Intersecting advice from highly successful people

January 26, 2021

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash

It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...

The Fourier transform of happiness

October 17, 2020

Photo by Enrapture Captivating Media on Unsplash

H/T to Robert Paul Chase for the title. (For those who don't know, this is a reference to Fourier analysis.) Your happiness, like the level of the ocean, is caused by a superposition of waves of different frequencies. Each operates on a distinct scale - they sum up to determine your well-being at any given point in life. Each wave tends to oscillate around its mean or neutral point (except for the slowest waves, which take your whole life to unfold). One useful way to think about becoming ha...

Dealing with damage before it wrecks you

July 5, 2020

Written: July 5, 2020 | Released: August 6, 2020 Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It's critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what's broken. A car will accumulate damage over time, but even if you don't take good care of it, you can get a new one even...

Bias based on facial attractiveness

July 2, 2020

There's a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person's face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details. In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate "brown hair white adult female"). If these were real people, they would likely be treated differently...

What Health Advice Is There a Consensus On?

January 16, 2017

What recommendations related to diet, nutrition and health seem to be universally agreed on by experts of nearly all stripes and schools of thought? Given the incredibly high levels of disagreement in these areas, and the poor quality of studies, it often seems like we know almost nothing. Below is my attempt (via a combination of brainstorming and crowdsourcing) to list what there does seem to be a high rate of consensus on. Please let me know if you notice any mistakes. Tentative L...

Changing Your Life Using Habits

August 1, 2011

One of the most effective ways to get ourselves to regularly do a behavior is to make it automatic through habit formation. Once something has become a habit we no longer have to worry about forgetting to do it, or worry about lacking sufficient motivation. We do the behavior without even trying to do it, without even thinking about it. Habits make behavior effortless. We can program ourselves with new habits by following a very simple procedure. If you want to regularly do behavior B after s...