This leads to a lot of confusion, and it also implies that claims about “the reason” behind a complex social phenomenon should be interpreted with caution.

Here are 3 common situations of this happening, each illustrated with realistic political examples:

1) Correlated variables
You want to explain why politician X won. If being older and Christian are substantially correlated with each other AND ALSO with voting for X, then you could write either:

• X wins because of older voters!
• X wins because of Christian voters!
  …depending on who the writer prefers to blame it on.

2) Multi-causality
Many events have multiple causes, and so while it isn’t incorrect to say one “caused” that event, it is incomplete and can be misleading.

For instance, suppose you want to explain what caused politician Y to lose in a very close election. Any small deviation would have made the results different. So you could validly say:

• Y loses because fewer Z’s voted than usual!
• Y loses because more W’s voters than usual!

That way, the writer can choose what group they want to try to make into the guilty party. There may be dozens of such small discrepancies that could have “caused” the result.

3) Causal chains

If A caused B, which caused C, which caused D, you could blame D happening on any of A, B, or C, and each story is true (though incomplete).

This can provide convenient excuses to ignore solvable problems. For instance, people often say nuclear power is not adopted much because it’s so expensive. True – but why is it so expensive? If it is regulation that has made it so expensive (which I believe is true in this case), then blaming low usage on cost alone is misleading.

When reading an explanatory story based on data, it’s worth asking yourself: Is this the only story the dataset tells? Fairly often, it won’t be.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 10, 2023.

1. Soldier Altruists think it’s obvious how to improve the world and that we just need to execute those obvious steps. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough people taking action (e.g., due to ignorance, selfishness, or propaganda), and

(ii) bad groups blocking things (e.g., corrupt politicians or greedy corporations).

2. Scout Altruists think it’s hard to figure out how to improve the world – and most attempts either don’t work, only slightly help, or make things worse. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough understanding of causal mechanisms (e.g., due to a lack of high-quality evidence, not enough attention to the evidence we do have, not enough careful reasoning, etc.), and

(ii) too much investment in bad solutions (e.g., due to people jumping to conclusions, doing what feels good emotionally rather than what is effective, ideological blindspots, inertia, etc.)

Soldier Altruists say we need to DO and FIGHT more. Scout Altruists say we need to THINK and TEST more. Soldier Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to be less selfish and more motivated to act, we would make a lot of progress towards a better world. Scout Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to pay more attention to evidence and to have more good-faith debates with strong norms around the quality of argumentation, we would make a lot more progress.

Soldier Altruists may think Scout Altruists are far too reluctant to act and are wasting their time on research and debate. Scout Altruists may think Soldier Altruists are far too confident in their conclusions and are wasting their effort pushing for changes that aren’t going to help much (and which, in some cases, might even make things worse). Of course, in reality, there is a continuum between these two positions. So, on a scale from 0 (Soldier Altruist) to 10 (Scout Altruist) where do you fall? I’m probably a 7 or 8.

As some commenters have pointed out, there is a relationship between this distinction and “Conflict Theory” vs. “Mistake Theory.” I think it is related – but also distinct in important ways. Conflict theory says that there is a giant zero-sum struggle (groups fighting over fixed resources). Whereas in this case, we’re operating from a framework of altruism: “the world can be made a lot better – what’s the big barrier to that happening? Is it that we know what to do and we’re not doing it enough/with enough energy, or is it that we don’t really know what to do?”

Also, to clarify another important point brought up in the comments: I’m not asking, “do you think it’s obvious how we should improve the world if we had a magic wand that could change whatever we wanted?” – instead, the question is: “is it obvious what to do to improve the real world, given that we don’t have a magic wand?” Do we just need to put more money/time/effort/people into executing the current “obvious” strategies because they will work well if we just scale them up? Or is it pretty unclear what strategies we should even be putting more resources into (meaning that a lot of thinking, research, debate and/or evidence evaluation will typically be necessary to even figure out what is worth scaling up)?

Julia’s book (which I highly recommend): https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556/ref=nodl_

This piece was first written on April 23rd, 2021, and first appeared on this site on January 7th, 2022.

You can make inferences using…

(1) Deduction:

As a consequence of the definition of X and Y, if X then Y.

X applies to this case. Therefore Y.

“Plato is a man, and all men are mortal; therefore Plato is mortal.”

