To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it’s a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all the meaningful senses of that word. 

I have two concerns here.

1) An experience of something being a certain way does not itself make it not that way. By analogy, if someone has an LSD trip where they have the experience of “not having a body”, that experience itself doesn’t necessarily imply that they truly don’t have a body. Similarly, the experience of not having a self doesn’t automatically mean the self doesn’t “exist” in any meaningful sense. An experience of something being true is different than the thing being true, even if that experience feels incredibly real and accurate.

2) The “self” refers to more than just the feeling of having a self, or there being a “self” that chooses our thoughts. There are lots of aspects of self, and even if we rule some out, that doesn’t mean there is no self at all; it only means some versions of self don’t hold. For instance, one part of having a self – and of myself being different from you – is that when I prick my finger, I directly feel it, but you don’t. That makes me a self that’s different than you. Meditation doesn’t remove this notion of self. There are many other notions of self as well, such as us existing as a bundle of personality traits, associations, memories, etc., that meditation also doesn’t remove. 

On the other hand, to defend meditation practices for a moment, I do think that they can show us that some of our naive assumptions about our experiences are genuinely incorrect. For instance, by causing us to pay a lot more attention than normal to our moment-to-moment experience, meditation can lead us to realize that our mind doesn’t work the way we assumed. A good example of this is when we pay close attention to where our thoughts come from and, in doing so, notice that many of them seem to just appear in our minds without us consciously choosing to think them. I believe that’s a valid observation. It’s less “I feel this is true, so it must be” and more “I paid more attention to what’s happening moment-to-moment and noticed things weren’t operating the way I had assumed”. I think, at most, meditation may show that we don’t have a “self” in some particular sense of the word “self” that many people might assume we do have.  This may be important (perhaps very important), but it’s different from saying “we have no self,” full stop.

Additionally, I know that people who have nondual experiences (where they experience a lack of self during meditation) often view it as very beneficial. For instance, they may feel it leaves them feeling more deeply okay, more joyous, and less prone to suffering. I believe that some people do have experiences like these, and that that’s awesome. But also, that’s different than saying that “there is no self”.

Finally, I want to clarify that not all non-dual practitioners and teachers make the claims I’m describing above – I’m just reacting to those that do. I also am not saying that none of our naive ideas about the self are confused – some likely are, and some definitions of the self that we might assume exist don’t exist in the way we might think. For instance, if you pay close attention, there is no separate, identifiable, enduring, independently existing controller of our thoughts and actions – and you may well find, upon searching, that every candidate for self ends up just being an object in awareness. And you may even find that the feeling of having a self is itself simply a feeling. Yet, there’s also a lot more to ideas of a “self” than only those things. And saying “something isn’t what appears” or “this one definition doesn’t hold up to careful observation” is different from “this thing doesn’t exist at all”. I think that just claiming “there’s no self” may be more accurately re-stated as “some notions of the self turn out not to make sense or to dissolve when you pay close enough attention.”

This piece was first written on March 23, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 10, 2026.

Here’s a list of some of those theories (as I interpret them), explained in extremely concise terms as best as I could manage:

The List of Thinkers and Their Core Ideas:

1. Peter Singer

We would ruin expensive shoes to save a drowning child we walked by, but not forgo expensive shoes to save one far away. We say it’s wrong to torture animals, yet our factory farms constantly torture them to make the meat/eggs we choose to buy. We should do more good.

2. Nick Bostrom

Technology is often good, but not always, and sometimes it is incredibly dangerous (e.g., nuclear weapons, engineering of viruses). If we invent enough technologies, eventually we may invent one that totally devastates civilization, even if actors are well-intentioned.

3. Eliezer Yudkowsky

Each year, AI gets more powerful. It’s on course to eventually be smarter than the smartest human in almost all ways. But these AIs are alien minds that won’t embody what we care about sufficiently well. When that happens, it will likely go extremely badly for humanity. Nobody knows how to make such a system safe.

