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...

Obvious Defaults Perform The Best

June 10, 2017

It's surprising how often, in highly complex domains where we are trying to figure out what to do, an obvious or simple default can perform extremely well. This is sometimes even true when the defaults are clearly not optimal. Here are simple defaults in four complex domains that can be surprisingly hard to outperform: 1. Charity: give money to the poorest non-drug addicted people you can find, and let them do whatever they want with the money. GiveWell, which has spent yea...