Here’s what I think: intuition is mainly a set of patterns, evaluations, anticipations and predictions that we learn from experience. Intuition differs in effectiveness across people and tasks because:
Focus: We have experience in different domains. One person spends their time cooking, another training in martial arts.
Wideness: Most have experience in more than one domain, and there can be cross-domain synergies as well. Perhaps the martial artist cook has an advantage.
Time: ...
More
Author: Spencer
Principles of Prioritization
By: Spencer Greenberg and Uri Bram
For a new project, how do you decide WHAT to do WHEN? We propose that there are two main types of projects: 'Jigsaw Puzzles' and 'Quests'. Let's explore each type and how to best prioritize the tasks that they involve.
Type 1: Jigsaw Puzzles
A 'Jigsaw Puzzle' has a finite scope; you know what the steps are, more or less. Each piece of the puzzle has to be included in the project, so the question is just what order to do them in. A good example of ...
More
An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Traits
The rules of evolution are simple: (1) if a trait makes survival or breeding more likely, then that trait will tend to survive in the long term by being passed down the generations. (2) Gene mutation and gene mixing create new traits, which naturally vary in how much they promote survival.
Yet, the consequences of these simple rules are profound. Various facets of the world are hard to understand without taking evolution into account. Since our brains and bodies (as well as the natural world...
More
Robust Good
People often underestimate how brittle attempts to improve the world are.
Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as:
A & B & C & D & E
One broken link in the chain means it looks like you're doing good but you're not really doing it.
For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this:
The medicine reliably cures the disease
& the side effects are not worse than being...
More
Five Powerful Learning Techniques Most People Have Never Tried
Obscure yet very powerful methods of learning that many people have never tried
Here are five uncommon but highly effective learning techniques:
1. Intuition Flooding
To understand something well on a gut level, spend hours looking closely at a huge number of examples, until your intuition forms a predictive model.
I do this fairly often but don’t think I’ve heard it discussed!
Example: Look carefully at 100 user interfaces.
2. Expert Observation
Ask an expert if you can wa...
More
Everyone Misspeaks, So Watch Out For Cherry Picking
Obvious but often forgotten: everyone misspeaks sometimes.
We all sometimes say things that:
don’t make much sense
we realize we don’t agree with (after a moment of reflection)
are based on misremembering facts
sound different than what we meant
High stress situations tend to increase those effects. An interesting implication: anyone on TV, or who is otherwise recorded enough times, will be found making the mistakes mentioned above. So people can cherry pick examples t...
More
Thinkers Who Say the World Is Insane
Some thinkers see that the world is far more insane than is acknowledged, and that our narratives about society, the future, or the self don’t make sense. They develop a theory to explain things.
Here’s a list of some of those theories (as I interpret them), explained in extremely concise terms as best as I could manage:
The List of Thinkers and Their Core Ideas:
1. Peter Singer
We would ruin expensive shoes to save a drowning child we walked by, but not forgo expensive shoes to sav...
More
Low-Hanging Fruit Policies That Don’t Get Implemented
Some policies seem like low-hanging fruit to benefit the US and its people, yet don’t get implemented. Why? It’s probably a combination of:
• political wars that pull things back and forth instead of moving forward
• voter confusion
• voters prioritizing other topics
• collective action problems
• they’re blocked by the few who are made worse off by them
• they are bad ideas, I’m wrong about them, or people’s values around them differ too much
Regardless of the reason, here...
More
10 Structures of Problems
The Original 10
1. Smashed WatchThere are so many issues at once that fixing one has no benefit unless you fix others too.
2. Leaky PipeFixing one problem causes the others to intensify. If you plug up one leak in a pipe leaking in multiple places, that increases the water pressure causing the other spots to leak more.
3. Shark LaserA proposed solution is not aiming at a meaningfully important problem, so it doesn’t matter how well you get it to work or how much you enhance it.
4. O...
More
There Are More Types Of Feminism Than People Realize
There are many distinct views related to feminism that most people are aware of. Here, I’ve attempted to summarize all of the ones I’m aware of. There is some overlap between them, but they are meaningfully different, and some are mutually incompatible. As you read, it may be worth considering: which one (or combination of) these viewpoints is closest to your perspective.
I also ran a survey to examine people’s level of agreement with these different views. Respondents were allowed to choos...
More