While I think there are very serious concerns that advancing technologies, and AI in particular, raise (such as lack of control over these systems with could be a tremendous threat, reduction of agency, and the potential for extreme concentration of power), if we can keep these technologies well under control and pointed at the betterment of humanity (a big if) I don’t think they have to destroy meaning. Here’s why:

While some people do derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work (such as myself), and such people could be especially hard hit if they are replaced by technology, there are, thankfully, many things that humans intrinsically value, and therefore, lots of potential sources of meaning. By seeking and then (at least to a reasonable degree) creating what we intrinsically value, we create meaning.

So let’s have a quick look at different human intrinsic values (i.e., things people value for their own sake, not as a means to an end) and how advancing technology, such as AI, may impact each of them:

—

Spirituality and purity: there are no reasons I see that technology would have to interfere with spirituality, religion, or attempts to act purely. So these values could continue being a source of meaning.

Truth and learning: if anything, really effective technology can accelerate the search for truth and our ability to learn. At the same time, technology gone wrong could make the truth harder to discern (e.g., if technology facilitates misinformation outcompeting accurate information).

Achievement: this one could be hard hit by technology insofar as it’s related to doing things that eventually AI may do better than all of us. At the same time, humans find a lot of value in achievements regardless of non-human performance. For instance, people compete in sprints (even though cheetahs could easily outrun us) and find value in achievement in chess (despite AI being able to easily beat the best human). A lot of people also value personal achievement – merely doing the best you can, or improving to do better than your own previous results.

Freedom: while technology could impair freedom (e.g., if it concentrates power into the hands of certain actors, they might choose to limit freedom), there is also potential for technology to expand freedom a lot by allowing us to do many things that weren’t possible before, either because we didn’t know how to do them or because they were too costly before.

Pleasure, non-suffering, longevity: there is no fundamental tension between technology and these values, and technology may be able to improve these by reducing sources of suffering (such as disease), increasing lifespans, and making pleasure more easily accessible.

Happiness (as distinct from pleasure and non-suffering): This is a tricky one, because technology can cut both ways here. For instance, while it’s likely social media has increased some kinds of pleasure, it may well have reduced overall happiness for some people by making them more disconnected or impacting the way they see the world.

Caring, reputation, respect, loyalty, and virtue: these don’t have to be impacted by technology; we could continue valuing these in our relationships with others, even in a world where AI has replaced most work. The main threats I see here from technology are the ways that social media can cause people to spend less face-to-face time together, and the way that AI friends or “relationship” partners could take the place of human relationships.

Justice and fairness: this could go either way. Technology could concentrate power in a way that makes these worse or systematize bias. On the other hand, if the benefits of technology are distributed widely, they could create increased abundance. Technology also has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to reduce (currently commonplace) human bias.

Diversity: globalization tends to reduce diversity, and so technology could accelerate that trend. On the other hand, giving people more freedom through technology could end up increasing forms of diversity (such as how people choose to live their lives).

Protection: technology has the ability to make us safer, so while we may experience more protection (for ourselves and our loved ones), it also could mean that our own role of protecting others is reduced, which could reduce the meaning derived from providing protection. On the other hand, if technology is not developed thoughtfully, the world could feel increasingly chaotic and even become more unsafe, so protection could become even more important.

Nature: technology has a track record of destroying nature, so that trend may continue. However, it’s possible that with sufficiently advanced technology, that trend will go the opposite direction (e.g., cheap green energy makes it easier to protect nature). Technology often destroys nature either as a means to accelerate or as a side effect of acceleration, but sufficiently advanced technology may reduce that effect.

Beauty: technology has the possibility of increasing beauty in the world (making it easier to create and experience beauty), but also runs the risk of filling the world with generic slop.

Overall, while advancing technology may have a negative impact on some things that humans intrinsically value, as long as we don’t destroy the world with these technologies and avoid allowing extreme concentration of power from them, other intrinsic values may not be impacted or even be benefited by technology. As long as we can seek and (to a reasonable degree) create what we intrinsically value, there are sources of meaning available.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think.

2) Normalizing cheating in one domain normalizes it in other domains too.

There are lots of ways to use AI to improve your thinking (e.g., ask an AI to critique a belief you hold or to help you explore points on all sides of a debated issue). But when a teacher says, “Write this without AI,” and you have an AI write the essay, it’s preventing you from engaging in significant thinking.

Thinking well involves a number of components, such as:

– gathering evidence
– considering arguments
– formulating a viewpoint
– honing your viewpoint
– presenting your viewpoint clearly

Replacing thinking with AI is not analogous to replacing doing multiplication with a calculator. That’s a memorized algorithm. Thinking well, on the other hand, is core to understanding the world, figuring out what goals to set, not being duped by others, and many other essential aspects of life.

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2025.

They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI’s inaction damages the academic environment – especially for the non-cheating students, but even for the cheaters, too.

You’ve got to prove you can be trusted to do the right thing in small instances before you can be a candidate for being trusted to do the right thing in big instances. I hope OpenAI will get their act together and do the right thing. This is not a hard test, but so far, they’ve failed it. I hope they will pass by releasing it ASAP.

Here are my responses to the most common objections to my points that I’m seeing in the comments:

Objection 1: It’s impossible to detect whether something is written by AI: this is untrue. The technology has already been developed, and it uses watermarking. The token generation process is modified so that you can detect which AI wrote the text, even if sentences are re-ordered, or some words are swapped. Of course, with sufficient editing, the watermark will be gone.

Objection 2: Kids will just switch to other AIs in order to cheat: some will, but even small behavioral barriers making something more difficult can cause big changes in the frequency of a behavior. Additionally, it will raise the chance of being caught quite a bit, which can also have big behavioral consequences. Finally, OpenAI really should work with the other top AI companies to produce watermarking standards so that all the top AI companies include watermarking.

