Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and postdoc at Columbia University with a Harvard PhD and Rhodes Scholar background. Jim O'Shaughnessy is the founder of O'Shaughnessy Ventures and author of What Works on Wall Street. Their conversation explores cultural convergence, institutional decay in science, and alternative approaches to research and discovery.

The discussion begins with Mastroianni's thesis that culture is converging into sameness, supported by data showing the dramatic increase in movie remakes and sequels. This connects to broader patterns of declining deviance among young people since the 1990s, which Mastroianni argues stems from increased prosperity and life expectancy creating incentives for long-term thinking.

They examine how professionalization has constrained scientific discovery, drawing insights from Innovation and Its Enemies about historical resistance to new technologies and Seeing Like a State about formal institutions depending on informal rule-breaking. The conversation culminates in Mastroianni's proposal for 'science houses' - alternative research institutions that could train scientists outside traditional academic constraints.

The Data Behind Cultural Convergence and Declining Deviance

Movie data confirms cultural stagnation fears: until 2000, 25% of top-grossing films were sequels/remakes, but after 2000 this jumped to 75% being part of cinematic universes.

Teen behavioral data shows dramatic declines in smoking, drinking, and pregnancy starting in the 1990s, representing both positive and negative variance reduction.

"Some deviance is good, we call that creativity, and some deviance is bad, we call that crime" - the kids smoking in bathrooms may later do interesting things as adults.

Life history theory explains the shift: increased prosperity and safety signals lead organisms to adopt slower, more cautious strategies focused on long-term survival rather than immediate reproduction.

Why Innovation Faces Eternal Resistance Despite Historical Patterns

Innovation and Its Enemies documents centuries of resistance to coffee houses, where rulers correctly predicted coffee culture would undermine their authority - "they were 100% correct about the effect that coffee houses were going to have."

Innovation resistance follows a "stranger problem" - each successful innovation becomes normal, so we never learn that future innovations might also succeed.

"We're all born into a point in history where everything invented before feels normal, and everything invented after feels like a change."

The internet eliminates cultural niches: "You cannot be a person and not know who Taylor Swift is" - unlike previous eras where neighboring towns could have completely different religious cultures.

The Professionalization Problem in Modern Science

Institutions resist revolution because they've invested in current systems: "If everything is going to change, that's actually a big problem for you" when you own real estate and have capital expenditures.

Seeing Like a State principle applies to innovation: "All formal order is parasitic on informal order" - institutions only work because people secretly break the rules.

Professionalization "raises the floor but lowers the ceiling" - makes sense for dentists, not scientists: "I would trade a thousand people who produce papers that never get cited for one Newton."

Early Royal Society meetings featured experiments like "unicorn horn powder in circles with spiders" - embracing weird investigations that professional science now finds embarrassing.

The Replication Crisis as Opportunity for Independent Researchers

The Scientific Virtues by Slime Mold Time Mold argues scientists need virtues like "stupidity and humor and rebellion" rather than just methodological practices.

Replication offers low-hanging fruit: "Most publications, no one ever looks at it. No one checks it before it gets published" - even checking code and data would be valuable.

What Works on Wall Street exemplifies direct-to-public research: O'Shaughnessy's empirical study bypassed academic publishing, with academics asking "why didn't you publish this as a PhD thesis?"

The internet's "efficient circulatory system" means quality work reaches relevant people quickly, even from unknown researchers with few followers.

Science Houses: An Alternative Training Model

Science houses would function like "hacker houses for scientific projects" - 4-5 year apprenticeships publishing directly to internet rather than through journals.

Current system wastes resources: new research institutions recruit from academia, then "need to be deprogrammed" - "What if we didn't have to staff our new world with refugees from the old world?"

A science house could be endowed "in perpetuity for $15 million" - equivalent to "what Harvard spends every year on postage."

Success condition is doing "cool stuff, not growing" - growth becomes a failure condition unlike universities where additional billions represent wins.

Cybernetic Psychology and the Future of Mental Health

Current psychology focuses on cataloging biases rather than understanding mind structure: "We've squeezed all the juice out of that orange" of heuristics and biases research.

Cybernetic approach views mind as "stack of control systems" managing temperature, hunger, social needs - offering new frameworks for personality and mental illness.

DSM's symptom-based categorization is like "organizing all the coughing diseases together" - lung cancer, choking, and colds have nothing structurally in common.

"Of all the disorders listed in the diagnostic and statistical manual, we have not cured one" - current treatments barely improve effect sizes from 0.15 to 0.17.