“For any number that is an integer, there exists another integer greater than that number. 1,000,000 is an integer. So there exists an integer greater than 1,000,000.”

Especially popular among philosophers and mathematicians?

Flaws: to apply to the world, you need to add in assumptions about the world, or to apply other methods of inference on top.

(2) Frequencies:

In the past, 95% of the time that X occurred, Y occurred.

X occurred. Therefore Y (with high probability).

“95% of the time when we saw a transaction identical to this one, it was fraudulent. So this transaction is fraudulent.”

Especially popular among applied statisticians and data scientists?

Flaws: You need to have a moderately large number of examples like the current one to perform calculations on, and the method assumes that those past examples were drawn from a process that is (statistically) just like the one that generated this latest example. Moreover, sometimes it is unclear what it means for “X” to have occurred. What if it’s something that’s very similar to but not quite like X that occurred – should that be counted? If we broaden our class of what counts or change to another class that still encompasses all of our prior examples, we’ll potentially get a different answer. Though, fortunately, there are plenty of cases where the class to use is fairly obvious.

(3) Models:

Given our probabilistic model of this thing, when X occurs, the probability of Y is 0.95.

X occurred. Therefore Y (with high probability).

“Given our multivariate Gaussian model of loan prices, when this loan defaults, there is a 0.95 probability of this other loan defaulting.”

Especially popular among financial engineers and risk modelers?

Flaws: hinges on the appropriateness of the parameterized probabilistic model chosen, may require a moderately large amount of past data to estimate free model parameters, and may go haywire if modeling assumptions are suddenly violated.

(4) Regression:

In prior data, as X and Z increased, the likelihood of Y increased.

X and Z are at high levels. Therefore Y.

“Height for children can be approximately predicted as an (increasing/positive) linear function of age and weight. This child is older and heavier than the others, so we predict he is also taller than the others.”

Especially common among economists and data scientists?

Flaws: often is applied with simple assumptions (e.g., linearity) that may not capture the complexity of the inference, but very large amounts of data may be needed to apply much more complex models (e.g., to use neural networks).

(5) Bayesianism:

Given my prior odds on Y being true…

And given evidence X…

And given my Bayes factor, which is my estimate of how much more likely X is to occur if Y is true than if Y is not true…

I calculate that Y is far more likely to be true than to not be true (by multiplying the prior odds by the Bayes factor to get the posterior odds).

Therefore Y (with high probability).

“My prior odds that my boss is angry at me were 1 to 4, because he’s angry at me about 20% of the time. But then he came into my office shouting and flipped over my desk, which I estimate is 200 times more likely to occur if he’s angry at me compared to if he’s not. So now the odds of him being angry at me are 200 * (1/4) = 50 to 1 in favor of him being angry.”

Not as popular as it should be?

Flaws: it is sometimes hard to know what to set your prior odds at, and it can be very hard in some cases to perform the calculation. In practice, carrying out the calculation might end up relying on subjective estimates of the odds, which can be especially tricky to guess when the evidence is not binary (i.e., not of the form “happened” vs. “didn’t happened”), or if you have lots of different pieces of evidence that are partially correlated. On the other hand, if you can do the calculations in a given instance, and have a sensible way to set a prior, this is, in my opinion, the mathematically optimal framework to use for probabilistic prediction. In that sense, we can think of many of the other approaches on this list as (hopefully pragmatic) approximations of Bayesianism (sometimes good approximations, sometimes bad ones).

(6) Theories:

Given our theory, when X occurs, Y occurs.

X occurred. Therefore Y.

“One theory is that depressed people are most at risk for suicide when they are beginning to come out of a really bad depressive episode. So as depression is remitting, patients should be carefully screened for potentially increasing risk factors.”

“When inflation rises, unemployment falls. Inflation is rising, so unemployment will fall.”

Especially popular among psychologists and economists?

Flaws: it’s very challenging to come up with reliable theories, and often you will not know how accurate such a theory is. Even if it has substantial truth to it and is often right, there may be cases where the opposite of what was predicted actually happens, and for reasons that the theory can’t explain.

(7) Causes:

We know that X causes Y to occur.

X occurred. Therefore Y.

“Rusting of gears causes increased friction, leading to greater wearing down. In this case, the gears were heavily rusted, so we expect to find a lot of wearing down.”

