State of the Wonderland: Q3
A lookback at Cognitive Wonderland's past three months
It's time for another installment in the State of the Wonderland.
For those that haven't read one of these before, each quarter I do a little review/reflection on my previous quarter (3 months) on Substack. I'll talk about some things I've read that stuck out to me from the quarter, give some stats on the publication, a look back and reflection on what I've been writing about, and a look forward. It's more of an "insider" post than my usual, so I don't email it out, as I assume anyone not active on the Substack app is unlikely to be interested.
Cognitive Wonderland has now existed for 9 months(!). That means this is the third State of the Wonderland. Here are the previous ones:
Let's start off with some Recommendations—things I came across or read in the past quarter that I'm excited about.
Recommendations
Substack Publications
Previously I've just pointed to one Substack that stood out to me in the previous quarter. But I just couldn't do that this time. There are some relatively new Substackers that I'm really excited about. What they all have in common is they are all academics (or former academics) who write really well and with solid expertise on topics I'm interested in. Since they're new, they're all woefully undersubscribed relative to their quality, so give them some love.
, : Michael is a psychologist that researches self-control, the topic that first drew me from philosophy to the cognitive sciences. He's written about the replication crisis from the perspective of an insider. The writing is really interesting and human from the perspective of someone with deep psychology expertise.
, : Matt writes about the psychology of decision-making. I actually first came across his writing on his Psychology Today blog independently, where I found his excellent writing on the 2 System view of heuristics and decision-making, and was excited to discover that same week that he had come over to Substack.
, : Dean is hilarious. He's also a phenomenal writer—like, written a best-selling book level. He's written funny and insightful posts debunking popular narratives around smartphones and otherwise informing people of the neuroscience of everyday life.
, : Pete Mandik is a philosopher of mind and illustrator. I actually called out one of his comics about consciousness in my first State of the Wonderland. Pete's advocacy for qualia quietism (basically, let's shut up about qualia and instead be more specific about what we mean) cuts to the core of a lot of issues with the state of many philosophy of mind arguments.
Articles
Against Moral Responsibility and Retributive Justice by at
A while ago, I wrote an article saying that we have free will. It was my attempt to articulate the dominant philosophical view on free will: compatibilism. While it was overall well received, I was surprised that it also made a lot of people mad. I had someone going around criticizing everyone who shared the article, calling them (and me) names and saying they shouldn't share the article because it's bad. Someone called me childish for my views and blocked me. Some just angrily disagreed. Plenty of others politely disagreed, which was much better. But all these negative responses were weird, they made arguments that were irrelevant to the position I had outlined. It was kind of depressing. Had I done such a poor job of articulating myself? I wondered if I had to take another run at the issue, but given the unreasonable response the first time, I wasn't relishing the thought.
In contrast to those discussions, Ian's critical article was a breath of fresh air. It draws on the philosophical literature and actually makes the case against compatibilism. Ian is what's called a hard determinist and argues against free will and moral responsibility. I don't agree (for reasons I outline in a comment on his article), but Ian makes the case well and raises the issues at the core of the disagreement. Regardless of your position on the issue, if you read Ian's article, you will be better informed as a result.
New Year Party Pooping by at
Enough about free will, let's talk about something serious: poop.
Lauren's article is great and was easily a highlight of my last quarter on Substack. It's science writing at its best—amusing and enjoyable while being informative. Reading it gave me a lot of laughs and taught me about poop and laxatives. It's playful and cute, and you should go read it.
Cognitive Wonderland’s Growth
On November 3, 2024, Cognitive Wonderland was 6 months old and had 2,094 subscribers.
As of February 3, 2025, Cognitive Wonderland is 9 months old and has 3,333 subscribers.
That's 1,239 subscribers over 3 months.
It's pretty wild the growth this publication has had. I continue to be mystified by it. It's certainly no protection against imposter syndrome—it's easy to weave narratives about how I got here that have nothing to do with the quality of my ideas, articles, or (most worryingly) shitposts. But I'm thankful for the interest people have in my writing and those that have engaged in various ways. While the numbers are nice, the real motivating force is always exploring ideas I'm interested in and articulating viewpoints I hold. It's great to be able to be my weird self and have that resonate with people.
There's one very obvious cause of this growth this quarter: I was lucky enough to have
recommending Cognitive Wonderland as he started his publication, . Lewis launched his publication and got somewhere around 5k subscribers in his first month. Crazy.Subscriptions driven through his recommendation account for over half (683) of new subscribers for the quarter.