Objection 3: Eventually, this tech will get beaten, so there is no point: that is a weak argument. Every spam filter gets beaten by some spammers, but the solution is not to give up on spam detection; it’s to continually evolve the methods to keep spam at a minimum. Similarly, it’s better to have a dynamic situation where cheating isn’t so easy and the risk of getting caught cheating isn’t that low.

Objection 4: Essay writing is an antiquated skill now that we have AI: the purpose of learning to write essays is to practice thinking clearly and communicating. It’s an extremely bad idea to stop teaching kids how to think clearly and communicate well. Yes, in real life, they can use AI assistance, but they still need to practice thinking and communicating – outsourcing these critical skills to AI instead of learning them yourself is a very unwise idea.

This piece was first written on August 4, 2024, and first appeared on my website on August 25, 2024.

Epictetus, born ~50AD, was a disabled man born into slavery in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Nothing that he wrote down survives; we know about him only through the words of other scholars. But he was so wise that his ideas reverberate through society today. This article summarizes some parts of his incredible life and the impact that he had on the world:

Epictetus’s Life

Epictetus walked with a limp, a disability he may have had from birth, from when his leg was broken deliberately by his enslaver, or from a later medical condition (stories on this differ). He was passionate about philosophy from a young age. His enslaver, who had previously been a slave himself, let Epictetus study Stoic philosophy. Epictetus obtained his freedom in adulthood and taught philosophy in Rome. But the Roman emperor then banished all philosophers from the city. At that point, Epictetus moved to Epirus, Greece, where he founded a school of philosophy.

Epictetus’s Impact

The reason we know about his ideas is due to his most famous pupil, Arrian, who wrote in the prologue to Discourses of Epictetus: “whatever I heard him say I used to write down, word for word, as best I could, endeavoring to preserve it.” Arrian said Epictetus “induce[ed] his listener to feel just what [he] wanted him to feel.” 

People who cited Epictetus’ ideas in their writing include:

• Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius
• Voltaire, who described him as someone “whom one almost despairs of imitating”
• Author Tom Wolfe (the book, Enchiridion of Epictetus is referenced in “A Man in Full”)
• Novelist James Joyce
• Herodes Atticus who called him “the greatest of the Stoics”

Additionally, Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007) credited Epictetus with providing a foundation for his system of psychotherapy, underlining the prevailing relevance of Epictetus’s observations about the people of ancient Greece. Ellis’ theory (rational emotive behavior therapy, R.E.B.T.) eventually became a major part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the most evidenced-based therapy for treating mental disorders today.

Epictetus’s Ideas

Epictetus was part of the Stoic school of philosophy, which is about letting go of negative emotions like fear and jealousy and being calm – or “stoic” – in the face of suffering. 

Here are some of the most insightful quotes attributed to Epictetus, organized by topic. You’ve probably heard some of these ideas expressed by famous people alive today. Well, Epictetus said these things almost two THOUSAND years before them. Let that sink in for a moment before reading on. (We’ve edited some quotes for clarity – you can find most of the originals on Goodreads.) 

Epictetus on challenges

• “There’s one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
• “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

Epictetus on relationships

• “Keep company only with those who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”
• “Anyone capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed.”
• “If evil be said of you, and it’s true, correct yourself; if it’s a lie, laugh at it.”
• “It is a fact of life that other people, even people who love you, will not necessarily agree with your ideas, understand you, or share your enthusiasms.”
• “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.'”

Epictetus on self-improvement

• “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
• “He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”
• “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
• “How long will you wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
• “No person is free who is not a master of themself.”
• “Don’t just say you’ve read books. Show through them you have learned to think better, to be more discriminating and reflective. Books are the training weights of the mind… it’s a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

Epictetus on meaning

• “Seek not the good in external things; seek it in yourselves.”
• “Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
• “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”
• “Who is rich? He who is content.”

Epictetus on wisdom

• “Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness.”
• “He is a wise person who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those he has.”
• “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

Epictetus’s story is very inspiring, and it is a nice reminder that many of our experiences – and the wisdom that can guide us through these experiences – are shared by people who are geographically, culturally, and temporally distant from us. 

Whereas with most of our beliefs, when we get strong counter-evidence, we become at least a bit less confident in those beliefs, with anchor beliefs, strong counter-evidence doesn’t budge us at all – it just bounces off. That means we either ignore the evidence (e.g., just don’t let ourselves think about it), explain it away (e.g., “I must have misunderstood what happened”), or change our mind about other facts to incorporate the counter-evidence without our anchor belief budging (e.g., “they must have been lying to me.”)

Understanding the role that Anchor Beliefs play in human psychology – and identifying your own personal Anchor Beliefs – can help you make better sense of the world around you. Additionally, such an understanding can help you search for false Anchor Beliefs – those apparently unquestionable truths that make up the foundations of some people’s worldviews despite being wrong! Challenging your own false anchors is very difficult, but the consequences may be life-changing.

This article provides an introduction to Anchor Beliefs, including an explanation of how they differ from other beliefs, what can make them so hard to change, and a list of common categories of Anchor Beliefs that can help you identify your own. We also give some proposals for how false Anchor Beliefs form, how you can identify these false beliefs in yourself, and what you can do to question them in a safe and productive way. If you care about understanding your own mind and the minds of other people, we think you may find this write-up valuable! 

How do Anchor Beliefs work? Instead of shifting with evidence, they shape how we see evidence.

