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Recent Posts
- Break Your Downward Emotional Spiral
- Know Your Addictions
- Seek Criticism
- Accepting Your Error Rate
- Planned Resolutions: meeting goals, rather than just making them
- How Journalism Distorts Reality
- Don’t Always Desire Your Desires
- Getting Yourself To Act How You Know You Should
- Making Really Hard Decisions
- How Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?
- The Seven Causes of Disagreement
- Wanting While Not Wanting
- Self-Skepticism
- Do We Know Why We Act?
- How Great We Are
- Testing Too Many Hypotheses
- Your Beliefs as a Temple
- Surprised? Update your model.
- Deconstructing Accomplishment
- Human Symbiogenesis
- If That Didn’t Solve Your Problems, Try Something Else
- Finding Our False Beliefs
- (Almost) Everything is Uncertain
- Finding Good Relationships Faster
- Predicting Using the Past
- Eschew Obscure Words
- Viewing Your Time As Money
- Your Law Firm Does Not Have Your Incentives
- Adapting Your Expectations for Friendship
- Careful Analysis vs. Automatic Processing
- Keeping Ideas at a Distance Using Probability
- You Know That Worst Problem In Your Life? Go Fix It!
- Demystifying the Magic Of Attraction
- Fighting Against Your Counterproductive Inclinations
- Reimagining What You Think You Want
- Agencies Are Not Agents
- Planning Your Life Based on Your Ideal Ordinary Week
- Truth Discernment Can be a Super Power
- Experts Are Expert But Not Necessarily In What You Think
- Changing Your Life Using Habits
- The Interplay Between Your Reason and Emotions
- What’s So Special About Your Own Beliefs?
- Some Things Are Only In Your Simulation
- Still Living with the Emotions of our Ancestors
- Do We Really Read Non-fiction to Learn?
- Novel Ways of Carving Up Knowledge
Monthly Archives: July 2011
The Interplay Between Your Reason and Emotions
It can sometimes be useful to think of yourself as consisting of multiple systems. You have an emotional system that constantly processes your sensory input and thoughts, and produces emotions like fear, anger, happiness and contempt based on this input. … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged belief, cbt, cognitive therapy, distortion, emotion, irrationality, rationality, reasoning, system
1 Comment
What’s So Special About Your Own Beliefs?
Suppose that Tom and Sally have a disagreement over a factual question (as opposed to one of values or preferences). She claims that the argument he is making has errors or is unconvincing, but Tom feels the same way about … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged argument, belief, debate, disagreement, fallacy, justification, logic, rationality, truth
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Some Things Are Only In Your Simulation
It is impossible to perceive anything directly. What we experience as a visual image starts out as electromagnetic radiation of various frequencies which reflects off of an object and then hits our eye. The photoreceptor cells in our eye are … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged brain, cleanliness, exist, existence, impurity, neurology, reality, simulation, vision
2 Comments
Still Living with the Emotions of our Ancestors
According to evolutionary theory, emotions evolved because they were helpful for survival. Anxiety alerts us to potential danger and makes us wary. Anger motivates us to fight and shows our allies that we need help. Jealousy motivates us to keep … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged anger, anxiety, emotion, evolution, fear, genetic, reaction, self improvement
3 Comments
Do We Really Read Non-fiction to Learn?
When you ask people why they read non-fiction, they are likely to tell you that their primary motivation is to learn. But are people’s behaviors really consistent with this being their motivation? Almost all of the information that we read … Continue reading
Novel Ways of Carving Up Knowledge
Normally we divide up the elements of knowledge into the traditional categories of history, literature, math, physics, chemistry, psychology, fine arts, and so forth. We are so used to these divisions that it may not even occur to us that … Continue reading