“This gene produces this phenotype, and we see that this gene is present, so we expect to see the phenotype.”

Especially popular among engineers and biologists?

Flaws: it’s often extremely hard to figure out causality in a highly complex system, especially in “softer” subjects like nutrition.

(8) Experts:

This expert (or prediction market, or prediction algorithm) X is 90% accurate at predicting things in this general domain of prediction.

X predicts Y. Therefore Y (with high probability).

“This prediction market has been right 90% of the time when predicting recent baseball outcomes, and in this case, they predict that the Yankees will win.”

Not as popular as it should be?

Flaws: you often don’t have access to the predictions of experts (or of prediction markets or prediction algorithms), and when you do, you usually don’t have reliable measures of their past accuracy.

(9) Metaphors:

X, which is what we are dealing with now, is metaphorically a Z.

For Z, when W is true, then obviously Y.

Now W (or its metaphorical equivalent) is true for X. Therefore Y.

“Your life is but a boat, and you are riding on the waves of your experiences. When a raging storm hits, a boat can’t be under full sail. It can’t continue at its maximum speed. You are experiencing a storm now, and so you too must learn to slow down.”

Especially popular among self-help gurus and some ancient philosophers?

Flaws: Z working as a metaphor for X doesn’t mean that all (or even most) solutions that are good for situations involving Z are appropriate (or even make any sense) for X.

(10) Similarities:

X occurred, and X is very similar to Z in properties A, B, and C.

When things similar to Z in properties A, B, and C occur, Y usually occurs.

Therefore Y (with high probability).

“This conflict is similar to the Gulf war in that…and with “Gulf”-like wars, we have always seen that…”

“This data point (with unknown label) is closest in feature space to this other data point which is labeled ‘cat,’ and all the other labeled points around that point are also labeled ‘cat,’ so this unlabeled point should also likely get the label ‘cat.’”

Especially popular among historians and within some machine learning algorithms?

Flaws: in the history case, it is difficult to know which features are the appropriate ones to use to compare similarities, and often the conclusions are based on a relatively small number of examples. In the machine learning case, a very large amount of data may be needed to train the model.

(11) Cases:

In this handful of examples (or perhaps even just one example) where X occurred, Y occurred.

X occurred. Therefore Y.

“The last time we elected a [insert political group you don’t like] as president, we saw what happened. Let’s not make that mistake again.”

“The last three times I went to action movies, I didn’t like them. So I don’t want to go to one again.”

Especially popular with politicians and with nearly everyone in daily living?

Flaws: unless we are in a situation with very little noise/variability, a few examples likely will not be enough to accurately generalize from.

(12) Intuition:

X occurred. My intuition (that I may have trouble explaining) predicts that when X occurs, Y is true. Therefore Y.

“The tone of voice he used when he talked about his family gave me a bad vibe. My feeling is that anyone who talks about their family with that tone of voice probably does not really love them.”

Popular with nearly everyone in daily living?

Flaws: our intuitions can be very well-honed in situations we’ve encountered many times and that we received feedback on (i.e., where there was some sort of answer we got about how well our intuition performed), but in highly novel situations or in situations where we receive no feedback on how well our intuition is performing, our intuitions may be highly inaccurate (even though we may not FEEL any less confident about our correctness).

This essay was first written on October 7, 2018, and first appeared on this site on December 31, 2021. 

Here are the materials, in case you want to run an event like this or just learn about the format:

Part 1: Brief presentation about why disagreements are so often unproductive

1. You want to “win” more than you want to figure out what’s true (e.g., seeing disagreement as a competition)

Example: you want to one-up the other person, the other person is a rival

2. It’s really about your group identity, not about the content of the disagreement per se (i.e., what the argument is really about is whether my group is better than your group)

Example: Republicans vs. Democrats, Yankees vs. Mets

3. Others are watching and you think backing down would lower your social status or lose you respect (e.g., you think it would look bad to back down)

Example: dinner party disagreements, public debates

4. You have emotional discomfort with finding out you are wrong on this topic (e.g., cognitive dissonance, feeling dumb for being wrong, realizing that you did something immoral in the past)

Example: you’ve already said you are “certain” you are right, so think you would look really dumb now being wrong

5. There would be real-world negative consequences to believing the truth about this, which your subconscious detects, and so you fight against learning the truth (e.g., social rejection, feeling that you’d need to abandon your current lifestyle)

