But I think approximately everyone has at least one of those beliefs; it’s just not that obvious because many of these strange beliefs are idiosyncratic, and people often hide them from each other and sometimes even from themselves (by avoiding thinking about that belief, or by not reflecting on how crazy the belief would seem to others).

For one person, the weird belief may be their lucky coin (see this lovely essay that I learned about from @mariellevolz after writing a first draft of this essay).

For another person, it may be an unsupported belief that they are unlovable.

For a third person, it might be an attachment to a certain diet that they’re convinced would solve all sorts of problems if everyone would just go on it (like they did).

Or it could be a strange belief they learned from their childhood religion, which everyone except adherents of their exact denomination of their religion sees as ridiculous.

And so on.

Because I think just about everyone has strange false beliefs like this, I try not to judge people too much based on the fact that they have a “weird” belief that I think is way out of alignment with reality. Of course, even if I’m right, that doesn’t mean everyone is an equally “bad” thinker.

Some people think, “That person believes X, what an idiot,” and write the person off. I aspire not to do that based on one crazy belief but rather to look at a person’s beliefs and how they arrive at their beliefs more holistically.

Being an effective thinker is better measured by how we do, on average, on the important things (weighted by their importance) rather than the worst thinking we do on any single topic.

I also believe that with time and consistent effort, we all can get better at thinking clearly and that it’s a worthwhile investment for most people.

But even with hard work, we’re unlikely to get to zero weird false beliefs.

This piece was first written on February 2, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 7, 2024.

Note: here, I use the term “success” merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want “success” in the sense in which it is used in this post (or you are interested in being able to predict it in others), you may find some of the models here useful.

I’m also interested to know: which model (below) do you find most useful for thinking about success, and which one of these factors (used in the models) do you think is currently most limiting your success?

1. Noise theory:

success = luck

2. Genetic determinism:

success = (innate) aptitude + luck

Note: whenever I use “luck,” I mean random factors not already accounted for in the other factors in the model. So in the case above, “luck” means luck other than the random chance of what your aptitude is.

3. Traditional right:

success = aptitude + surrounding culture + hard work

4. Social justice left:

success = privilege + luck

5. Economic left:

success = social/economic class you’re born into + luck

6. Cynical theory:

success = some combination of self-promotion, bullshitting, social skills, good-lookingness, starting resources, and luck

7. Gladwell: 

success = whoever practiced for 10,000 hours + luck

8. Dweck: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + luck

9. Duckworth: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + grit + luck

10. Seligman: 

success = skill * effort * self-promotion * luck

11. Psychometrics: 

success = IQ + conscientiousness + low neuroticism + luck

12. Ericsson: 

success = luck + hours spent doing “deliberate practice” (i.e., with specific goals and tight performance feedback loops, while analyzing mistakes and dividing skills into micro-skills that can be practiced independently, ideally all done under the supervision of expert coaches)

13. My mega model:

success at a fixed goal = luck^a

* (resources+opportunities)^b

* (community/collaborator quality and supportiveness)^c

* (innate aptitude at relevant skills)^d

* intelligence^e

* rationality^f

* (creativity and resourcefulness)^g

* (social skills)^h

* (hours of deliberate practice)^i

* (unitary or obsessive focus on the goal)^j

* (conscientiousness and self-control)^k

* (physical or mental health)^l

* confidence^m

* (ambition and agency/self-directedness)^n

* (self-promotion skill and effort)^o

* courage^p

* (goal/task-specific factors)^q

* (efficiency and prioritization)^r

Each exponent a, b, c, …, r is a different number from 0 to 1. Note that each of these traits is selected because I believe, on average, having more of them improves the chance of success – that’s why I exclude negative exponents. Furthermore, I’m claiming that these factors, on average, each have diminishing marginal returns. That’s why the exponents are each less than 1 (making a concave function).

The values of the exponents vary depending on the field and type of skill. For instance, in some areas, courage is a minor factor (in which case the courage exponent, n, would be close to 0, and in other fields, courage is essential, in which case n would be close to 1). So, in other words: success is a PRODUCT of roughly 18 factors, and how much each factor matters depends on what you’re trying to do.

