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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: August 2011
(Almost) Everything is Uncertain
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” … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged chaos, expert, forecasting, prediction, probability, system, uncertainty
2 Comments
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged attraction, compatibility, dating, probability, relationships, romance
2 Comments
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. … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged cognitive bias, estimate, forecasting, planning, prediction, probability, projects
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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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged beauty, communication, information, intelligence, language, vocabulary, words
3 Comments
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged bias, cognitive bias, cost, irrationality, monetary, money, reward, time, value
3 Comments
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, … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged employees, hiring, incentives, law, law firms, legal, motives, profit
11 Comments
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged automatic, careful, conscious, heuristic, intuition, planning, prediction, problem, processing, solution, subconscious, thought, unconscious
4 Comments
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged belief, bet, gamble, prediction, probability, right, surprise, truth, wrong
5 Comments
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, … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged anxiety, brainstorming, cure, depression, guilt, help, problem, problem solving, self-help, solution, therapy
4 Comments
