The Pattern Where Populist Leaders Rise To Power And Take Advantage Of The Populace

October 23, 2025

There's a pattern that has repeated many times throughout history, which leads to countries suffering under terrible leadership. It's important to understand this pattern because it's likely to continue to repeat. Here are the steps of how this happens, as I see it, though not every one of these steps occurs in every single case: (1) Many people feel dissatisfied with the state of their society and its impact on their lives, and blame the groups that have long remained in power. (Sometime...

Fascinating Obscure Concepts That Are Worth Knowing

July 8, 2025

For years, whenever I've encountered a word for a fascinating concept that my computer's built-in dictionary didn't recognize, I've added it to a collection I keep of "Fascinating Obscure Concepts." Here's the first part of my list of these unusual concepts you may never have encountered before: —LITTLE-KNOWN SELF-IMPROVEMENT CONCEPTS 1) Musterbating: Albert Ellis' term for rigid, self-imposed ideas that many people hold that "I/you/they absolutely must (or should) do X." Rather than seei...

Four extremely bad ideas that have been popular

July 5, 2024

Here are four incredibly bad ideas (that are still commonly believed): 1) That people should be judged for, blamed for, or feel shame about the behavior of their ancestors. Of course, if your ancestors did bad things, you should condemn those acts. And if you directly benefit from something bad your family member did, you should consider if you can make amends. But, logically, people cannot be morally responsible for events that they were unable to affect. This bad idea (th...

Anonymized Responses to Taboo Questions – A Social Experiment

February 14, 2018

If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, "Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions," which allows attendees to see each other's (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn. I've included the details of the event format below, including materials you can use to throw your own version of it. Important Note: this event fo...

What People Want Most

January 14, 2018

What do people want more than anything else in the world? I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote using 24 categories in random order developed from the first study, including an “other” option. A...

What is a large correlation? Looking at the sizes of 166 correlations.

January 13, 2018

How large is a "large" correlation when it comes to studying people? Below are 166 (rather interesting!) size-ordered correlations that I calculated on 870 people in the United States, who were recruited using our study recruitment platform, Positly. All responses are self-reported by the study participants, mostly measured on a scale of 1-4 or 1-5, except those that suggest a different scale (e.g., number of minutes doing something, age, symptom scores, etc.) Keep in mind that if A an...