My Top-10 Weakly-Held Policy Perspectives

February 2, 2019

Written: February 2, 2019 | Released: June 27, 2021 Change my mind! Below are my very tentative, weakly held perspectives on ten very complex policy topics. If you have strong evidence or solid arguments against (or for) any of these viewpoints, I'd be really interested to know. Please post in the comments, referencing which topic you are referring to (e.g. "#1 - Heath insurance", "#5 - Death penalty", etc.). --- A few notes: I'm assuming the constraint that proposed policies are not a...

Meaningful Hypothetical Traditions

December 27, 2018

There is a vast number of hypothetical traditions that could be practiced, compared to the few that actually are. If you were inventing a new tradition that you and millions of others would practice one day each year for many years to come, and you wanted it to produce positive effects on the participants, what would your new tradition be? Below are a few ideas for hypothetical traditions. I’m sure some would dislike each of these, but I’m hoping some of them would add net value if actually ...

Computer Keyboard Commands That Actually Save Time

November 24, 2018

Many of us spend a lot of our time at our computers. Yet how efficiently do we really use them? Memorizing the most useful keyboard commands might save you minutes a day. Here are some of the most useful ones I've found: Switch windows within a single application (Command-` on Mac)Paste while using the formatting of the document you're pasting into (Command-Option-Shift-V on Mac)Skip to next/previous email in the Gmail email client (k and j once you turn on Gmail key commands)Show desktop (F...

The Relationship Between Personality and Life Satisfaction

November 16, 2018

What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out! We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffi...

Non-Fiction That’s Worth Reading

November 15, 2018

Are you looking for a good non-fiction book to read? Yesterday I asked people to share one of the best non-fiction books they've ever read, that may be lesser-known. The request yielded 102 unique recommendations, only 18% of which were familiar to me. Incidentally, there was very little overlap between this list and Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Best Non-Fiction Books" (found here: http://bit.ly/2qOzZrh), there appear to be ~5 books in common. As a personal frame of reference for...

Minimizing Cognitive Loads

April 27, 2018

Written: April 27, 2018 | Released: June 27, 2021 It seems easy to underestimate the extent to which one "cognitive load" might sap your capacity for others. This underestimation could be having detrimental effects you aren't aware of. For instance, if you are trying to have a deep and important conversation in a noisy and distracting environment, it may seem that it's merely hard to hear. But, it's possible that the effort you expend trying to understand the other person's words causes f...

Understanding the Scope of Human Morality

April 18, 2018

Written: April 18, 2018 | Released: June 27, 2021 What is the scope of morality? If we look across cultures (including micro-cultures that exist within other cultures), there is a vast number of things that people view as immoral. However, if you eliminate those that are only viewed as immoral because they are believed to lead to other things viewed as bad, the list becomes a lot smaller. So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as inherently immoral, that is, a...

Predictors of Extreme Success

April 16, 2018

What traits, behaviors, or characteristics of a person are the best predictors of whether they achieve extremely high levels of success in their life? For instance, those who have: created billion-dollar companies with huge influence (e.g., Elon Musk)made multiple revolutionary scientific advances (e.g., Einstein)achieved absurdly high levels of skill at sports (e.g., Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who set the long-standing world record in the seven-event Olympic sport "Heptathlon")reached extraordin...

How to Identify ‘Hot Topics’ in Various Fields of Study

April 6, 2018

Ever wonder what the biggest topics are in academic Artificial Intelligence research, or Gender Studies, or Decision Science, or Dental Hygiene research? Want to figure out whether an academic discipline is actually valuable to society, or see some of the most important insights a field has generated in the last five years? Here's my (relatively) easy method for getting a sense of what an academic discipline has been "thinking about" by quickly examining the top two most cited papers from fi...

The Many Models for Depression

February 28, 2018

People often argue whether depression is, or is not, caused by a "chemical imbalance". Much of what happens in our brains is chemical, why would depression not be? If by "imbalance" we happen to mean "a state of brain chemicals that the patient doesn't want", as opposed to, say, some specific theory that is now discredited like "not enough serotonin" (i.e., the low serotonin myth), then depression can reasonably be thought of as a "chemical imbalance". Disagreement about whether depressi...