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LITTLE-KNOWN SELF-IMPROVEMENT CONCEPTS

1) Musterbating: Albert Ellis’ term for rigid, self-imposed ideas that many people hold that “I/you/they absolutely must (or should) do X.” Rather than seeing these as preferences or nice-to-haves, they see them as absolutes, which fuels irrational belief and negative emotions.

2) Hormetic exposure – Exposures that are beneficial precisely because they are mild stresses (e.g., exercise, fasting, hot/cold therapy). By putting the body under stress, in some cases, you can trigger helpful adaptive over-compensation (hormesis).

3) Healthspan – The length of time you spend in good health, free from chronic disease and disability (not merely alive). For some who see themselves as wanting to increase their lifespan, their values might be more accurately captured by aiming to increase their healthspan.

4) Valuism – Okay, this is mine. A personal life philosophy with 2 parts:

(i) figure out what you intrinsically value

(ii) seek to use effective methods to create more of what you intrinsically value.

It’s a framework for living without requiring belief in absolute moral truth.

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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS RELATED TO CRITICAL THINKING

5) Paltering – Misleading an audience by selectively stating only true facts that nonetheless foster a false overall impression. Some of the most effective public manipulators mainly palter instead of lying.

6) Deepity – A term coined by Daniel Dennett (piggybacking off of its usage by an unspecified friend of his teenage daughter) to refer to statements that seem profound by exploiting ambiguity: they have one interpretation by which they are trivially or boringly true and another interpretation by which they are meaningless or false (but where it would seem profound if true). Our brains can accidentally mix these interpretations together, leading to the mistaken impression that the statement is both true and profound (e.g., “Love is just a word.”)

7) Epistemics – The norms, methods, and quality standards governing how beliefs are formed, updated, and justified. If you think that society is bad at figuring out what’s true, you may want people to work on improving their epistemics.

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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS FOR THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD

8 ) M.E.C.E. – A useful principle for structuring information by dividing it into categories that are mutually exclusive (there’s no overlap between categories) and collectively exhaustive (no items are left out; everything has a category).

9) Hyperstition – A term coined by Nick Land for a narrative or idea that becomes true (or shapes reality) precisely because people believe and propagate it. For instance, if people believe a company to be very valuable, that can make it become very valuable, or if people believe a handbag is very popular (even if at that time it isn’t actually), that can make it become very popular.

10) Superstimuli – something that is optimized by human ingenuity to stimulate our naturally evolved reward circuits more than they could be stimulated by things in our natural environment. For instance, junk food is a food superstimulus, or social media is a social superstimulus.

11) Bezel – Galbraith’s term for the illusory wealth created by fraud or embezzlement before it gets discovered. It’s the gap between the perceived and real asset value. The bezel makes the defrauder and defrauded both have a psychological perception of wealth.

12) Gamable – Able to be strategically manipulated or “gamed,” i.e., its rules allow actors to extract advantage without fulfilling the system’s intended purpose. One of the most important aspects of system design in high-stakes situations lacking trust is that systems should be ungamable. Otherwise, the system will be exploited or not achieve its intended purpose.

13) QALY – A quality-adjusted life year (related to healthspan but in the context of improving the lives of others): a way of quantifying the benefit of any intervention designed to help people live longer or improve their health that takes into account both the number of extra years of life produced AND the quality of those years of life. So, 1 QALY is one extra year of life lived in full health.

14) Longtermism – An ethical view that “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.” Sometimes, it’s justified by arguing that the importance of actions may lie in their effects on the far future, given the vast potential number of future lives.

15) Familicide – Murder of one’s family (typically spouse/partner and children), often followed by suicide. Why bother having a word for this upsetting concept at all? Well, bizarrely, it’s statistically the most common form of mass murder (i.e., where three or more people are killed during one event).

16) Superorganism – A coordinated collective (e.g., an ant colony or tightly integrated human society) that functions as a single organism despite being composed of many organisms. Interestingly, even the human body is a superorganism since we’re composed of distinct living organisms.

17) Umwelt – An organism’s perceptual experience of the world or the slice of reality created by a particular creature’s unique sensory and cognitive apparatus. For instance, the Elephantnose Fish apparently gets a 3d sense of its surroundings by creating an electric field – their umwelt must be nearly unimaginably different than our own.

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LITTLE-KNOWN EMOTION-RELATED CONCEPTS

18) Alonely – negative feelings caused by not getting enough time alone (the opposite of loneliness).

