Why Do Victims Often Not Report Sexual Harassment Or Assault?

October 2, 2026

This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on October 1, 2026 This is my final essay 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 and the third essay can be read here. I sometimes hear people ask why victims of sexual harassment or assault don’t report what happened to them (or why they sometimes wait years to mak...

My Social Experiments

August 13, 2026

For many years, I've thrown social experiments as part of a group I founded, called Ergo. Our rule: we can never repeat the same event format. Once we've used one, it's dead, forcing each event to be experimental. Here are a few of our bizarre/entertaining past events: 1) Novelty party: each attendee brings something interesting (an experience, food, or object) that they believe other attendees will not have experienced before. A winner is crowned based on surveying attendees about how novel...

Why We Need And Lose Institutions

July 24, 2026

It’s sometimes easy to forget that institutions often arise as solutions to problems. For example: • Journalism uncovers and spreads information that matters to people that would otherwise be hard for them to know. • Education teaches people what they'll need to know that they won't easily learn on their own. • Science increases our understanding of (and control over) reality. • Civil Courts right wrongs between people. • Finance (among other things) e...

What Do People Who Have Committed Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault Say About Why They Committed It?

July 2, 2026

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 ...

What’s Between Us and Reality

June 30, 2026

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...

The Mental Models You Don’t Know About

April 13, 2026

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-...

Does Meditation Really Demonstrate There Is No You?

March 23, 2026

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...

Age Of Gurus

March 4, 2026

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...

Will The U.S. Legal System Get You Justice?

December 28, 2025

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...

A problem with correlations: rare traits usually have small correlations to other things, just by virtue of being rare

December 27, 2025

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...