Note that this is designed so that if you have literally 0 of any factor, then the level of success is automatically 0 (since 0 times any number is 0). For instance, if you have literally no physical health, you are, presumably, dead, and if you have literally no ambition, presumably you just sit around all day or do the minimum you need to eat.

It’s worth noting that the factors above are not completely statistically or causally independent in reality (becoming higher in one may make you higher in another, on average). But I think the enormous extra complexity of trying to account for these dependencies probably is not worth it in practice.

How do you improve your odds of success?

A lot of times, when people are extremely successful, I think it’s because they avoid being TOO low in any of the factors, and they have one or two factors where they are exceptionally high. Many factors are “bounded” ones: for instance, you can’t work more than 24 hours per day. So it’s impossible to work more than 3x the amount the average person does. But there are some “unbounded” factors where you can potentially be WAY higher than the average person (e.g., “creativity”), which can drive the success score very high (as long as no other factor is close enough to zero to drag it back down). Hence, this model leads to an approach for thinking about how to be more successful (if that’s something you care about).

Put simply, success often flows from not being TOO weak on really important factors and having one or two really strong (and relevant) strengths.

Getting into more detail, here is a process you might use to consider how to increase your odds of great success:

1. For the goal/task you’re trying to succeed at, figure out which of the above factors matter substantially (which maps onto trying to – very roughly – figure out the exponents for each factor).

2. If your strong/weak factors are not a good fit for the goal, consider changing the goal to better play to your strengths, or consider teaming up with someone (e.g., a co-founder) to compensate for your weaknesses.

3. Once you have settled on a goal, identify any especially low factors (relevant to that goal) that are driving your potential for success down, and think about how you can improve at those. Due to multiplicative effects, very low factors can really drag down your potential for success. For instance, if you have severe mental health challenges that interfere with your day-to-day tasks, working on that first can be a great idea (even if you’re just optimizing for success).

4. Identify your strongest factors (that are relevant to that goal) and think about how you might improve at them or hone them to get them VERY high. You can also figure out how to make even more use of these great strengths of yours to achieve good outcomes. Often, one of the most effective things we can focus on is leaning into our greatest strengths (for instance, by designing a path towards our goals that leverages them or working to enhance them even more). This is especially the case once we’ve gotten barriers to success out of the way (i.e., we’ve worked on improving our especially low factors).

A question for you: right now, which of the factors listed above is the one that is most significantly limiting your success?

This piece was first written on September 12, 2021 and first appeared on this site on March 25, 2022.

1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we’ve been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this.

2. Popcorn. It’s freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it’s delicious.

3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s.

This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it was around.

4. That we have three types of color receptors. This allows most people to see an AMAZING array of colors!

Cats and dogs can’t do this, and things must look way duller.

However, colors probably are way cooler to birds, some of whom have FOUR color receptors and can see ultraviolets!

5. That we freaking EXIST! Think about that for a moment. Almost every human that has ever lived is not alive right now, but you and I are!

It seems to be crazy luck that we were born at all. If your parents had sex moments later, a different baby likely would have been born, as a different sperm likely would have fertilized the egg (or none would have at all). As  A.J. Jacobs points out, with an average of hundreds of millions of sperm per ejaculate, these odds are like winning a major Powerball lottery!

6. That we’re not chickens (or insects)!

Probabilistically speaking, shouldn’t we expect to be a member of the most abundant category of conscious beings on Earth rather than a rarer category?

If chickens are conscious (as I think they are), we really lucked out to be born human instead of one of the >20 billion chickens alive right now that’s living in terrible factory farm conditions (and that will die as soon as it is big enough or isn’t laying enough eggs).

If insects are conscious (have something that it’s like to be them, which might be true for some insect species, though I doubt it is true for all of them), then it’s REALLY weird we don’t find ourselves to be insects since there are vastly more of them than humans!