With many low-stakes, shallow-rooted beliefs (such as which turn to take to get to a restaurant), our commitment to the belief tends to adjust when we get counter-evidence (for example, “this doesn’t look familiar – I wonder if I took the wrong turn back there”). This behavior looks like an approximate form of Bayesian updating. Anchor Beliefs don’t work like this. 

Anchor Beliefs almost never change, yet we still have to make sense of new information that we come across (some of which may strongly contradict our Anchor Beliefs). As mentioned, one solution is to warp the evidence that we receive such that we can fit it into our worldview AND keep our Anchor Belief intact at the same time. This is how Anchor Beliefs get their name: they are like huge, steel anchors securing boats to the ocean floor – only an enormously powerful current will be able to make them budge; any lesser current will simply swirl around the anchor. In this way, only incredibly powerful evidence can pose a threat to our Anchor Beliefs. And even then, our brains are highly adept at interpreting evidence so that our original Anchor Belief remains steadfast. 

Here’s a silly example to show how this might look in reality. Imagine that you HAVE to believe the walls of your house are blue. If you don’t, then everyone you love will reject you (or something equally catastrophic). So it’s really important that you believe the walls of your house are blue. This means you must bend the evidence that you receive so that your perception is compatible with this belief. But the walls of your house don’t look blue. How can you make sense of this? Maybe there is some strange-colored light in the house that makes the walls appear white. Or maybe there’s something wrong with your vision. Or maybe the walls are just an incredibly pale shade of blue that is very close to white. It’s not clear which explanation is correct, but it’s not worth wasting your time worrying about why blue walls would appear white.

While you may think that you wouldn’t fall for a false Anchor Belief like this, being particularly smart or logical doesn’t necessarily help you challenge these kinds of beliefs. You’re more likely to come up with smarter and more logical reasons why your Anchor Belief must be correct (regardless of whether or not it is). If you search hard enough, there is almost always a way to reinterpret the evidence so that your Anchor Belief can remain steadfast. 

Examples of common Anchor Beliefs

Some Anchor Beliefs are profound (say, about the origins of life), but many are prosaic (say, about the earth being spherical rather than flat). We all have large numbers of boring and trivial-sounding Anchor Beliefs such as:

• 1+1 = 2
• humans have teeth
• you live in [whatever country you believe you live in]

Consider for a moment how hard it would be for someone to convince you that you were wrong about any of these beliefs! And consider for a moment how INSANE things would be for your worldview if you did correctly come to believe that these beliefs were false. The ramifications would be so shocking that it is hard to comprehend the implications of being wrong.

What makes the above Anchor Beliefs “trivial” is they have a really high probability of being true, and virtually everyone concurs about them. Much more interesting and important to consider are Anchor Beliefs that may be false. False Anchor Beliefs are often acquired through social and cultural influences, though they can also come about in other ways (e.g., as defense mechanisms or by generalizing from a small number of traumatic experiences). Here are some common categories of Anchor Beliefs that could be false:

• Things that almost everyone you know is taught
• Certain religious beliefs learned in childhood
• Perceptions of ourselves (e.g., as good/bad)
• Views about one’s community
• Views about “enemy” groups
• Inferences from viscerally shocking first-hand experiences (e.g., “the world’s unsafe”)
• Beliefs your social group REQUIRES
• Claims that the reputation of your most trusted authority figures are staked on
• Beliefs that, if you stopped believing them, would leave you very confused about what to believe or what to do

The idea of an Anchor Belief is connected to (though not the same as) a number of other ideas, including:

• sacred values (social psychology)
• soldier vs. scout mindset (see Julia Galef’s book on the topic)
• shibboleths (the Bible)
• conflict vs. mistake theory (see Slate Star Codex)
• trapped priors (see Astral Codex Ten)
• belief updating (Connection Theory)
• core beliefs (CBT)
• leaving lines of retreat (see LessWrong)

What does changing an Anchor Belief involve?

While Anchor Beliefs almost never change, on rare occasions, we cut an anchor loose, and our boat suddenly lurches forward into the unknown. Jettisoning an anchor doesn’t necessarily take you where you want to go. It is scary, and it isn’t always safe. It may even lead you to abandon other, even more steadfast anchors. But abandoning an Anchor Belief is sometimes the only way to move forward. There’s no guarantee that the new beliefs you adopt will be correct. Consider your belief “the earth is round” (i.e., approximately an oblate spheroid, rather than flat like a disk). 

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if you came to believe in a flat earth, and you traced out the consequences of that belief. What is NASA, then? And SpaceX? What is the field of astronomy, or geology, or cartography? Surely our government must know – so why are they keeping it from us? How long have they known this? How do they prevent the truth from getting out? Is the whole world involved in this conspiracy? Am I in danger if I publicly say it’s a conspiracy? Why don’t more people speak out about this? Have all of my friends and family also been misled? Is gravity real (and if so, how does it work on a disk)? What are the stars in the sky? 

It would be incredibly disorienting to work through all the implications that would follow from changing this once previously-unquestioned belief. Additionally, many of us have never checked whether the earth is actually round! Have you looked carefully at the arguments for this claim? And at the counterarguments to those arguments? Have you ever doubted (for even one minute of your entire adult life) that the earth is round? If we trust the evidence we receive from our eyes, many of us might assume that the earth is flat. So, how do we know that it is not? We learn this fact through our social world. (Unless, perhaps, you’ve lived by the ocean and had a habit of watching tall sailboats on the horizon.) 

