Becoming a great public speaker is hard! To make it easier, here is a list of tricks for giving better talks or lectures, organized by when to use each trick. CREATING YOUR CONTENT Brainstorm Before doing a ton of external research while developing your talk, first get down the parts of the talk that you can pull directly from your mind and memory to give yourself a much faster star...

Suppose that if we humans keep doing an activity, then we'll have at least a P percent chance of causing the most horrible series of events so far in human history within 50 years. How big does P need to be before it's irresponsible to say, "Well, the horrible event is unlikely to happen, so let's not worry about it"? 50% (1 in 2)?5% (1 in 20)?1% (1 in 100)?0.1% (1 in 1,000)?0.01%? (1 in 10...

Opposing parties in debates over commonly-raised questions often fail to focus their arguments on the same concept. These "ambiguous questions" are usually those that are fundamentally unresolvable until one disambiguation of the question is agreed upon. Until that disambiguation is reached, the debate often swirls in circles as different parties effectively argue about distinct topics, seemingly...

Here's my list of 23 high-impact ideas (for work, fun, health, etc.) that I've internalized over time: Health If you don't like exercise, instead of forcing or avoiding it, find ways to make it fun so that you actually want to do it (e.g., find a different type , such as a sport that engages you, or allow yourself to watch your favorite TV show or listen to your favorite podcast only while...

Here's my favorite philosophy of mind thought experiment that challenges pur view of personal identity or "self". It takes a while to explain but is quite a mind fuck, so bear with me. THE SETUP It feels, to nearly everyone, on a gut level, that I am 'me' and you are 'you', and consciousnesses are distinct from each other and easy to separate. Moreover, the vast majority of people acc...

It's not often discussed, but I believe that pre-cursors to commonly-diagnosed mental disorders often come with some benefits (as well as "flip side" costs that are linked to those benefits). As these traits become more extreme in nature (e.g., sufficiently far in the direction of what would be considered a diagnosable clinical disorder), these "flip side" costs (as well as other costs not associ...

I've been trying to better understand and resolve two seemingly contradictory (yet I think critically important) facts about human nature: (1) Human groups have pretty much always done unspeakably horrible things to other groups (e.g., think mass murder and numerous forms of oppression). And fairly often, while it is happening, this evil seems to be condoned, supported, or only passively oppos...

What does the formula for happiness look like? Here's my attempt at it: happiness =    social-acceptance+ self-acceptance+ meaning+ hope+ pleasure+ efficacy+ resilience+ optimism - physical-wants- pain- anxiety- loss and depression   Positives social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level fe...

Are you a "credentialist" or "non-credentialist"? Here's a test I designed so that you can find out. After noticing a number of times that people's feelings about formal credentials can differ dramatically and that this seems to impact their views on certain important topics, I've been working on defining a "credentialist" trait (or attitude). In a nutshell, the non-credentialist/credential...

One oversimplified but potentially useful way to think about corporate regulation is to prevent it from being profitable to cause harm. Of course, this can be very challenging to achieve, and one can debate what "harm" means, how broadly it should be construed, and what to do in cases where there is substantial uncertainty about how to make harm unprofitable. But insofar as it's unprofitable t...