When you’re predicting how much a variable changes over time using a regression, do you tend to add the baseline value of that variable as a predictor to control for it? If you do, you can end up with completely misleading results.  For example, if you’re trying to predict change in anxiety in 2025 vs. last year (anxiety in 2025 minus anxiety in 2024), you’ll get misleading results if you ente...

I believe that if you are healthy and have a healthy diet, then taking 30+ supplements per day (even if you spend a ton of time researching which ones to take) has a net negative expected value on your health. The two fundamental issues are: Issue 1: That every supplement has: -a chance of harmful interactions with other drugs/supplements (and as you take more and more, the number of pot...

I have a number of intrinsic values, but two of my most important intrinsic values are happiness and the lack of suffering for conscious beings. While these are fairly common intrinsic values, I suspect many people actually value them more than they realize. In other words, upon careful reflection, many people would realize that happiness and lack of suffering are stronger intrinsi...

A lot of psychological terms don't mean what people think they mean (at least, not according to psychologists). There's an increasing drift between how they get used colloquially in everyday language and the commonly accepted definitions among psychologists. There's a sense in which the lay usage is "wrong" (in that it doesn't match more scientific, precise, or technical usage), but of course,...

There are a ton of false narratives that circulate widely in and about the US. To help combat that, here's a list I've been compiling of facts that contradict common narratives related to the US that many people believe. In some cases, these facts contradict common beliefs that most Americans hold, whereas in other cases, they contradict beliefs held mainly just by some subgroups (e.g., subgroups...

What causes bad things? It sounds like a huge question, but maybe it's not as big as it seems. Here's my updated/improved list of high-level causes of bad things in the world. Note that these are not mutually exclusive categories. I've also added some potential solutions for each cause. I'd be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of s...

A common worry is that technological development, and increasingly advanced AI in particular, will necessarily remove meaning from our lives. For instance, if humanity ends up in a situation of extreme material abundance, but at some point there is a lack of ability for most (or all) people to do work that's value-additive, will that lead to widespread depression and lack of meaning? While I t...

People often say things like the following about anger's relationship to other emotions - but are they B.S.? They say: "Depression is anger turned inward." "Anger is sadness's bodyguard." "Anger is just a manifestation of sadness." "There is an anger iceberg (anger on top, with sadness, fear, or shame beneath)." "In men, sadness and depression show up as anger." While there is...

It's interesting how studies on the negative effects of social media on mental health are mixed: some find an effect, some don't (or only find a very small effect). Some take this as proof that social media is actually fine for mental health. My hypothesis is different. I think that the effects of social media are extremely heterogeneous based on app, population, and dosage: that in some subgr...

There's something really interesting and potentially important happening in the space of people suffering from chronic medical conditions that modern medicine provides no good solutions for, such as Long COVID, IBS, functional dyspepsia, fibromyalgia, chronic back or joint pain without injury/disease, ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, PTLDS/Chronic Lyme disease, and so on. I'm talking here specificall...