Infinite Loops Podcast: Adam Mastroianni – Why Creativity Feels Like It's Dying

Host: Jim O'Shaughnessy
Guest: Adam Mastroianni, Experimental Psychologist
Episode: 306
Date: March 19, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the perceived decline of creativity and cultural variance in modern societies. Adam Mastroianni joins Jim O'Shaughnessy for a wide-ranging discussion exploring why our world feels culturally “stuck”, the consequences of reduced rule-breaking and deviance, the professionalization of science, and how new institutional models can revive discovery and innovation. The two also examine how societal incentives, the internet, and the structure of education impact creativity, the pursuit of science, and the replication crisis. Mastroianni shares his vision for "Science Houses"—new, decentralized communities aimed at enabling scientific creativity—and challenges listeners to be more than passive consumers in the ongoing story of human progress.

Key Topics & Insights

1. Cultural Sameness, Deviance, and Creativity

• Cultural Convergence (01:09–04:05, recurring):
  • Adam notes a real, measurable increase in "sameness" across popular culture (film, music) and attributes this to a reduction in both positive and negative deviance.
    • "Some deviance is good, we call that creativity. And some deviance is bad, we call that crime." [00:00, 01:55]
  • Positive deviance (creativity) and negative deviance (crime, rule-breaking) have both declined among young people since the 1990s.
    • "These things just go down and down and down, starting mainly in the 90s... It's a good thing that the students aren't smoking in the boys room anymore. But... if you don't have that deviance at the beginning, maybe you don't get it down the line in both positive and negative forms." [01:55]
• Why this Decline? (04:54–07:47):
  • The trend predates smartphones/social media. Adam suggests increased prosperity and safety, leading to “slower life history strategies,” as a more likely driver.
    • "We are much less likely to die by being killed by another human, by disease or by deprivation than we have been at any point in human history... So it's natural that I'm kind of looking around going like, all right, well, I want to make sure it contribute to my 401k." [05:40]

2. The Internet: Variance Amplifier or Monoculture Machine?

• Amplification & Flattening Effects (09:09–13:08):
  • Internet fragments attention and allows niche content, but it also beams the same global pop culture into every home.
    • "There's no place... that is safe from the dominant and mainstream culture that's being beamed onto the airwaves... If everybody has the same inputs, we're more likely to produce the same outputs." [09:09]
    • "Now, everybody knows about Game of Thrones whether or not they've actually seen it." [11:17]
  • Loss of geographic or subcultural variety compared to previous eras.
    • "You could wander from one town to another [in the 19th century]...encounter a completely different religious culture... I don't think you can get anything like that in the U.S. anymore." [11:17]

3. Moral Panics, Innovation, & the History of Resistance

• Recurring Pattern (14:50–16:37):
  • Societies have always had moral panics around new things ("the novel", coffee, moneylending). The fears are often correct in terms of disruption, but “the world with coffee” is actually better for most.
    • "There's a hundred, several hundred years of history of resistance to coffee...rulers who wanted to stamp out these coffee houses were 100% correct about the effect... just turns out that for most of us, living in a world of coffee is a better one." [14:50–16:37]
• Suppression by Elites (16:37–20:52):
  • Established institutions suppress novelty to maintain order; revolutionary innovation nearly always occurs at the margins.
    • "All formal order in these tight states, these autocratic states, are actually parasitic on informal order... The state only works because people secretly disobey the rules." [18:33]
    • "Breakthroughs tend to happen despite all of the forces trying to stop them from happening." [18:33]

4. Institutions, Science, and the Professionalization Problem

• Why Big Institutions Fail at Radical Innovation (20:52–24:45):
  • Large organizations prefer slow, predictable improvements, but the most important innovations don’t work that way.
    • "Institutions...really don't like the idea of a revolution because you've kind of invested in things being the way they are...we need a new set of institutions that are smaller and that are run differently..." [18:33–20:52]
• Science Houses: A Model for Discovery (21:26–23:09):
  • Adam’s “Science House” concept: a hybrid of hacker houses and scientific apprenticeship, detached from orthodox academic incentives.
    • "What if instead you went and lived basically in a hacker house where you worked on scientific projects under the tutelage of a more experienced person?...Your application was just the fact that you had ever done an empirical research project and posted it directly to the Internet. That's it." [21:26, 24:45]

5. Status, Prestige, & Permissions in Science

• Difficulty of Escaping Academic Status Games (23:09–29:17):
  • Most alternative research orgs are still populated by academia “refugees” who need to be ‘deprogrammed’.
• Unlocking Agency (27:26–29:17):
  • Many potential contributors wait for permission or signals of prestige.
    • "There are so fewer [doing independent science] than there could be, I think, because they're waiting for permission." [27:26]
• First Steps for Would-Be Scientists (29:57–33:11):
  • Start by reading 'The Scientific Virtues' (Slime Mold Time Mold), practice “virtues” (rebellion, humor, stupidity), try to replicate a result—just do something and share it.
    • “The scientific version of a still life is doing a replication. This is also a really useful thing that so few things get replicated that if you could just redo something...post it on the Internet...as soon as you've done that, you're in it, you're doing it, you've become the thing.” [29:57]

6. The Replication Crisis, Fraud, & Institutional Incentives

• Systematic Weaknesses (33:11–38:38):
  • Data errors abound; replication is rare but powerful.
  • Incentive structures (grants, journals) reward “sexy” findings, not hard validation.
  • Politics, power struggles (suppression of David Bohm’s ideas) have always warped science.
    • “There are these competing power structures and there’s us, we humans...Pogo sitting very contemplatively and saying, ‘We’ve met the enemy and it’s us’.” [38:01]