19) Ego-syntonic – Experienced as consistent with one’s self-image, values, and goals. For instance, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is usually ego-syntonic, meaning that insofar as they’re willing to accept their traits, narcissists usually don’t see them as problematic.

20) Mudita – Buddhist “sympathetic joy,” that is, genuine happiness at another’s good fortune, which can be viewed as the inverse of envy or schadenfreude.

21) Compersion – Empathic pleasure or happiness felt when a loved one experiences pleasure or happiness. This word usually crops up in polyamorous circles, indicating feeling happy at the fact that one of your partners is experiencing happiness with another romantic or sexual partner. Some see it as the near opposite of jealousy.

22) JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) – Positive satisfaction you get from deliberately skipping social or popular activities in favor of using time for something more personally valuable (such as time with loved ones). Some see it as the near opposite of FOMO (fear of missing out).

23) Alexithymia – A condition where you struggle to identify, describe, and/or differentiate your emotions. If you often can’t tell how you feel or usually can’t put your emotions into words, you may have Alexithymia.

24) Defusion – The skill of viewing thoughts as transient mental events rather than literal truths – such as by viewing them from an external perspective – which reduces their emotional power over us. For example, instead of just having a thought X and being “inside” it, you observe that “you’re having the thought that X” or even “I’m noticing that I’m having the thought that I’m having the thought that X.” You can ask yourself about a particular thought: are you “fused” with that thought (living inside of it, treating it as the truth) or defused from it?

25) Pronoid – A pervasive conviction that other people or the universe at large are conspiring for your benefit. It is the optimistic mirror-image of being paranoid: where a paranoid expects hidden threats, a pronoid expects hidden aid. Thanks to Andreea Alexuc for introducing me to this concept.

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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS FOR THINKING ABOUT PEOPLE

26) Wamb – A term coined by John Nerst, which means the opposite of “nerd.” Things that are wamb tend to be socially mainstream, trendy, cool, and non-intellectual. Jock, prom king, football players in high school are often the epitome of wamb. We can also think about a wamb-to-nerd spectrum that people and things can be placed on.

27) D.A.R.V.O. – A tactic often used by abusers when they are accused of wrongdoing: (1) Deny wrongdoing, (2) Attack the accuser, and (3) Reverse Victim and Offender (so as to make the abuser appear to be the victim)
28) Mimophant – Someone who is simultaneously aggressive, forceful, or insensitive to other people’s feelings (charging forward like an elephant) yet hypersensitive to criticism or has their own feelings easily hurt (like a mimosa plant, which quickly retracts its leaves when touched).

29) Apophenia (Spectrum) – Apophenia is the cognitive bias of perceiving meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. I prefer, though, to adapt this concept to use it as a spectrum applied to people. I use it to indicate the extent to which you spot patterns and connections. Those who are high in apophenia find real patterns that others miss but also see more false patterns, whereas those who are low have fewer false patterns but may miss real patterns. There’s a fundamental trade-off related to pattern identification – some people have more false positives, whereas others have more false negatives. People with schizophrenia tend to be very high in apophenia.

30) Lightgassing – The opposite of gaslighting – when someone reinforces your false misconceptions about the world (e.g., “You’re right, your girlfriend [who broke up with you] is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve you.”) This is another one by me.

This piece was first written on July 8, 2025, and first appeared on my website on September 15, 2025.

Think of something you value that:

A. Multiple other people you know are capable of achieving, but that…

B. You assume you would not be capable of achieving, even though…

C. You have never actually tried to do this thing well before.

Now, suppose for a moment that you have no choice but to do the thing. That is, everything you care about in the world will be destroyed if you do not achieve it in X months. Here, X could be 1 if it’s a very small thing, or X could be 100 if it’s a much larger thing.

Under those circumstances, do you STILL believe you would fail to achieve it?

I think this sort of thought experiment can help us distinguish between things that we don’t believe we are capable of merely because we aren’t motivated enough, versus things that we ACTUALLY believe are impossible for us.

And I think it’s important to distinguish between these two cases, because if something is in the first category, we may actually be able to get ourselves to succeed just by finding ways to increase our motivation!

I also suspect that for many people, a number of the things that they view as being impossible for them would seem more possible in the face of carrying out this thought experiment. In other words, it is easy to confuse “I’m not motivated enough to try really hard” with “I’m incapable.”

