The Theories of Change List: Causes of Behavior Quickly Shifting in a Positive Direction

August 23, 2017

Mostly people stay the way they are, or change slowly. So what are the reasons that individual human behavior sometimes quickly shifts in a positive direction? Here's my current "theory of change" list. It seems to me that developing a better understanding of behavior change is incredibly important for creating a better world. Some of these categories are, of course, overlapping. OPERANT CONDITIONING Rapid small rewards: your friends respond very positively when you crack jokes, so you end up ...

Psychological Immune Systems – the List

August 23, 2017

A really important difference I've noticed between people is how their "psychological immune systems" work. In other words: people differ substantially in the collection of strategies that their brains use when bad things happen to prevent themselves from becoming too unhappy or too dysfunctional for too long. This seems like an important part of understanding why some people are happier than others, even in the face of difficult challenges. Here is my list of the different psychological immune...

Amazing Possibilities in Virtual Reality

August 23, 2017

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following: (1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction). (2) massively multiplayer real-time environments (with fast internet and computers with state of the art GPUs, this is fairly doable a...

Guessing the Probability Distribution

August 23, 2017

Tips for guessing what distribution a variable (or set of values) might have People often assume that the frequency with which a variable will take on different values (i.e., probability distribution) is likely to follow a bell curve (i.e., a normal distribution); this is often a mistake. Instead, consider these rules of thumb for deciding which probability distribution to use as a model in different situations: (1) Binomial - when flipping coins Number of occurrences out of a fixed nu...

Describing Your Group Identity

August 18, 2017

A thought experiment about the pros and cons of describing your group identity in different ways: should the person in this example identify as being a member of the group or not? Suppose that the vast majority of people identify themselves as being either part of group Apple, Banana, or Cherry and that these groups are typically viewed as being mutually exclusive (e.g., few people say they are "Apple-Bananas"). Furthermore, suppose that on the issues where Apples, Bananas, and Cherries all ...

Nature Versus Nurture – Can We Know For Certain?

August 15, 2017

People often want to know the extent to which a trait is genetic versus environmentally determined (e.g., "nature" versus "nurture"). This distinction is not nearly as clear cut as is usually assumed. Let's consider the obvious example of height in a population, a trait that's well known to be purely hereditary. Many causes of a population's height distribution are not hereditary. For example, a population's height is also determined by economic factors, like whether there was malnourishment...

The Cactus Crossing Conundrum

August 6, 2017

The Cactus Crossing Conundrum is an ethics and "fairness" thought experiment I wrote for you in which your moral intuitions are represented as a number between 0 and 100: Suppose there are two villages, "Smallville" and "Largeford," which are a 5-minute walk apart. There are 100 people in Smallville and 200 people in Largeford - so Largeford has twice as many people in it. According to their ancient traditions, ALL of the people in the two villages must meet once per month in one of t...

Religions are endlessly fracturing

August 3, 2017

One day, a number of years ago, I decided to try to diagram out all of the schisms and splits I could identify in the Abrahamic religions (which include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism). Click here for a high resolution version of this image. As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I'm sure i...

How To Be A Better Public Speaker

August 2, 2017

Becoming a great public speaker is hard! To make it easier, here is a list of tricks for giving better talks or lectures, organized by when to use each trick. CREATING YOUR CONTENT Brainstorm Before doing a ton of external research while developing your talk, first get down the parts of the talk that you can pull directly from your mind and memory to give yourself a much faster start and make it a lot clearer where the holes are and what actually needs to be researched. This preve...

What level of societal risk is too much to dismiss?

August 1, 2017

Suppose that if we humans keep doing an activity, then we'll have at least a P percent chance of causing the most horrible series of events so far in human history within 50 years. How big does P need to be before it's irresponsible to say, "Well, the horrible event is unlikely to happen, so let's not worry about it"? 50% (1 in 2)?5% (1 in 20)?1% (1 in 100)?0.1% (1 in 1,000)?0.01%? (1 in 10,000)?0.001%? (1 in 100,000)?0.0001%? (1 in 1,000,000)? To me, it seems bizarre to dismiss a thre...