So, thanks Lewis!
Recommendations aside, my growth through other means has ebbed and flowed a bit over the quarter due to my own engagement. November was a pretty rough month for me professionally—bad enough that I quit my job at the end of the month. It was a relatively new job, I was only there three months, but it just clearly wasn't working. Now I'm doing some teaching and consulting and have no plans to go back to a full-time job. The increased flexibility (and increased mood) mean I've been more active on Substack (and doing a bit more self-promotion) as of the beginning of January. My non-recommendation driven growth has improved substantially in January, and hopefully will remain high.
Reflecting on my writing from this quarter
I'm a skeptic. I mean that in the Carl Sagan, James Randi, and Steven Novella sense—I'm skeptical about supernatural claims and critical of pseudoscience.
But I've never considered Cognitive Wonderland a skeptic blog, even though there is a niche for it (and one I'm interested in!). The reason is pretty simple: skepticism tends to be critical, and I want the focus of my writing to be more positive and optimistic. Not that these are inherently at odds—Carl Sagan was brilliant in being able to write about the wonder of the cosmos while writing some of the foundational books for the modern skeptical movement. But I'm no Carl Sagan.
I wanted (and want) the focus of Cognitive Wonderland to be on, well, wonder. The wonder of the world of ideas and breaking out of everyday thinking. I'm starting to think those things (skepticism and wonder) are more connected in my mind than they might appear on the surface, in difficult to articulate ways. Maybe there's an article idea in there.
Anyways, all of that is to say, I like skepticism, but it hasn't been the explicit focus of Cognitive Wonderland.
Last quarter, I was surprised by the positive reception of my (skeptical) article on the misuse of neuroscience in the self-help world. It's my most popular article.
I wrote it mostly out of annoyance. I made the mistake of reading Deep Work, a book I had heard good things about but I found full of flagrant exaggerations and misrepresentations of psychology and neuroscience. I wanted to write a post just about how people should think about neuroscience in self-help contexts—mostly as not particularly useful.
I had worried there would be a backlash to that article. I was, after all, calling bullshit on a lot of stuff people like. But it never came. People were pretty reasonable about the whole thing (unlike the free will debacle).
This quarter, I wrote a few articles that can be considered skeptical—most explicitly, on Myers Briggs being pseudoscience, and about a few "neuromyths". In a similar vein, I wrote about psychology's replication crisis.
These articles have been pretty popular. They've spurred a little backlash (some people really like Myers Briggs and Learning Styles), but nothing as serious as I worried, and it's pretty easy to respond to the critics when there's just reems of clear, unequivocal research proving your point. Beyond that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
That said, they're not my favorite articles. They're fine—I spent a lot of time on them and I'm proud of them! But if I were to pick my favorites from the last quarter, they would be my articles about embracing reductionism and how science is philosophy. They didn't do nearly as well, but they're more important to me.
That's fine. Some things I'm interested in don't have as wide an appeal as others. I'm sure there are plenty of things I could write about that would be more popular (I mean, I could write self-help mush myself). But the point of this place is for me to write what I want to write. Skepticism is a part of that, and it's cool to find out it's received well. Knowing that, I'll probably be a little more likely to write skeptical stuff in the future when I want to. But there's less uncertainty there—it's easy to take pot shots at stuff without scientific backing, and I learn a bit from it, but not as much as I do when I'm trying to articulate my thoughts on philosophical problems.
Skepticism is a part of me, but I'm not going to start focusing on it just because it's my most popular topic.
Moving Forward
But in terms of topics, what am I going to focus on? I've been writing a lot about psychology lately. Blame the replication crisis thing for that, I went down a rabbit-hole and haven't really come back up. There will probably be a bit more of that.
I'm also going to be experimenting with some guest posts. Look forward to that.
Beyond that, I don't have any super specific plans to share. I have lots of ideas I want to write up, but no specific large topic I plan on covering. Basically I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing—writing about whatever idea excited me recently.
That's all for now. This ended up a lot longer than I intended, but it gave me a chance to unpack things, and if you ended up reading it hopefully it gave you some insight into where me and the publication are. Only 3 months to Cognitive Wonderland's first birthday!
Thanks Tommy! Your article on free will compatibilism was a fine statement of the view that I was criticizing and really helped me formulate my own ideas.
Thanks for the shout out, Tommy, and thanks for the insights you shard here and in other writing.