• 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-Kruger effect will confidently claim that it’s about how people with little skill believe they are more skilled than experts

• White Swan Theory: most real-world impact comes from the most commonly occurring instances, since they’re so numerous (e.g., most people’s perspective on whether swans are dickheads comes from their interactions with white swans, not black ones)

• Zuckerberg’s Number: technology enables us to break free from evolutionary constraints by barely having a social relationship with 5000 people

• Barkinson’s Law: regardless of how much time is allocated for a project, many people will start working on it at the last possible moment

• Schloccam’s Razor: Among competing explanations that all fit the facts, use the one that is most useful

• The Savile Effect: Attempts by powerful people to suppress information often succeed – it’s just that you only hear about the ones that fail

• The Autism Effect: when a trait’s apparent prevalence skyrockets due to broadening definitions and improved screening, somebody will inevitably blame its rise on really stupid shit like Tylenol or vaccines

• Stalin’s Razor: don’t attribute to stupidity what could be adequately explained by the person in charge being a dangerous, power-obsessed psycho

• Musk’s Law: those with tremendous success early in life become convinced that they are geniuses in other domains where they very much aren’t

• Daze’s Rule: people will be more impressed if you use fancy math to make a point than if you just say the same thing

• Dunderham’s Law: the fastest way to summon wrong answers online is to post the right one.

• Godberg’s Law: As people get increasingly angry at something happening in society, the probability that someone eventually tries to blame the Jews for it approaches one

• Dumbar’s Principle: famous number about humans inevitably have very stupid origin stories (e.g., ~150 stable social ties, 10000 steps for health, 8 glasses of water per day, a >2.9013 positive-to-negative ratio needed to flourish)

• The COVID Principle: people will often risk their lives before they risk standing apart from their tribe

• Diner Equilibrium: when nobody is actually happy with the outcome of a negotiation, but everyone is satisfied enough not to complain

• Multipolar party: when, despite nobody being in charge, humans miraculously self-assemble and cooperate to solve challenges, as often occurs at Burning Man

Just in case you didn’t catch on: these are parodies of “real” mental models 

This piece was first written on April 13, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 30, 2026.

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 replication crisis occurred (from the perspective of the psychology of those who precipitated and enabled it).

Sociologists may also apply ethnographic methods to examine the institutions, practices, and self-concepts of sociologists.

After all, what could be more available to study and more at the top of your mind than your own group? And why not apply your field’s methods to your group since you are already applying them to everything else?

But in my experience, this kind of “Wesearch” – if you’ll allow me to coin a term – is quite rare and niche.

If I’m right about this, why would that be? I suspect part of the reason is that people want to see themselves as not being merely governed by simple forces.

It’s all fine and good to model other anonymous people as merely responding to incentives, being impacted by severe confirmation bias, mimicking each other’s behavior for social status, etc. But we don’t want to think of ourselves, and the colleagues we respect in that way. It feels reductionist (and inaccurate) to do so. Our colleagues might even feel insulted to be modeled in such a way. These are models only for everyone else.

An interesting exception, pointed out by a reader, is that academic psychologists often have run studies on graduate students (e.g., their mental health and other psychological challenges they face). But even still, that’s only an example of it studying one aspect of itself.

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 26, 2025.

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 canceled out by negative ones.

So let’s instead look at the distribution of the absolute values of the correlations. The average *magnitude* is r=0.1, with a median of 0.07. This shows how small a correlation of 0.1 is – it’s about the magnitude you’d get correlating two human variables picked at random!

We see similar results if we look only at positive correlations. The mean and median are still r=0.1 and r=0.07. So it seems that there *is* a “crud factor” – random human things really are correlated (on average)! But not very much, just slightly. 

Yet, while there’s some correlation on average, it’s also worth noting that the most *common* correlation is right around 0! So, the correlation mean (r=0.1), median (r=0.07), and mode (r≈0) are all a bit different.

Finally, note that different data sets could find different results depending on what they contain. But, to my knowledge, this is the most diverse and largest test of its kind by far.

