Idea-Inducing Questions

August 2, 2020

Struggling to come up with an idea for a blog post? Want to post ideas on social media but can't think of what to write about? Want to come up with interesting topics for an intellectual discussion or meetup? Use my lists of "Idea-Inducing Questions" to generate nearly endless ideas to write about, think about, or discuss! Questions about learning and truth-seeking • Recently learned: what's a powerful idea, concept, or mental model that you've been learning about recently that you...

The FIRE Framework: deciding when to trust your gut

April 7, 2019

Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019. The idea that you should "just trust your gut" - that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) - is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we're best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short). Case 1: Fast decisionsThere is no cho...

Controversial Issues – Good, Bad or Both?

January 18, 2018

Nearly all controversial issues (i.e., nuclear power, marijuana legalization, and minimum wage increases) have both benefits and drawbacks. Yet our brains resist seeing issues that way. It’s easy for us to believe that our side is fully right, and therefore that the other side is completely wrong. That’s typically what both our own side and the other is convinced of, and usually, we’re all mistaken! Since most of us discuss these controversial issues with people who share our perspective,...

Ten Useful Reframings

November 1, 2017

1. I just made a huge mistake; what on earth is wrong with me? How the hell could I be so stupid? Reframe: I'll learn so much from this mistake that I'm never going to make one like it again. 2. This bag is too heavy, I have to walk way too far Reframe: Exercise is healthy, and people pay trainers to get them to lift heavy stuff or go on the treadmill, this is just exercise with the world as my trainer! 3. This train/bus/line is taking forever, what a pain! Reframe:...

Tips for Productive Disagreements

October 6, 2017

Typically when two people disagree, neither makes significant progress in convincing the other, and little or nothing is learned on either side. It's tough to make real-life disagreements productive, but here are my favorite techniques for making it easier to do so. These help more if you are significantly motivated to use the disagreement to deepen mutual understanding of the issue. I'm assuming here that you have control over your own behavior, but not over the other persons, because th...

Coming to Terms with Mortality

September 27, 2017

Here is a list of ideas that helped me have less fear of my own mortality. I hope that you find some of them useful if you're afraid of dying.You've been dead before: you already know what it's like to be dead (i.e., it feels like nothing, it's a total lack of any experiences). You were dead from the moment of the Big Bang (assuming that's when time started) until some time after your conception. If any of the human religions turn out to be correct, then you may even have a chance of continuing...

Restaurants I wish Existed

September 14, 2017

Here is a list of ideas for wild and wacky restaurants that I hope someone will create someday. Note: If you're a creator of wacky-concept restaurants, feel free to steal these ideas, just please invite me to the opening! No Spoons (a.k.a. Soup Flight)The entire menu always consists of 30 soups (most hot, some cold, most savory, a few sweet, most classic, a few experimental). They are only served in 1.5 ounce shot glasses, which you sip the soup from; no bowls or spoons. Anyone who brings...

The Value of the Unsaid Obvious

July 16, 2017

Some thoughts on the, potentially very large, value of ideas that are both obvious and obscure, and why I like to try to state the "unsaid obvious": The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn't begin to scratch the surface. As a simple example, let's consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8x8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece...

Redesigning High School from Scratch

June 10, 2017

If you were redesigning high school education from scratch, what material would you include in the curriculum (assuming it's a well funded high school), that is generally not taught in high schools today? Some classes that I might want to include are: Thrive: staying happy and healthy. This could include: Cognitive-behavioral therapy skills training (to help ward off depression and anxiety)Emotional control strategies from dialectical behavioral therapyBehavioral activati...

Problem-Solving Techniques That Work For All Types of Challenges

June 7, 2017

photo by Jorge Láscar (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jlascar/4475570857)

A lot of people don't realize that there are general purpose problem solving techniques that cut across domains. They can help you deal with thorny challenges in work, your personal life, startups, or even if you're trying to prove a new theorem in math. Below are the 26 general purpose problem solving techniques that I like best, along with a one-word name I picked for each, and hypothetical examples to illustrate what sort of strategy I'm referring to. Consider opening up this list when...