Example: religion, eating animals, addiction

6. You feel pressure to back down in the disagreement or that it would be inappropriate to mention flaws in the other person’s argument [H/T: Divia]

Example: disagreement with your boss, or in an especially polite social context, or with a person who you think would react negatively to be being challenged

7. The conversation drifts, so at first it was about your disagreement over X, but now it is about your disagreement over Y, so you can’t make progress on X

Example: pointing out whenever the other person says something you disagree with, even if it is tangential to the main point

Part 2: Tips for having productive disagreements that both parties learn more from (for attendees to keep in mind during the interactive portion of the event):

Tip 1: Remember that you are here to learn from the other person, not to “win” an argument

Tip 2: Work from the assumption that the other person has good intentions and is not a bad person, even if you think they believe something harmful

Tip 3: If the other person changes your mind about anything (even something small), tell them so and thank them for helping you have a more accurate perspective, changing your mind means you’re doing this right!

Tip 4: Carefully clarify definitions, since words are ambiguous and people often mean different things by the same word (once you do this you may realize that you don’t actually disagree at all)

Tip 5: Try to discover WHY the other person believes what they do, not merely just WHAT they believe

Tip 6: Remember that some of your beliefs are inevitably going to be wrong, it’s better for you to find that out now and start believing the truth as soon as possible rather than to hold tight to those wrong beliefs indefinitely

Tip 7: Remember that even if the other person IS wrong, you can still gain a more accurate view on the issue by understanding any valid points they are making

Tip 8: Remember that most controversial topics have at least some reasonable points on both sides, and you should know the best of what the other side can offer

Tip 9: Remember that even if your goal in the end is really just to persuade the other person, it still helps to ask lots of questions so that you deeply understand why they believe what they believe before trying to persuade them

Tip 10: Remember that we shouldn’t be 100% confident in any of our beliefs, so it’s better to think of your beliefs in terms of confidence levels (“I’m reasonably confident in this belief”) rather than in terms of things being either all true or all false, and talking to someone who disagrees with you can help you make your confidence level more appropriate even if you don’t end up concluding they are correct (e.g., after the discussion you might change your mind from being “very” confident to only being “moderately” confident)

Tip 11: Stay on topic, and hone in on the core of the disagreement, don’t get distracted by side disagreements or let the conversation drift away from the most important parts or you will inevitably not make progress, and if the other person says something you disagree with that is not that relevant to the topic, just let it go

Part 3: The interactive portion of the event

Handout 1

A spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics (print one out for each attendee): everyone will fill this out. If a person doesn’t want to discuss a certain topic, they should mark it as “unsure” or just leave it blank.

Important note: while this might sound like a huge number of controversial topics, it seems that a large number of topics is actually needed since many items people will not have an opinion on, or will agree with most other group members on (due to meeting groups often having similar views in many domains), or will find too ambiguous. If you write your own controversial topics, I don’t recommend using less than 50.

Here is another spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics adapted for people in the effective altruism community.

Handout 2

Step by step instructions for the interactive portion of the event (print one out for each attendee):

Step 1.

Find a random person to be your partner, preferably someone you don’t already know.

Step 2.

Compare your sheet with your partner (overlaying them after folding the right edge of one sheet works well) to find a topic where one of you selected “agree” and the other selected “disagree.”

Don’t select a topic that either of you marked as “unsure” or that either of you left blank; those topics are off-limits.

Step 3.

(i) Pick who will start as Person 1 (the explainer) and who will start as Person 2 (the asker).

(ii) Person 1 then explains why they marked that they agree or disagree.

(iii) During this time, Person 2 asks clarifying questions, with Person 2’s only goal being to try to TRULY understand Person 1’s perspective.

Good questions for Person 2 to ask include, among other things:

A. What do you mean by the word X? (i.e., clarifying a definition)

B. Could you give me an example of that?

C. Could you explain why you think that’s true?

(iv) Person 2 then tries to repeat back to Person 1 the reasons that Person 1 said they agree or disagree with the original statement, until they can do so in a way that Person 1 confirms is an accurate characterization of Person 1’s view. Being able to state someone’s perspective back to them is a great way to confirm you’ve really understood it.

Step 4.

Now switch who is Person 1 and who is Person 2 and repeat exactly what you did in Step 3.

