There was a time as a kid when I believed I was pretty much flawless. Unsurprisingly, it turned out I had even more flaws as a kid than I do now. I just had very poor self-awareness. In an environment with little criticism, it’s easy to forget about your flaws. But the more aware of them you are, the better position you will be in to correct them. So when you get really serious about self-impro...

No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you'll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if you've freed yourself from thinking in terms of true and false dichotomies, and made the effort to convert your beliefs to probabilities or degrees of be...

So often when we make resolutions to change our lives we fail to carry through on them. Setting a goal and telling ourselves we'll achieve it requires no sacrifice and feels good. It's the actual effort to achieve that requires willpower and sacrifice, so it shouldn't be a surprise that we set goals more often than we actually take significant steps towards achieving them. But another, importan...

Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading t...

When we reflect on the many things that we could have, some will produce feelings of desire. But when we take an extra moment to reflect on these desires themselves, we find some to be undesirable. The desire to fit in with the crowd may be accompanied by a contrary desire to be unconcerned by what other people think. Or we might long to be reunited with an ex, but feel averse to having those feel...

Just because you know what you should do, doesn't mean that you're going to do it. You may know that it would be smart to lose weight, but aren't on a diet. You may be convinced that when you're feeling tired during the day you should do jumping jacks to boost your energy, but instead you lie down on the couch. You may know that using a formal decision making procedure is a good idea when you're t...

Suppose that you'd like to make fewer mistakes. How do you go about actually learning from the ones you've already made, rather than repeating them? The first step is to admit to yourself that you've made a mistake. Trivial errors, like accidentally putting the container of orange juice in the freezer, are easy enough to come to terms with. But for more serious matters, or matters that involve pr...

Why do people who hate that they overeat keep overeating? Why do people who know that their girlfriends or boyfriends are bad for them keep taking these girlfriends and boyfriends back? Why do so many people who want to go to the gym never actually bother to do it? These circumstances can be explained, at least partially, in terms of desires changing and conflicting with each other. What we wan...