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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
Tag Archives: belief
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
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
The Seven Causes of Disagreement
There are an incredible range of subjects that people disagree about, but only a small number of core reasons that people disagree. When we encounter complex and difficult to resolve disputes, it can be helpful to break them down in … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged agreement, belief, debate, definitions, disagreement, facts, fallacy, information, logic, signaling, values
4 Comments
Self-Skepticism
My recent talk “Self-Skepticism” at Skepticon 4 in Missouri. I discuss what led me to become skeptical of my decisions and beliefs, as well as what studies say about the reliability of our self-knowledge. Click here for the talk slides.
Posted in Videos
Tagged accuracy, action, belief, decision, knowledge, rationality, self, self-skepticism, skepticism, truth
4 Comments
How Great We Are
Most of us know we are great. We easily see our own potential, goodness, and areas of skill. We’re sure we have strong justifications for our behaviors and beliefs. When things go wrong for us, it usually isn’t fundamentally our … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged belief, delusion, flaws, irrationality, self image, self improvement
2 Comments
Your Beliefs as a Temple
Your beliefs form something like a temple. The temple has many columns, rooms, and towers. The columns are facts and reasons that support the rooms. The rooms of the temple represent your major beliefs. The towers correspond to beliefs that … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged argument, belief, change, debate, disagreement, justification, rationalization
4 Comments
Surprised? Update your model.
In order to make predictions, your brain must have a model of reality. This model is necessarily much simpler than reality itself. To see why, imagine that you are about to drop a baseball from waist height. Your brain can’t … Continue reading
Finding Our False Beliefs
By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can’t possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged belief, bias, correct, disagree, emotion, error, false, prediction, rationality, true, truth, wrong
3 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