4. Robin Hanson

Many of the explanations for why we do things don’t make sense (if we did X for claimed reason Y, we’d also do Z, which we don’t do). The most parsimonious explanation is that much of our behavior is just social signaling, which we engage in without even realizing it.

5. Elon Musk

If we let climate change or A.I. get out of control before we get off this planet, we’re F’d. Let’s get off this planet before it’s too late.

6. Jonathan Haidt

We often think we use our reason to arrive at moral conclusions, but mainly we use our reason to try to rationalize or justify what our moral intuition tells us. Political parties/groups have differing moral intuitions, and there are good people on all sides.

7. Noam Chomsky

We view the U.S. as a democracy, yet large corporations and a small group of elites have far more sway over what happens than anyone else. We view the U.S. as a world benefactor, yet its actions abroad are self-serving.

8. Andrew Yang

Automation is eventually going to take away a massive number of jobs (with e.g., self-driving cars and trucks, automated checkout, and AI assistants). We need to figure out how to make society work for all as jobs disappear and wealth becomes even more unequally distributed.

Of course, I had to vastly oversimplify your views to fit them in this format – hopefully I did so about as accurately as the format allows.

This piece was first written on August 26, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 18, 2026.

To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, the average estimate was about 49 days. In fact, the average time it took the students to complete these papers was about 56 days, 7 days worse than their worst case scenario estimates. Only about 30% of the students finished their projects in the amount of time they estimated. Other studies have demonstrated a similar optimistic bias on a variety of project types, from computer programming to tax form completion.

Why might we be bad at making estimates about our own projects? It is likely a combination of:

• Our tendency to plan as though the stages of a project will each go smoothly (when, in fact, one or more of these stages may have hitches).
• A self-serving bias, where we take credit for our past successes, but treat our past failures as being caused by unpredictable external events. This can lead us to have an inflated sense of our ability to complete projects.
• Our tendency to try to impress others by exaggerating how well we can perform (which becomes relevant when we are making our estimates in front of others).
• A wishful thinking bias, where our beliefs are influenced by how much we want something to be true. Since it is more pleasing to believe that a project will be completed quickly, in some cases we may be biased towards believing that.

So how can we correct this problem in our forecasting? Well, just knowing about it makes it possible for us to consciously make corrections for what are likely to be overly optimistic estimates. But even this approach often fails, as we may not adjust enough (being optimistic about the amount of bias that we have), or overact and adjust too much. Fortunately, there is a prediction method, known as Reference Class Forecasting, that has a tendency to be more reliable. At its core, this technique involves considering past cases that were similar to the project that you are now trying to make predictions about, and applying probabilistic thinking.

Rather than asking “Given what this project’s parts consist of, how long do I expect it to take?”, Reference Class Forecasting involves asking, “How long did similar projects I’ve done in the past take?” If you’ve never done a project similar to the one at hand, you can modify this question to, “Historically, how long have projects like this one taken for people with a level of skill that is similar to mine?” Once you have recalled or collected data on how long similar projects have taken, it is then easy to make estimates for how likely the project is to take different lengths of time. For instance, to estimate the probability that a project takes more than 30 days, we can just check what percentage of the time similar projects took us 30 days or more. The more data you have on similar projects, and the more similar those projects are to the project you are now doing, the less uncertain your estimates will be.

Reference Class Forecasting is useful, in part, because it gives us a way of predicting how long a project will take (or how costly it will be) that is unlikely to be influenced by our various biases. Wishful thinking, excessive optimism, and self-serving tendencies can be avoided simply by viewing our project as one among many, and thinking in terms of the probability of different outcomes. This process is certainly not perfect. For instance, it is not obvious which projects should count as “similar enough” to include in our analysis. And there will be a fundamental trade-off in this procedure between considering more past projects that are less similar, or considering fewer past projects that are more similar, and it isn’t clear what the optimal tradeoff is. But, nonetheless, this method often yields substantial improvements in prediction accuracy over other approaches.

