As you may have experienced yourself, sometimes, when people are chronically ill and go to lots of doctors, the doctors conclude that there is nothing medically wrong. I think it's important in these cases not to jump to a conclusion too quickly about why it has remained undiagnosed and to take seriously *all three* of these possibilities: 1) Diagnosis Error: It's a non-standard presentati...

Consider the quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -Albert Einstein Of course, that's not the definition of insanity, and Einstein didn't say it (despite the quote often being attributed to him). For those reasons, it sounds pretty stupid. But I would argue there is something wise about the quote and that it's worth...

A weird thing about anecdotes: there are so many humans, and each human has so many things happen to them, that for a great many simple stories, you might make up (as long as it is within the bounds of physics/current technology/human capacity, and isn't too specific), something similar has happened to somebody. For instance, I just made up these stories that I've never heard of ever happening...

Why do smart people fall for stupid things? Here is what I think is an important part of the answer that almost never gets discussed. It's easy to look around at the stupid seeming things that other people believe (e.g., people who join harmful cults, get scammed by a con artist, become vocal evangelists for a placebo treatment, or jump on the hype train of some outrageous new bubble) and wond...

How are personality traits distributed? Let's take a deep dive into the distribution of personality traits on Myers-Briggs-style tests, Big Five personality tests, and Enneagram tests, based on data we collected on 23,000 people globally: This bell-curve-like shape is a problem for MBTI-style tests because they want to classify each person as either Extraverted or Introverted, either Sensi...

A new word for an emotion that, very oddly, previously had no word in English:Squeeglee - "the emotion people experience when perceiving something as cute, such as a baby or puppy."Noun: "When a cat wears a hat, it fills me with squeeglee."Verb: "I squeeglee that kitten."This word is the winner of a poll where I proposed four ideas for what to call this emotion of finding something (non-sexually)...

Have a hypothesis about the world, society, human nature, physics, or anything else that nobody has directly tested before? It might seem like conducting a costly experiment would be required to find out whether it's true. But a lot of the time, you can check your hypothesis easily using what I call an "Instantaneous Experiment." How to do an Instantaneous Experiment: Step 1: Think of a...

This is part 2 in my series about "anchor beliefs" - but you don't need to read part 1 in order to understand it. I think that almost everyone has beliefs that are essentially unchangeable. These don't feel to us like beliefs but like incontrovertible truths. Counter-evidence can't touch them. They are beliefs we can't change our mind about. I call these "Anchor Beliefs." When Anchor Belief...

It's really a shame that OpenAI hasn't deployed its technology for detecting whether text was generated using ChatGPT, despite it being developed 2 years ago. They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI's inaction damages the academic environment - especially for the non-cheating students, ...

Looking for a fun but unusual and somewhat boundary-pushing activity to do with a small group of friends that requires almost no preparation? I made a little collaborative scavenger hunt designed to be done in any city. I completed it recently with friends, and it went well! Depending on the city, it may be more difficult or less difficult, but we did it in Manhattan. It's designed so that no on-...