Best click ever.

Liberation Day is the best short story I've read in years... and the one before it was also by George Saunders.

What a mind / heart on that guy.

Direct cash transfers to homeless people in Vancouver increases stable housing and savings, not purchases of temptation goods (eg, alcohol).

But people wrongly believe that homeless individuals would spend the money on temptations.

PS: Academic Twitter can be pretty great!

Behavioral science *did* offer useful insights during the pandemic.

I'm inspired by how scientists responded to this crisis, assembling international, interdisciplinary groups to closely examine the best evidence.

Was happy to play a tiny role in this mega-collaboration.

A stellar talk on self-compassion by Dan Harris. Characteristic of everything Dan does, it's incisive, vulnerable, and totally hilarious.

Yuan Chang is a truly special scientist and person. This is an amazing opportunity!

'People who are encouraged to value empathy across party lines are also more likely to support bipartisan cooperation and less likely to report hating people on the other side of a political issue.' Luiza Santos Jamil Zaki, Robb Willer, Jan G. Voelkel psychologicalscience.org/news/news-rele…

This is a great and much needed project: a common database to assess how replicable well-known psychological effects actually are.

If you're in the field, consider helping out!

LOTS to come. Stay tuned; I can't wait to share this project with you!

/end

Finally, I'd love to hear from any of you about your own cynicism stories. What experiences caused you to fall into cynicism? What has freed you from it?

11/

I am *thrilled* to be working with Colin Dickerman, who shares my vision for this project, and as always with my friend and long-time collaborator, Seth Fishman.

10/

The organizer Mariame Kaba says, 'hope is a discipline.' It is not the same as being naive, or ignoring social problems. It's a crucial path towards addressing them together.

9/

It's been inspiring learning from activists, teachers, artists, students, Nobel Prize winners, and spies (!) about how they fight cynicism.

Their stories and the science will give us a map for charting our own path back to hope.

8/

Thankfully, though, understanding the disease in this case gives us tools to treat it.

There are many strategies we can use reverse cynical thinking in ourselves and each other: cultivating curiosity, hope, connection, and collective action.

7/

Finally, cynicism is a tool of the status quo. It saps people's energy for change by making them feel it's impossible.

6/

Cynicism also brings out the worst in others. When friends, lovers, strangers, and bosses treat people like they can't be trusted, that alienates others and often makes them *actually* behave selfishly.

Cynics tell a story full of villains and end up living in it.

5/

Cynical thinking is a bleak 'theory of everyone,' a lens through which we judge people based on their worst sides.

Often that makes us demonstrably more wrong and less healthy. Cynics are more depressed, earn less money, and die younger than non-cynics.

4/

First, cynicism is an understandable response to inequality and injustice. We are living through a crisis layer cake. If you think things are bad, it's not all in your head.

But cynical thinking doesn't help, and in fact can make many of these problems worse.

3/