But wouldn’t we measure a non-zero correlation even if there were no true correlations, just due to random chance? 

The answer is yes, but if there were no true correlations, the average absolute value of correlation would be a lot smaller. I ran a simulation where I generated fake correlations (where the true correlation was zero, any measured correlation was just due to noise arising from a limited sample size). I did this using the real sample sizes from our actual database of correlations. 

The result is that we still do measure an absolute value of correlation above zero, as expected, but it’s very small. The median absolute value of correlation is just 0.02 and the mean is r=0.03. We get pretty much the same numbers if we take the median and mean of just the positive correlations as well (instead of the absolute values). So even though a small amount of the crud factor likely is attributable to random noise, we can see that it is substantially bigger than what we’d expect if it was all just due to random noise.

You can explore our 1 million correlations for free with our Personality Map tool: https://personalitymap.io

To learn more about the “crud factor” in psychology, check out this interesting paper:
Crud (Re)Defined.

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. Thank you to those who provide it!

Before responding to these critiques, let me clarify what my actual claims are.

I claim that:

i) One thing the human brain does is assign value to states of the world (e.g., if that person loved me, it would be valuable; if they hated me, it would produce negative value).

ii) Upon careful reflection, we will see that most of these things we value we only value instrumentally – that is, we value them because they give us other things. But some of our values are “intrinsic values” – we care about them for their own sake and would value them even if they give us nothing else (see here).

iii) Intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans. No claim is being made here about what people “should” value or what is “objectively” morally valuable.

Since we’re talking about psychology (not philosophy), we can study people to discover their intrinsic values.

How can people’s intrinsic values be studied? Well, we had people go through a quiz to help make sure they understand what intrinsic values are, and then we asked them about many values and had them rate them on this scale.

What we found is that most people say they have MANY intrinsic values. Here are examples of the most common ones we found among Westerners.

Okay, so now to address the critiques, starting with the first one:

Critique 1: “But I only care about well-being (or happiness) – that’s my ONLY intrinsic value.”

Well, you may be right that you only value well-being (with no other intrinsic values). On the other hand, in our studies, it’s very rare for someone to have only one intrinsic value, so perhaps you are mistaken about your values (or using definitions in a different way than me).

Even if you do only have one intrinsic value (which you might!), that doesn’t mean that most other people only have one – in our experience, most people report having many, even when a lot of effort is made to help them understand what exactly an intrinsic value is.

Let’s take on the second critique:

Critique 2: “People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being.”

One way to interpret this critique is as a claim about what objectively matters – e.g., “people might think other things matter, but the objective moral truth is that only well-being matters.”

This is a very controversial philosophical position that most laypeople and most philosophers disagree with. For instance, these survey results of professional academic philosophers show that most don’t accept consequentialism, let alone theories that only value well-being (see this result from the PhilPapers Survey).

But even if the objective moral truth were that only well-being matters, that still wouldn’t mean that people’s intrinsic values all bottom out in well-being.

Remember, these are psychological facts we’re referring to here, NOT facts about the universe or philosophy. People might (psychologically) intrinsically value things that are not “objectively”/”universally” valuable.

Another (quite different) way to interpret this critique (“People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being”) is that all psychological values bottom out in well-being.

For instance, perhaps if people reflect deeply enough, they will realize that everything they think they value intrinsically (that doesn’t seem to be just about well-being), they actually ONLY value because of its impacts on well-being.

This strongly contradicts what people claim about their own intrinsic values.

I think there are actually a lot of situations where people intrinsically value something other than well-being.

Let’s consider some of these:

(1) Some people seem to value truth intrinsically – in fact, they’d rather know an unpleasant truth even if it made their well-being a bit lower than believe a lie. I’m not saying they value truth infinitely – just that they would sometimes be willing to sacrifice some amount of well-being for the truth. For instance, if a friend (who is now deceased) secretly hated them during the whole friendship, I think many people would want to know that, even if they predicted they would be less happy knowing than not knowing.

