Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Gates' Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, ...
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Author: Spencer
Three Types of Nuanced Thinking
I think that one of the most important skill sets for good thinking is “Nuanced Thinking,” which is what I call it when you approach a problem with open-mindedness while avoiding binary thinking traps (i.e., resisting dichotomies). Our brains, too often, are dichotomizing machines. We tend to simplify the world into true or false, good or bad, is or is not. This dichotomizing tendency works well when it comes to relatively simple topics like:
• 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our p...
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The Four States of Distress: how should you comfort a friend or loved one in need?
(co-authored with Kat Woods)
When a friend or loved one has something bad happen to them, what should you do to help them feel better? This question can be difficult to answer because it seems that at different times people want different things: empathy, problem-solving, optimism, distraction, and so on. See for instance this study where people give divergent answers about what they want from a friend after something bad happens.
We propose that there are four general states that a perso...
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Coronavirus Precautions
As you have likely heard, the Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) has continued to spread throughout the world. As of March 4, 2020, cases of the virus have been confirmed in 73 countries, including 16 U.S. states. China had a massive outbreak, which mostly seems to be under control, but the virus is spreading exponentially in many other countries. Nobody knows what is going to happen at this point, but it makes sense to be prepared in case things get bad.
Here are a few import...
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A Guide to Programming Yourself
Imagine you could program yourself like a simple robot, with rules like, "when situation X occurs, do Y." What rules would you choose to program yourself with to improve your life or the lives of those around you?
Interestingly enough, we can program ourselves in this way, and it's not even that hard to do. As a simple example, you can program yourself so that when you FIRST ENTER YOUR KITCHEN IN THE MORNING, you always DRINK A TALL GLASS OF WATER. Or you can create a rule in your ...
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Remaining Mysteries of the Universe
It's fascinating to me that, despite all of humanity's incredible progress over the last few thousand years, so many profound mysteries about the nature of reality remain.
Below is my list of what I see as the deepest mysteries.
What would you add to the list?
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LIST OF DEEP MYSTERIES ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY
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1. THE UNIVERSE
1.1 Eternity - Will our universe last forever? If it won't, what will the end of the universe be like (e.g., a new big bang, a big crun...
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What In The Hell Is Humor?
Comedy and laughter are remarkably tricky to explain. As evidence of this, I'll point to the fact that there are more than 13 different theories of humor (each described at the bottom of this post). If you examine them, I think you’ll agree that while each captures relevant aspects of humor, none satisfactorily describes humor in all its forms.
Part of what makes comedy so hard to describe is that it has such variety. While the boundaries between different types of humor are fuzzy, I think y...
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How Do You Increase The Productivity Of A Team You Are On Or That You Lead? A Simple Framework
We can think about "productivity" in terms of how much value a team creates (according to any particular measure of value) on average each month.
With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to b...
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Reasons to Forgive
Written: March 27, 2019 | Released: August 30, 2021
In my experience, many obvious-seeming psychological concepts explode in complexity when you attempt to dissect them. For instance, trying to respond to a question about "why we forgive" made me realize there are a vast number of motivations for forgiveness.
After someone wrongs you, you can forgive them based on:UNDERSTANDING
• Empathy - you realize that you would have done the same thing that they did if you had the same choice to m...
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Conversation Etiquette – How Much to Talk
Have you noticed that people often talk more (or less) than their share in one-on-one conversations? What percent of the time should you talk when you are one-on-one with a close friend, acquaintance, or stranger? I ran a study to investigate that question using our Positly.com platform (n=143 participants in the US). See an image summarizing the results here:
You might think that introverts would want the other person to talk more of the time, and extroverts would prefer to talk more, b...
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