As an example, suppose you believe you are just inherently bad at math, and that no matter how hard you try, you couldn’t understand calculus. Well, what if the fate of the world rested on your understanding of calculus in 6 months? I think under those circumstances, you would very likely find a way to learn it, with plenty of time to spare.

This piece was first written on April 26, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 22, 2025.

1. Your natural posture when sitting at your computer → this may affect how your body feels in 20 years
2. Where emotions manifest in your body (e.g., I feel anxiety in my chest and annoyance as a twinge in my face) → greater awareness here may help you more quickly and accurately identify your emotions.
3. The clothing you feel your best and worst in → this may lead you to dress in a way that makes you feel your best, and may make you more aware of how you want to be seen by others.
4. Key areas in which you’re subtly lying to yourself or issues you are rationalizing away → you may be avoiding certain truths about yourself (e.g., a problem or weakness you need to work on), your behaviors (e.g., that you’re behaving unethically in some situation), or other people (e.g., that a relationship in your life is destructive) that could be valuable to face head-on.
5. The deep roots of your anxiety (e.g., fear of failure, social rejection, physical danger, financial instability) → this may point to an area where focused problem solving or therapy (e.g., Exposure Therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) could be helpful.
6. The people in your life that bring out the best or worst in you → this may be an indicator of who you should aim to spend more, or less, time with.
7. What you blame others or the world for that you helped created → you might inadvertently be blaming others for some things you should take (at least partial) responsibility for yourself (on the other hand though, some people blame themselves for things that really were the fault of others)
8. What sort of work tasks cause you to go into a flow state (i.e., those that challenge and engage you to hold your focussed attention) → you may want to seek out more of these activities
9. Why you waste time doing things that are neither useful, fun, nor meaningful → you may be addicted to something (e.g., a video game) or trying to fill a psychological need for which you could find a healthier alternative
10. What daily behaviors enhance, or detract from, your wellbeing (e.g., the way you eat, how much exercise you do, how much you drink, what time you go to bed, etc.) → there may simple changes that will make your life better

It feels, to nearly everyone, on a gut level, that I am ‘me’ and you are ‘you’, and consciousnesses are distinct from each other and easy to separate. Moreover, the vast majority of people accept that you 1 minute from now is still the same “YOU” in a meaningful sense as YOU right now; that it makes sense for you right now to try to prevent harm to you one minute from now (even if acting purely selfishly – not altruistically trying to prevent harm coming to any being).

But imagine the following hypothetical scenario taking place far, far in the future, when our understanding of the brain, our ability to perform brain surgery, and our technology, in general, is drastically more advanced than today.

You’ve voluntarily elected to undergo an operation (for science!) where your brain will be slowly but completely replaced with a replica brain.
The steps of the surgery are as follows:

(1) you are temporarily put into a deep slumber (e.g., using something like general anesthesia) for a few hours.

(2) surgeons very carefully remove some tiny portion of your brain and then analyze that portion of the brain (e.g., using some sort of scanning device)

(3) based on this analysis, they then construct a replica brain piece (whether robotic or made of organic material, it doesn’t really matter) that will behave essentially just like the piece they just removed (e.g., maybe using some kind of 3d cell printer)

(4) they then insert this replica piece in the place where the original brain piece used to be and affix all of its connections to the surrounding brain tissue just as the original brain piece was affixed so that it will operate within the greater brain essentially just like that missing brain piece used to

(5) the original piece removed from the brain is then carefully preserved elsewhere, and its original position in the brain is carefully recorded

(6) finally, you are woken up, and you get to spend the day doing whatever you like before returning the next morning for further surgery

Now, after each time that steps 1-6 occur, you should feel almost exactly the same (minus any nuisances of having undergone brain surgery, but with this future technology, those are minor). After all, only a very small portion of your brain was removed each time, and that piece was replaced with a piece that was designed to be functionally identical. If the portion removed was small enough, and the replacement piece was a sufficiently accurate replica, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’ve changed at all.
What’s more, you remember your life before surgery, you remember being put to sleep on the lab table, and you remember waking up. You have no more gap in your life than you would after a sleep where you don’t remember your dreams.

So it seems that after steps 1-6, you are still “you” in any meaningful sense (or if not EXACTLY you, you are still really, really close to you).

Okay, but suppose now that steps 1-6 are repeated many times (replacing one tiny brain region each morning and then spending the rest of each day living your normal life).