(2) As an extreme example, many people are horrified by the idea of spending the rest of their life in total bliss if the way it is achieved is via a machine that deludes them into thinking at every moment that they’ve just won a Nobel prize, or if it’s achieved by a drug with no side effects which makes them blissful but prevents them from ever doing anything else other than lying there and experiencing bliss. Many people are adamant that they wouldn’t choose such a life even if it makes them way happier than they would normally be, and even if their loved ones could get it too (so they wouldn’t be leaving loved ones miserable).

(3) Many people care about how people think of them after they are dead – after the point that their well-being can be impacted.

(4) Many people seem to intrinsically value human connection – while human connection (e.g., love) does tend to make people happy, people often are willing to do things that make themselves less happy for those they love – even when those things aren’t about improving the happiness of the loved one (e.g., making well-being sacrifices to satisfy the wishes of a loved one after that person has passed away).

(5) There are many things people profess a willingness to sacrifice some of their well-being for, and they actually back that willingness up with behavior (i.e., they say and act as though they believe the thing is more valuable than the marginal well-being it sacrifices). For instance, some people seem to value nature itself (I’m not talking about the suffering of animals in nature or the impact nature has on humans – I’m talking about the protection or preservation of nature itself – such as the protection of trees, ecosystems, or the survival of endangered species). Some people make some well-being sacrifices to have a more positive effect on nature.

(6) Another intrinsic value some people appear to have is not being too prideful or boastful. People do not usually care about this (I claim) because of considerations related to well-being. Similarly, many people care about worshipping god or being a good practitioner of their religion – for reasons unrelated to potential reward (though, of course, the religion might say there also can be a reward).

(7) Many people seem to value equality intrinsically. For instance, many people (in fact, most people, I think) would be willing to sacrifice a little total utility to spread the utility a bit more equally. They think a world where 10 people each have (in arbitrary units) 0.999 utility (leading to a sum of 9.99 utility) is better than one where one person has 10, and everyone else has 0, even though the former world has slightly less total utility than the latter. Equality may be a well-being-related value, but it is not the same as valuing well-being – many people are willing to give up some total well-being to get more equality.

All of that being said, many intrinsic values are, indeed, well-being-related.

But even if we just consider well-being-related intrinsic values, I think it’s a mistake to collapse them into a single intrinsic value of well-being (or happiness) since they can be very different from each other (despite all being well-being related) and can be valued in very different amounts by any one person.

As an example, most people value their own happiness to a different degree than the happiness of their family members, and they value their family members’ happiness to a different degree than that of strangers (or cows, or snakes, or ladybugs). So yes, these are all well-being-related values, but I think it’s more accurate to think of these as multiple intrinsic values because the amount they value each is not the same. Again, I’m not talking here about objective moral truth (is it right to value these different amounts?) – I’m talking about psychological facts.

Furthermore, some people even value positive states of well-being to different degrees than negative ones (e.g., they value reducing suffering more than increasing happiness). This suggests that well-being isn’t a single unified intrinsic value for these people.

There is one more interpretation of a critique like “people may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being,” which is that all people REALLY value is their own pleasure – when they say they value something like nature itself or equality or being remembered when they’re gone, they are just getting pleasure out of the thought of that thing, and it’s that pleasure itself that they value. I think this is a very inaccurate perspective on the way human minds work, but it’s way too much to cover in this essay. Here is a whole other essay where I address that topic if you’re curious to see it.

So, do all intrinsic values boil down just to well-being? I don’t think so – intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans, and “bottoming out in well-being” just doesn’t seem to be how most human minds work. Most humans intrinsically care about lots of different things.

This piece was first written on June 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on June 20, 2024.

