Stuart K. Hayashi I keep hearing from Sam Harris fans that neuroscience proves that humans don’t have free will. They want me to mull over their case and concede their correctness. Yet my opting — in contrast to the alternatives available — to take the initiative to contemplate their case and weigh the evidence for it is something that depends on my having the capacity to will myself freely

Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine.

My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free.

Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research.

Here are some of my favorite psychology findings:

1. The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine.

2. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence.

3. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity.

4. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require.

5. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness.

6. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep.

7. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way.

8. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects.

9. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering.

10. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines).

None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet.

In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science:

If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.

Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun.

Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...]

A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.

Psychology isn’t centrally the new n=5paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop.

The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area.

(I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make)

Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions.

I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general:

1. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad.

2. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole.

To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here.

To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee.

From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter:

This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines!

The Left loathes anyone who dares think for themselves.

That comes in many forms, and it’s often done hand-in-glove with the Legacy Media.

Now, it’s time to shun a rising pop star for not toeing the liberal line. Need context?

After releasing a song about the October 7 attacks, Boy George has found himself at the centre of a culture war. @suzanne_moore argues he’s learning what it means to be cancelled https://t.co/UehSteMWce pic.twitter.com/Y1lD3EXTwO

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 4, 2026

The Left is currently attempting to cancel Boy George for daring to defend Israel and the Jewish people.  Cue the complete lack of outrage from the Left’s newly formed free speech defenders.

Why?

Progressives discard their free speech concerns if it might help right-leaning voices or arguments. Another example?

British singer M.I.A. got fired for sharing right-leaning views on stage, and the Left ignored the obvious free speech implications.

Why?

The Left demands ideological fealty above all else. That explains the new attacks on singer Tate McRae. The Canadian singer is under fire for the craziest reason possible.

She might, gasp, be MAGA – AKA a right-leaning soul or even a devotee of President Donald Trump.

The term “MAGA” is overused on the Left, much like the Right has been too cozy with deploying the word “woke” in recent years. To the Left, MAGA means a free thinker, someone who shares right-leaning principles or refuses to embrace every progressive tenet.

(Just ask J.K. Rowling about that)

So when McRae sang onstage with country superstar Morgan Wallen, it set off a warning flare to the Left. 

Wallen is a Heartland-friendly singer who defies the norms now and then. That means he might be MAGA, even if he doesn’t share his political views in public. And if she’s sharing a stage with Wallen, then, well, you do the totalitarian math.

Here’s just a sample of the media bullying McRae:

Stereogum:

She has also largely avoided taking any kind of political stand, which has its own drawbacks, like the moments when fans worry that she might have MAGA tendencies.

By “fans,” they mean the editors at Stereogum…

Forbes:

Tate McRae distances herself from MAGA Association—but doesn’t outright deny

Elite Daily:

Politics are everywhere right now… except for in a carefully-worded, PR-vetted Tate McRae statement…

McRae’s nebulous politics first came into question in the summer of 2025, when she collaborated with Morgan Wallen. Though Wallen has also not publicly disclosed his political beliefs, he’s perceived to be right-leaning, and McRae admitted to “learning” from the “controversy and criticism” that resulted from their duet shortly afterwards.  

Here’s what started the absurd attacks. This is a quote from a new Variety profile, one where the interviewer pressed the apolitical star on, you guessed it, her political views.

“I like to say my piece through organizations I support and the environment that I have on tour… I think it’s pretty obvious what kind of person I am and the things I support. And I hope that my fans can see that through the things that I’m putting my energy towards.”

Why press her in the first place? Four reasons:

• Clicks
• The mag gets an anti-Trump screed to further its narrative
• The mag outs a Trump supporter, siccing the Left on him or her
• It’s a warning to anyone else who might support the Right

Except McRae didn’t play ball. Reporters opted to bully her anyway. She’ll be pressed even further on the issue, because the media smells blood.

Culture War blood.

What McRae is going through is similar to what WNBA star Sophie Cunningham is enduring. The athlete took a common-sense stance on trans women playing against biological women without being cruel or dismissive.

For that, she’s under fire from the media. Of course she is.

The sheer nastiness, the loathing for independent-minded women and anyone saying the wrong thing, runs like a thread though this hateful Guardian piece
(And well done Sophie, because they attack when they can’t silence)

https://t.co/oli9ubCUEk

— Francis Harris (@fharris2011) August 3, 2026

The bullying will continue until victims start rhetorically punching back. Or the sane among us stand up for them en masse.

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