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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: knowledge
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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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
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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
Novel Ways of Carving Up Knowledge
Normally we divide up the elements of knowledge into the traditional categories of history, literature, math, physics, chemistry, psychology, fine arts, and so forth. We are so used to these divisions that it may not even occur to us that … Continue reading