Reference Class Forecasting can be used for many things besides planning projects. For instance:

• If you want to know how likely your friend is to cancel plans with you, consider the frequency with which they canceled in the past. For example, you can check your calendar to look at the last six times you had plans, and try to remember if they canceled on each of those occasions. If they canceled half of those times, it is quite likely they will cancel this time as well. If they didn’t cancel any of those times, then they probably won’t this time either. Of course, if you have extra information, such as that your friend has a cold and it is raining outside, you’ll want to try to make an adjustment to this probability, and conclude that your friend is less likely to show than normal.
• Suppose that you are stressing out about a test that is coming up a in a couple of weeks, and want to know how likely you are to do poorly. Well, consider your history of taking tests in the past that seemed to be of about this difficulty. If you never got a grade lower than a B on ten such exams, then it is quite unlikely that you will get a C on this next one.
• Perhaps you are feeling hopeless about finding a boyfriend, because you haven’t dated anyone for a while. Think back to your dating history, and note how long it took you to meet someone you liked in past cases. Unless something important has changed in your life that would affect your dating outcomes, this information can help you estimate how long it is likely to take you to find someone in the future. If this procedure tells you that you likely will have to wait a depressingly long time to find someone you like, consider the strategies you can use to increase your average romantic happiness.

Using the past to predict how well things will turn out in the future is certainly not an infallible method. Sometimes things change in a fundamental way such that past examples are just not relevant, or we lack knowledge about past examples. There are also fairly arbitrary decisions to be made during this process, like deciding which cases are similar enough to include. But, remarkably, using this simple procedure can often give us reasonable answers to questions that we care about, and produce predictions that may be less biased and more accurate than would typically be achieved by the methods we would have naturally relied on.

In cases where it is very important that our predictions are accurate, we can use both Reference Class Forecasting and other methods, and compare their results. When they agree, this should give us increased credence in our predictions. When they disagree, we can try to figure out why our prediction methods are diverging.

The next time you want to make a prediction, consider asking yourself, “Are there past examples similar to this case? What were the outcomes in those past cases, and how often did each of those outcomes occur?”

To figure out how much we value our time we can ask ourselves simple questions, such as, “How much would I have to get paid to be willing to do an hour of work now?” The answer we give will not always be the same from day-to-day, or even from hour to hour. On vacation we might be in a mindset where we find work more unappealing, and so might require a higher pay. On the other hand, in times when we are strapped for cash, we might be willing to accept less pay. Our required monetary reward will also depend on how pleasurable or displeasurable we expect the work to be. And if we’ve just been working for five hours, we might require more pay for the next hour than we did for each of the last five.

Let’s consider how we might actually apply this concept of placing a monetary value on our time. Suppose that a store is giving out free mugs, but to get one, you have to wait for 10 minutes in line. Ask yourself, “How much money would a person have to pay me now to wait for ten minutes in that line on his behalf?” Suppose that you decide that you’d be willing to do this waiting for no less than $5. That means that if someone said they would pay you only $4.95 to stand in line for them, you’d turn down the offer. Now, ask yourself, “In the future, would I rather have $5 or one of these mugs they are handing out?” Or, similarly, try “Would I be willing to spend $5 now to buy one of these mugs?” If the answer is that you’d prefer to have $5 than a mug then it probably doesn’t make sense to wait in the line. In this case, you are assigning that 10 minutes of time waiting in line a value equivalent to $5, but the mug is worth less than that dollar amount to you. Put another way, you would be willing to wait in that line for $5, but if you did so, you wouldn’t actually want to buy the mug with the $5 you earned! It is reasonable therefore to think of the waiting in line as being more costly for you than the mug is valuable to you. On the other hand, if you’d rather have the mug than the $5, in that case it likely would make sense to wait in the line.

Incidentally, it may be important to frame the question as “Would I spend $5 to buy that mug if I could?” rather than “Would I sell that mug for $5 if I already had it?” The problem with the latter is that research has shown that we tend to be biased to prefer items that we currently possess to ones that we don’t yet have. So, if imagining owning the mug is enough to trigger this bias, the latter question could lead to distorted answers.

