Astral Codex Ten

Jonathan Haidt

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Jonathan Haidt

Article

Jonathan Haidt is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between February 14, 2021 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “social psychologist Jonathan Haidt”; “When Haidt is presenting his own work on moral foundations in the second section of the book”; “Jonathan Haidt apparently has this graph in his book Happiness Hypothesis”. It most often appears alongside Steven Pinker, Clinton, Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: February 14, 2021
  • Last seen: May 30, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Statement on New York Times Article
February 14, 2021 · Original source
When I discussed this with the New York Times, they said they were going to reveal my real name anyway. As a protest and an attempt to prevent this from happening, I deleted my blog and replaced it with a post condemning the New York Times’ actions. The post “went viral”, 513,000 people read it, hundreds (thousands?) of people cancelled their New York Times subscriptions in protest, and it was a major scandal. There were some news stories about it at the time – you can read some of them eg here or here. I was proud to receive support from voices like Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, science broadcaster Liv Boeree, and Atlantic editor Yascha Mounk.
Inline links: a post condemning, here, here
Your Book Review: The Righteous Mind
July 15, 2022 · Original source
I had a general feeling that The Righteous Mind sits in the background of a lot of the political or meta-political content that I know and love. It had the aura of a sort of foundational text for the loose family of political views and affiliations I have. I don’t consider myself a centrist, which I think is how Haidt identifies himself, but I do share his disdain for tribal partisan politics and general sense that so much of what passes for political debate is just people yelling foundational definitional disagreements past each other mostly for the benefit of their own fans. I felt like I’d probably picked up most of its insights further downstream, and wouldn’t get much out of reading it.
Most of all, though, it just feels horribly outdated only a decade after it was published, and that’s a real death blow for an attempt to get beyond the ephemera of partisanship and talk about political differences in a more fundamental way. At its core the book is an attempt to go beyond the surface partisanship of R vs D, and dive into the underlying moral psychology that Haidt thinks drives those differences. Unfortunately, just ten years from writing, his underlying structure looks almost as disposable and skin-deep as the latest scandal or wedge policy issue.
For all I thought its argumentation was muddled and unclear, the way the book is structured is very clear and helpful. It’s divided into three sections, each of which has clearly stated main points it sets out to prove. Within those sections, each chapter ends with a brief summary that makes it clear what Haidt wants you to focus on and take away.
Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness
September 13, 2022 · Original source
My old psych 101 textbook said that romantic love lasts between a few months and a few years. Jonathan Haidt apparently has this graph in his book Happiness Hypothesis, though I don’t have the book and can’t evaluate the source:
Inline links: apparently has
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
12: Jonathan Haidt revisits whether social media is bad for mental health. Previous studies have said no, by lumping together different ages, genders, types of screen time, and types of mental health result. Haidt finds a subgroup where the answer seems to be clearly yes: teenage girls using social media seem more depressed and anxious. I don’t usually like subgroup slicing but he seems to have done a really good job proving that this subgroup does badly across many different studies. He thinks this is because teenage girls are using Instagram and worrying about body image. I wouldn’t have predicted that this in particular would be so much worse than all the other kinds of social media use, but I guess I’m wrong!
Inline links: revisits whether social media is bad for mental health
Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?
June 30, 2023 · Original source
Cf. Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations.
Inline links: Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations
Bayes For Everyone
May 30, 2025 · Original source
If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least similar to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary. I think it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.