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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
Category Archives: Articles
Break Your Downward Emotional Spiral
Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can form a vicious feedback loop, sending you into a downward emotional spiral. You get a bad review from your boss, and start to feel upset. This negative emotion brings on thoughts about when you’ve … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged anxiety, behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy, depression, distortion, emotion
6 Comments
Know Your Addictions
What are you unable to stop after you start? Do you: Tell yourself you’ll eat just a few chips, then eat the whole bag? Watch funny YouTube videos “for a few minutes”, and then notice that an hour has passed? … Continue reading
Seek Criticism
There was a time as a kid when I believed I was pretty much flawless. Unsurprisingly, it turned out I had even more flaws as a kid than I do now. I just had very poor self-awareness. In an environment with … Continue reading
Accepting Your Error Rate
No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you’ll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if … Continue reading
Planned Resolutions: meeting goals, rather than just making them
So often when we make resolutions to change our lives we fail to carry through on them. Setting a goal and telling ourselves we’ll achieve it requires no sacrifice and feels good. It’s the actual effort to achieve that requires … Continue reading
How Journalism Distorts Reality
Journalism provides us with important information about what’s going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged belief, bias, correlation, distortion, information, journalism, studies
1 Comment
Don’t Always Desire Your Desires
When we reflect on the many things that we could have, some will produce feelings of desire. But when we take an extra moment to reflect on these desires themselves, we find some to be undesirable. The desire to fit … Continue reading
Getting Yourself To Act How You Know You Should
Just because you know what you should do, doesn’t mean that you’re going to do it. You may know that it would be smart to lose weight, but aren’t on a diet. You may be convinced that when you’re feeling … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged action, akrasia, behavior, desire, forgetting, habit, inaction, knowledge, motivation, productivity
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How Can We Learn From Our Mistakes?
Suppose that you’d like to make fewer mistakes. How do you go about actually learning from the ones you’ve already made, rather than repeating them? The first step is to admit to yourself that you’ve made a mistake. Trivial errors, … Continue reading
