Gossip has a very bad reputation. The word "gossip" itself (and its synonyms, like "idle talk," tittle-tattle," "hearsay," "blather," and "rumor-mongering") have negative connotations. And this bad reputation is not totally unreasonable, as gossip is sometimes very harmful. But, on some occasions, it's actually a very good and useful thing that people gossip. For instance, if someone in a comm...

Cross-posted on the Clearer Thinking blog. Travis Manuel helped to edit and improve this post.  People like to think of things as "good" or "bad," such as: Trans fats are bad for you, and broccoli is good for you. Lethargy is bad, but exercise is good. Being cowardly is bad, and having courage is good. A problem with putting something in the "good" bucket of your mind, thoug...

Here's a misery-filled dynamic that I believe commonly plays out regarding small observed differences between groups: (1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions. (2) Some people ("Dichotomizers" or "Oversimplifiers") observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small ...

Gödel's incomplete theorems are famously profound, strange, and interesting pieces of math. But it's hard to understand them, and especially hard to understand why they are true. I've never been quite satisfied with the explanations I've seen for the general public, so I wanted to take a crack at explaining what these theorems say and give a flavor of why they hold. See what you think: Inc...

There is something very strange about the art world, which, I think, has to do with art stemming from four different motivations that often come into tension with each other.  More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons: 1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this...

As you may know, Sam Bankman-Fried ("SBF") was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. He now faces the potential of more than 100 years in prison. I've been trying to figure out how someone who appears to believe deeply in the principles of effective altruism ("EA") could do what SBF did. It has been no surprise to me to see that the actions he was convicted of are nearly universal...

Imagine you lived in a universe where whatever you give your attention to gets drawn to you. So, if you pay attention to cute dogs on the street, you'll soon be followed by cute dogs all the time. And if you pay attention to the angry guy muttering to himself, soon there will be angry mutterers all around you. This is similar to what new age spiritualism calls the Law of Attraction ("you attract ...

Coauthored with the Clearer Thinking team and cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog. We recently conducted qualitative research by crowd-sourcing over 100 open-ended responses to the question: "What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy or who are likely to hurt you if they become your close friend or partner?" We thought t...

I've done a bunch of experimentation with giving permanent custom instructions to ChatGPT/GPT-4. Below, I've included the set of custom instructions that seem to work the best for me. Feel free to use these instructions if you find them helpful (you can make them permanent so they get used with every prompt you send to GPT by adjusting your settings): -In your responses, channel the wi...