Grim Old Days, Tradwives, APA Scandal, Flying Cars

Reading, watching, and listening highlights: October 2026

Celebrate Halloween and celebrate progress by ordering my colleague Chelsea Follet’s excellent new book, The Grim Old Days!

New and interesting

• The Preindustrial Past Was a Horror Story, by Chelsea Follett

  Halloween draws near, and it’s the season for scary stories. I have a true one for you. The gruesome reality of ordinary life throughout much of history.

• Freedom in the 50 States by the Cato Institute

  • My colleague Stephen Slivinski ranks all 50 states on personal and economic freedom. How well does yours do?

• The 1950s housewife would have loved DoorDash, by Homemade Hayek

  • Modern tradwives forget the futurism that actual 1950s housewives embraced—from Wonder Bread to instant mashed potatoes, canned goods, and microwaves.

• The Inmates Run the Asylum at the Psychological Association, by Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz

  • In a perverse irony of DEI history, the APA may lose its accreditation for being racist.

• AI and the End of Loneliness, from Paul Bloom/TED:

• Tesla Unveils ‘Flying’ Roadster with SpaceX Thrusters, from Tesla/SpaceX:

Hot takes

• Surround yourself with optimists:

ZUBY:@ZubyMusic

Surround yourself with people who see a flying car and say, "Awesome!" Not people who see a flying car and say, "It's not actually flying" or "I don't see the point." This post is not about cars :)

5:32 PM · Oct 16, 2026 · 499K Views

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1.09K Replies · 5.23K Reposts · 46.1K Likes

• Exponential progress is remarkable and just beginning:

  

  Praetor@FourVork

  in just over a month, we've had - flying cars - AI solving a Millenium Math problem - A new antibiotic discovered by AI lab - 722 AI written Math papers released at once - A solution to AI alignment - Google reducing errors 40× in quantum computing, making it practical - Opus 5…

  

  roon @tszzl

  every week during the singularity is just utterly insane

  12:16 PM · Oct 16, 2026 · 244K Views

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  98 Replies · 401 Reposts · 3.78K Likes

• Much of our psychology is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

  

  shipra@shipranotes

  An unspoken rule they never teach you in school: you can simply choose a delusional sense of optimism toward the world, believing everything will work out and that you’ll succeed in every facet of life. Reality bends more often to stubborn endurance than it does to calculated

  

  shipra @shipranotes

  Delusional optimism is a competitive advantage. Overestimating your chances makes you persist long after logic tells you to quit. ​That extra persistence is what turns bad odds into wins.

  

  10:50 AM · Oct 13, 2026 · 40.7K Views

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  15 Replies · 356 Reposts · 2.27K Likes

• Should have been called the DUM:

  

  Allen Frances@AllenFrancesMD

  DSM-6 is a grift/mistake whose only real purpose is publishing profits for Am Psychiatric Assoc. Changing its name from 'Diagnostic & Statistical Manual' to 'Diagnostic & Scientific Manual' is putting lipstick on a pig. Giant leaps in neuroscience during past 50 yrs have had…

  

  Psychiatric News @PsychiatricNews

  At a time when many established scientific practices are being questioned, including vaccines and other longstanding evidence-based public health interventions, how does changing the name of the DSM help? 🔗👇

  

  11:53 AM · Oct 27, 2026 · 36K Views

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  19 Replies · 86 Reposts · 316 Likes

• Metamodernism will succeed postmodernism:

  

  Oliver Traldi@olivertraldi

  One thing I've been thinking about is how the philosophy of the 1980s to 2000s - the phil mind wars about consciousness and intentionality, Parfit and Singer, decision theory debates - seems completely topical and urgent now, and the woke turn of the 2010s seems shallow and weird

  

  Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart

  Maybe AI will kill us all one day. Or maybe it will deprive us of livelihoods and meaning.. But in the meantime, just as the arrival of writing caused an explosion of philosophical interest among the ancient Greeks, the arrival of talking computers is doing the same to us now.

  9:18 PM · Oct 22, 2026 · 21.7K Views

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  24 Replies · 44 Reposts · 627 Likes

In case you missed it

• Progress Roundup 10/25/26, from HumanProgress.org

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