Ario Jafarzadeh

If you want to sample a mix of X voices on Iran, check out this list: x.com/i/lists/732252…

Wharton’s latest AI study points to a hard truth: “AI writes, humans review” model is breaking down Why "just review the AI output" doesn't work anymore, our brains literally give up. We have started doing "Cognitive Surrender" to AI - Wharton’s latest AI study points to a hard truth: reviewing AI output is not a reliable safeguard when cognition itself starts to defer to the machine.when you stop verifying what the AI tells you, and you don't even realize you stopped. It's different from offloading, like using a calculator. With offloading you know the tool did the work. With surrender, your brain recodes the AI's answer as YOUR judgment. You genuinely believe you thought it through yourself. Says AI is becoming a 3rd thinking system, and people often trust it too easily. You know Kahneman's System 1 (fast intuition) and System 2 (slow analysis)? They're saying AI is now System 3, an external cognitive system that operates outside your brain. And when you use it enough, something happens that they call Cognitive Surrender. Cognitive surrender is trickier: AI gives an answer, you stop really questioning it, and your brain starts treating that output as your own conclusion. It does not feel outsourced. It feels self-generated. The data makes it hard to brush off. Across 3 preregistered studies with 1,372 participants and 9,593 trials, people turned to AI on over 50% of questions. In Study 1, when AI was correct, people followed it 92.7% of the time. When it was wrong, they still followed it 79.8% of the time. Without AI, baseline accuracy was 45.8%. With correct AI, it jumped to 71.0%. With incorrect AI, it dropped to 31.5%, worse than having no AI. Access to AI also boosted confidence by 11.7 percentage points, even when the answers were wrong. Human review is supposed to be the safety net. But this research suggests the safety net has a hole in it: people do not just miss bad AI output; they become more confident in it. Time pressure did not eliminate the effect. Incentives and feedback reduced it but did not remove it. And the people most resistant tended to score higher on fluid intelligence and need for cognition. That makes this feel less like a laziness problem and more like a cognitive architecture problem.

I asked Claude to build my daughter an app that plugs into our piano, can read live key strokes, can show her sheet notes and key view and ends with a Guitar Hero style game. All while giving progressively harder songs. Today she’s using It and crushing It.

I joined CNN's @KateBolduan to discuss field updates from Iran and analysis of the regime's military and security response. Iranians have received a first chance in many generations to reclaim their motherland. We won't miss this chance.

High agency design engineers have a super power of asking seemingly obvious questions about issues/gaps they see, letting their untainted curiosity lead them to investigate further, and then employ their skills to rectify gaps (blissfully unaware of historical constraints). It’s beautiful

Best podcast I’ve heard yet on the current conflict

Today I'm releasing my entire newsletter archive (350+ posts) and all podcast transcripts (300+ episodes) as AI-friendly Markdown files. Plus an MCP server and GitHub repo. A few months ago I shared my podcast transcripts on a whim, and y'all built the most amazing things—an RPG game, a parenting wisdom site, infographics, a Twitter bot, and 50+ other projects. Let's see what happens when I give you even more data. Grab the data here: LennysData.com. Paid subscribers get all of the data (some 350 posts and 300 transcripts). Free subscribers get a subset. I don’t think anyone’s ever done anything like this before, and I’m excited to give you this excuse to play with that AI tool you've been meaning to try. Here’s my challenge to you: build something, and let me know about it. I’ll pick my favorite and give you a free 1-year subscription to the newsletter. Just post a link to your project in the comments here: lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-i-built-…. If you’ve already built something, slurp in this new data and submit it, too. I’ll pick a winner on April 15th. Check out today's newsletter post for inspiration on what you could to build: lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-i-built-… LFG.

@NazaninBoniadi why have you blocked me on Instagram? We’re in the same ultimate fight here, are we not?

Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo. Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, the same circuit that processes cocaine and sex, fires at levels in response to sound that it will never reach again for the rest of your life. A 2011 McGill study used PET scans and fMRI simultaneously and found that music triggers dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. The caudate nucleus lights up during anticipation of the good part. The nucleus accumbens lights up when it hits. Your brain is treating a guitar riff with the same reward architecture it uses for food-seeking and pair bonding. During adolescence, that response is dramatically amplified. Pubertal hormones are flooding the system. The prefrontal cortex is still wiring itself. Memories formed during this window get encoded with a density of emotional tagging that nothing in your 30s or 40s can replicate. Researchers at the University of Leeds identified this as the “reminiscence bump”: the period when your sense of self is forming, and the music playing during that formation becomes structurally integrated into your identity. A 2025 longitudinal study from the University of Gothenburg analyzed 40,000 users’ streaming data across 15 years. Younger listeners explored broadly across genres. Older listeners collapsed into increasingly narrow loops, almost entirely anchored to music from their teens and early twenties. Your brain stopped losing interest in new music years ago. It’s running a cost-benefit analysis. Familiar songs deliver guaranteed dopamine with zero processing cost. New songs require pattern recognition, expectation-building, and repeated exposure before the reward circuit kicks in. Past 25, most people stop paying that tax. The one variable that predicts whether someone keeps exploring: the personality trait “openness to experience.” Score high, you keep seeking. Score average, you default to the familiar forever. The fix, if you want one: deliberate exposure. Three listens minimum before your auditory cortex builds enough predictive models to generate a reward response. One passive listen on a playlist will never get there. Your brain needs repetition to find the pattern, and it needs the pattern to release dopamine.

ironically having haters is an amazingly good signal because opposition is one of the only reliable feedback mechanisms for whether you're actually doing something interesting.

50% of all relationship advice on Reddit is “leave.” 15 years of data, 52 million comments, and the trend line only goes one direction. A researcher filtered r/relationship_advice down to 1,166,592 quality comments and tracked what people actually recommend. In 2010, “End Relationship” sat around 30%. By 2025, it’s approaching 50%. “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%. Every category that requires patience lost ground every single year. The one category growing faster than “leave” is “Seek Therapy,” which went from 1% to 6%. The subreddit is slowly learning to say “this is above my pay grade.” Train a model on this dataset and it would absolutely tell people to break up. The training data is 50% “leave” and climbing. The model wouldn’t be broken. It would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe about your relationship. A 50% prior that you should leave, a 14% prior that you should talk about it, and a 6% prior that you need a professional. That’s not LLM psychosis. That’s the median human opinion on your relationship, backed by the largest advice dataset ever assembled.

@daniel_dsj2110 @JOHNMAUS will know

Are there no longer any world renowned philosophers? I can’t think of anyone in their 50s or 60s now that has the influence of a Rawls or Habermas— neither of them were as influential as Foucault. Of course, I’m not that familiar with the state of philosophy in China or Africa.

Never forget this Islamic regime massacred 43,000+ people in 48 hours on January 8-9, 2026. Here’s an infographic to make clear the scale of this regimes evil. That’s a full stadium full of humans 50 acres of humans 6 football fields of humans, The DC National Mall filled with humans. 898 murders an hour 15 murders every 15 minutes 1 murder every 4 seconds @POTUS @VP @marcorubio @PeteHegseth @SecScottBessent @netanyahu @PahlaviReza

⚠️ Update: Two full weeks have now passed since #Iran fell into digital darkness amid a regime-imposed internet blackout. The public remain isolated from the outside world with only a limited domestic intranet after 336 hours while state-approved accounts get whitelisted access.

God, I love this prompt.

stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle's support bot is free:

it’s kinda crazy ppl don’t realize everything you ever encounter is a bundle of tradeoffs. products, people, etc. you buy into the whole package or you don’t. there’s no unbundled version waiting somewhere with the rough edges filed off. e.g. the reason apple products feel inevitable is that the constraints are actually the things that are load bearing. the thinness of the thing costs you the port or the battery life. the walled garden costs you freedom but buys you coherence. you’re not meant to want everything. you’re meant to recognize yourself in a particular set of sacrifices. the same logic applies everywhere.

It’s very telling to see which folks in the Iranian diaspora call others “FOB” and make fun of Persian accents. Hint: it’s never people who want Iran to have outside help

One of the best takes I’ve seen on AI. Humans just aren’t designed to make their life as efficient as possible.

Incredible

I'm really enjoying the fact that Americans are using Iranian memes and adapting them to pre-existing American memes. I feel like our two Nations are using humour to rekindle a forgotten friendship that has been dormant for the last 47 years. We are using comedy to heal. 🇺🇸🇮🇷