In memory of Daniel Kahneman, who accelerated our understanding of the mind

March 27, 2024

Photo by Andreas Weigend on Flickr. Cropped but otherwise unaltered. Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

I'm not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of: Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments) Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases) The focusing illusion (where we overempha...

Seven simple but effective methods for improving your connection with others

March 15, 2024

Here are some of the most useful simple methods I've adopted for improving my connection with others (though I still have room for improvement): 1) When you like someone, greet them warmly, demonstrating with your face and body language that you like them. 2) Try your best to channel "interested attention" in conversations - where you give the other person your total focus while paying very close attention to what they are saying (and how they are saying it) and starting with the prem...

Does money buy happiness, according to science?

February 28, 2024

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024. Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...

I’m an extreme non-credentialist – what about you?

February 28, 2024

I'm an extreme (>99th percentile) non-credentialist. Does that mean if I find out someone has a nutrition Ph.D., then I don't think they know more about nutrition than most random people? Of course not. Credentials are evidence of what someone knows (e.g., having a nutrition Ph.D. is evidence that you have nutrition knowledge). But part of what makes me an extreme non-credentialist is that if I spend an hour watching someone with a nutrition Ph.D. debate a completely self-taught person, a...

Do we all have strange beliefs?

February 2, 2024

Many people think that if you have one really weird (presumed false) belief that society would label “crazy,” then that implies you’re an idiot, or bad, or crazy yourself. Think “QAnon,” “the moon landing was faked,” or “all GMO foods are dangerous.” But I think approximately everyone has at least one of those beliefs; it’s just not that obvious because many of these strange beliefs are idiosyncratic, and people often hide them from each other and sometimes even from themselves (by avoiding ...

When Is Gossip Good?

January 28, 2024

Gossip has a very bad reputation. The word "gossip" itself (and its synonyms, like "idle talk," tittle-tattle," "hearsay," "blather," and "rumor-mongering") have negative connotations. And this bad reputation is not totally unreasonable, as gossip is sometimes very harmful. But, on some occasions, it's actually a very good and useful thing that people gossip. For instance, if someone in a community is genuinely very dangerous, it's important that the evidence of this is spread throughout the...

How great is the U.S., really?

January 5, 2024

This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog. According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth? The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...

Think smarter about what’s “good”

December 20, 2023

Cross-posted on the Clearer Thinking blog. Travis Manuel helped to edit and improve this post. People like to think of things as "good" or "bad," such as: Trans fats are bad for you, and broccoli is good for you. Lethargy is bad, but exercise is good. Being cowardly is bad, and having courage is good. A problem with putting something in the "good" bucket of your mind, though, is that this can lead to the belief that the more of it there is, the better. But most go...

Understanding two of the weirdest theorems in math: Gödel’s incompleteness

November 17, 2023

Gödel's incomplete theorems are famously profound, strange, and interesting pieces of math. But it's hard to understand them, and especially hard to understand why they are true. I've never been quite satisfied with the explanations I've seen for the general public, so I wanted to take a crack at explaining what these theorems say and give a flavor of why they hold. See what you think: Incompleteness Theorem 1 is about whether all mathematical truths can be proven. The first inco...

Four reasons art is made – and how they shape the art world

November 11, 2023

There is something very strange about the art world, which, I think, has to do with art stemming from four different motivations that often come into tension with each other. More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons: 1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this urge. In this category, I would also include art that is mainly motivated by helping the artist ach...