At some point, 50% of your brain has been replaced (whether measured by mass, volume, or “functionality,” it doesn’t matter). Are you still “you” in a meaningful sense?

In my experience, at this point in the thought experiment, most people will say that it’s definitely still you. With each tiny replacement, you couldn’t tell the difference, and as long as those replacements were each accurate enough, you shouldn’t even be able to tell the difference with 50% of your brain replaced. What’s more, there was never even any large gap in your consciousness.

But here’s the twist: as you realized a few months into the experiment (well before 50% of your brain was swapped), the surgeons had actually lied to you originally. You thought that they had been analyzing each piece of your brain bit by bit as they removed it in order to make replicas of each piece.
What they had ACTUALLY done (while you were asleep that very first time on the operating table) is scan your entire brain right away, building a nearly perfect, functioning, living replica, which they keep in a vat. This functioning replica is able to think just like you, has all your memories, and even BELIEVES that it is you. The replica is so accurate that, if the replica was hooked up to a machine that lets it talk, a person who knows you really well wouldn’t be able to tell which of you it was talking to (other than due to the fact that the replica is disembodied – which of course would change its behavior, but your own behavior would change in an equivalent way if you were disembodied).

So when the surgeons were removing tiny portions of your brain, they were also removing the closest possible corresponding tiny portion of the replica brain (after putting it to sleep in the same manner that they put you to sleep) and simply swapping it with yours. So the replica got your tiny portion, and you got the replica’s corresponding (and incredibly close to equivalent) tiny portion.

This lie from the surgeons doesn’t much change what happened to your brain FUNCTIONALLY since, in either case, each tiny portion of your brain is replaced with a very similar tiny replica portion. However, since the replica brain and your brain are having different experiences each day, there are genuinely irreconcilable differences between the tiny parts of the two brains (e.g., your brain may have some new connections in that tiny region that the replica doesn’t). The surgeons simply do their best to always swap the tiny part from your brain with the closest, most identical portion of the replica brain, even though the match isn’t 100% perfect. By making the tiny portions sufficiently tiny, you should still notice very little difference upon waking after each surgery.

Now, most people agree that when the replica of your brain is first created (before any swapping occurs), it is just like you, but it is not actually YOU. One way to think about this is that you still control your original body, and you still experience the thoughts of your original brain, whereas the replica separately experiences its own thoughts. In fact, you didn’t at first even know that a replica was ever created, you just went on having your normal experiences, so it seems that the replica being created had no effect (initially) on your identity.

But now that we’re at the halfway point, with half of the portions of your brain swapped out into the replica and half of the replica brain swapped into yours, personal identity becomes genuinely confusing. Both copies are now half original and half replica. In fact, both brains have a consistent series of memories, with no weird gaps (beyond the sort that one has from sleeping at night). The replica remembers going to sleep that first time on the surgery table just like you do; the only difference (as far as it is concerned) is that when it woke up, it didn’t have a body. Each day you and the replica both underwent surgery, and after each surgery, you both woke up being very close to identical to what you were prior to surgery.
While I think at this point most people still think that the original brain that slowly had 50% swapped out is more YOU than the replica that slowly had 50% swapped in, it’s gotten a lot harder to explain WHY. Both brains now have an equal amount of original material, and both feel equal, like they are the original you.

The thing is, the surgeons aren’t done at 50%. They decide to go all the way, continuing steps 1-6 until 100% of your brain has been swapped with the replica brain.

The really weird thing now is that the body walking around that you used to identify as YOU now has the replica brain in its head! And the vat where the surgeons keep the other brain has your original brain in it! In other words, the two brains are now just back to what they started at, with the only difference being that during the interim period, they were temporarily mixed up (continuing to gain experiences while mixed up), and “your” brain happened to end up in the vat whereas the replica ended up in your body.

Compare this whole thought experiment to the surgeons just (all in day one) removing your brain and putting it into the vat, then making a replica that they put into your body. The actual thought experiment is very similar to this, except that with the slow process of swapping a tiny portion each time, your two identities get more mingled (since those brain regions are all slightly changing each day as the two brains have experienced, one in a body, one in a vat).

At this point, people tend to be much more confused, but I think most would say that the brain in the vat is now the real YOU. After all, it is essentially entirely your original brain.

