Four tiny parables about starting a company

December 22, 2018

TLDR: become a looper of questions to know how to program the machine that will polish the stone while you outlast the jungle. 1. Looping the Question “What don’t I know that I must know?” This Meta Question is your obsession. The answer to that Meta Question is itself a question, and it leads you to create your first data loop (say, conducting a series of interviews with experts). After sucking down much of what it has to teach you, you’re hearing the same answers again and again. Da...

Facial self-awareness – a psychological difference

November 10, 2018

Here's a social characteristic that divides us that I think few people are aware of: how often, during a typical face-to-face conversation, do you pay attention to or visualize what your facial expressions must look like to the other person? I first became aware of this distinction during a conversation with friends, where we stumbled on the realization that we are very different from each other in this way. I am almost never aware of my face, whereas one of my friends is aware of it most of...

How word choice subtly manipulates us

October 19, 2018

Images by Lisa "welshie.wonders" on Pexels (eye) and Piotr Łaskawski on Unsplash (letters)

It's remarkable the degree to which language can paint a picture of something being good or bad, or someone being trustworthy or unreliable, without actually making any factual claims. The more aware of this you become, the more you start seeing it all over the place. Language is often not neutral and objective even when it professes to be. We all know that language can have positive or negative connotations without actually claiming anything specific, but I think it's easy to underestimate how...

The many ways to make inferences

October 7, 2018

There are a LOT of ways to make inferences. Many more, I think, than is generally realized. And they all have their weaknesses. You can make inferences using… (1) Deduction: As a consequence of the definition of X and Y, if X then Y. X applies to this case. Therefore Y. “Plato is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore Plato is mortal.” “For any number that is an integer, there exists another integer greater than that number. 1,000,000 is an integer. So there exists an in...

The Inner Why Technique

October 5, 2018

Here is a simple technique I really like using that I think can help us (a) better understand ourselves and (b) have more say over how we react in response to our emotions. I call it the "Inner Why" technique. How to do it:When you notice a sudden change in your emotional state (e.g., you start becoming anxious, sad, frustrated, or angry), immediately give yourself the best quick explanation you can for WHY you think that change in your emotions just occurred. The sooner you can do it after ...

How good is our sense of taste? Do we even know what we actually like?

September 23, 2018

I recently conducted an in-person mini-experiment on whether we can tell different beverages apart - and how much we like them (with co-organizer Hannah Vazquez). Different stations were set up, each containing small (<1oz) tasting cups of a single type of beverage (with 5-6 distinct beverages of that type, labeled A, B, C, etc. so that nobody could tell which was which). The stations were: 5 types of water 5 types of cold coffee 5 types of pinot noir red wines (of varying pric...

The Museum of Questioned Quality

July 21, 2018

What would a fine art museum be like, if it were optimized relentlessly for what you care about? Within the limits of my ability to model my own preferences, I think my ideal fine art museum would be what I'm going to call "The Museum of Questioned Quality." I suspect lots of people would find this museum concept distasteful, to say the least. So before describing what the museum is, I'll explain why the idea is appealing to me and what the idea sprouts from. The Museum of Questioned ...

A thought experiment about what you’d be truly capable of doing (if you had no choice)

April 26, 2018

Think of something you value that:A. multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but thatB. you assume you would not be capable of achieving, even thoughC. you have never actually tried to do this thing well before. Now suppose, for a moment, that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X months. Here, X could be 1 if it's a very small thing, or X could be 100 if it's a much larger thin...

How to run self-experiments to improve your life

March 24, 2018

Written: March 24, 2018 | Released: May 28, 2021 I suggest running experiments every month or two to find new ways to improve your life. The basic procedure is simple:(1) Think of something important you'd like to try to improve (e.g., your fitness, sleep, anxiety, dating life, friendships, productivity, happiness at work, etc.).(2) Come up with a few ideas for something safe you could start doing (or start doing differently) that you think may have a reasonable chance of substantially impro...