This technique of placing a monetary value on our time is particularly useful in situations where something is being offered for free, since people often sacrifice an unreasonably large amount to receive free items. Perhaps genuine pleasure is created just from knowing that you got something for free, which helps compensate for such sacrifices. But nonetheless, one should be cautious about overacting to the word “free”, which can certainly snag us with its large psychological appeal.

To consider another example, suppose that you’re trying to decide whether you should drive an extra 15 minutes each way to go to the cheaper grocery store rather than the pricier one (we’ll assume, in this case, that the two stores have equally good products). The question to then ask yourself is, “How much would I have to be paid to drive for a total of 30 minutes on someone else’s behalf?” If the answer is $10, then ask yourself, “How much do I expect to save by going to the cheap store?” If the answer is more than $10, then it probably makes sense to drive the extra distance. If the answer is less than $10, it probably doesn’t make sense.

Our brains are not necessarily going to make sensible decisions unless we explicitly reason using this process. For instance, one study showed that people said they were willing to drive a certain extra distance to save a small amount of money on small purchases, but not on large purchases, even when the dollar amount saved was equivalent in the two cases. If being paid $10 is worth 30 extra minutes of driving to you, it should be worth it to drive that 30 extra minutes to save $10 whether you are then going to be spending $20 or $20,000 at your destination.

When you are making a decision involving sacrificing your time, it can be well worth it to ask yourself, “How much would someone have to pay me to use my time in this way?” Then, ask yourself, “How much would I be willing to pay to be given what my sacrifice of time is getting me?” If the former is bigger than the latter, you should seriously consider not using your time in that manner.

There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzzle, which require strong thinking skills to solve. And then there are TRULY difficult questions, that require an extremely honed thinking process, like:

• How can I make so much money in the next five years that I never have to work again?
• Which job should I choose right now to maximize my average lifetime happiness?
• Which charities help the world the most per thousand dollars donated to them?
• What can I do to change our society into a significantly more ideal place?
• What is the greatest threat to humanity as a species, and what can we do now to reduce this threat?

Notice that these important questions are somewhat ambiguous. They also can’t be addressed without gathering and combining information from many sources, and involve factors that are extremely hard to predict. And they can’t be solved unless you can do a reasonable job of estimating difficult to estimate quantities. They all require truly excellent thinking to tackle. Truth discernment becomes a super power when it leaves the realm of puzzles and enters the realm of extremely valuable real world questions.

At high levels, truth discernment ability is not just IQ, though surely is somewhat correlated with it. It is not just the ability to apply logic, though logic is an important component. It also requires certain habits of mind, like regularly asking yourself what the evidence is for your own beliefs. It requires using techniques, like thinking in terms of probabilities rather than thinking in black and white. It requires caring more about getting the right answer than about seeming right or believing what it is convenient psychologically to believe.

The exciting thing about truth discernment is that it is not just a genetic ability (though genetics is surely a contributing factor). It is an ability that we can improve a great deal if we take the time to hone our thinking. We can familiarize ourselves with the logical fallacies to the point where our brain notices them occurring in real-time. We can learn the cognitive biases so that we know the ways our brains are likely to fail us and can consciously correct for these failures. We can learn to prevent unhelpful emotions from derailing our logic too often. We can practice our reasoning by drilling in LSAT questions. And we can learn the methods of rationality, or at least read about another person using them.

Many comic book writers have realized that intelligence is a legitimate super power. Lex Luthor was superman’s nemesis despite being physically inferior to him in every capacity. He could still compete with superman only because of the power of his thinking. But it is not a very high level of intelligence, per se, that is so powerful. Being able to solve the hardest logic puzzles won’t automatically let you solve problems that matter. Truth discernment is the essential skill, the ability to figure out the likely answer to truth claims regarding important real world questions. Will taking this action bring me more happiness in the long-term than not taking this action? Will this regulation, if it passes, improve poverty? Will this business venture make large quantities of money? Is string theory an accurate description of reality?

Being able to accurately discern the truth can be a super power, and with study and practice, it is an ability that we can very substantially improve.

Influences: Eliezer Yudkowsky