If this all sounds very abstract asking “which one is really YOU?”, then how about asking this more concrete question: now that you know the full details of the experiment, if one of the two brains (either the one in your body or the one in the vat) is going to be tortured in the future (after all the surgeries are fully complete) and you get to pick which of the two brains it happens to (you pick prior to the experiment beginning, of course), which one do you choose to be tortured (assuming here that you’re a selfish person that doesn’t want to experience torture)? You can also ask the same question (again, choosing before the experiment begins), assuming that the torture occurs after 50% of your brain is swapped with the replica (instead of 100%). In the 50% case, which brain would you choose to be tortured (the one in your body, or the one in the vat)?

Another way to think about what we mean by “YOU” in this thought experiment: suppose the brain that ends up in the vat and the brain that end up in the body both are properly hooked up to working eyes at the end of the experiment so that they can both see, and furthermore that when the experiment has totally finished the brain in the vat will get to see a picture of Tom Hanks, whereas the brain in the body will get to see a picture of Bob Saget if you (before the experiment has started) are asked “Later when the experiment is over will you see a picture of Tom Hanks or a picture of Bob Saget?” what would you answer? If you say “Tom Hanks,” then you expect to have the experiences of the brain that ends up in the vat, whereas if you say “Bob Saget,” then you expect to have the experiences of the brain that ends up in the body. Note that if, for someone reason, this question lacks meaning for you, then note that outside of weird philosophy of mind thought experiments, this sort of question is not only meaningful but has an obvious answer. For instance, if you knew someone was going to show me a picture of Bob Saget tomorrow and show you a picture of Tom Hanks tomorrow and someone asked which picture you expected to see tomorrow, you would say “Tom Hanks” – duh!

How can this scenario be interpreted?

(A) We could say that the brain in the body started out as YOU, and at some discrete point, things flipped so that YOU end up in the vat. But what seems to make no sense about that is where to draw the line on that flip. The only way this could happen is if there was exactly one surgery (which, remember, only after swaps out a tiny, functionally nearly identical brain region) which caused the brain in the body to flip to no longer being you and the brain in the vat to being fully you. If there was some special “soul” molecule in your brain which determined what was you, then this would make sense (since the moment that soul molecule was transferred, the brain in the vat would become you), but nobody seems to believe in such a soul molecule (neither scientists nor believers in souls).

(B) We could say that in the end, neither of the two brains are YOU in a meaningful sense. This seems pretty weird since, after the first small surgery, it seems nearly certain that the brain in your body is YOU in a meaningful sense (or very, very nearly you), so what operation prevents the being in the vat (which has all your original brain matter essentially, and has all your memories, and has the daily experience of being you daily) from being you? What exactly about this whole procedure fully eroded your identity?

(C) We could say that both brains are about equally much you (say, each close to 50% you). This seems weird because at which point did you split into two? It also seems weird because the brain in the vat is actually made of essentially all of your original brain material, so how did this slow process of taking piece by piece somehow make the replica brain have equal claim to being you? After all, if all the surgeons had done is take your brain out and move it to the vat immediately, we’d all agree that the vat brain was you, not the replica.

(D) We could say that BOTH brains end up as fully you. This seems even weirder because it’s not like what one of those brains thinks will causally change the behavior of the other. And the brain in the vat definitely doesn’t control your original body. So they can’t both be you in the sense of both being one indistinguishable consciousness. But maybe they could both be you in the sense of having equally strong claims to being you?

(E) We could say that this thought experiment is physically impossible. In order to work (as a thought experiment), it doesn’t actually matter how incredibly hard or unlikely this scenario is (the point is simply asking how we should interpret it if it WERE to occur). But if something about the thought experiment actually violates the laws of physics, then we can dismiss it, saying that it couldn’t take place in our universe, so the question being asked is not actually a question about our universe. But what aspect of the thought experiment violates the laws of physics?

(F) We could argue that although it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, the only way to do it without violating those laws would be to have the tiny swapped brain regions be a lot more different from each other than I imply. In other words, doing swaps of tiny brain regions is not impossible, but it’s impossible to make them extremely similar (e.g., because the brain is changing too fast each day, or because of error in such a procedure that is impossible – it’s directly implied by physical laws). This conclusion might push us a bit towards (B), thinking that neither brain is really you (they get too messed up in the process, so both drift from you in a meaningful sense).

