New year, new ways to connect

Featuring The Best Of 2023 and a look ahead to An Educated Guess in 2024

Happy new year everyone! I hope you had a restful winter break. Mine was so nice that I struggled to get back in the saddle. I’m sure you recognize the feeling. This is one reason for the delay in posting this issue—sorry about that.

The other reason is that this post was not that easy to write. In keeping with new year’s traditions, I wanted to evaluate how the newsletter had been going so far, reflect on these results, and form a resolution for 2024. But this required making some wise decisions on the shape of the newsletter in the new year, which simply takes time.

Anyway, I’m happy with how it turned out. Today I am excited to announce the first

More details are below. So read on—and as always, let me know what you think in the comments or in an email to jeroenvanbaar@substack.com. Thanks!

Evaluation

When I started writing this newsletter about three months ago, I didn’t really know what to expect. All I knew was that I wanted to start sharing more of my research with a broader audience—in part for fun and in part out of frustration with the academic world.

Since the beginning, I tried to write about stuff that interested and excited me. I’ve had such a good time putting together each issue by asking challenging questions, digging through data, connecting disparate fields of science, and pouring the ideas into an enjoyable text. The fact that there are now more than 250 of you tells me I’m doing something right, so I can’t wait to keep it going in 2024.

Since many of you joined recently, you might not have seen some of my most popular posts thus far. These are the ones most others loved to read and share with their friends:

Third place (342 readers):

The world has a bundle on its head

Second place (705 readers):

Why far-right Wilders won the Dutch election

First place (6596 readers):

Data dispatch #4: the falling nutritional value of crops

Reflection

Alongside the launch of this newsletter, I made some big changes in my life. I moved across continents, got married, and resigned from my job. When reflecting on these changes, one keyword comes to mind: connection.

Social connection has been supremely important to me personally in the last few months. My move to Washington, DC has made it much harder to connect with my friends and colleagues, but it has also given me the chance to grow new relationships and reinvent my existing ones. Such transition periods in life are effortful but very rewarding (and necessary) in the long run. Given how common social isolation is these days, I’m sure many of you recognize this from your own lives. See my earlier post on this:

Data dispatch #3: Sitting *alone* is the new smoking

Connection has also been a growing theme in my research. As a population mental health scientist, I learned that mental illness is not an individual problem but results from complex interactions between different facets of one’s life, including family, housing, work, and social inclusion. To make progress in public mental health—and many other fields of applied science—it is key to embrace this complexity. Luckily, many researchers are developing ways to analyze the complex foundations of population health, and I plan to contribute to this wave of work in my own research and with the new book I’m writing. Already, writing this newsletter has given me the opportunity to learn about topics like climate change, nutrition, and economics. These topics are outside of my regular fields of study but critically important to make educated guesses about the big societal issues of today.

Finally, connection with you, the reader, is key to the success of this newsletter. I am grateful to those (many!) of you who replied to my welcome email. Your messages help me figure out who I’m writing for, thus making my work more relevant with every passing week. So thanks—also for your likes, comments, and shares. This keeps me going and growing.

A resolution

In this new year, therefore, I want to foster the connections we’ve made so far and develop news ways to make Educated Guesses together.

For the newsletter itself, not much will change. I intend to keep publishing every week, mixing regular essays with data dispatches and meta-level updates. By reading my posts, I hope you will:

• Feel the joy of discovery that comes from tying together different fields of research;

• Discover fascinating insights that are useful to you and the people you care about;

• Engage in debate with other readers about what our society could and should look like.

But in addition to writing posts, I want to grow new ways of entering in conversations with you. If there’s one thing that my recent move brought back to the fore for me, it’s that the internet makes it exceedingly easy to connect. Just yesterday, I chatted with my parents and siblings over a lunchtime video call, which took less effort than walking down the street to a neighbor’s house.

You don’t read very much about the positives of social media these days. Popular publications such as

After Babel

and

Generation Tech

only highlight the detrimental effect the internet can have of the mental health of teenage girls. But social media also offer fantastic opportunities for connection not based on proximity but based on shared interests. In fact, in the research I have seen, teenagers and adolescents often indicate that social media strengthen their social network, not weaken it—a fact easily overlooked by the anti-social media pundits.

I can’t get too much into the data here—let’s keep that for another time. My point is that in 2024 I want to capitalize on the unprecedented potential for connection online, both in my private life and for An Educated Guess.

This is not just for the good of the newsletter, but also for myself. Back in the Netherlands I would often visit schools, companies and other organizations to speak about psychology and neuroscience, something I absolutely love to do. This part of my work has all but disappeared after my move. Using the internet I want to bring it back.

I’m therefore starting an exciting experiment: the Educated Guests video meet-up. About once a month I will hold an hour-long Zoom call where anyone who subscribes to this newsletter (free or paid) can join. I will kick off each session with a brief and light-hearted talk of about 15 minutes about one of my own research topics. The rest of the time will be spent in a low-key and fun group conversation about the topics covered in this newsletter. As a special thank-you to my paid subscribers, they will get access to the video recording of at least the talk and if the participants agree also the conversation.

What I’m hoping to achieve here is:

1. To share the most useful and practical insights from my research into neuroscience and psychology with a wider audience;

2. To find better, more refined answers to the issues highlighted in my posts, by hearing from you about your expertise, be it academic or professional or obtained in everyday life;

3. To learn more about what you’re interested in, which will allow me to write better newsletters in the future.

This video meet-up is also the moment to ask me anything you’ve always wanted to know about the brain and mind (and anything else I claim to know about)! So, are you curious about the neural basis of altruism, political polarization, or psychedelics? Do you want to know more about why poverty can cause mental illness? Or are you itching to debate a point I made about nutrition or climate change (not my primary expertise!)? Join the video meet and bring it up!

I will use my experience as a researcher and teacher at Brown University and the University of Amsterdam to try and answer your questions as best I can. When I don’t know the answer to a question, I will research it for a future newsletter issue. And since I know many of you have your own expertise—be it academic or experience-based—I expect the best answers to arise from the group discussion. This could really supercharge our thinking by capitalizing on the wisdom of the crowd, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Let’s make many educated guesses together.

The first Educated Guests Video Meet-up will take place on Wednesday, January 17th from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm U.S. Eastern Time. This is 17:30 UK and 18:30 Central European time (Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, etc.).

The Zoom link will be sent around to all subscribers (free or paid) a week in advance. You will be asked to register and suggest one question (or educated guess) for the group conversation.

Full disclosure: this is a total experiment and I have no idea if it will flourish or crash and burn. Nobody might show up or the conversation might not go anywhere. But I like talking about science and I am sure many of you do too. Simply connecting over our curiosity will likely be enough.

In the end, this entire newsletter is big experiment too and thus far it has benefited most from taking risks. So I’m going out on a limb to do what I love most: share stories of science that might be fun or useful for you to hear. To me, that seems worthy of the best connection. I hope to speak to you soon!

Next week, another Educated Guess.