7. AI, Paradigms, and the Limits of Data-Driven Knowledge

• What Can AI Actually Do? (41:54–45:51):
  • AI could accelerate some scientific tasks—data-walking, anomaly detection—but “meaning” and radical paradigm shifts may require the human spark.
    • “If we had trained an LLM on all extant text up until the year 1550, would it then spit out Copernicus?...the most important thing was not in the data set and in fact clashes with the data set.” [41:54]
  • The strongest advances often require “outsider” thinking.
    • "There's simply no way that you can ask a person to write a list out of all the things that would never occur to them, right?" [48:31]

8. Polymaths, Specialization, and the Loss of Weirdness

• The Case Against Over-Professionalization (52:14–53:58):
  • Professionalization raises the floor and lowers the ceiling; it stifles the wild polymathy that often produces breakthroughs.
    • "Specialization is for insects. A human being ought to be able to do all these things." [53:58]
    • "If you read the accounts of early Royal Society meetings, it's like, 'We got some unicorn horn powder, and we made a circle. We put a spider in the center...'...some of them turned out to be really important." [52:14]
• Activating the Rebel (55:54–62:18):
  • Radicalization often starts from institutional frustration or outsider experience.
    • [Jim shares his rebel origin story: 57:21–60:11]

9. Mental Health, Pathology, and "Control Systems" Psychology

• Rethinking the Mind (68:55–73:33):
  • Heuristics-and-biases tradition in psychology is played out; Mastroianni proposes a cybernetic approach: view the mind as a stack of control systems, akin to engineering feedback systems.
    • "Humans need to keep many things at the appropriate levels or else they die. We can't get too hot or get too cold...If you could figure out the number of systems...you get a theory of personality for free." [68:55]
• DSM, Society, and Malfunction vs. Symptoms (73:33–75:46):
  • Our nosological categories are shaped more by moral sentiment and incentives than scientific discovery.

10. Medicalization, Economics, and the Perverse Incentives of the System

• "Free Cures" and Why They Don't Spread (77:22–78:26):
  • Good, non-monetizable solutions (like a hiccup cure) languish, while chronic treatments thrive due to recurring revenue models.
    • "There is a really effective cure for the hiccups...But when I've had the hiccups before, I've remembered to look it up and I've done it and it's worked 100% of the time...no one can make money off it." [77:22]

11. Science House: Structure and Cost

• How Would Science Houses Actually Work? (86:01–89:17):
  • Modular, independent, with their own "weirdness," cross-pollinating like an archipelago not a university.
  • Endow one for perpetuity with $15 million, run pilot for less.
    • "You could endow a science house in perpetuity for $15 million ... For what Harvard spends to mail its pamphlets... you could have one of these houses forever." [87:46]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Deviance & Creativity:
  "Some deviance is good, we call that creativity. And some deviance is bad, we call that crime." – Adam [00:00]
• On Professionalization:
  "Professionalization makes a ton of sense for your dentist and makes no sense for your scientist." – Adam [52:14]
• On the Need for Weirdos:
  "The most important [innovations] cannot live in large institutions ... they are parasitic on basically people breaking the rules." – Adam [18:33]
• Internet’s (Partial) Failure:
  "The empty promise of the Internet is like, yeah, there's gonna be a lot more people doing this ... there are so fewer than there could be, I think, because they're waiting for permission." – Adam [27:26]
• On “Background Bullshit”:
  "Specialization, professionalization, becoming trained in a certain discipline makes certain ideas into background bullshit." – Adam [83:35]
• Advice for New Scientists:
  "Read 'The Scientific Virtues'... The virtues are all counterintuitive things like stupidity and humor and rebellion." – Adam [29:57]
• On System Design:
  "Science is a strong link problem ... the way that you solve [it] is by increasing variance, taking more weirder shots." – Adam [89:46]

Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment/Event | |----------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Deviance: Creativity vs. Crime | | 01:55 | Survey data on youth deviance and creativity | | 04:54 | Why deviance dropped before social media | | 05:40 | Prosperity & life history theory | | 09:09 | Internet’s double-edged cultural effect | | 13:08 | Fragmentation, printing press, and monoculture | | 14:50 | Moral panics, history, and innovation | | 18:33 | How innovation evades institutional suppression | | 21:26 | "Science House" concept described | | 27:26 | Why people wait for “permission” and status issues | | 29:57 | First steps for would-be independent scientists | | 33:11 | Replication crisis, bad data, and institutional fraud | | 41:54 | Limits of AI and paradigm shifts | | 52:14 | Professionalization: Raising the floor, lowering the ceiling | | 55:54 | Origin stories: How rebels are made | | 68:55 | Heuristics, biases, and cybernetic psychology | | 73:33 | DSM and symptom-based pathologies | | 77:22 | "Free cures" and misaligned incentives | | 86:01 | Detailed Science House plan and costs | | 91:46 | Adam’s “Emperor Microphone” closing wisdom: "Be brave, be kind." |

Closing Wisdom

If Adam had a magic microphone to incept two universal values into the world:
"Be brave, be kind." [91:46]

Jim responds: "Only weak people are truly cruel. It takes bravery and all of that to be kind." [91:52]

Tone & Takeaways

• The conversation is candid, intellectually rigorous yet playful—both host and guest value humor, rebellion, and intellectual humility.
• Both lament the status-driven, bureaucratic limits on real discovery, but see hope in a new crop of “science houses,” outsider thinkers, and the autonomy that internet and new institutions can bring—if we have the courage to pursue them.
• Aspiring creators and scientists are urged to “just start”—replicate, rebel, experiment, and connect physically with others on the same journey; the ecosystem for creative deviance and real discovery can be rebuilt from the ground up.