Fortunately, the earth isn’t flat. At least, our Anchor Beliefs say so – we’ve never personally run experiments to check, nor have we closely scrutinized the arguments for and against this claim. (If you wanted to, there are simple experiments that you can run – for example, you could attach a camera to a helium-filled high altitude weather balloon and see the round horizon from the vantage point of the camera.) Notice that most scientific facts you believe are not as fundamental as “the earth is round,” which is a fact that has many important implications for our belief systems. Other scientific facts have fewer implications. For example, people were interested to learn that dinosaurs probably had feathers, but few (if any) had reasons to resist this update in their beliefs – because it didn’t challenge a core part of their worldview. In contrast, questioning a belief like “the earth is round” would throw most people’s belief systems into disarray. 

Interestingly enough, if you already believed there was a cabal secretly ruling the world and that scientists were controlled by this cabal, then the earth being round may merely be an ordinary belief rather than an Anchor Belief. In that case, switching your view from believing in a round earth to believing in a flat earth is not likely to be perspective-shattering – it’s easy to incorporate it into your worldview as just another thing the cabal has manipulated people to believe. 

What happens when our anchor beliefs are wrong?

Anchor Beliefs aren’t necessarily false. A lot of them are true. They just aren’t necessarily true. So, it’s important to distinguish between two types of Anchor Beliefs: (1) “False Anchors” and (2) Anchor Beliefs that happen to be true. False Anchors are obviously much more worrisome. However, they often aren’t easy to spot.

Remember, Anchor Beliefs feel to us (the believer) not like mere beliefs but like indisputable truths. However, it’s almost certain that we learned them from the people around us or derived them from shoddy generalizations, and they may not be obvious truths at all (that doesn’t mean they are false, just that they may not be indisputable like they seem). Our own Anchor Beliefs are like the dark matter of the self. They flow through us without detection, and they influence our actions.

It’s not that doubting these beliefs is impossible, but we tend to automatically dismiss skepticism towards our Anchor Beliefs (or entirely ignore evidence that contradicts them) so that we don’t have to face abandoning our worldview. False Anchor Beliefs can have negative consequences the way any false belief can: by causing your predictions to be out of sync with reality. What makes them worse than your average false belief is that they are hard to change, largely because so many other beliefs tend to rely on them. But remember that not all Anchor Beliefs are false (so it wouldn’t make sense to give up a belief merely because it’s an Anchor). 

Why is it that some of our beliefs become Anchor Beliefs?

In the simplest examples (such as 1+1=2), a belief can become an Anchor Belief (i.e., almost impossible to change) because we have so much valid evidence for it being true that our prior probability of it being true is almost 100%. These are Anchor Beliefs that we’re almost certainly right about – we’ll call them Steel Anchors because they provide a sturdy foundation for an accurate worldview. But what about those Anchor Beliefs we may well be wrong about? Beliefs that are foundational to us but are not the result of witnessing tons of valid evidence?

Let’s call these Anchor Beliefs Tin Anchors. We are almost completely unable to change our mind about Tin Anchors, despite the fact that they don’t provide a valid foundation for an accurate worldview. Five reasons that we may form Tin Anchor Beliefs:

1. It could be that Tin Anchors are a consequence of too many beliefs being piled on top of one fundamental belief, such that the fundamental belief can’t be questioned without challenging the whole pile of beliefs.
2. Tin Anchors might also be explained by the fact that it is better to have some model of the world than to have no model at all; without any kind of model, you fail to make predictions about the world, which is essential for understanding it. When an Anchor Belief falls, we’re often temporarily thrown into a state of confusion about what to believe, which makes predictions difficult. Tin Anchors, like real anchors, keep us stabilized.
3. Another explanation behind Tin Anchors is that people might grow up in social communities with poor epistemic standards; if everyone you trust tells you that something is true despite not having good evidence (especially if this starts in childhood and if this continues for a long time), these beliefs may become unmovable aspects of your worldview.
4. You might also find yourself forming Tin Anchors when you are in a situation where your brain predicts highly negative consequences from abandoning a belief. This makes changing our minds about that thing very painful and difficult. We will find all kinds of ways to cling to a belief if the alternative involves losing something that seems essential to our survival. Doubting one of these beliefs is like sticking your hand into a cage full of poisonous snakes: your mind wants to get away from the doubt as fast as possible (to avoid the severe predicted danger).
5. Tin Anchors sometimes occur when we generalize from shocking or traumatizing experiences. For instance, someone who is abused as a child might have an unshakable belief that they can’t trust other people not to hurt them (of course, some people truly cannot be trusted, but their brain may have overgeneralized this).

Finding your Anchor Beliefs

It may be valuable to ask yourself: “What are my own Tin Anchors?” If you want to consider what Tin Anchor Beliefs you may have, here are some questions that it might be helpful to ask yourself: 

• “What beliefs did I pick up from those around me that I can’t imagine not believing (yet many people in other social groups somehow manage not to believe)?”
• “What viscerally shocking experience might I have overgeneralized from that explains my worldview now?”
• “What might other people from another community claim my Anchor Beliefs are?”

These are pretty safe queries, as you’re very unlikely to stop believing your Tin Anchor Beliefs. And identifying one of your beliefs as a Tin Anchor doesn’t make it change, though it might be useful to know where your Anchors lie. Of course, it might be valuable (though costly) to try to change such an Anchor Belief if you want to. This might be something worth considering. 

So, how do you challenge your Anchor Beliefs?

Suppose you think that you’ve found one of your own Tin Anchors that you think has important implications for your life, and you actually want to examine whether it’s true. One strategy that may help is to try and clearly imagine the world where this Tin Anchor Belief turns out to be false. What is that world like? Can you deal with and accept that world? How would believing that you live in that world change your behavior and relationships? Can you accept those changes?

