Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions

February 13, 2025

Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions for at least two reasons: You can’t reason based on track record in the same way you can with normal predictions. The stakes are extremely high. Being wrong on normal predictions rarely matters as much. Why? Regarding point one, reasoning based on track record: Normally, a type of prediction being wrong again and again will lead you to dismiss that type of prediction. For instance, if every year (for some reason), experts...

What Is The Range Of What We Humans Find Immoral?

April 18, 2018

If we look across cultures (including micro-cultures that exist within other cultures), there are a huge number of things that people view as immoral. However, if you eliminate those that are only viewed as immoral because they are believed to lead to other things viewed as bad, the list becomes a lot smaller. So, what are those things that at least some human cultures view as INHERENTLY immoral, that is, acts they would still think of as immoral even if no other consequences of that behavio...

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...

Who Are We Kind To, Who Do We Kill?

July 24, 2017

I've been trying to better understand and resolve two seemingly contradictory (yet I think critically important) facts about human nature: (1) Human groups have pretty much always done unspeakably horrible things to other groups (e.g., think mass murder and numerous forms of oppression). And fairly often, while it is happening, this evil seems to be condoned, supported, or only passively opposed by a large and fairly culturally representative group, rather than by just a few very bad people....

Why do people not behave in their own self-interest?

March 19, 2017

Naively, one might assume that people do what it benefits them to do. In fact, that's an assumption commonly made in economics. Yet it's clear that our behavior is not always in our own self-interest. People frequently buy fake supplements, try drugs they know are highly addictive, eat things they know they'll later regret, drive away the people they love most, procrastinate on really important things, and so on. So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here's my list of reasons we ...