7. That any conscious beings exist at all! Why isn’t the universe just a bunch of gas and rocks and shit? It’s not at all obvious there should be anything that has the ability to have experiences – yet here we are!

It’s not even obvious why there is SOMETHING instead of NOTHING!

This was first written on February 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 25, 2022.

Is it worth taking a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying , in order to experience the novel thrill of sky diving? Is a 1 in 500,000 chance of death worth it to go bungee jumping?

It’s hard to know whether these risks are reasonable, because numbers like 100,000 or 500,000 feel so abstract to us. To think more clearly about these numbers, it helps to get our intuitions engaged.

We can start by figuring out the daily risk of dying that we automatically face every day. My “death calculator” tool above will compute yours, as estimated from your gender and age. For instance, in the United States, a 30 year old man has about a 1 in 260,000 chance of dying tomorrow whereas a 30 year old woman has about a 1 in 583,000 chance. A 55 year old man has a 1 in 46,000 chance of dying on any given day and a 55 year old woman a 1 in 79,000 chance. Note that while it’s extremely difficult to estimate a person’s life span (since future technological and societal changes may radically alter how long people live), estimating how likely a person is to die in the next day is much more accurate and straightforward.

Once you’ve used the tool to calculate your own chance of dying tomorrow, you can start thinking about the risk of dangerous activities relative to how much risk you already take each day (merely by going about normal activities). In particular, you can calculate how many total days worth of risk an activity involves. So for instance, if you are a 30 year old male, and ride 100 miles on a motorcycle tomorrow, then you’ll experienced 11.2 days worth of risk of dying tomorrow, rather than a single normal day of risk.

To do the calculation of how many days of risk you’re taking in a day where you do the dangerous activity, simply calculate the following: Start with the probability that you die in a normal day, add to it the probability that you die from doing the risky activity, and then divide the result by the probability that you die in a normal day.

So for instance, if you were to go BASE jumping tomorrow (an activity that appears to have about a 1 in 2,300 chance of death), and if you normally have a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying in a given day (for instance, you’re a 46 year old man) then you’d be taking on ((1/2300)+(1/100000))/(1/100,000) = 44.5 days worth of ordinary daily risk tomorrow, instead of just 1 day of risk.

Would that be worth it? For some people, it might be possible it is worth BASE jumping once in their in life. But suppose you were to go BASE jumping 20 times over the next year, on 20 different days. Then rather than consuming 365 days of typical risk that year (as a 46 year old man), you’d be taking on about 1235 days worth of risk, an additional roughly 2.4 years of risk! It’s hard to imagine that being worth it, even if BASE jumping is incredibly enjoyable. Of course, there is also a high risk of injury, aside from the risk of death.

Below is a table with estimates of the chance of dying from doing various activities.

Taking a 340 mile road trip on occasion with friends seems very reasonable. For instance, a 30 year old male will only be doubling his risk of dying that day, and a 30 year old female will be taking on about 3.3 days of her usual daily risk. But taking a job as a taxi driver in a suburban area or a long distance courier, driving 340 miles most days, would be much more risky. A 30 year old male who took such a job would be doubling his risk of dying every day. Another way to think about it is that despite being a 30 year old male, he would living with the daily risk of a 43 year old male. Similarly, a 30 year old male who decided to go BASE jumping one day, would be living that day with the daily risk of death of an 88 year old man.

So what risks are worth taking? It’s ultimately a subjective question. But thinking in terms of how much you’re increasing your ordinary daily risk, and converting risks into the daily risk of people of different ages, can make these abstract numbers more intuitive. And stronger intuition can help us reason more sanely about our choices.

Disclaimer: these numbers come from the internet, so if you want to be confident about any of them, you should double check them using a reliable source. Note also that actual death rates will depend on a variety of factors, including the amount of experience you have doing that activity and the location where you are doing it. Furthermore, note that for many of these activities there are risks of injury, in addition to risk of death, but I’ve only considered risk of death in this analysis. Be very cautious before deciding to engage in any dangerous activity!