If you DO live in that world (where your Anchor Belief is false), would you want to believe you live in it, or would you rather pretend that your Anchor Belief isn’t false? If the answer is truly “yes” – you really would want to know if the belief is false, and you’re prepared to face the ramifications and consequences of losing that belief – then now you can truly start to put the belief to the test. Consider the strongest arguments on each side by, for instance, using our Clearer Thinking Belief Challenger program. Seek out evidence that might disconfirm the belief. Ask people that disagree with this belief why they disagree with it. Surround yourself with some people who don’t have that Anchor Belief for a little while. See if the belief survives these tests. 

How can you work around someone else’s false Anchor Beliefs?

Suppose you know someone who you think has a harmful, false belief. If your goal is to help them understand the world accurately, it is simplest to first identify the relevant Anchor Belief that this false belief relies on and assume that it cannot be changed. (Changing someone else’s foundational Anchor Belief will require an IMMENSE current or, in other words, powerful evidence that is impossible to ignore or misinterpret.) Consider what you’d say to this person to nudge them towards truth GIVEN their Anchor Beliefs. Too often, we try to change other people’s minds by attempting to shift 20-ton anchors. Instead, it is more effective to identify those Anchor Beliefs and then act as best you can under the assumption that you will almost certainly not be able to change them.

Is it bad to have Tin Anchors? Some of these Anchor Beliefs are bad, but others are fine. In any event, it seems like we may not have a choice – Anchor Beliefs might be part of the construction of human minds. Once we acknowledge that people have these almost entirely unquestionable beliefs, the world – and how people act in it – begins to make much more sense. There’s a reason so many boats are just stuck where they are (no matter how much paddling appears to be happening on the surface).

For more about Anchor Beliefs, see part 2 of this series.

This essay was first written on November 21, 2021, was published on Clearer Thinking on December 22, 2021, and was cross-posted here on December 24, 2021.

It’s also really common to see people over-react to a single experience they’ve had (e.g., “I know I don’t like Taiwanese food because I tried it once”) or to an anecdote (e.g., “I’m convinced this supplement will work because my friend took it and says it worked”).

And yet, in some contexts, one data point can teach us a LOT. Here are six ways that we can sometimes learn useful information from just one data point:

Providing Evidence

1. By Bayes Factors: suppose hypothesis “A” says a data point is nearly impossible, and hypothesis “B” says the data point is quite likely. Then the existence of that one data point (by Bayes’ rule) should move you substantially toward believing hypothesis B (relative to A).

Example: you have had a rash on your arm for ten years (with no variability). You buy some “rash cream” off of a shady website, and within two hours of applying it, the rash is gone. As long as your senses aren’t deceiving you, you can be confident the cream works because it’s otherwise highly unlikely for the rash to vanish.

2. By Providing the Mean When There is Very Low Variance: normally, a single data point doesn’t allow an accurate estimate of any statistics. But in situations of very low variability, a single data point can be an accurate approximation of the mean!

Example: there is very little variability in how long it takes to walk to the store from your home. Hence, walking that route just once allows you to estimate quite accurately how long it will take in the future (e.g., it takes about 40 minutes to walk to the store).

3. By Showing What’s Not THAT Unlikely: if we witness just one example of a thing, chances are its traits are not EXTREMELY unrepresentative of the class from which it comes. Of course, it’s possible they are, but the vast majority of the time, a single data point will not have extremely rare traits.

Example: you see an adult Spider Monkey for the first time (in the wild, let’s say). Chances are that this Spider Monkey is somewhere between the 1st percentile and 99th percentile for size. It’s unlikely that the only Spider Monkey you’ve ever seen is one of the very largest or smallest that exists. You can expect that most of the traits this particular Spider Monkey has are not incredibly rare.

Showing Possibilities

4. By Alerting Us to a New Possibility: sometimes, a single data point shows us that a possibility or phenomenon exists that we had never before seen or considered.

Example: Roentgen had a cathode tube covered in heavy black paper and was surprised when an incandescent green light escaped and projected onto a nearby fluorescent screen. He had discovered a new phenomenon. It eventually led to the discovery of x-rays!

5. By Causing Us to Think of a Hypothesis: if we see something work for a single example or see that things went a certain (surprising) way, it can give us a hypothesis or approach that may apply to other cases – especially if it coheres with other justified beliefs we have.

Example: suppose that, while bartering over a price at a food stand, you see a friend use a negotiation tactic you have never seen before. Upon seeing this tactic used, it immediately makes sense to you that the tactic works, yet the idea had simply never occurred to you before.

6. By Illustrating a Causal Mechanism: studying a single data point or example can allow us to see HOW a mechanism works, enabling us to build up a causal understanding or model. We can then apply this understanding to other examples.

Example: you take apart one mechanical clock and pay close attention to how it works. From this experience, you build up a causal model of how such clocks function. Later, when a different mechanical clock stops working, this causal model helps you quickly diagnose the problem.

An interesting aspect of learning from one data point is that, every once in a while, one data point unlocks the information from a whole bunch of other data points.

For instance, if someone is in an abusive relationship but is still convinced that their partner is a “good guy who means well,” a bunch of data points about the partner’s behavior may simply not make sense in the “he’s a good guy” frame. So those data points just sit around causing confusion and end up being dismissed or integrated in a contrived way (e.g., “It’s weird that he yells at his business partner on the phone so much, but I guess he’s just really passionate about his business. And it’s weird that he sometimes tells me I look terrible – but that’s just because he’s concerned that others will think badly of me, and he’s looking out for my best interests.”)

Then a single new data point can suddenly cause a reconsideration of the hypotheses that their partner is a good person and allow them to consider that maybe he’s actually a highly manipulative and selfish person (e.g., catching him cheating in a way that’s impossible to ignore). Once this new hypothesis becomes available, suddenly, all of those previously ignored data points make sense and can be integrated quickly. Hence, processing one data point can sometimes enable you to process a whole bunch of others.

