Organization Development Consultant. I-O Psychologist. Former Tenured Business Professor. Scientist. Management Consultant. Thought Partner. @vocentive
San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2013
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Follow up to (nitter.gq/Matt_Monnot/status/211…): (
P.S. Mo Wang is genuinely one of the nicest people in I-O psychology. That's actually true. And an editor of impeccable judgment.
If that seems like Sycophancy Slop, well, that's also kind of the joke. But seriously, I've always been told that if you have to explain a joke, or if only a handful of people would find it funny, it probably isn't a very good joke.
I disagree. I think the more obscure the reference, the smaller the audience, and the longer and more elaborate the explanation required to appreciate it, the funnier the joke becomes.
Especially when the explanation is substantially longer than the joke itself and increasingly difficult to distinguish from a sincere attempt to ingratiate oneself with the editor of a prestigious academic journal. Which, to be clear, this absolutely isn't.
Although I recognize that denying the existence of an ulterior motive while repeatedly drawing attention to the possibility of one may itself constitute evidence of precisely the behavior I'm denying, which is arguably another layer of the joke, assuming there was a joke to begin with, and that anyone other than the one person for whom it was intended is still reading this parenthetical.
Which, incidentally, is still not finished. Seems like Parenthetical Explanation Slop.) #AISlop
I've found LinkedIn's "Seems like AI slop" button incredibly useful. I'm a "better safe than sorry" kind of guy, so I click it every time.
In fact, I've contacted the following websites to request analogous functionality:
Pitchfork.com — "Seems like Morrissey-Derivative Slop"
Instagram.com — "Seems like Clarendon Filter Slop"
Nextdoor.com — "Seems like Suspicious Van Slop"
HarvardBusinessReview.org — "Seems like Peter Drucker With a New Acronym Slop"
Goodreads.com — "Seems like Pretending You've Read Infinite Jest Slop" (P.S. Unless you're Jason Kottke, no one has actually read this book.)
Journal of Applied Psychology — "Seems like Mo Wang's Reign of Editorial Terror Slop"
(If you know Mo, the idea of him being mean is hilarious. If you're the one person who found this funny, this one's for you.)
Substack.com — "Seems like Heterodox Thinker Slop"
Strava.com — "Seems like Zone 2 Recovery Run With Six PRs Slop"
TED.com — "Seems like Paradigm Shift Slop"
LinkedIn.com — "Seems like Anti-AI Slop"
And finally, I know we've all been thinking it:
PigProgress.net — "Seems like Pig Slop"
I've found LinkedIn's "Seems like AI slop" button incredibly useful. I'm a "better safe than sorry" kind of guy, so I click it every time.
In fact, I've contacted the following websites to request analogous functionality:
Pitchfork.com — "Seems like Morrissey-Derivative Slop"
Instagram.com — "Seems like Clarendon Filter Slop"
Nextdoor.com — "Seems like Suspicious Van Slop"
HarvardBusinessReview.org — "Seems like Peter Drucker With a New Acronym Slop"
Goodreads.com — "Seems like Pretending You've Read Infinite Jest Slop" (P.S. Unless you're Jason Kottke, no one has actually read this book.)
Journal of Applied Psychology — "Seems like Mo Wang's Reign of Editorial Terror Slop"
(If you know Mo, the idea of him being mean is hilarious. If you're the one person who found this funny, this one's for you.)
Substack.com — "Seems like Heterodox Thinker Slop"
Strava.com — "Seems like Zone 2 Recovery Run With Six PRs Slop"
TED.com — "Seems like Paradigm Shift Slop"
LinkedIn.com — "Seems like Anti-AI Slop"
And finally, I know we've all been thinking it:
PigProgress.net — "Seems like Pig Slop"
Does a day of meditation make that day more self-compassionate?
In a 28-day diary of 65 employees in a two-week online self-compassion program, the days people meditated did not differ clearly from the days they did not: the within-person slope for same-day self-compassion was 0.00 SD, 95% credible interval [-0.09, 0.09].
Meditating on a given day also did not detectably lower the next day's emotional exhaustion once that day's own exhaustion was accounted for: -0.03 SD, [-0.16, 0.11].
The estimates held across priors, missing-data shifts, and two ways of centering the predictor.
The method is the point. Nonmeditation days were rare (12 of 65 people had none), so the model treated each person's meditation tendency as latent instead of subtracting a shaky observed average.
Archival intervention diaries carry adherence items their original phase comparisons never used, and they can answer questions the original analysis did not ask.
I love AI disclosure statements required by publishers these days. Some think it's a bit overreach. But I have to say I did enjoy my last disclosure:
"During the preparation of this work the author used large language models accessed through Cursor (Anthropic Claude, xAI Grok, OpenAI GPT, and Google Gemini) to draft and revise text, write figure code, and check reported statistics; a word processor with Clippy and autocorrect; and statistical software, so that no coefficient was obtained by hand. The author reviewed, edited, and verified the output and takes full responsibility for the content. These tools are not authors."
Long live Clippy. The original AI threat.
A forecast, not an effect of the exercise. Completers only, one program network, self-report. Secondary analysis of a randomized trial by Wang, Goldenberg, Lerner & Gross (2025); data public at osf.io/9awj3. Paper under review.
How the curve works: think of a smoke detector. Turn it up and it catches every fire but goes off for toast. Turn it down and it misses fires. The red curve shows every setting at once. The dashed line is a detector that is guessing.
Here, accept 30 false alarms per 100 people who turned out fine, and the eleven questions reach 59 of 100 who went on to be in distress. AUC .72. When the forecast said 60 percent, about six in ten did report elevated stress.
One in four German employees still worked from home last year — almost double 2019. This year’s RTO and isolation studies disagree on location. They do not show that the office, by itself, fixes loneliness.
I tested a different lever: a self-compassion score taken in 2018, before any of this, among 3,052 employed adults in a German national probability panel.
People a standard deviation higher on that score entered 2020 about 3% more satisfied with life. They were also less lonely and less overwhelmed by digital tools in 2024 (r = −.36; β = −.20). Through the 2020–2021 drop, life satisfaction fell about 9% at every level of the trait. Telework from 2021 to 2025 moved the same way for everyone.
The associations sat with the self-critical items, not the self-caring ones.
The level is what lasted.
@gesis_org
