Is Taking Every Supplement That Might Work A Good Idea For Health?

December 6, 2025

I believe that if you are healthy and have a healthy diet, then taking 30+ supplements per day (even if you spend a ton of time researching which ones to take) has a net negative expected value on your health. The two fundamental issues are: Issue 1: That every supplement has: -a chance of harmful interactions with other drugs/supplements (and as you take more and more, the number of potential interactions grows quadratically - like supplements squared) -a chance of contamination (e...

But Does Social Media Use Actually Cause Bad Mental Health?

November 2, 2025

It's interesting how studies on the negative effects of social media on mental health are mixed: some find an effect, some don't (or only find a very small effect). Some take this as proof that social media is actually fine for mental health. My hypothesis is different. I think that the effects of social media are extremely heterogeneous based on app, population, and dosage: that in some subgroups, some social media apps (when used in high doses) have substantially negative effects on mental...

Something Unexpected That May Help Some Common Chronic Medical Conditions

October 30, 2025

There's something really interesting and potentially important happening in the space of people suffering from chronic medical conditions that modern medicine provides no good solutions for, such as Long COVID, IBS, functional dyspepsia, fibromyalgia, chronic back or joint pain without injury/disease, ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, PTLDS/Chronic Lyme disease, and so on. I'm talking here specifically about people where all other reasonable explanations for their conditions (e.g., cancer, injury, a...

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...

At what step do you disagree regarding the ethics of factory farming?

November 9, 2024

At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I'm also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.) Note: any time the argument mentions something being wrong or immoral, you can treat it either as referring to something being (a) objec...

Three hypotheses to consider when a medical issue can’t be diagnosed

September 27, 2024

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 presentation of a known disease or a rare (or frequently missed or misunderstood) disease, making it hard to g...

Does money buy happiness, according to science?

February 28, 2024

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024. Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...

How great is the U.S., really?

January 5, 2024

This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog. According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth? The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...

Think smarter about what’s “good”

December 20, 2023

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, though, is that this can lead to the belief that the more of it there is, the better. But most go...

What Are All the Things That Humans Need?

July 28, 2021

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow! I'm defining a "need" here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can't just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people. You might say that you "need an iced tea" on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, s...