For many years, I've thrown social experiments as part of a group I founded, called Ergo. Our rule: we can never repeat the same event format. Once we've used one, it's dead, forcing each event to be experimental. Here are a few of our bizarre/entertaining past events:
1) Novelty party: each attendee brings something interesting (an experience, food, or object) that they believe other attendees will not have experienced before. A winner is crowned based on surveying attendees about how novel...
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psychology
What’s Between Us and Reality
We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality - as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you're having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each layer, two types of error happen: information gets left out, and bias creeps in. By the time experience reaches you, there's the potential for a great deal of both to have accumulated.
Put another way, rather than p...
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The Mental Models You Don’t Know About
I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know?
• Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn't measure anything, it's unlikely to achieve anything
• The Zareto Principle: roughly 20% of effects come from just 0.001% of causes
• The Dunning–Kruger-Kruger-Dunning Effect: people with little knowledge about the Dunning-...
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The Oddly Absent “Wesearch”
You might think that fields would very often apply their own methods to themselves.
For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time.
Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the repli...
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The Crud Factor: what’s the average correlation between totally random human traits?
We gathered >1 million human correlations spanning personality, demographics, behaviors, and beliefs, which enabled us to investigate an interesting question: is everything correlated with everything? In other words, is the so-called "crud factor" real? Here's our answer.
On average, there is almost no correlation between human variables (see image). The average is only r=0.02, with the median even smaller at r=0.01. But this is misleading because it allows positive correlations to be cancel...
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Are happiness and well-being the only things that people value?
The most common kind of critiques I get of my theory of human intrinsic values are:
1) "But I only care about well-being (in the sense of happiness, pleasure, or lack of suffering) - that's my ONLY intrinsic value."
2) "People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being."
Here's my response:
First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate thoughtful criticism of my work. It helps me see the truth more clearly and improve my ideas...
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In memory of Daniel Kahneman, who accelerated our understanding of the mind
I'm not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind.
Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of:
Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments)
Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases)
The focusing illusion (where we overempha...
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Dichotomizer (or Oversimplifiers) vs. Difference Deniers: a dynamic regarding group differences that leads to rage and confusion
Here's a misery-filled dynamic that I believe commonly plays out regarding small observed differences between groups:
(1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions.
(2) Some people ("Dichotomizers" or "Oversimplifiers") observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: "A's are like this, B's are l...
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Ten theories for how to achieve true happiness (and useful resources for you to try them out)
This essay is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog.
The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we've summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today.
How do you think about being truly happy?
You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine you...
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50 “Laws” of Everything
Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Gates' Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, ...
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