(G) You’re still [the brain in] the body. You “stay in the body (fully and determinately) with every small exchange, so you stay in the body after the full exchange process is completed.” (David Chalmers takes this view, as he indicated in a comment on my original post of this essay)

(H) We are so deeply confused about identity that when we say it is or isn’t YOU, we don’t realize that we aren’t actually saying anything sensible/meaningful; we only think we are.

(I) We could say that YOU started out in the body, then for a while you were mingled with this other being merging your YOUNESS, but, by the end, you have separated again with YOU ending up in the vat (for much the same reason that we would say you are in the vat if your brain had originally just been cut out immediately and put in the vat – only in this case it was done bit by bit instead of all at once causing a temporary period of being merged).

The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface.

As a simple example, let’s consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8×8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece has a pre-determined fixed rule for how it moves across the board and captures other pieces. There are far more than a quintillion (i.e., 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) such games, and while many of these games are less than entertaining, there will be games in this set that are far better than chess along any dimension of gaming that you should care to consider. In other words, chess is our limited human attempt to mine a tiny corner of game space.

Of course, this type of 8×8 board game is just a tiny subset of all types of games, which is, in itself, a minuscule subset of all types of ideas.

This VASTNESS of idea space is why I find it so valuable when a person or book mentions a powerful, plausible idea that I’ve never heard before, even if no evidence is provided for why I should believe the idea.

The chance that you would independently have thought up an idea that someone tells you about is vanishingly small (even if you feel like you COULD have thought of it). The act of raising a powerful, plausible hypothesis to your awareness can be hugely valuable. Mere identification of a point in idea-space can involve a ton of work, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Of course, we can then do our own vetting of ideas, even if the people who bring them to our attention don’t give us strong reasons to believe them. For instance, we can check them against facts that we already have strong reasons to believe. And we can ask ourselves, “does this idea contradict the evidence we have, or line up nicely with it? Does it explain things that confused us before and gel with other things we know to be true?” If we’re serious about testing the idea, we can even go out and gather new evidence about whether it’s true.

Some great ideas seem obviously true once you hear them. In fact, I’m a really big fan of trying to state the obvious; but not just any obvious things. The obvious things that people have likely not yet consciously considered. That is, what I like to call the “obvious and unsaid.” It bothers me when people dismiss obvious but rarely encountered ideas on the grounds that they seem obvious once you hear them because obviousness can be an asset rather than a liability.

These obviously true ideas can be especially valuable because they are easy to vet as being correct, yet due to the vastness of idea-space, they very easily could never have occurred to you before. So, stating obvious ideas that are rarely thought about, but which have important implications, can be an extremely efficient way to transmit value to others.

On a related point, when people say “everything’s already been done” or “there are no new ideas left,” the only way these statements could be sensible is if we interpret them as claims about humans rather than claims about ideas. For instance, as a claim that human minds are so similar to each other that, in the VAST space of possible ideas, we’re confined to a sad, well-trodden, little corner of derivative pseudo creativity.

However, I’m much more optimistic than this: while much is derivative, I think there are new ideas all over the place that we can learn to look for. As one person finds a new idea in a corner over there, and they share it over here, human knowledge advances. What’s more, I think that seeing new ideas as “derivative” is kind of missing the point.

Yes, good new ideas are often built from pieces of old ideas, but there’s nothing bad about that. Bricks are the building blocks of houses, and ideas are the building blocks of ideas.

Note: I highly recommend that you don’t just read this list of steps, but instead, that you actually do them! Reading these steps will not give you any benefit, but doing them might!

Step 1 – Think for a moment about the person who is the best influence on you, or the person in your life you don’t see that much that you most admire the traits or actions of.

Step 2 – Visualize something great this person did or said, or think of a trait of theirs you admire.

Step 3 – Ask yourself: are you sure you don’t want to make an effort to spend more time with this person than you do now? Consider sending them a message now to make plans to see them.

Step 4 – Think for a moment about the person who is the worst influence on you, or the person in your life that you see regularly whose actions or personality you least respect.

Step 5 – Visualize something distasteful this person did or said, or think of a trait of theirs that you don’t respect.

Step 6 – Ask yourself: are you sure you want to spend as much time with this person as you have been spending?

It’s as accurate as it is cliché: your choice of who to spend time with shapes what sort of person you become and what you value.

Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as “dangerous” or “not dangerous”, “food” or “not food”, “person” or “not person”, “real smile” or “fake smile”. It learns to categorize and predict automatically.

