To What Extent Are Women In The U.S. Actually More Social Justice Oriented Than Men?

October 30, 2025

There's a claim growing rapidly in popularity that organizations in the US have become much more social justice-oriented/woke over the decades because of the increasing fraction of women in them. Note that this is not a claim about organizations becoming generically progressive or liberal, or about women being progressive-leaning. It's a much more specific claim: that institutions in the US became much more social justice-oriented/woke in (a specific belief system held by some pro...

You’re right about everything

July 1, 2025

You're absolutely right. About all of it. The big stuff, the weird stuff, the "nobody-gets-this" stuff. Every belief you hold is, against all odds, completely correct. I know I said before that you were wrong, but it was I who was wrong! Here's proof: 1) Unlike others, you're self-aware. You know your limits, so - unlike other people - when you know something, it's true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective revea...

How to spot real expertise

April 23, 2024

Thanks go to Travis (from the Clearer Thinking team) for coauthoring this with me. This is a cross-post from Clearer Thinking. How can you tell who is a valid expert, and who is full of B.S.? On almost any topic of importance you can find a mix of valid experts (who are giving you reliable information) and false but confident-seeming "experts" (who are giving you misinformation). To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the fake experts even have very impressive credentials, and ev...

Three motivations for believing

April 20, 2024

There are three different motivations for belief, and it's important to distinguish between them. 1) Belief because you think something's true. For instance, you may think that the evidence supports the idea that you will eventually find love, or you may feel convinced by logical arguments you've heard in favor of god's existence. 2) Belief because you think it's useful to believe. Regardless of whether you predict something's true, you can predict that believing it will...

Oversimplifiers vs. Difference Deniers: a dynamic regarding group differences that leads to rage and confusion

December 17, 2023

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 ("Oversimplifiers") observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: "A's are like this, B's are like that." (3) O...

The many forms of belief

October 11, 2020

What does it mean to believe? We often say things like "I believe..." and "they think that..." But what do we really mean by a "belief"? It's notoriously tricky to define. For starters, we sometimes think of beliefs in binaries (true vs. false) and other times in probabilities (a 90% chance of coming true). We sometimes would be willing to bet on our beliefs ("I'll bet you $100 that New York City is not the capital of New York State"), and other times we wouldn't be willing to bet (e.g...

Three Types of Nuanced Thinking

June 15, 2020

image from: https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vixok

I think that one of the most important skill sets for good thinking is “Nuanced Thinking,” which is what I call it when you approach a problem with open-mindedness while avoiding binary thinking traps (i.e., resisting dichotomies). Our brains, too often, are dichotomizing machines. We tend to simplify the world into true or false, good or bad, is or is not. This dichotomizing tendency works well when it comes to relatively simple topics like: • 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our p...

Religions are endlessly fracturing

August 3, 2017

One day, a number of years ago, I decided to try to diagram out all of the schisms and splits I could identify in the Abrahamic religions (which include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism). Click here for a high resolution version of this image. As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I'm sure i...

What Seemed Like Perfect Reasoning Utterly Failed

February 1, 2014

Does warm water sometimes freeze faster than cold water when placed in the same conditions? "Absolutely no way," I said, a mere minute after I heard the claim. "People sometimes claim that NASA faked the moon landing too," I thought to myself. I pointed out why this claim is impossible. As warm water cools it must eventually reach the same temperature that the cool water started at. From that point on, the warm water will behave just like the cool water, but it will have taken the warm water a ...

Contradictory Insight

November 7, 2013

I was recently having a conversation with Geoff A. and Jana G. about how to systematically generate surprising ideas. I then sat down and created this program with them based on our discussion. Take a minute to try it, and generate some insight that you've never considered before! Click here to run Contradictory Insight!