For many years, I've thrown social experiments as part of a group I founded, called Ergo. Our rule: we can never repeat the same event format. Once we've used one, it's dead, forcing each event to be experimental. Here are a few of our bizarre/entertaining past events: 1) Novelty party: each attendee brings something interesting (an experience, food, or object) that they believe other attendee...

This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 1, 2026 This is an attempt to find out. This essay is the third in a series examining sexual harassment and assault. The first essay can be read here, which also includes more information about the study participants. The second essay can be read here. The results shown below are from a study I ran...

We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's...

I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know? • Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything • The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of c...

An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the "illusion of the self" and then claim something like “there is no self”. To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it's a mistake to assume t...

We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands due to the fracturing of media, social media and YouTu...

I think that people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the legal system (in the US, at least). For instance, many people think the US legal system is a good way to get justice when someone has committed a crime. In my experience, it's very hard to get the police to arrest someone who has committed a crime, unless the police showed up when the crime was actually in progress. While certa...

Correlations provide a very useful, quick way to summarize the relationship between two things (as a single number between -1 and 1). For instance, if we find that self-reported anxiety and self-reported depression have a high correlation (which they, in fact, do), then this suggests a substantial link between the two conditions. But something odd happens when we calculate correlations involvi...

It's fascinating how, with a slight adjustment to our focus and perspective, we can enjoy a positive moment more, which means more enjoyment in our lives at essentially no cost (other than the effort of learning and practice). In other words, we can derive more enjoyment from positive experiences without changing anything about our lives. While it’s of course also often beneficial to make actual ...