Can you trust survey responses?

March 29, 2025

Self-reporting on surveys seems ridiculously unreliable. People can lie or may not pay attention. People misremember things. People often lack self-insight. And YET, self-reporting fairly often works remarkably well in measuring things. Here are some examples: (1) In a large study we ran, IQ (measured by performance on intelligence tasks) had a strong correlation with self-reported (remembered...

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Is IQ Legitimate or B.S.?

March 25, 2025

Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny. To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study. We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, m...

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Five types of people who spread misinformation

March 22, 2025

People often assume that public figures who spread false information are just “liars.” Still, I think it’s more accurate and useful to realize there are at least five distinct and important types of misinformation spreaders: 1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call...

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Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions

February 13, 2025

Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions for at least two reasons: You can’t reason based on track record in the same way you can with normal predictions. The stakes are extremely high. Being wrong on normal predictions rarely matters as much. Why? Regarding point one, reasoning based on track record: Normally, a type of prediction being wrong again and again will...

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Why can’t society agree on who is a “man,” who is a “woman,” and who is neither? An empirical and philosophical investigation into the metaphysics of gender.

February 7, 2025

by Spencer Greenberg Gender is a central part of many people's identities, and yet a very basic and politically contentious question is still being debated: What IS gender? And what defines whether someone is a "man," a "woman," or neither? This question is especially topical and important now in light of the January 20, 2025, Executive Order from Donald Trump attempting to define w...

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The Crud Factor: what’s the average correlation between totally random human traits?

January 24, 2025

We gathered >1 million human correlations spanning personality, demographics, behaviors, and beliefs, which enabled us to investigate an interesting question: is everything correlated with everything? In other words, is the so-called "crud factor" real? Here's our answer. On average, there is almost no correlation between human variables (see image). The average is only r=0.02, with the median...

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Educators Helping To Improve Rational Thinking

January 24, 2025

I've recently been thinking that there are 4 main categories of educators who are trying to correct bad thinking or help improve rational thinking and that 3 out of 4 of them are essential for improving critical thinking across society (whereas one type is probably harmful): Child education: those who aim to teach children "critical thinking," - which often (but not always) means teaching the...

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The effects of AI on chess

January 5, 2025

It's interesting to observe the effects of AI on chess as a sport. You might expect that since AI defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997, and subsequently, AI became far better than any human player, interest in chess would diminish. But interestingly, there has been a surge in interest over the past 5 years, with more and more people playing and watching it (COVID and the Queen's Gambit get some of the ...

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Is magic “real”?

December 13, 2024

Is magic "real"? No, of course not - but also, yes, absolutely. Some people think that magic exists out there in the world. Many others think that magic doesn't exist at all. I believe that a more accurate view than both is that magic "exists" but only in the specific way that "redness" exists. Before I get into why I believe this, first let me explain what I mean by "magic." I don't ...

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Trusting the science

November 20, 2024

Is it a bad idea to broadly tell people to just "trust the science"? I think so. The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science: 1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society. 2) A lot of "science" is actually fake - see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago. 3) "Sc...

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