Nearly all controversial issues (i.e., nuclear power, marijuana legalization, and minimum wage increases) have both benefits and drawbacks. Yet our brains resist seeing issues that way. It’s easy for us to believe that our side is fully right, and therefore that the other side is completely wrong. That’s typically what both our own side and the other is convinced of, and usually, we’re all mis...

What do people want more than anything else in the world? I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote u...

How large is a "large" correlation when it comes to studying people? Below are 166 (rather interesting!) size-ordered correlations that I calculated on 870 people in the United States, who were recruited using our study recruitment platform, Positly. All responses are self-reported by the study participants, mostly measured on a scale of 1-4 or 1-5, except those that suggest a different sca...

Possible solutions to a harmful situation you are in can usually be categorized into just four types. You can: Exit, Alter, React, or Reframe. To elaborate, if a situation is causing you harm, you can: (1) EXIT the situation so that it can’t harm you anymore. For instance, if you’re in a burning building, you can try to leave the building. (2) ALTER the nature or characteristics of t...

Personal freedom (often part of liberal and libertarian perspectives): (1) People seem better at understanding what is good for them, as individuals, than regulators are at figuring out what those same people need, so I think personal freedom to do what you like should be the default position unless there is a good reason to deviate from it. (2) I think it makes our society better, on avera...

100/0 rule - you should be 100% certain 0% of the time. 80/20 rule - 80% of output is caused by 20% of effort (not literally true, but true in spirit most of the time). 77/23 rule - the poorest 77% of the world’s population accounts for approximately 23% of the world’s income (GDP figures 2010) [1] 75/25 rule - not more than 25 percent of the total unlicensed seaman on board a documented...

Valuation bubbles seem obvious after they collapse or have a big correction (in fact, they often seem insane in retrospect), but is it possible to tell when you're inside one? If it is obvious to most investors that there is a bubble, presumably, that bubble would be likely to burst quickly. So, we shouldn't expect it to be particularly obvious from the inside of a bubble that one is currently...

Here's my list common differences between people that are so large that those at the extreme opposite ends of the trait (say, the 5th percentile vs. 95th percentile) have a very hard time understanding and relating to each other. What would you add to the list, and what am I getting wrong? Note: each of these examples is supposed to illustrate a somewhat extreme form of each trait for clarity ...

Part 1: LEARNING HACKS 1. Crowdsource improvements to ideas: when you come up with a new idea or are mulling over a complex idea and still find yourself uncertain or confused about it, post to Facebook explaining the idea, and explain that you're curious to hear what other people think about it, or whether they agree or disagree and why, or what their own theories about it are. Crowdso...

How would you go about building improved models of human psychology so that you can better help people? It might seem nearly impossible at first, but data about psychology is all around us, and there are numerous approaches you could take to discover new insights. Here are 24 different methods you could use to better understand the way humans work. In each case, I use "trying to figure out new...