets public moral discourse as prestige competition under coalition conditions. There is a modicum of truth in this.
But once moral signaling becomes institutionally embedded through universities, HR bureaucracies, media systems, legal liability structures, accreditation mechanisms, philanthropic networks, and algorithmic attention systems, the dynamics cease to be intelligible merely as signaling behavior.
Entire systems of role coordination emerge whose stability conditions cannot be reconstructed simply by describing the motives of participants.
Saad repeatedly writes as though institutions are transparent expressions of individual psychology. If actors become sentimental, institutions become sentimental.
But institutions frequently persist in forms none of their participants fully endorse, understand, or control. Actors operate inside structures whose compatibility conditions exceed local intentionality.
This is why contemporary societies often display apparently contradictory tendencies simultaneously:
⁉️ punitive bureaucracies alongside permissive rhetoric,
⁉️ moral universalism alongside intense social atomization,
⁉️ therapeutic discourse alongside declining interpersonal trust,
⁉️ symbolic inclusion alongside material exclusion, and
⁉️ expanding rights language alongside weakening institutional capacity.
These are not merely emotional inconsistencies. They are signs of increasingly incompatible institutional commitments operating within the same social order.
Saad notices many of these contradictions. In fact, his most useful observations often exceed his own explanatory framework. He repeatedly identifies:
✔️ selective enforcement asymmetries,
✔️ institutional paralysis,
✔️ elite insulation from consequences,
✔️ fragmentation of shared legitimacy,
✔️ contradictory obligation structures,
✔️ symbolic moral inflation detached from operational capacity, and
✔️ collapsing norm coordination.
❌ But these are not fundamentally failures of empathy.
They are failures of systemic coherence.
By interpreting them primarily through maladaptive caregiving instincts and prestige signaling, Saad personalizes structural incompatibility.
He transforms failures of institutional organization into failures of moral sentiment.
That makes the diagnosis seem psychologically intuitive and politically resonant, because human beings naturally prefer agent-centered narratives. We want civilizations to fail because people became weak, decadent, cowardly, sentimental, or corrupt.
❌ But large societies rarely become unstable through a single moral trait.
They become unstable when too many institutional commitments cease to remain jointly sustainable across the entire social order simultaneously.
This is the central mistake of Suicidal Empathy. It perceives visible contradictions in contemporary liberal societies but explains them through an overly psychologized framework inherited from evolutionary-adaptationist thinking.
The result is a rhetorical cultural diagnosis fitting of a marketer that mistakes symptomatic emotional patterns for the deeper structural conditions governing whether a society can remain internally coherent at all.
Thus, it's hardly surprising to see @elonmusk and @michaelshermer front and center of the endorsements.
Marketers' gotta market. 🤑
Alternatively: https://t.co/kPB1obZrmT
@MACastagner It’s actually juicer than that. Saad was trying to align his work with Pinker’s, like a child desperate for his parents’ attention. And now Pinker is scolding him.
🍿
In Gad Saad's book Suicidal Empathy he does clarify that he's not against empathy across the board, just when it is detached from rationality. But with its hyperbolic title (US immigration enforcement may have been too lax in recent years, but that's hardly "suicide"), and the current political context (which he surely is aware of) in which Trumpian and evangelical attacks on empathy are being used to justify cruel, destructive, and irrational policies -- together with the taunting and trolling style that Trump seems to have unleashed -- criticism is warranted.
https://t.co/iEypHp62my
@DC_Draino Obvs
https://t.co/vZnG8U497z
@DavidDeutschOxf TY for sharing.
ICYMI: https://t.co/GC3C19gWHG
Unreciprocated admiration. Saad.
https://t.co/MgQbhiVkRg
I discussed the limits of empathy in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it's still a powerful force in the decline of violence and expansion of well-being, and I find the new right-wing contempt for empathy ("toxic empathy," "suicidal empathy") contemptible. With a presidential administration that delights in cruelty and callousness, an excess of empathy is the least of our problems.
@veritasium Interesting.
A theory may possess:
· precise local regularities,
· strong invariant structure,
· and unlimited finite confirmation,
while still lacking global determinacy.
“Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, is a terrible guide to his theme.”
He really doesn’t like being characterized as a marketer.
"As a right-leaning person myself, Saad’s excruciating style actually made me empathise, to some extent, with left-wingers & how they view the Right. If the Left can suffer from suicidal empathy...then right-wingers can suffer from homicidal incuriosity"
https://t.co/ZbVFJ1ia3v
https://t.co/Cv3aEAWXeL
Terrifying confession. President Donald Trump openly admits he was perfectly willing to crash the stock market by 25 percent.
He explicitly states he wanted Americans to pay 300 dollars for oil just to start a war.
The Trump administration is intentionally destroying us.
Programming proves you can specify a procedure precisely enough to run.
It does not prove you understand why the structure works, whether the interpretation is unique, or whether the phenomenon is even decomposable into procedures.
A simulation is not the same thing as comprehension.
Ironic.
@skdh
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