A side point is that it’s not always clear what “one data point” means. From the point of view of health or social science or economics studies, a single data point can mean one person or one task completed or one school or the statistics for one country. In ordinary life, we’re experiencing lots of information all the time, though we can still sometimes think of “one data point” as being one example or one experience or one attempt, etc.

There are also times when “one data point” is exactly what we’re interested in. For instance, we want to know whether we like THAT dish or what’s true of that exact thing, not that type of dish or that sort of thing. In such cases, of course, it’s precisely that one data point that we need to learn from.

So, can we learn a lot from one data point?

Unfortunately, we humans often err on the side of OVER-reacting to a single data point. We take one example, anecdote or life experience, and generalize it inappropriately.

But, if we are very careful, there are (perhaps surprisingly) sometimes valid ways to learn a LOT from just one data point!

1. Music: we prefer songs that are similar to others we like but that feel novel. If a song is too similar to what we know, then it’s derivative or boring (like listening to the same music on loop), but if it’s too novel, it is usually unappealing or dissonant. Music from other cultures can be hard for us to appreciate until we’ve listened to enough of it.

2. Learning: we learn best when an idea connects to what we already understand while also adding something on top. If it’s too far removed from what we already understand, it’s confusing, or we don’t believe it. Learning often works best when bridges are built between a person’s old understanding and some new understanding.

3. Products: we like user interfaces to be familiar, but also like them to let us do something new (or do something we value in a new, better way). An unfamiliar interface feels like a struggle to learn and can leave us frustrated. One of the great strengths of the iPhone, when it was introduced, was that the interface somehow felt familiar even though we had never used something like it before.

4. Dating: most people want those they date to be familiar in most ways (e.g., similar culture, religion, political beliefs, life goals, attitudes) yet highly distinct with respect to a few key variables. The differences being sought differ for each person, but some fairly common ones sometimes sought include: a masculine person contrasting with feminine one, a submissive person contrasting with a dominant one, a breadwinner contrasting with a homemaker, a side-kick contrasting with a leader, a joker contrasting with someone who laughs often, a strong person contrasting with someone in need of protection, or someone successful at rule-breaking contrasting with someone successful at being rule-abiding.

5. Stories: we enjoy stories that follow the standard tropes (e.g., the Hero’s Journey or the “love found → love lost → love recovered” romantic comedy), yet we want them to feel novel in some way and not too derivative. Truly novel movies are rarely as popular as ones that are executed on a classic formula but strategically deviate from it in enough key ways to feel fresh. For instance, I think The Matrix did a good job of telling a very standard “hero’s journey” story but with a number of novel-feeling elements thrown in (an intriguing setting, “bullet time” filming, etc.).

So if you’re making something, and you want people to really enjoy it, you may want to consider how you can make it Familiar Yet Different.

This piece was first written on September 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on June 10, 2022.

1. Autonomy

Pro: you’re the boss and decide what to do.

Con: you HAVE to always decide what to do. There will be a huge array of options at any given moment, and you’ll never know for sure which to work on. You can seek advice, but ultimately YOU are the one who must decide.

2. Lifestyle

Pro: since you’re the boss, you’ll have flexibility in your hours.

Cons: you’ll inevitably be working a lot of hours. It takes a lot of work to succeed as an entrepreneur. Since there is never an end to how much work can be done, you may have trouble “turning off” at the end of the day or on the weekend.

3. Resilience

Pro: it’s an incredible way to train resilience, persistence, and problem-solving skills.

Con: the world will punch you in the face between 5 and 100 times, and if you ever give up, you lose. This is stressful, and most humans would give up after 5 or 10 face punches.

4. Expected Value

Pro: if you’re well suited to it and work on a good idea, the expected (mean) value in terms of potential impact and monetary reward can be REALLY high. Some companies have truly altered the course of history. And obviously, many of the wealthiest people are entrepreneurs.

Con: the probability of failure is high, and luck is a significant factor. And unless you have substantial savings, you’ll likely be living frugally at first.

5. Learning

Pro: you will learn a tremendous amount. Even if the startup doesn’t work out, this valuable experience will apply to MANY other things. I don’t know of another way to learn so many things so quickly. One of the most important categories of things you’ll learn is “how to get difficult shit done in the real world while charting a path yourself for how to make it happen.”

Con: you will inevitably make many mistakes (ouch), and you have to face up to them (double ouch) in order to learn fast enough. It forces you to acknowledge and improve (or develop workarounds for) your weaknesses. It’s also important to note that if you are really not suited for entrepreneurship, or you just get unlucky right away, you might not learn that much. The great learning from entrepreneurship certainly doesn’t require success, but if you fail too immediately or don’t get anywhere close to success, it will be much less of a learning experience.

6. Meaning

Pro: you can choose to work on an idea that is DEEPLY meaningful to you. Most jobs don’t provide this level of meaning.

Con: if you fail, you will have invested a lot of time in (and then failed at) something deeply meaningful to you.

7. Respect

Pro: many people have a lot of respect for entrepreneurs, and it’s considered cool in plenty of circles.

Con: this respect increasingly kicks in as success increases, and before that, some people won’t even respect it as a career choice. If you fail, that will still garner respect from some people, but most people probably won’t give you much respect for having tried and failed.

8. Relationships

Pro: you will likely meet lots of interesting people and build meaningful relationships with your team members.

Cons: you may have to deal with difficult personalities or navigate complex human dynamics when it comes to employees, investors, customers, and/or co-founders.

9. Responsibility

Pro: it teaches you a deep form of responsibility, which strengthens your character.

