1) Round numbers: use "decrease decimal point" or "format" to automatically round numbers to the greatest number of decimal points that are truly useful (so 0.15, not 0.15121215 and 32%, not 32.42%).
2) Set units: use the "format" feature to make percentages into actual percentages (ending in %), to make dollar figures into actual dollar figures (starting with $), and so on. This makes it easier to interpret figures at a glance.
3) Use formulas: anything that can be calcul...
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Author: admin
Did That Treatment Actually Help You?
A mistake we all make sometimes is attributing an improvement to whatever we've tried recently. For instance, we may get medicine from a doctor (or go to an acupuncturist) and feel better, so we conclude it worked. But did it actually work, or was it just chance? Here's a trick to help you decide:
What matters (evidence-wise) is how likely that level of improvement would have been in that time period if the treatment works relative to how likely that improvement would have been if the treatm...
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Problems with meta-analyses
Meta-analyses are supposed to combine the evidence on a topic from many studies (e.g., does melatonin help sleep?) to produce an answer. Many people even consider them the gold standard for evidence about scientific questions.
Unfortunately, taking a weighted average of many different studies sometimes doesn't work because averaging the studies can be meaningless.
Suppose a meta-analysis on "meditation for depression" tries to average the results of a one-hour app-based mindfulness medita...
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You can’t buy back time once you’ve spent it
There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted.
If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable.
But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars building a yacht is not the dollars spent but the enormous quantity of people's time and all ...
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How can you help friends or family members who are struggling with a mental health challenge?
I've noticed that it's quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it's also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations.
With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here's a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is ...
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Personality traits as continuous spectrums
Nearly all human traits lie on continuums. Even many multi-trait conditions can be viewed as having distinct traits that each lie at one end of a spectrum. There are a number of cases where we only have a word for one side of a psychological spectrum, and we lack a word for what you'd be like if you inverted all the most common traits of a condition. Here's an attempt to give names to these opposites:
[Note: I've updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I firs...
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Reflecting on your life principles
When was the last time you reflected on your life principles? If you haven't reflected on them recently, why not schedule a time to do so?
Principles act as shortcuts to help you make choices that you'll be satisfied with, and they serve as beacons to guide you toward a better version of yourself. They also serve as an encapsulation of important lessons you've learned throughout your life.
We recently released an interactive module to help you determine your principles. It also makes it e...
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Demystifying p-values
There is a tremendous amount of confusion around what a p-value actually is, despite their widespread use in science. Here is my attempt to explain the concept of p-values concisely and clearly (including why they are useful and what often goes wrong with them).
— What's a p-value? —
If you run a study, then (all else equal, aside from rare edge cases) the lower the p-value, the lower the chance that your results are due to random chance or luck.
More precisely: a p-value is the probab...
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A step-by-step process to get full text access to most scientific and academic articles and papers
People often struggle to find the full-text of scientific papers. Here is a step-by-step guide to finding full PDFs of these articles. Be sure to follow all rules, laws, and regulations in your jurisdiction, and be sure you are aware of potential risks before using any of these methods.
Method 1: Search the title at http://scholar.google.com. If a pdf or full-text is available, it will show up as a link on the right-hand side of the search result. This works to find full text f...
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Importance Hacking: a major (yet rarely-discussed) problem in science
I first published this post on the Clearer Thinking blog on December 19, 2022, and first cross-posted it to this site on January 21, 2023.
You have probably heard the phrase "replication crisis." It refers to the grim fact that, in a number of fields of science, when researchers attempt to replicate previously published studies, they fairly often don't get the same results. The magnitude of the problem depends on the field, but in psychology, it seems that something like 40% of studies i...
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