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 overemphasize the importance of whatever factor we happen to be focused on at that moment)
• The peak-end rule (where our memories of an event tend to emphasize the peak moment of greatest intensity and how the event ended)
• The planning fallacy (the common bias where people underestimate the time and cost of large projects)
• The availability heuristic (where we evaluate how frequent, likely, or important an event is based on how easily we can recall examples of it to memory)
• The representativeness heuristic (where we evaluate how likely something is to be something else based on how similar it is to a prototype or stereotype rather than incorporating all the information we have, such as base rate information)

I feel grateful to have had the chance to spend a little bit of time with him. He was as wonderful in person as he was in his articles. I once even thought I found an error in one of his papers, and he was so nice about it when I pointed it out. It turns out I misinterpreted what method he used, and the paper was flawless!

The world has suffered a great loss today.

This piece was first written on March 27, 2024, and first appeared on my website on April 11, 2024.

(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 like that.” They also fairly often make it seem like this difference is large (or applies to almost everyone in the group), important, and fundamental (e.g., inherent and unchangeable).

(3) Other people (“Difference Deniers”), often acting with good intentions, criticize this oversimplification, which they correctly perceive as harmful. But instead of saying some combination of:

• “the difference in averages is small”
• “the distributions are heavily overlapping”
• “judging an individual based on a small difference in group averages is a poor way to make predictions, as well as unjust”
• “we shouldn’t judge people for differing on that trait” (if it’s not a trait one should be judged on)
• “if we want to remove the difference in averages, we should consider implementing policy XYZ”

they say “the difference in averages does not exist.” After denying the difference and seeing those they respect deny it, some of them become convinced anyone who believes in the existence of this (actually existing) small average difference is nefarious (and lump such people in with those who harmfully oversimplify people into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that.”) Others among them know the average difference exists but pretend not to because they want to fit into the group that adamantly denies the difference, or because they feel guilty about believing it (even though they are right about it existing).

(4) Oversimiplifiers from (2), who remain totally convinced an average difference exists (and are correct about its existence but exaggerate its magnitude), assume that the Difference Deniers from (3) must be either stupid (for not realizing there is a difference), or untrustworthy liars (for denying what they must see is true), or cruel lunatics (for getting enraged at people for believing in “the truth”).

Queue endless fights between the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, both of which are misrepresenting the actual reality of the situation and demonizing each other.

The problem with turning small averages into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” is that it is an inaccurate oversimplification and often unfair to A’s or B’s or both.

The problem with denying the existence of average differences that, while small, really do exist is that you end up believing falsehoods, or you end up lying, or both, and you may end up unfairly misjudging people who are (without malice) reporting on real average differences.

To avoid the weaknesses of both the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, I think the best way to handle these cases is to:

1) Avoid pre-judging people based on their membership in broad groups – learn about people as individuals before coming to judgments about them.

2) Avoid language like “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” so that you aren’t a Dichotomizer.

3) Avoid denying that an average difference exists when it really does exist, so that way, you aren’t a Difference Denier.

4) When relevant, remind people that small average differences are not a good basis for judging individuals (epistemically and morally), and point out that the distributions between the two groups are heavily overlapping (when they are) to combat people using differences in the average as a justification for stereotyping.

5) Point to (when relevant, helpful, and accurate) policies that may help close the gap between the two groups (keeping in mind that some gaps in averages are fine if the trait in question is merely a difference and not something “good” or “bad”)

6) Point out (when the difference in question is not something people should be judged for) that this attribute should not be a basis for judging people, i.e., that having different values of that trait is completely okay.

Another approach that can be taken when the group differences in the average are small but meaningful is well described by Guy Srinivasan in the comments on an earlier draft of this post: “Can we agree to make decisions as if there were no average difference, since usually all such decisions would turn out the same, and usually when they wouldn’t it’s perpetuating systemic problems to make the decision differently?”

Of course, as with any binary categories, some people will only be partial Difference Deniers or Dichotomizers – people are absurdly complex, and this model I present here is purposely simplified in order to help communicate this dynamic clearly.

Okay, but are there cases where the Dichotomizers or Difference Deniers are actually just right?

Absolutely, there are some.