Step 5.

Spend a final few minutes discussing the topic with the goal of pinpointing exactly why you disagree.

(i) Is it just a semantic disagreement, where once you agree on the meaning of words and definitions you actually agree with each other? This happens surprisingly often!

(2) Is it a disagreement of values (e.g., one of you simply values autonomy more than the other)?

(ii) Is it a disagreement about empirical facts that one could check (e.g., there might be studies out there that would settle the disagreement)?

(iii) Or is it a disagreement about intuition (e.g., you have different intuitions about a topic but can’t really explain why)?

Your goal should be to discover the “core” of the disagreement, the ultimate explanation for why you have different perspectives.

Step 6.

Now you’ll rotate to another person and repeat the whole process over again.

This piece was first written on June 25, 2017. Grammatical edits were made and an EA-adapted version of Handout 1 was shared on June 27, 2018. This editing note was added on December 23, 2022.

So why do we behave in these strange ways? Well, here’s my list of reasons we so often fail to act in our own self-interest. As you can see, the reasons are numerous.

Note: the items listed are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. Some reasons are connected, and sometimes multiple reasons apply in the same scenario.

(1) Misinformation – believing an action is in your self-interest when it isn’t, or that an action isn’t in your self-interest when it is (e.g., taking useless nutritional supplements daily, because you’ve heard they are helpful but are unaware of the significant risk they pose to your liver)

(2) Temptation – choosing a tempting, short-term benefit over a larger long-term benefit (e.g., eating the chocolate cake that you know you’ll regret tomorrow)

(3) Avoidance – avoiding a certain choice based on its short-term consequences, even though it could be better for you long-term (e.g., staying in an unhealthy relationship to avoid a painful breakup)

(4) Anxiety – avoiding a beneficial action out of fear of possible consequences (e.g., avoiding public speaking opportunities because they cause anxiety despite enjoying public speaking overall) [This is similar to Avoidance, but different because Avoidance is based on a real consequence, as opposed to irrational fear.]

(5) Altruism – acting in a way that is beneficial to a person or cause but harmful to you in some way (e.g., donating a substantial portion of your income to an effective charity) [this is a positive reason but included for comprehensiveness] 

(6) Forgetting – simply not remembering to act on something that is beneficial (e.g., forgetting to take your medicine)

(7) Confusion – not knowing how to carry out a beneficial action properly (e.g., you want to lift weights weekly to be healthier, but do not have sufficient training on the correct form to avoid injury)

(8) Distraction – intending to carry out a beneficial action but getting sidetracked during the process (e.g., sitting down at 6 pm for daily journaling but being called away to help your child)

(9) Delaying – pushing a beneficial action into the future since it has no clear deadline (e.g., you know you really should get treatment for your sleep problems that are ruining your happiness, but you’re busy and plan to address it next month)

(10) Helplessness – you’re convinced that attempts to take a beneficial action will inevitably fail, so lack the motivation to try (e.g., you feel that you’re dumb and will get bad grades no matter what, so you feel unmotivated to try in school)

(11) Unmotivated – knowing a certain action is good for you, in theory, but not feeling driven to do it (e.g., you know your current job is not a good fit for you but never feel motivated to search for a different one)

(12) Habits – you fall into harmful, subconsciously triggered routines of behavior or perpetually behave in a way that inhibits beneficial outcomes (e.g., you have a habit of fixating on negative traits of other people, and this makes it hard to develop deep friendships)

(13) Unequipped – you lack the ability or resources to carry out a beneficial action due to a lack of practice or training (e.g., you know it’s important to communicate honestly with your romantic partner, but struggle to put your thoughts and challenges into words)

(14) Love – making a sacrifice for a person with whom you have a close personal relationship (e.g., a parent who works an extra job so as to send their child to a better school they couldn’t otherwise afford) [similar to altruism, but more personal than acting out of general goodwill]

(15) Punishment – you punish yourself because you feel you deserve it, or to harm others indirectly (e.g., a teenager who engages in self-harm because they believe they are worthless or because they know it upsets their parents)

(16) Overwhelm – you have too many choices or too much information related to a certain action, so you shutdown or stick with the first or easiest choice (e.g., you know you should carefully select details of your 401(k) plan but, after reviewing three dozen options, you get frustrated and leave it at the default setting)

