Watch as your mind is thoroughly broken by these easy to state probability questions. intuiting probabilities = too hard for us mortals Problem 1 - That Tuesday Boy Is Your Bane Ajax has exactly two children. For no reason, in particular, you decide to ask Ajax, "is at least one of your children a male that was born on a Tuesday?" and he truthfully replies, "yes". Given this information you just learned, what's the percentage chance that both of Ajax's children are male (assuming a ran...

Right after you get back from a trip or action-packed vacation, I highly recommend the following: think through each day of the trip, one by one, and write a list of all the things you did. Visualizing each activity as you write it down. To ensure more detail, you can also do this at the end of each day of the trip, rather than waiting until the end. This will greatly improve your memory of your trip and make it a more valuable experience. It also makes it much easier to reminisce, and to co...

I’m not a designer or UI/UX person by trade, but I have to think a lot about interfaces and design in my work. Here are the 39 things I’ve learned over the years (including illustrative examples) about how to create nice looking interfaces and an effective user experience. (In my own designs I still have plenty of room for improvement along many of these dimensions.) Keep in mind that even if you don't do design FOR your work, you may still need to do design IN your work, whether you're making ...

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 ...

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...