When a group difference is SO huge that the distributions are nearly non-overlapping, then it’s reasonable to say, “A’s are like this, and B’s are like that.” For instance, it makes sense to say that “blue whales are big, mice are small.” In such cases, the Dichotomizers aren’t really oversimplifying. But when we’re talking about human groups, this kind of situation is very rare.

And in situations when the difference in averages between groups is so small as to be essentially insignificant for all purposes, the Difference Deniers aren’t actually denying reality. For instance, if it turns out that right-handed people are 0.001% better at school than left-handed people, that difference is so small as to not be meaningfully different from zero for all purposes, and so saying there is “no difference” is an extremely reasonable thing to do. There are, in fact, many attributes along which human groups differ so little that “no difference” is an accurate way to describe it (even though the difference is not literally zero to the 10th decimal point).

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 your own views of happiness and understand the perspectives that other people take towards living a good life!

For each of these theories, there are lots of different variants with subtle differences – we’ve aimed to capture some central representative ideas that many variants have in common. 

We’ve also included some resources you can use to try and increase your happiness levels by applying these different methodologies!

Positive Psychology

A growing scientific field, positive psychology applies the tools of psychology to the question of what makes life most worth living.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present-oriented.”

-Sonja Lyubomirsky

How to achieve true happiness: Keep a gratitude list, cultivate positive relationships, find ways to use your strengths/virtues, do activities that get you into a flow state, savor pleasurable things in the moment, anticipate fun things in your future, reminisce about meaningful things in your past, buy more experiences and fewer things, avoid the hedonic treadmill.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools: 

• Building Happiness Habits
• Tactics for Happier Living
• Savor Your Life
• Become a Great Listener

Other resources:

• To be successful, should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? (Podcast episode)

Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophical thought from 3rd Century BC Greece and Rome, which is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” 

– Marcus Aurelius

How to achieve true happiness: Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow, only try to control what you’re actually able to, remember you’re not entitled to anything, learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing, seek value in all that happens. Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Reframing Negative Emotions
• Resolving Harmful Situations

Books:

• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Donald Robertson

Christianity

Based on biblical scripture and church traditions, many practitioners of Christianity view it as including rules and guidelines for living a good and happy life.

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

– C.S. Lewis

How to achieve true happiness: Be humble, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor, accept Jesus Christ as your savior, worship God, pray, have faith, be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you, be a devoted wife/husband/father/mother/child, obey the Ten Commandments, don’t cast the first stone, avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride, avoid hell at all costs, live for eternity in heaven with God.

Books:

• Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life – Craig Groeschel

Insight Meditation

Vipassanā, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist practice popular before the 10th Century AD, which gained widespread popularity in the late 20th Century, including in the USA. This practice emphasizes mindfulness meditation as a path to gaining insights into the nature of reality.

“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”

– Buddha

How to achieve true happiness: Follow the eightfold path, train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath), use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self, realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self), learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion.

Books:

• The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka – William Hart
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book – Daniel M Ingram

Other resources:

• Waking Up (meditation app)

Traditional

This set of values may strike you as a familiar blueprint to a traditionally good life.

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”

– Edmund Burke

How to achieve true happiness: Work hard, marry a good person, have multiple children, spend time with family, fit into your role, remember that many others have it worse than you, don’t complain, avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs), don’t waste money, achieve stability in life.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• The Relationship Review
• Managing Arguments in Relationships

Common sense

A common-sense approach to happiness focuses on meeting all your needs and making sure you have stable sources of fulfillment. No surprises here!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

– James Madison

How to achieve true happiness: Sleep enough, eat healthy food, exercise, spend your time with people you like, have a pet, seek work that’s enjoyable/challenging/meaningful, make sure your basic needs are met, try to make enough money to achieve financial security, save for retirement, marry someone you love who treats you well, have a fun hobby.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy
• Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure
• Career Fulfilment Diagnostic

Other resources:

• Choose a fulfilling life path using these five exercises from “Designing Your Life”

Introspection

Introspective theories say that the path to true happiness is through truly understanding yourself, healing your past trauma, and being authentic with others.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– C.G. Jung

How to achieve true happiness: Use psychedelics for self-exploration, listen to and get in touch with your body, engage in self-care and self-compassion, investigate and heal your trauma, find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer), be vulnerable around the people that you trust, share your true feelings, explore and have compassion for the different “parts” of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things, investigate your “true self” and be true to it, learn to pay attention to your intuition, find a way to look at the world that resonates with you. 

