How to spot real expertise

April 23, 2024

Thanks go to Travis (from the Clearer Thinking team) for coauthoring this with me. This is a cross-post from Clearer Thinking. How can you tell who is a valid expert, and who is full of B.S.? On almost any topic of importance you can find a mix of valid experts (who are giving you reliable information) and false but confident-seeming "experts" (who are giving you misinformation). To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the fake experts even have very impressive credentials, and ev...

Six fresh takes on wisdom to help you become wiser

August 1, 2023

Becoming wiser seems like one of the most important things we can aim for. Yet, there's something extremely odd about wisdom: nobody agrees on what it means. Here are six thought-provoking definitions of wisdom that l find it useful to reflect on: 1) Wisdom as self-consistency: Wisdom is an equilibrium where you find alignment between all combinations of your: • values • beliefs • actions Inspiration: Justin Shovelain and Elliot McKernon 2) Wisdom as cau...

Philosophical questions that arise when we compare reality to our subjective experience of it

December 23, 2020

A surprisingly large number of unsettled questions in philosophy arise from the difficulty of meshing: A. our theoretical understanding of what things are "really" like (physics, atoms, etc.) with B. our direct, first-hand experiences as humans. Examples: (1) Ethics - most people experience a visceral feeling that some things are inherently and universally morally wrong (e.g., murdering children). Yet it's unclear what, in the universe of atoms (or in physics), could make (o...

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...

Getting Yourself To Act How You Know You Should

February 20, 2012

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 tired during the day you should do jumping jacks to boost your energy, but instead you lie down on the couch. You may know that using a formal decision making procedure is a good idea when you're trying to make important decisions, yet you've never bother to use one. So why don't we always do ...

Self-Skepticism

December 14, 2011

My 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.

Surprised? Update your model.

September 24, 2011

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 possibly know enough about the atoms composing that baseball and the air around it to simulate what will happen at the atomic level. And even if your brain did have accurate knowledge about the atoms, using information at such a fine a level of detail would be extremely comp...

Novel Ways of Carving Up Knowledge

July 26, 2011

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 knowledge can be split in plenty of other ways. But imagine, for instance, a school that offered the following subjects: Making Observations Formulating Theories Making Predictions Testing Predictions Developing Happiness Making Observations coul...