Con: you are ultimately, at the end of the day, responsible for everything. You’re the captain, the last line of defense, and the goalie. When someone else at your company screws up, and it ends up having a bad effect on the business, as unfair as it may seem, it’s actually your fault. You hired them, or didn’t put safety measures in place, or didn’t spot the problem early enough, or didn’t give them the training they needed, etc. The captain is responsible for the fate of the ship and every crew member on it.

10. Adaptability

Pro: it hones your creativity and adaptability, can really build self-confidence, and can help you develop a sense of how much you’re capable of (probably more than you think!) as you figure out solutions for complex challenges, develop new ideas, and map out how to make them a reality. It pushes your boundaries in new ways and makes you grow.

Con: it can stretch your creativity and adaptability to the limit. Plans, essential as they are to make, rarely survive their collision with reality. It sometimes pushes your boundaries more than you would like and can place you into situations that you find terrifying (e.g., a high-stakes negotiation to save your company when it is on the brink of failure, or a major technical failure that leaves hundreds of customers furious at you, etc.).

So, why NOT be an entrepreneur? Because it’s a high-risk, chaotic, stressful, responsibility-filled, boundary-pushing, challenging life. And it’s hard work. Not everyone is suited to this path, and it’s irresponsible to pretend that everyone is.

BUT, if you’re well suited for it, it can be one of the most deeply meaningful, high-value, high-impact lives to lead. You’ll meet lots of people, build resilience and adaptability, push your skills to new heights, and learn a STAGGERING amount. For some people, it is absolutely their best life path.

If you think that entrepreneurship may be the right path for you, and you haven’t yet picked what idea to work on, you may be interested in learning more about our work at Spark Wave. We’re a startup studio (venture builder), and we recruit people who are interested in becoming CEOs for our mission-driven software products (no technical background or prior startup experience is required). We aim to reduce some of the worst negatives of entrepreneurship while building products that we believe could add a lot of value to the world. Our goal is to help make a better world through software and entrepreneurship. You can learn more and get in touch with us at: https://www.sparkwave.tech

This piece was first written on September 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on July 29, 2022.

Use my lists of “Idea-Inducing Questions” to generate nearly endless ideas to write about, think about, or discuss!

Questions about learning and truth-seeking

• Recently learned: what’s a powerful idea, concept, or mental model that you’ve been learning about recently that you think is worth knowing?

• Changed opinions: what is a strongly held belief you used to have that you changed your mind about? What caused you to change your mind? Why do you think you were wrong before?

• Influential book: what is the name of one book that substantially influenced the way you think about things? What did you learn from it that you can pass on to your audience?

• Debates: what’s something you disagree with a certain group of people on? What do you think is the core of the disagreement?

• Thorny problems: Is there a complex problem, situation, idea, concept, or a set of competing ideas that you’re still trying to understand or figure out your opinion on? What are the factors that are driving your opinion in different directions or that make the issue tricky to figure out? What are the open questions or confusions you have about it still?

• Third perspectives: For any pair of opposing ideas that most people in the public sphere take either one side or the other on, can you think of a third perspective or synthesis of both ideas that could actually be better than taking either side?

• Misconceptions: What’s a commonly believed idea that you think is actually wrong or a misconception?

• Underrated or overrated ideas: What’s a powerful or useful idea that you think is significantly underrated? Or conversely, what’s an idea that is talked about a lot in a positive light that you think is overrated or that isn’t actually a good idea?

• Epistemics: how do you think about what to believe versus what ideas to reject? How do you approach understanding hotly-contested, thorny, or highly complex topics? What mental models or approaches do you use to help you think more clearly or analyze questions or evaluate evidence?

Questions about ideas that have useful applications

• Beneficial ideas: what’s an idea that, if it became widely known and adopted/used, would greatly improve the world?

• Versatile ideas: what powerful idea or concept do you think has many different useful applications across many life domains?

• Psychology tools: what’s a powerful idea, concept, mental model, or tool from psychology that you think is useful to people’s lives?

• Tools for making sense: what’s a powerful idea, concept, mental model, or tool that you think can help people better understand or make sense of the world?

• Scientific principles: what principle from a mathematical or scientific field (e.g., economics, statistics, evolutionary biology, etc.) do you think is important or valuable to know about (because it helps you understand the world or because there are applications of it to daily life)? How can you apply this idea in life?

Questions about your own ideas and experiences

• Your ideas: What’s an idea you’ve come up with that you think would be valuable for your audience to hear about?

• Ideas you’ve applied: What’s an idea that you’ve found to be very useful or powerful in your own life? How have you applied it successfully?

• Unique experiences: what’s something you have experienced that very few people have experienced (whether it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or just something strange or surprising)? What did you learn from that experience?

• On your mind: What’s an idea you’ve been thinking about a lot lately? What are your current thoughts about it?

• Area of expertise: what topic are you very knowledgeable about? What is the most valuable idea from that field that you think many people would benefit from knowing about?

Questions about unusual or neglected ideas

• Powerful obscure ideas: In your opinion, what is one of the most valuable or important ideas or concepts that most people don’t know about?

• Contrarian ideas: What’s something you disagree with most smart, educated people about (according to your own definition of smart and educated)? Or what’s your answer to the Thiel question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

• Overlooked areas: What’s a topic area that very few people have an opinion on or knowledge of, that you think it’s important to have an opinion on, or that is well worth learning about?

This piece was first written on August 2, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 27, 2022.

I think one of the big choices to be made in life (once basic needs are well met) is whether to try to optimize more for a life of stability or for a life of acceleration. There is a tension between these two types of lives because they imply making different decisions in many realms.