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Life-Changing Questions
• Your Primal World Beliefs
• Defining Emotions

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself – Kristin Neff

Other resources:

• How many minds do you have? (Podcast episode)
• The 10 Most Important Components of Self-Compassion
• Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps?
• How to Communicate Better with the People in Your Life (podcast episode)
• Exploring your Shadow and Healing your Traumas (podcast episode)

Self-help books

Books advocating techniques for self-improvement have exploded in popularity since the mid 20th Century. Each takes a different angle on how to be happy – here, we have collected some common themes.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

-Thomas Edison

How to achieve true happiness: Repeat affirmations that motivate you, form healthy daily habits, always work on becoming a better version of yourself, try new things, figure out what you really want and then plan to get it, prioritize, set ambitious goals, keep your home organized, think positive thoughts, believe you can do anything that you put your mind to, wake up early, make at least a little progress towards your goals each day, don’t let fear stop you, don’t give up, avoid negative people, surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System
• Design Your Own Self-Experiment
• Achieve Your Goals
• Get Going: Overcome Procrastination

Books:

• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The Motivation Hacker – Nick Winter

Other resources:

• How to Achieve Self-Control Without Self-Control
• How to Hack Your Own Brain (podcast episode)
• The Secrets of Effective Learning (podcast episode)
• By the Book (podcast)

Hedonism

As an approach to life, hedonism is all about doing whatever you can to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Bobby McFerrin

How to achieve true happiness: Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it, live in the moment (don’t worry about the future), dance, party, seek out cool experiences, do exactly what you feel like, ignore societal pressure, have sex, eat tasty food, do fun drugs, spend money on fun things, don’t let others tell you what to do.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 2 Minute Mood Boosters

Other resources:

• Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wondrous Destinations
• Happiness and Hedonic Adaptation (podcast episode)
• When is Suffering Good? (podcast episode)

Altruism

An altruistic approach to happiness is about devoting yourself to helping others and making the world a better place – the theory says you can gain fulfillment through knowing that other people are better off thanks to your efforts.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson

How to achieve true happiness: Give to charity, volunteer your time, choose a career that lets you help others, become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself, work hard to be kind, generous, and thoughtful, think hard about how you can do good, help strangers, build communities and projects to improve the world.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Leaving Your Mark on the World
• Charity Effectiveness Test
• Change Behaviour for the Better
• What Causes Match Your Values?

Books:

• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help – Larissa MacFarquhar
• Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Other resources:

• Four ways to have a positive impact on the world right now

Which of these theories resonates most with you?

It might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. An experimental approach could be useful – you could explore the resources we’ve linked above, try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you. 

We hope that exploring these theories has helped you conceptualize your own approach to happiness. Which theories of happiness have you lived by previously? How did you choose them, or did you pick them up unconsciously from your environment? How could you tweak these theories, combine them with other schools of thought, or replace parts that are unhelpful for you? What other theories of happiness do people live by?

A big thank you goes to Adam Binks for his help with this post!

Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy a book using the links in this article, you’ll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.

If you’re not an outlier, you may never guess that someone’s internal experience could be so vastly different. Even if 5% of people have an experience, and it causes very different internal experiences than you have but doesn’t manifest in an apparent difference in behavior, you might not notice the difference exists. So these “outliers” don’t necessarily have to be rare to escape your notice.

