Adam Mastroianni

He declared peer review dead. His next question is what human researchers are still for.

Contrarian, funny, irreverent. The summit's intellectual troublemaker.

Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist with a Harvard PhD who left academia to write Experimental History, read by roughly a hundred thousand people. His research is largely about how confidently wrong we are: how badly we remember, how poorly we read each other, and — with Dan Gilbert — why every generation is convinced morality is collapsing when the data says otherwise. His essay arguing that peer review has failed became one of the most argued-over pieces of science writing in years, and the complaint underneath it is that the system pays people to be safe, incremental and unsurprising.

He does not stay in the lab. His July 2026 New York Times op-ed argued that the environmental case against AI data centers is weaker than it looks, and closed by pushing responsibility back onto individuals and social norms rather than zoning boards. It got him attacked from several directions at once, which is roughly his natural habitat.

He is the empirical counterweight to a weekend about embracing not-knowing. Someone has to document how shaky our knowing actually is — and then ask what is left. If machines absorb the careful incremental work, the human job becomes the high-variance bet.

You'll take away: a harder look at what you're spending your own effort on. If the safe increment is the part that's about to get cheap, the calculation changes for anyone running a lab, a research function, or their own career. He's specific about how confident people go wrong, which makes the argument usable in every day terms.

ONE READ — "The rise and fall of peer review," Experimental History. His most-argued-over essay, and a fast read on how knowledge production actually works.