(17) Reactance – you resist outside efforts to control you (e.g., an employee who intentionally takes three cups of coffee per day in order to flout the two cup limit)

(18) Freedom – you choose to act contrary to your self-interest solely to demonstrate (to yourself or others) your freedom to choose (e.g., a person who makes a minor bad decision to show they could do so any time, if desired)

(19) Impulse – you feel a strong, subconscious-rooted urge to carry out certain harmful actions (e.g., a person who feels a strong urge to curse constantly)

(20) Expectations – you are expected to or pressured to act a certain way, and you are either used to satisfying expectations or desire social acceptance (e.g., an unbelieving person attends weekly religious services long-term solely because the community views them as devout) 

(21) Over-optimizing – you expend so much time, attention, or effort toward improving on a process or decision that you end up losing more than you gained (e.g., someone who changes projects every year because they want to find the very “best” project but actually accomplishes little because the projects are all left unfinished)

(22) Fatigue – you do not have the cognitive resources to make a good judgment at that moment [resulting from lack of sleep, burnout, drugs, etc.]

(23) Misjudgment – you misjudge the relevant probabilities or values involved in a choice and so choose the wrong one (e.g., making a bad stock market investment because of misanalysis of the relevant factors) 

(24) Uncertainty – you avoid options that are uncertain or ambiguous because certainty makes you more comfortable (e.g., someone who passes on a new interactive theatre experience, something they have no previous experience with, to instead watch a movie they’ve seen fifteen times)

(25) Inertia – you stick to the decision you previously made, or the path you’re already going down, even though it is clearly no longer beneficial (e.g., you’ve finished the first year of law school and, even though you don’t like it or want to be a lawyer anymore, you don’t withdraw) 

(26) Haste – you make a decision under time pressure and therefore don’t consider all the options or don’t consider the options thoroughly enough (e.g., a deer runs into the road, and you decide to swerve left even though it would have been a lot safer to swerve right)

(27) Prioritization – you expend effort or resources to make good decisions in some areas but not in those that are less important to you (e.g., a person chooses to focus their entire energy on getting healthy but neglects interpersonal relationships)

(28) Morality – you think it would be immoral to take the action that is most in your self-interest, or you feel guilty thinking about taking it (e.g., you really want a stereo and know you wouldn’t be caught stealing it, but you won’t take it anyway) 

(29) Emotion – you are experiencing intense emotions that alter your perception of what a good decision would be (e.g., you are really pissed off, so you punch the person that you’re talking to)

(30) Complexity – the decision is too complex for you to reason about effectively or too different from previous decisions you’ve made for your intuition to be reliable (e.g., you’ve just been elected president, and now you have to make decisions involving hundreds of factors and hard to predict second-order effects in areas that you’re not an expert in)

(31) Identity – you think of yourself as the sort of person who does X, so you choose to do X to maintain this self-identity or as a shortcut in decision-making (e.g., a person who thinks of themselves as a non-drinker and so doesn’t even consider the option of drinking in cases where they could potentially benefit)

(32) Attention – you make self-harming decisions because you want others to notice you, step in to help you or show that they care (e.g., a person who burns themselves with cigarettes so that others will notice the burns and feel concerned)

(33) Myopia – you think that your options are more limited than they are or you fail to fully consider what your best option is (e.g., you quit your job because you think of your options as either “stay” or “quit,” whereas you would have actually been better off renegotiating your role without quitting)

(34) Normality – you don’t want to take any action that may be considered strange, odd or weird (e.g., even though you are confident you would be better off having an open relationship rather than a monogamous one, you would not consider it because in your culture that would be a “strange” lifestyle)

I pointed out why this claim is impossible. As warm water cools it must eventually reach the same temperature that the cool water started at. From that point on, the warm water will behave just like the cool water, but it will have taken the warm water a while to even get into that state. Freezing occurs at the same temperature for both warm and cold water, but warm water of course will take longer to get to that temperature.

This isn’t quite 1+1=2, it’s more like 23+14=37. I double checked my answer and was 98% confident. It’s amazing what some people will believe, and how powerful reasoning is at solving these sorts of problems.

But I was wrong. And not just a little bit. In fact there are tons of ways that warm water might be able to freeze faster. This is the so-called Mpemba effect, observed by the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, and Francis Bacon.