Here are a few real examples of some of the most extraordinarily different psychological experiences I’m aware of:

(1) Some can control things about themselves that people don’t normally view humans as being in control of (e.g., can choose to quickly lower their heart rate, or can choose to suddenly make themselves feel happier if they want) vs. those who aren’t in control of things that people normally think we all control (e.g., they feel as though they are literally unable to take action in certain types of situations regardless of how bad the consequences of inaction are, or they can’t stop thinking about a certain thing no matter how much they want to)

(2) Some view themselves as truly special, capable of world-changing things that no one else is, or existing for a singular and unique purpose, vs. people who view themselves as inherently inferior to others or fundamentally not deserving of love

(3) Some lack any desire for friendship and have no negative feelings about long periods of solitude vs. those who prefer to spend literally every hour of their waking time around others.

(4) Some control their physical condition primarily by treating their body as a chemical machine and consciously varying the inputs (e.g., caffeine, certain foods, nicotine, marijuana, alcohol, microdoses, modafinil, Adderall) vs. those who purposely avoid any substance that causes significant changes in their physical condition.

(5) Some have virtually no awareness of the facial expressions they are making vs. those who are aware of their facial expression at all times in social settings

(6) Some never experience a specific emotional state (e.g., they have little idea what a “depressive” state means because they’ve never experienced one, or they have never had an experience of awe) vs. people who experience specific emotions at a higher frequency or intensity than is typical (e.g., they find humor in almost everything)

(7) Some have almost no awareness of social dynamics (e.g., who is trying to suck up to whom and who is trying to signal what) vs. people who observe social dynamics just as they would a person’s hair color

(8) Some have almost no ability to change how they feel emotionally by changing their cognitive beliefs about a thing vs. can actually “snap” their emotions into alignment immediately using their cognitive beliefs when the two are out of sync

(9) Some view coincidences and strange occurrences as being deeply meaningful and fundamentally non-random vs. those who view most of their existence as being driven by unavoidable but totally meaningless chance

(10) Some have extremely limited abilities to guess what emotion another person is feeling in a given situation vs. those who constantly are aware of the emotional states of the other people in the room

(11) Some have learned that it is bad when another person is very unhappy and want to help, but experience essentially no emotion about it vs. those who viscerally experience pain when they see (or even hear of) someone else who is very unhappy, and can’t imagine what it would be like to not feel compelled to help

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 here?

1. Papers: Reading academic studies (e.g., from social psychology, consumer psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, etc.)

Example: reading the newest academic papers on treatments for PTSD.

2. Products: Carefully examining products and apps that have been successful (as well as, potentially, those that have failed) to understand what human needs they were or weren’t satisfying and why they succeeded or failed.

Example: looking at what mental health apps related to PTSD are popular in the app stores.

3. Outliers: Investigating extreme case studies of real-life events (e.g., case studies of people with extreme psychological conditions who may have been reported about in the news or true stories about what actually happened when people were placed into really extreme conditions).

Example: reading about cases of extreme cults and whether or not each cult produced PTSD-like symptoms in its members.

4. Society: Examining the large-scale trends and organization of societies, including potentially human cultures around the world (American culture, traditional cultures, etc.) and how they are similar or different, and which societal structures tend to be created and what the effects of these structures are, etc.

Example: investigating which sort of societies PTSD appears to be much more prevalent in.

5. Conversations: Talking to smart and insightful people about what they think is true of human psychology. You can also show them the models or theories you have so far to get their criticism and suggestions for improving them.

Example: asking really smart (non-experts) who had PTSD what their current theories about PTSD are.

6. Reading: Reading books, blog posts, media articles, etc., containing information from smart or insightful people about psychology (including potentially writing from life coaches, relationship experts, marketers, thoughtful bloggers, user experience designers, game makers, etc.)

Example: seeing what theories bloggers have proposed regarding PTSD that many academics may not have considered.

7. Experts: Reaching out to experts and talking to them to understand their models of psychology (e.g., psychologists, psychiatrists, game developers, etc.). You can also show them the models and theories you have so far to get their criticism and suggestions for improving them.

Example: talking to world-class experts in PTSD.

8. Textbooks: Reading academic textbooks about psychology, cognitive science, etc.

Example: Linehan’s textbook on DBT and thinking about possible applications of DBT in PTSD treatment.

