For Health And Longevity, Be Wary Of Mechanisms

May 8, 2025

Often in health and longevity discussions, you'll hear arguments about mechanisms. For instance: Antioxidants -> reduced free radicals -> less DNA damage -> less cancer Unfortunately, these biologically plausible-sounding claims usually don't work when rigorously tested. Are mechanistic arguments useless? No. They are a great source of *hypotheses*. While most of these hypotheses fail, some eventually lead to important new treatments. Unfortunately, health gurus, podcast...

What If You HAD To Do It?

April 26, 2018

A thought experiment about what you'd be truly capable of doing, if you had no choice: Think of something you value that: A. Multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but that… B. You assume you would not be capable of achieving, even though… C. You have never actually tried to do this thing well before. Now, suppose for a moment that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it i...

Testing a Theory Without an Experiment

January 25, 2018

You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I aspire to use this approach significantly more often than I do now. How to Test a Theory Without...

Ways to develop new hypotheses about human psychology

November 16, 2017

How would you go about building improved models of human psychology so that you can better help people? It might seem nearly impossible at first, but data about psychology is all around us, and there are numerous approaches you could take to discover new insights. Here are 24 different methods you could use to better understand the way humans work. In each case, I use "trying to figure out new things about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)" as an example. What techniques am I leaving out...

The Brain of Theseus – a thought experiment

July 27, 2017

Here's my favorite philosophy of mind thought experiment that challenges pur view of personal identity or "self". It takes a while to explain but is quite a mind fuck, so bear with me. THE SETUP It feels, to nearly everyone, on a gut level, that I am 'me' and you are 'you', and consciousnesses are distinct from each other and easy to separate. Moreover, the vast majority of people accept that you 1 minute from now is still the same "YOU" in a meaningful sense as YOU right now; that ...