From what I can tell, the significant majority of people on this planet (even among those who have their basic needs already well met) seek a life that is more one of stability than one of acceleration. And I think that, to many, stability epitomizes most elements of what it means to live “the good life”: forge friendships you can keep for decades, find work you can be a master of, meet a life partner with compatible goals and values, buy a house you will live in indefinitely, spend your free time doing the hobbies you love most, etc.

Yet, in some social circles I encounter in New York and San Francisco, the presumption seems to be that acceleration is the obviously superior goal.

So which do you seek more: stability or acceleration?

Optimizing for stability may involve things like…

(1) hobbies: figuring out what you enjoy doing most and doing those things whenever you have time,

(2) friendship: figuring out who you like being around and turning that group into your permanent circle that you spend almost all your social time with,

(3) work: getting skilled at some type of work that provides the lifestyle you want and doing that thing you’ve mastered day after day,

(4) risk: avoiding substantial risks, even if they have high expected value, or avoiding situations that seem very difficult or that provoke anxiety,

(5) romance: finding a reliable partner who shares most of your values and long term goals,

(6) beliefs: being skeptical of bizarre or wacky ideas, especially if they contradict your deeply held beliefs or challenge what has worked well for you,

(7) location: finding the place you want to be and putting down permanent roots,

(8) behavior: developing habits that work well for you and making them permanent,

(9) self-improvement: working on the behaviors or traits you have that increase instability in your life, for instance, those that cause conflict with people you care about or that make you unhappy in your current situation,

(10) mindset: treating your values as relatively static (i.e., you value what you value), your talent level as relatively fixed (i.e., fixed rather than growth mindset), mistakes as something you should seek to minimize, your optimization procedure as seeking something “good” rather than spending more time attempting to find “the best” (i.e., “satisficing” instead of maximizing), “exploitation” (as opposed to exploration – “exploitation” in this context doesn’t refer to exploiting people but refers to going with the best things you’ve found so far), and

A focus on stability may also be associated with: conservativeness (“if we’ve always done it this way and it’s worked for us, why change things?”), older age (“I’ve already explored enough”), and coming from a region/upbringing with economic or structural instability (e.g., “I want the stability I never had”).

On the other hand, optimizing for acceleration may involve things like…

(1) hobbies: regularly trying new activities, including ones that you don’t predict you’ll enjoy much, or doing hobbies that cause perpetual learning,

(2) friendship: regularly making new friends and interacting with people that are different from the ones you already know,

(3) work: switching jobs or pushing to get promoted whenever your work feels too routine or easy, or when it feels like you’re not pushed right to the edge of your ability,

(4) risk: periodically taking significant risks when you think the expected value is high, or throwing yourself into situations that are very difficult or anxiety-provoking when you believe they will make you better in the long-run,

(5) romance: finding a partner that challenges you to become a better version of yourself, or to do things outside of your comfort zone, or that you can learn a lot from,

(6) beliefs: taking bizarre or wacky-seeming ideas seriously before deciding whether to reject them (at least, when they come from sources you have respect for), even when they challenge your basic premises or lifestyle,

(7) location: exploring many different places to live (e.g., countries or regions) and environments to live in (e.g., alone/with groups, around different subcultures),

(8) behavior: regularly discarding old routines and trying on new ones to see if they have benefits, or resisting making routines at all,

(9) self-improvement: pushing yourself to always learn new things and to work on the behaviors or mental habits you have that may be limiting your potential, and

(10) mindset: thinking of your values as continually evolving, believing you can improve yourself in nearly any capacity if you work hard enough (i.e., growth mindset), treating mistakes are an opportunity to learn and as a positive sign that you are trying things that are sufficiently hard, and believing you should strive to do the very best you can and to be the very best you can be.

A focus on acceleration may also be associated with: liberalness (“we should be open to and learn from the ideas and practices of those who are very different from us”), younger age (“I want to explore all that’s out there”), and coming from a region/upbringing of abundance (e.g., “I want something even better than what I had”).

Note that acceleration is not necessarily exponential. In many cases, especially when trying to accelerate an area that you’ve already spent a lot of time working on, improvements will be slow and linear (whereas acceleration may be rapid in areas where you’ve done relatively little optimization before).

Some life choices cause an interesting mix of focus on stability and acceleration. For instance, having children is, I think, very much an action that drives acceleration: it annihilates routines, carries significant risk, speeds up maturity, and challenges you to be a better, more selfless person. On the other hand, once you have a child, there is pressure to seek stability for the sake of that child. So perhaps it is a choice that produces a focus on acceleration in the short term but on stability in the long term.

Of course, you can seek stability in some areas (e.g., romance) while seeking acceleration in others (e.g., work), but I think as a simple, compressed model, it can be useful at times to view stability and acceleration as existing along a continuum.

Some people seek neither stability nor acceleration, but I don’t think it is terribly common to seek neither of these for a large proportion of life. Counterexamples, though, would include hedonists focussed on maximizing their pleasure and a subset of people with long-term severe depression who have stopped actively seeking any improvements to their life (perhaps due to “learned helplessness”).

The idea of stability vs. acceleration is related to (and includes in it) the idea of an “exploration vs. exploitation” tradeoff (discussed in the machine learning literature, and more recently, in a self-improvement context). However, I intend this concept to be much more general, as it also encompasses ideas like risk aversion, openness to ideas that challenge your lifestyle, and how you choose to direct your self-improvement efforts.

I don’t think that either stability or acceleration is “better” than the other. Where you should ideally fall on the spectrum right now depends heavily on what you value, as well as your life circumstances and opportunities. You may choose to emphasize stability at one point in your life and acceleration during another, or you may be caught right in the middle, trying to strike a balance between the two (even as they tend to be in tension against each other).