9. Models: Looking at what models or frameworks of psychology others have created (e.g., in social psychology, theoretical cognitive neuroscience, gamification research, persuasion research, etc).

Example: looking at the model of PTSD that is used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy treatment.

10. Intuition: Our own intuition for what’s true about humans (presumably based on our first-hand experience interacting with others, as well as our first-hand, ingrained experience of just being a human).

Example: We may have the intuition that after experiencing a traumatic event, people will tend to start having frequent disruptive thoughts about that event, even when doing unrelated things.

11. Interviews: talking to individuals or groups about their thought processes, feelings, behaviors, etc., to understand their individual psychology and then attempting to extrapolate that knowledge to humans more generally.

Example: interviewing 20 people with PTSD about what their experience of it is like and what does or does not seem to help them.

12. Application: attempting to put into practice a psychological theory (e.g., by coaching individuals using a psychological technique or by trying to build an app that implements it) and paying attention to the ways it seems to work or not work.

Example: creating a tool for people with PTSD and making it publicly available, then monitoring how people respond to it.

13. Anecdotes: psychologically surprising or interesting anecdotes that we’re confident actually happened (e.g., because they happened to us or were reported on by a trustworthy source) that may have a bearing on human psychology.

Example: a story a friend told you about how they (believe) they fully cured their own extreme PTSD in a matter of days.

14. Self-observation: careful (and honest) observation of our own thoughts/beliefs/behavior/emotions and internal processes.

Example: observing the mental processes in your own mind that seem to occur after a very upsetting event has happened.

15. Self-experimentation: simply trying techniques and paying close attention to what effects they appear to have and what it feels like to apply them.

Example: try the technique of writing down for a week every upsetting thought that you notice yourself having, as well as writing down everything you observe or learn about the experience of doing this.

16. Deduction: combining propositions we already believe to produce new propositions we didn’t realize before that may be true.

Example: knowing that women with PTSD are much more likely to have associated depression than men with PTSD, and knowing that depression is a strong risk factor for attempting suicide, we might predict that women with PTSD are more likely to attempt suicide than men with PTSD (even though they may not be more likely than men to actually commit suicide).

17. Experiments: Conduct your own online randomized controlled trials, surveys, longitudinal studies, or fMRI studies, etc.

Example: looking at which variables that don’t seem obviously PTSD related are, in fact, strong predictors of whether someone has PTSD.

18. Statistics: looking up known statistics about a phenomenon.

Example: looking up whether younger people or older people are known to be more likely to get PTSD in any given 12-month period.

19. Data: finding existing data sets (e.g., large longitudinal surveys or government data sets) and running your own statistical analyses to test hypotheses.

Example: measuring whether it is true that after someone gets a pet, they are more likely to recover from PTSD than similar people who do not get a pet. Running studies can also be a good way to search for new hypotheses. For instance, examining which of many variables in the data are most associated with a rapid recovery from PTSD.

20. Literature: looking at portrayals of psychology in literature, art, myths, stories, philosophical writings, etc.

Example: What hypotheses do Kafka’s novels give us about the nature of trauma?

21. Crowdsourcing: Request suggestions for hypotheses on a social media platform like Facebook or X or on a question-answer site like Quora.

Example: posting to Facebook asking people to suggest theories for why PTSD sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t happen after extreme trauma.

22. Social experiments: bringing a group of people together under a new set of chosen social rules or guidelines and observing what happens.

Example: getting a small group of people together with the idea that it will be a time to discuss traumas that members of the group have experienced.

23. Evolution: considering what possible evolutionary function different psychological phenomena might have.

Example: consider ways that aspects of PTSD responses might be evolutionarily adaptive.

24. Practitioners: examine how people “in the field” who benefit from being able to understand this aspect of psychology do their work.

For example, at veterans hospitals where rates of PTSD are high, investigate what techniques and approaches the therapists have developed to work successfully with their patients.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 22, 2025.