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...

Is gun ownership a constitutional right? What about a “right to privacy” that makes it unconstitutional to ban birth control? And can the federal government really use the power to regulate “commerce among the several states” to make laws banning certain plants in cases when they are grown only for private use? I know of 8 approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution (and its amendments). ...

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...

I’ve noticed that people start with different assumptions about what usually causes large, positive changes in the world. It is rare for us to directly address these differences in worldview, even though they may contribute to difficulties seeing eye-to-eye on how we can make things better. For instance, I think some people believe that large, positive change usually comes about due to one or ...

If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, "Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions," which allows attendees to see each other's (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn. I've included the details of the event format belo...

Books about how to be likable and charismatic often say things like: LOOK make eye contact when people are talking to you (but look away occasionally so as not to be creepy, and look away for a greater proportion of the time when you're talking since that's what people do naturally) REPEAT reflect back to people what they've said to you (e.g., "So you're saying that…") ASK get people tal...

It's easy to underestimate how remarkably different our psychological experiences can be. "Psychological outliers" may be much more common than you think because there are so many ways a person can be an outlier. If you are a psychological outlier in some way, you may assume others are more similar than they really are (much the way that synesthetes, who experience a combination of different sens...

You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I...

There is a surprising lack of consensus on how to do statistics, especially as applies to science. As the tool that underpins the scientific enterprise, you'd think we would have figured it out by now. You'd be wrong. The mathematical proofs are, of course, very rarely disputed. The use of mathematics is much more often disputed. Why do these disputes arise? I've observed five different typ...