If you try to enumerate all of the things that you know with absolute, 100% certainty, you will find that the list is very small.
You know that “something” exists.
If you have mental experiences, then you know that “you” exist (though coming up with a reasonable definition for what “you” means can be remarkably tricky).
If your mental experiences are varied, then you know that whatever exists creates varied mental experiences.
With some cleverness, you may be able to add to this list ...
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Month: August 2011
Finding Good Relationships Faster
For those who are interested in finding someone to date, a little probabilistic thinking can help a lot. To see how, let's take a moment to analyze the situation.
Every time that you meet a new person, there is some chance that you will end up in a romantic relationship. If we want to assign a probability to this happening in any particular case, that probability will depend on the information that we know about both you and this other person. For instance, if we know that he or she is of a g...
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Predicting Using the Past
When we try to predict how long a task will take, we are in danger of falling prey to the planning fallacy. This is the natural human tendency to underestimate how long your own projects will take and the costs involved.
To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, the average estimate was about 49 days. In fact, the average time it took the students to complete t...
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Eschew Obscure Words
Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like "nonplused", "loquacious" and "limerance" spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don't consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books or articles. Unfortunately, obscure words have a tendency to interfere with communication.
Sometim...
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Viewing Your Time As Money
Should I wait in line to get this free mug? Should I walk to dinner rather than taking a taxi? Should I drive an extra fifteen minutes to go to the cheaper grocery store? Should I keep reading reviews for another twenty minutes to make sure I've really found the best hot water bottle that $10 can buy? These questions can be quite difficult to answer without a framework for valuing our time, especially since considerations of this sort tend to trigger cognitive biases.
To figure out how much w...
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Your Law Firm Does Not Have Your Incentives
If you hire a law firm, as an individual or the owner of a small business, there is a pretty good chance they will bill you by the hour. So if the work performed takes 100 hours rather than 50, you will pay them twice as much. From the law firm’s perspective, this is reasonable, because each one of their work hours is about as valuable to them as every other one (holding the specific employees on the project constant). However, if we are justified in assuming that law firms are entities that can...
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Adapting Your Expectations for Friendship
One of the most powerful methods for changing how well you get along with others is to learn to adapt your expectations to how people are likely to behave. In fact, this simple trick is so powerful that it makes it possible for you to have satisfying and mutually value creating friendships even with unreliable, dull or self-centered people, should you choose to do so.
Consider the complete opposite of expectation adaptation: you have a single set of expectations that you hold all of your friend...
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Careful Analysis vs. Automatic Processing
Thinking very carefully about problems can be an extremely powerful way to answer questions or make predictions. But there are some problems for which our non-conscious processing systems produce superior results.
Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as "dangerous" or "not dangerous", "food" or "not food", "person" or "not person", ...
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Keeping Ideas at a Distance Using Probability
We often talk about ideas by using phrases like "I believe X." But what do we mean when we say that we "believe" in an idea? Do we mean that we have 100% confidence that the idea is true?
Let's hope not. Even statements that we all would say we very strongly believe, like "tomorrow the sun will rise", and "I am not a robot" we should not assign 100% probability to. While we can be very, very, very certain that the sun will rise tomorrow and that our brains are not computers, we cannot be abso...
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You Know That Worst Problem In Your Life? Go Fix It!
Sometimes it is obvious to us what our biggest problem is. We can pinpoint one thing in our life that is by far our biggest source of unhappiness or stress, and we know that if we were to correct it, our life would be substantially improved. When this happens, it makes self-improvement easier in a certain sense, since it provides us with an obvious route to improving life. If you have twenty problems, all of which produce roughly equal reductions in your happiness, it can feel overwhelming just ...
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