The fact that the water has previously been warmed contributes to its freezing quickly: for so it cools sooner. Hence many people, when they want to cool hot water quickly, begin by putting it in the sun.

-Aristotle

My wrongness here isn’t so much about being wrong about the effect, per se. The extent to which this effect is real, and under exactly what conditions, can reasonably be debated. My wrongness is in being convinced I was right when I couldn’t have known I was. I couldn’t possibly have ruled out all the possibilities in a single minute. For example, I didn’t even consider these ideas that came up after two minutes of googling:

• Evaporation : the warm water evaporates, meaning there is less water to freeze.
• Frost: the cool water may be more likely to freeze from the top (with the frost trapping in further heat) whereas the warm water may be more likely to freeze from the bottom and sides.
• Convection: warm water and cold water produce different currents, which could alter the heat distribution.
• Supercooling: if free of impurities and in the right conditions, water can actually drop below freezing temperature without freezing, and the propensity for supercooling might be affected by the starting temperature.
• Conductivity: the hotter liquid might melt an existing layer of frost that is preventing the liquid from directly touching a much colder surface.

What could have prevented me from making such a ridiculous error? How could I have noticed that I was being insanely overconfident? There are a few signs that should have tipped me off:

• Lack of expertise: The physics of heat and fluids is outside of my domain of expertise. I should have recognized that this is not a subject I know a lot about and so been more skeptical of my own opinions.
• A simple model: I was employing a very simple model for the situation (involving just the temperature of the water). While beautiful, and easy to work with, really simple models rarely capture all the details of a situation. For instance, I didn’t consider the possibility of evaporation or frost, because those variables weren’t included in my model. If you’re using a simple model, you should consider whether you’re missing important factors.
• Insufficient time: If you haven’t thought about something for very long yet you are already very opinionated, you might want to think about it longer.
• Didn’t consider alternatives:  I didn’t even try to think of ways that this effect could be real. Instead, I came up with an argument why it couldn’t be real, and that argument sounded convincing to me, so I stopped thinking. This problem is the big one. So here’s a 30 minute free mini-course I designed to train you to avoid exactly this problem.

Reasoning is only as good as the reasoner. And we humans don’t have the best track record. The trouble is, it’s easy to find arguments that seem totally convincing. The trick is that we shouldn’t just try to convince ourselves that we are right. We should try to convince ourselves that we are wrong. If we do that in earnest, we’ll be much more likely to end up with the right opinion.

*Ice photograph by Dingske.

The high level components necessary for accomplishment in tennis are the same as they are in nearly every field. Accomplishment relies on the following factors:

1. Ambition. While it is possible to accomplish things that you don’t set out to achieve, when that occurs it is usually just due to luck. Setting something as your goal is the first step towards accomplishing it. If we have low ambitions, we are unlikely to achieve great things.
2. Talent. Most accomplishments require a certain starting level of skills relevant to the accomplishment. To be become a great singer, it helps to have good pitch. To be a great investor, it helps to have a personality that allows you to act calmly when others are afraid. While abilities can be honed with training, your current level of talent represents your starting point in the accomplishment race. If you start too far behind, even really good training may not get you to where you need to be.
3. Reasoning. The path towards almost every major accomplishment involves making difficult decisions. Which job should you take? Which helpful books should you read? Who should you make an effort to get to know? Which skills should you work to hone? Which training methods should you apply? The superpower of being able to reliably answer these kinds of questions will make your accomplishment much more likely. One very bad decision early on may lead you to failure.
4. Time. Most big accomplishments require a very large investment of time. You are not going to be able to invent a better type of microchip without first learning a lot about computers, electrical engineering, and materials science. This will take years.
5. Resources. These can be both physical (e.g. money) or social (e.g. knowing the right people to help you achieve your goal). If you have an incredible business idea, but don’t have the money to fund it, and can’t get in contact with someone who will fund it for you, you’re out of luck. A strong social network can make achievement much easier. It often takes the well-coordinated effort of many people to achieve great things. There may even be a person out there whose advice or help is exactly what you need for success. And sometimes involving others in our projects can make up for our own lack of talent, lack of money, or lack of time.

Any of these five factors can prevent you from accomplishing great things. If your goals are unambitious, your achievement will probably be low. If you are lacking in relevant talent, you’re unlikely to ever achieve great heights of ability. If your reasoning is poor, you’ll be likely to make bad decisions related to how to achieve your goals. If you don’t put enough time into achievement, you’ll probably not accomplish very much. And many goals require some money, or the help of others, and without either of these, your ambitions may not get off the ground.

