Which Risks of Dying Are Worth Taking?

October 16, 2013

First, click here to figure out your chance of dying tomorrow. Is it worth taking a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying , in order to experience the novel thrill of sky diving? Is a 1 in 500,000 chance of death worth it to go bungee jumping? It's hard to know whether these risks are reasonable, because numbers like 100,000 or 500,000 feel so abstract to us. To think more clearly about these numbers, it helps to get our intuitions engaged. We can start by figuring out the daily risk of dying that...

Do Your Methods Reliably Lead You to the Truth?

October 8, 2013

Would you be satisfied believing merely what it's trendy to believe? If so, you can adopt the beliefs of the people of your country, city, and friend group. But if you want to reliably have truer beliefs, you're going to have to use different methods than most people do. Selecting which "epistemic methods" to rely on may be one of the most important decisions you make. Your epistemic methods may determine the career you choose, the political party you vote for, the God or Gods you worship, wh...

Why We Overvalue What We No Longer Have: The Psychology of Loss

October 3, 2013

We over value the things we have, overreact when we can't have something anymore, and resist change. In other words, we hate loss. But because loss is frequent and inevitable, our hatred of it guarantees that we suffer. Let's take a look at the psychological mechanisms that make us act this way. The Endowment Effect Suppose that Nathan and Mae are two students at the same school. It is randomly determined that Mae will be given a school mug, which she gets to keep. Mae then writes down the le...

How Can We Explain Tiny Startups Crushing Huge Tech Companies?

September 24, 2013

Suppose that mega-corp, a large corporation, has hundreds of employees, hundreds of thousands of customers, tens of millions of dollars of cash, a recognized brand, and an experienced CEO. Tiny-upstart, on the other hand, is just two twenty-five year olds with an idea, no funding, no users and no business experience. If mega-corp and tiny-upstart are in the same line of business, then by any reasonable stretch of the imagination tiny-upstart will lose the fight. So how is it that tiny sta...

Make a Plan to Improve Your Life

September 20, 2013

Have you considered creating a plan to improve your life? If not, how about doing it right now? Or if you don't want to make one for yourself, you can use this one. A friend asked me to help him make a plan to become happier. He is already pretty happy, but thought he could be more so. What you see below is the general life improvement plan we came up with, which should apply to most people (plus some improvements I added for this post). Each week of the plan is an experiment, where you wo...

Break Your Downward Emotional Spiral

July 16, 2012

Your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors can form a vicious feedback loop, sending you into a downward emotional spiral. You get a bad review from your boss, and start to feel upset. This negative emotion brings on thoughts about when you've made mistakes at your job, and you feel even worse. You now start imagining your boss firing you, and your mood sinks into despair. Let's dissect what's going on here. An event triggers an upsetting thought, and the thought causes negative emotion. With you...

Know Your Addictions

July 7, 2012

What are you unable to stop after you start? Do you: Tell yourself you'll eat just a few chips, then eat the whole bag? Watch funny YouTube videos "for a few minutes", and then notice that an hour has passed? Choose to have "one drink", and end up having five? Decide to play video games "for an hour" and then later discover you've been at it the entire night? Tell yourself you'll check your stock portfolio "just once more" today, and then check it three more times? Regardless of w...

Accepting Your Error Rate

June 4, 2012

No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you'll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if you've freed yourself from thinking in terms of true and false dichotomies, and made the effort to convert your beliefs to probabilities or degrees of belief, you'll still be wrong by way of assigning high probabilities to false propositions. Most pe...

Planned Resolutions: meeting goals, rather than just making them

May 7, 2012

So often when we make resolutions to change our lives we fail to carry through on them. Setting a goal and telling ourselves we'll achieve it requires no sacrifice and feels good. It's the actual effort to achieve that requires willpower and sacrifice, so it shouldn't be a surprise that we set goals more often than we actually take significant steps towards achieving them. But another, important part of the story as to why resolutions are so often ineffective is that they often lack a plan. S...