Idea-Inducing Questions

August 2, 2020

Struggling to come up with an idea for a blog post? Want to post ideas on social media but can't think of what to write about? Want to come up with interesting topics for an intellectual discussion or meetup? Use my lists of "Idea-Inducing Questions" to generate nearly endless ideas to write about, think about, or discuss! Questions about learning and truth-seeking • Recently learned: what's a powerful idea, concept, or mental model that you've been learning about recently that you...

Remaining Mysteries of the Universe

September 28, 2019

It's fascinating to me that, despite all of humanity's incredible progress over the last few thousand years, so many profound mysteries about the nature of reality remain. Below is my list of what I see as the deepest mysteries. What would you add to the list? — LIST OF DEEP MYSTERIES ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY — 1. THE UNIVERSE 1.1 Eternity - Will our universe last forever? If it won't, what will the end of the universe be like (e.g., a new big bang, a big crun...

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...

A Common Problem with Debates

July 30, 2017

Opposing parties in debates over commonly-raised questions often fail to focus their arguments on the same concept. These "ambiguous questions" are usually those that are fundamentally unresolvable until one disambiguation of the question is agreed upon. Until that disambiguation is reached, the debate often swirls in circles as different parties effectively argue about distinct topics, seemingly discussing the same thing. Examples of common "ambiguous questions" include debates like: Is ...

Predicting Depression

May 12, 2017

I created simple statistical model (on a sample of people in the U.S.) to help predict how depressed someone is, based on 91 variables about them. I was attempting to predict the severity of the depression by their PHQ9 score, a simple subjective scale that averages scores on 9 common symptoms of depression. For instance, it asks how often you have experienced feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" and how often you have experienced feeling "tired or having little energy" in the past two weeks....