Alternatives To Circling For Facilitating Group Connections

August 2, 2025

Circling, for anyone who hasn't tried it, is an unusual kind of "authentic relating" group activity that can help people better understand each other and themselves. Thinking about it got me wondering - what other similar activities can a group do together that can accomplish different results (that might have their own unique strengths and weaknesses)? Here's my brainstormed list of Circling alternatives. I'll start with Circling itself, for those who are not familiar. Note: if you plan to ...

Fascinating Obscure Concepts That Are Worth Knowing

July 8, 2025

For years, whenever I've encountered a word for a fascinating concept that my computer's built-in dictionary didn't recognize, I've added it to a collection I keep of "Fascinating Obscure Concepts." Here's the first part of my list of these unusual concepts you may never have encountered before: —LITTLE-KNOWN SELF-IMPROVEMENT CONCEPTS 1) Musterbating: Albert Ellis' term for rigid, self-imposed ideas that many people hold that "I/you/they absolutely must (or should) do X." Rather than seei...

You’re right about everything

July 1, 2025

You're absolutely right. About all of it. The big stuff, the weird stuff, the "nobody-gets-this" stuff. Every belief you hold is, against all odds, completely correct. I know I said before that you were wrong, but it was I who was wrong! Here's proof: 1) Unlike others, you're self-aware. You know your limits, so - unlike other people - when you know something, it's true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective revea...

Narcissists Aren’t Necessarily Who You Think They Are

June 20, 2025

Here are 8 common misconceptions about narcissists that can lead to misidentifying them or being hurt by them: —Myth #1: Narcissists don't know they are narcissistic. Surprisingly, quite a number do. Since narcissists are rarely able to see their own flaws clearly, there are 2 positions they usually take: i) I'm narcissistic, but that's good, actually or ii) I'm not narcissistic In fact, enough highly narcissistic people know they are narcissists that on anonymous surveys, the...

Does The Music You Listen To Predict Your Personality?

May 23, 2025

Does whether you like rock music rather than pop or country say something about your personality? I would have thought not, but we ran a study, and it turns out yes - in the U.S., your music tastes predict aspects of your personality! Much to my surprise, liking rock and classical music predicts the same things about your personality: having greater "openness to experience" (a personality trait from the Big Five framework) and being more intellectual. Makes sense for classical, but who wo...

Is it a problem if students cheat using AI?

May 23, 2025

A really bad take I'm hearing: "It's fine if students use AI to cheat at writing, they'll have AI in real life." It's bad because: 1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think. 2) Normalizing cheating in one d...

The Oddly Absent “Wesearch”

May 23, 2025

You might think that fields would very often apply their own methods to themselves. For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time. Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the repli...

For Health And Longevity, Be Wary Of Mechanisms

May 8, 2025

Often in health and longevity discussions, you'll hear arguments about mechanisms. For instance: Antioxidants -> reduced free radicals -> less DNA damage -> less cancer Unfortunately, these biologically plausible-sounding claims usually don't work when rigorously tested. Are mechanistic arguments useless? No. They are a great source of *hypotheses*. While most of these hypotheses fail, some eventually lead to important new treatments. Unfortunately, health gurus, podcast...

When is it worth it to argue over definitions?

April 10, 2025

It’s almost always a waste of time debating definitions with people (“semantic debates”). Just stop for a moment to define terms or switch to using the other person's definition so you don’t talk past each other. Definitions can be whatever we want them to be, and most of the time the important thing is just that our definitions match closely enough so that we can communicate effectively. Attempts to argue about definitions usually are a fool’s errand. And yet... there are some situations...

When are tariffs beneficial?

April 7, 2025

What is the point of tariffs, in general? Lots of countries have them, to at least a small degree. It's rarer that countries use them to a large degree. Why? My understanding is that there are four main reasons tariffs get put in place: (1) Special interests that benefit from tariffs lobby for them at the expense of everyone else. This is obviously a bad reason to have tariffs. (2) Sometimes countries have an interest in building out capabilities in very specific industries as part of ...