Are You a Doomer, a Zoomer, or a Tuner?
When alarming information races, a third response is possible — and learnable.
Updated March 5, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
On a Sunday in February, a 7,000-word essay from Citrini Research appeared on a finance Substack. It was fiction — explicitly labeled as such, set in 2028, describing a cascade of AI-driven unemployment and market collapse its authors called a "human intelligence displacement spiral." Within 24 hours it had tens of millions of views. By Monday, the Dow had dropped 800 points. Citadel Securities published a formal rebuttal within 48 hours. Within a week, markets had largely recovered and the episode had been absorbed back into the scroll.
Robert Shiller, whose work on narrative economics earned him a Nobel Prize, has spent decades documenting what traders resist believing about themselves: that markets move on stories as much as fundamentals, and that the emotional system responds to narrative before the analytical one catches up. This has been true since the tulip bubble. What is new is the delivery mechanism — and the speed.
This is not the crisis Citrini described. It is the one the Citrini event exemplifies — the proverbial tail wagging the dog.
So: what kind of thinker were you that week? And — more pressingly — what kind of thinker do you want to be the next time something like this lands in your feed? Because it will. And the next version may be considerably better designed with the aid of an AI acting as a expert in psyops.
Two Responses, Neither of Them Useful
There is a name for what happened to the market that Monday. Behavioral economists call it System 1 thinking — the fast, automatic, pattern-matching mode that served our ancestors well when the threat that moved fastest won. Daniel Kahneman spent a career documenting the gap between the system that fires first and the system capable of deliberate analysis. The gap is not a character flaw. It is architecture. And it was never designed for a world in which tens of millions of people receive the same alarming narrative simultaneously, before breakfast, on a device in their pocket.
The responses that followed — panic selling on one side, institutional rebuttal on the other — look like opposites. They are not. Both are System 1 in different costumes. The doomer sells everything and asks questions later. The zoomer dismisses the concern before engaging it. Both are moving fast. Neither is sitting with the uncertainty long enough to do anything useful with it. The prefrontal cortex — the part capable of longer time horizons and deliberate analysis — requires time and deliberate effort to engage. That Monday, neither side gave it much.
What makes the Citrini event more than a familiar market panic is its category. In work currently in preparation with co-author Varun Mehta, we argue that AI-driven events constitute a genuinely new type of disaster: "AI Disaster" — distinct from natural disasters, which have no agent, and from human-made ones, where accountability has an address. AI-driven disasters occupy an uncanny middle: the accountability response fires, but has nowhere to land. The model, the data, the engineers, the procurement officer, the regulator — all are partially responsible, none completely. That diffuse, objectless quality amplifies threat perception in ways that are predictable, documented, and worth understanding before the next event arrives. This general stance toward disaster is formalized in the Model for Adaptive Response to Complex Cyclical disasters, a systems-level view on crisis prevention, preparedness, and response.
There is a third way, generally true for how folks consider AI. Not zoomer, not doomer, but rather tuner .
A tuner is someone who, when the alarming narrative lands, does something deceptively simple: slows down. The tuner has what therapists call an internal supervisor — the part of you that can observe your own reaction in real time. I notice I want to sell everything. I notice I feel certain the scenario is overblown. I notice I am moving fast.
That noticing creates a gap — however small — between the narrative hitting your feed and your finger moving toward the execute button. In that gap, System 2 becomes possible. Not guaranteed. Possible. The tuner is not a different kind of human. The tuner is a human who has built a slightly better operating system for moments exactly like this one — and who tends to make considerably better decisions when the floor feels soft.
What Tuning Actually Looks Like
The capacity to hold uncertainty without collapsing into either catastrophe or dismissal is not evenly distributed, but it is more learnable than it appears in moments when the floor feels soft. What distinguishes the tuner is less a matter of temperament than of developed habit: the kind of thing that might come from having done real therapeutic work, or from having lived long enough through enough market cycles to develop a felt sense of the difference between genuine emergency and the experience of emergency — which, as any clinician or trader who has survived a few of these will attest, are not always the same thing.
In practice, tuning feels less dramatic than either of the alternatives. It's slowing down when everything in the nervous system is signaling speed — not because slowing down is comfortable, but because the habit has been built in advance of the moment that demands it. It's speaking with at least one other person before acting on alarming financial information — not to be talked out of anything, but to restore enough reflective capacity to think rather than simply react. It's asking who benefits from the information traveling as fast as it did, and gauging the urgency against what you actually need to do to remain efficient within the relevant timeframe — which is almost never as compressed as the activation makes it feel.
Kahneman's insight holds here: One cannot simply choose to think slowly when the System 1 alarm is firing. But one can build the environments and habits that make slower thinking more likely — and that work happens before the crisis, not during it. The human psyche, updated and maintained, is not a liability in volatile conditions. It may be the most underleveraged competitive advantage available.
The Citrini event recovered cleanly. The lesson did not visibly retain — which is itself a data point. The same speed that made the exploit possible makes the structural learning difficult. Markets rebooted, ran a counter-narrative, and resumed normal operations. Nobody publicly asked what it means that a fictional scenario could have done that, or what a more sophisticated version of the same mechanism might accomplish.
A learning model trained on this event and every prior narrative-driven market disruption, optimized for maximum psychological impact and minimum rebuttal time, is not a science-fiction scenario. It is an engineering problem, and not a particularly difficult one. The financial system is a larger and softer target than most people inside it want to believe — not because the people are soft, but because the vulnerabilities are structural, documented, and now faster to exploit than at any prior point in history.
The aggregate of individual responses is the market response. Enough tuners changes the vulnerability profile of the system — not by eliminating the alarm, but by widening the gap between receiving it and acting on it. That gap is where the thinking lives. Building it is not a self-improvement project. It is, at sufficient scale, a form of systemic resilience .
Harry Stack Sullivan observed that human beings are "simply more human than otherwise" — a generous recognition of the durability of human nature across centuries and circumstances. The pattern — alarm, reaction, rebuttal, recovery, repetition — has been stable across centuries of financial crises. What has changed is the infrastructure available to exploit it.
Van Geelen, J., & Shah, A. (2026, February 22). The 2028 global intelligence crisis. Citrini Research.
Citadel Securities. (2026, February 26). The 2026 global intelligence crisis. Citadel Securities.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Vibrant Emotional Health, Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, & Decision Point Systems. (2022). Model for Adaptive Response to Complex Cyclical Disasters (MARCCD). marccd.info/
Shiller, R. J. (2019). Narrative economics: How stories go viral and drive major economic events. Princeton University Press.
Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry (H. S. Perry & M. L. Gawel, Eds.). W. W. Norton & Company.
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Grant Hilary Brenner, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, helps adults with mood and anxiety conditions, and works on many levels to help unleash their full capacities and live and love well.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.