When you see a chair you are immediately able to recognize it as a chair and associate it with your concept of chair, even if it is the largest chair you have ever seen, or the first one you’ve seen with a zebra stripe pattern. Your brain has effectively developed a way to rapidly recognize things as being “chairs” or “not chairs” based on whether they match a certain pattern. This pattern was learned automatically from exposure to many chairs in the past. You don’t have to consciously consider whether this particular object has the features necessary to make it a chair, your brain produces an answer before you are even aware of thinking about it.

To give another example, consider what happens when a chess Grandmasters looks at a chess board. In many cases, they are able to glance at a board positions and immediately (without conscious thought) identify them as being strong or weak, with good reliability. Of course, they might then choose to reason consciously about the positions in order to check or improve upon their gut responses.

Having considered these two ways of making predictions and decisions, the question then arises: when should we rely on thorough conscious analysis, and when should we use our automatic processing? To answer this, let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches.

Careful Conscious Analysis

Advantages

• Handles problems where multiple logical deductive steps are necessary to find a solution (e.g. I know that all A’s are B’s, and also that if something is a C it cannot be a B, therefore this particular A is not a C.)
• Allows the application of theories to problems, and in doing so lets you leverage the research and thinking of others (e.g. what does economic theory tell us will happen to soybean prices when the supply of soybeans dries up?)
• Allows you to develop theories of your own which can then be applied in future situations. (e.g. I’ve noticed that when I attack him on his left side he parries and counter attacks. So this time I will initiate a fast attack to the left, and as he begins to parry, I will drop the point of my blade to get underneath his sword, and carry the momentum into an attack to the right instead)
• Lets you compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple possible methods or solutions. (e.g. The first theory predicts results will come out a certain way, but the second predicts a slightly different outcome. However, the first theory has a better track record on cases like this one.)
• Produces reasoning that can be communicated to others. (e.g. I came to my conclusion by evaluating the randomized controlled trials and noting that…)

Disadvantages

• Unless you have honed your truth discernment skills, you may fall prey to logical fallacies, become misled by cognitive biases, or rely on theories that have not been empirically validated. Performing truly excellent and reliable conscious analysis takes work, skill, self correction, good habits of mind, knowledge about potential pitfalls, and practice. (e.g. Due to the compatibility of your astrological charts, I think that he would make an excellent husband.)
• Thinking carefully is a slow process. (e.g. There is a deer in the road about thirty feet ahead of me and I’m going 60 miles per hour. If I hit the brake now will I have time to stop before I hit it? Will it be more or less dangerous to me if…)

Unconscious Automatic Processing

Advantages

• Operates fast (e.g. That ball he hit is going out-of-bounds so there is no need to run and try to catch it)
• Can be used in lots of situations where feedback is readily available, even when you don’t have a theory about how to solve the problem consciously (e.g. Now when I look at a cubist work I immediately know if is by Picasso, Braque or someone else, even if I’ve never seen it before.)
• Starts to get trained automatically without effort if you just do something enough times (e.g. Having listened to enough songs that I knew the titles of, I can now often guess what the title of a song is just from its lyrics)

Disadvantages

• Cannot effectively handle all types of problems. This method is especially bad for problems that require long deductive chains to solve, or where gathering various sorts of evidence together is necessary. (e.g. I know that the randomized controlled trials say otherwise, but my own experiences as a psychologist still tells me that psychodynamic therapy is more useful and cost-effective for treating depression than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
• May give you wrong answers when the problem changes compared to what you have been trained on (e.g. I know we’re playing squash now, but that move I did would have been perfect if we were playing tennis!)
• Requires repeated exposure, so won’t work well when you don’t get to practice a lot or see examples over and over again. (e.g. Well, I’ve only done heart surgery two times before, but from what I can tell this doesn’t quite seem to be in the right place, so I’m going to abandon the standard procedure and improvise)
• Doesn’t always provide us with conscious insight into why the prediction came out a certain way (e.g. I know that thing is designed to put food onto, but it still looks like a chair to me)

Careful analytical thought, and automatic processing relying on pattern matching are both extremely useful ways of approaching problems. When processing needs to be done quickly and you can train yourself through lots of examples with feedback, automatic processing may provide the best method for making predictions. But when chains of logical deduction are required, or evidence needs to be gathered and evaluated, or repeated exposure is not possible, or strong predictive theories exist, then as long as you have honed your thinking skills sufficiently well, conscious analysis will probably provide the best results.