Flipping this analysis around, we see that we need to make sure that we have these five factors in place if we are going to have the best chance of accomplishing what we hope to. Sure, we might get lucky, and not need them all. Maybe we’ll win the lotto and so won’t need to worry about physical resources anymore, or maybe our bad reasoning will happen to not harm our project. But if we want to maximize our chance of success, we should have sufficient ambition, talent, reasoning skills, time investment, and physical/social resources. Whichever of these is our weakest point is likely what we should focus on improving. We can consider how we can try to affect each of these factors:

1. Ambition may be hard to change. You simply may not care about accomplishing much. But reflecting on what you would like to complete before your die may make you realize that you do in fact care about achieving certain goals.
2. Your current level of talent is fixed, but you can make up for a lack of it by involving other people whose talents complement your own, and by reasoning about how to improve your skills and then investing sufficient time into doing so.
3. Reasoning can be honed with practice.
4. Time simply needs to be invested. But reasoning can help you make your time more productive and efficient, and involving others in your goals lets you pool your time with theirs. If at your current rate of time investment, your goals may take decades to achieve, you may need to start taking time away from something else.
5. If you don’t have the money or social network required to complete your goals, that may be solvable with further time investment. You may need to take a job to make the required money, and devote time to building new social contacts that are relevant to what you’d like to achieve. For instance, you can start introducing yourself to more people at places where those who are likely to be helpful are likely to be.

If you want to maximize your chance of accomplishing your goals, figure out which of these five factors is your weakest point, and fix it. Then, if necessary, repeat.

It turns out that the answers produced by our reasoning system are highly impacted by our emotional state. When anxious, the probability we assign to bad events occurring increases compared to when we are excited. When depressed we tend to plan as though activities are unlikely to bring us pleasure, even ones that do bring us pleasure reliably (so we avoid friends, predict that we won’t enjoy our favorite activities, lie in bed without trying to entertain ourselves, etc.) When anxious we tend to plan for the future in a risk averse way, whereas when angry we tend to be risk seeking and often act without planning. And when we feel vulnerable we tend to construct theories about cause and effect relationships (both real and imagined) more readily and based on less data than we do when we feel safe.

Since the conclusions produced by our reasoning system are altered by our emotional state, if our goal is to get the right answers reliably while reasoning it makes sense to take into account how our current emotions are likely to alter our conclusions. To be safe, it is wise to save important reasoning for times when you are emotionally neutral. Don’t compose that email to your boss while you are still angry at him, don’t do financial planning when you are anxious, and avoid drawing conclusions about conspiracy theories when you are already feeling vulnerable.

On the flip side, our reasoning system is capable of altering our emotional state. Techniques to achieve this are discussed a great deal in the Cognitive Therapy literature. Founders of this field hit upon a remarkable finding: when you get people who are experiencing strong emotions (like anxiety or depression) to write down the thoughts running through their heads, you find that many of their thoughts are unreasonable, distorted or irrational. That is, rather than being based in sound reasoning, their negative emotions are at least in part produced and maintained by irrational, exaggerated and self-destructive thinking. So, it was theorized, correcting some of these distorted thoughts using rational thinking might lead to an improvement in the devastating emotions that people experience. And this is, in fact, precisely what happens.

When seeing a cognitive therapist, patients are taught to make Thought Records. That is, when they are experiencing unhelpful and painful emotions they take a few minutes to write down what situation just occurred and the thoughts that they are having. They then may search these thoughts for common cognitive distortions, consider the evidence for and against their thoughts, come up with “rational responses” (true statements that dispute their negative thinking), or write more balanced and realistic thoughts to replace the ones that they had. The result of this process is that the level of emotion is often reduced, and over the long-term, incorrect and unreasonable beliefs that lead to negative emotions can be altered.

If you need to get correct answers to factual questions, don’t reason while emotional. If you must reason while emotional, consider how your emotion is likely to influence your conclusions. And if you frequently suffer from unhelpful or painful emotions, consider learning about Cognitive Therapy techniques which can help you feel better and correct distortions in your thinking that may be magnifying your harmful emotions.

Influences: David Burns, Paul Ekman