This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 1, 2026
This is an attempt to find out.
This essay is the third in a series examining sexual harassment and assault.
The first essay can be read here, which also includes more information about the study participants. The second essay can be read here.
The results shown below are from a study I ran about sexual harassment and sexual assault on a sample of people in the U.S. (574 people recruited on ou...
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Author: Spencer
What’s Between Us and Reality
We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than p...
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The Mental Models You Don’t Know About
I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-...
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Does Meditation Really Demonstrate There Is No You?
An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the "illusion of the self" and then claim something like “there is no self”.
To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it's a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all t...
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Age Of Gurus
We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands due to the fracturing of media, social media and YouTube.
If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come u...
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Will The U.S. Legal System Get You Justice?
I think that people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the legal system (in the US, at least). For instance, many people think the US legal system is a good way to get justice when someone has committed a crime. In my experience, it's very hard to get the police to arrest someone who has committed a crime, unless the police showed up when the crime was actually in progress.
While certain laws are overenforced (e.g., some drug use-related crimes, minor traffic violations) and some ver...
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A problem with correlations: rare traits usually have small correlations to other things, just by virtue of being rare
Correlations provide a very useful, quick way to summarize the relationship between two things (as a single number between -1 and 1). For instance, if we find that self-reported anxiety and self-reported depression have a high correlation (which they, in fact, do), then this suggests a substantial link between the two conditions.
But something odd happens when we calculate correlations involving rare traits: the correlation usually has a small magnitude (i.e., is close to zero)!
To illust...
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Four ways to get more pleasure from good things
It's fascinating how, with a slight adjustment to our focus and perspective, we can enjoy a positive moment more, which means more enjoyment in our lives at essentially no cost (other than the effort of learning and practice). In other words, we can derive more enjoyment from positive experiences without changing anything about our lives. While it’s of course also often beneficial to make actual changes to our lives, I think most people underestimate how much we can enhance our lives through su...
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Psychological Words That Don’t Mean What You Think
A lot of psychological terms don't mean what people think they mean (at least, not according to psychologists).
There's an increasing drift between how they get used colloquially in everyday language and the commonly accepted definitions among psychologists. There's a sense in which the lay usage is "wrong" (in that it doesn't match more scientific, precise, or technical usage), but of course, language has always been and always will be in flux. At the end of the day, a word does mean what p...
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Don’t Use The Baseline Value As One Of The Predictors When You’re Predicting A Change In The Same Variable
When you’re predicting how much a variable changes over time using a regression, do you tend to add the baseline value of that variable as a predictor to control for it? If you do, you can end up with misleading results.
For example, if you’re trying to predict change in anxiety in 2025 vs. last year (anxiety in 2025 - anxiety in 2024), you’ll get misleading results if you enter anxiety in 2024 as one of the predictor variables. If this sounds counterintuitive to you, read on. I’m inte...
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