Written: May 5, 2018 | Released: June 25, 2021 Can you justifiably believe that you may be able to really change the world? There's a certain seeming absurdity in believing you can change the world. And by "change the world," I don't mean playing a small (though still meaningful) cumulative role in bringing about change as part of a group of many thousands of people, each contributing incr...

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. ...

Think of something you value that:A. multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but thatB. you assume you would not be capable of achieving, even thoughC. you have never actually tried to do this thing well before. Now suppose, for a moment, that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X...

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. ...

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...

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 acad...

Written: March 24, 2018 | Released: May 28, 2021 I suggest running experiments every month or two to find new ways to improve your life. The basic procedure is simple:(1) Think of something important you'd like to try to improve (e.g., your fitness, sleep, anxiety, dating life, friendships, productivity, happiness at work, etc.).(2) Come up with a few ideas for something safe you could start d...

Written: March 23, 2018 | Released: June 4, 2021 If we shouldn’t judge a (non-fiction) book by its cover, what should we judge it by? In my experience, highly analytical people tend to reduce non-fiction books to the ideas they contain. From this point of view, most non-fiction is pretty bad. Why bother reading 350 pages just to get 3-6 ideas? Why wade through 20 anecdotes and stories th...

Written: March 8, 2018 | Released: July 2, 2021 Guilds are common and enormously influential today. We're so used to the way that society is organized that it's easy not to notice what a "guild-based" society we have. While guilds provide major benefits, they also come with societal costs that I think are almost always under-appreciated. What I'm referring to here are professional groups th...

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 depre...