Part 1: LEARNING HACKS

1. Crowdsource improvements to ideas: when you come up with a new idea or are mulling over a complex idea and still find yourself uncertain or confused about it, post to Facebook explaining the idea, and explain that you’re curious to hear what other people think about it, or whether they agree or disagree and why, or what their own theories about it are. Crowdsourcing the perspectives of others can be a fantastic way to improve your own understanding and to get suggestions for how an idea can be improved. You may have noticed that I use this method all the time! It’s been very valuable to me.

2. Audiobooks when bored: listen to audiobooks when you’re doing things you don’t enjoy that require little focus (e.g., simple cleaning, laundry, riding the subway, or in the backseat of a car). Note that some public libraries offer ways to access numerous audiobooks for free (e.g., the N.Y. public library has the Libby app / OverDrive program).

3. Learn to listen faster: When listening to non-fiction audiobooks (that you are reading primarily for information rather than entertainment), start at a listening speed that feels comprehensible but slightly challenging (i.e., where you catch everything said but ONLY when you focus), such as 1.25x or 1.5x speed. Once that starts to become easy to listen to, increase the speed a bit more, incrementally working your way up. With some practice, you likely can get comfortable listening at higher speeds. For example, for most non-fiction books, I prefer 2.5x. But keep in mind you may lose some retention at higher speeds (especially when you’re not used to it – it takes practice), and you’ll need slower speeds for especially complex books and when you’re in environments that are noisy or where the focus is more difficult, so in each case think about what speed gives you the best trade-off between time used and retention of the content. I don’t recommend speeding up books that you read for pleasure unless speeding them up causes you to enjoy that kind of book significantly more. I also would really recommend speeding up online lectures and informational videos if you find that they are usually slower than would be ideal for you (I usually prefer 1.5x-2x speed for online videos – the sound recording quality is generally not as high as for audiobooks making very fast listening difficult). YouTube actually now has speed adjustment built-in (look in the settings under the video), but you can also get plugins for most browsers that will allow you to speed up other video content (e.g., the Video Speed Controller plugin for Chrome which works on all HTML 5 videos).

4. Record good ideas: whenever you encounter an idea or concept or fact or framework or process you’d like to remember, or think of any interesting idea of your own, add it to a notepad on your computer. Or better yet, use our new, free tool ThoughtSaver, which is specifically designed for this purpose: ThoughtSaver.com (note that this is very, very much a beta product and a very much improved version we’ve been working on will be coming out pretty soon). I’ve been using this technique for a long time and have my own personal database on ThoughtSaver of well over a thousand ideas, which I think serves as a quite interesting and potentially powerful resource! ThoughtSaver also provides a special bookmarklet for your web browser that you can add to your browser toolbar so that you can quickly add ideas or facts that you read online immediately upon reading them, and it will put things in your database automatically. Another related thing I’d recommend (that I’d like to improve at myself): as soon as you finish a new book (or lecture or blog post), get in the habit of quickly recording the most important ideas that you think you learned from it. If you don’t do that, you’ll very likely forget most of it, so jotting those ideas down may make your learning dramatically more efficient! Here’s an article I wrote years ago about the remarkable learning inefficiencies in the standard approaches we have to read: http://bit.ly/2A9uPwp

Part 2: HEALTH HACKS

5. Make a healthy eating routine: eat the same food five days a week for breakfast and lunch (but probably not dinner), and carefully optimize those preset meals for long term health and other things you care about, like cost.

6. Make workouts enjoyable: if you don’t enjoy working out (as many people don’t), one of the best things you can do for your health is to find a way to make workouts enjoyable. For instance, for some people, this means joining a team sport, or taking workout classes, or finding a workout partner, or setting weekly goals for yourself that are challenging but attainable, or hiring a coach or trainer, or listening to great music while working out, or picking a more intellectually stimulating form of working out (e.g., jiu-jitsu). Personally, the technique that I find works amazingly well for making working out enjoyable is to limit certain things I enjoy to be done only when I’m working out (e.g., watching my favorite T.V. shows). If you don’t enjoy working out, your chance of skipping workouts or quitting altogether will be much higher. Once you find a way to genuinely enjoy it, creating a routine that you stick to for the long term will be dramatically easier.

Part 3: LIVING HACKS

7. Use phone alarms: when you have a meeting or event coming up, free yourself from having to check the time over and over by simply setting a phone alarm to go off an appropriate number of minutes before you have to leave or log in for it. Set the alarm to vibrate only or make it a tasteful and quiet sound (e.g., I like quiet chimes) so that if you’re already in a meeting when it goes off, people won’t even really notice it. This technique is useful for both work and social settings. It frees you to focus on what’s happening around you (e.g., what your friend or colleague is saying) rather than thinking about whether it’s time for you to leave yet. I prefer alarms to go off 10 minutes before phone calls (to give me an advanced warning – plus the snooze feature on iPhones will cause it to go offer almost 10 minutes later, which works perfectly). For meetings that I have to travel to, I like to set the alarm to go off 10 minutes before I would have to depart for the meeting.

8. Turn off notifications: while some notifications may be necessary for your job, turning off all other notifications can make you substantially less distracted throughout the day; more productive. Every time a notification pops up, it takes you out of what you were just doing, potentially forcing you to recollect your thoughts to get back into that work. For certain types of work that require a lot of contexts (stored in working memory), this can be especially problematic.

9. Reduce device addiction: my favorite way to do this is to use various plugins, which can directly take much of the addictiveness out of various apps and services. For email on your phone, consider having it only update every 30 minutes rather than in real-time (which saves battery, too). The cost of device addictiveness is high: while we could be doing things that are more meaningful or important, we instead spend far too much time checking our phones over and over! This is not your fault (devices and apps are designed to be addictive) but there is something you can do about it. I also recommend setting a policy for yourself of uninstalling any app that you find you can’t control your usage of due to such a high level of addictiveness (e.g., certain games). It’s just not worth constantly tempting yourself by having them installed.

10. Be the one to reach out: when you meet someone in a work context with business cards involved, take the cards of people you want to be in touch with (rather than just giving them yours) so that you can make sure follow up actually happens (rather than leaving it for the other person to remember). More generally, when you meet someone that you actually want to talk to again, be sure to get their contact info rather than only giving yours; that way, you can be in control of a follow-up occurring. Then actually follow up! For instance, send yourself an email immediately after talking to them to remind yourself who they are and why you want to reach out to them (you can take a photo of their business card too and attach it to the email so that you don’t have to carry it around).

11. Use pros and cons: if you’re making a major life decision, don’t just wing it. Make a carefully composed list of pros and cons. Better yet, also score them with how important each one is. The purpose of this is to help make sure you’re not missing anything important and to make it easy to recognize which are the critical considerations that you should be taking into account (and which you can safely ignore). At the end of the day, this doesn’t mean you should trust the output of the pros and cons analysis, but going through the exercise is likely to improve your intuition on what to do because you’re seeding it with all the relevant considerations (and reducing the chance you miss something important).

Part 4: MONEY HACKS

12. Use quick math for tips: When tipping in the U.S. at a restaurant, move the decimal point on your bill over to the left one digit, then double the value, which gets you to a 20% tip, then round or adjust down (to give a somewhat lower tip if desired). For instance: $23.60 becomes $2.36 when you move the decimal point over to the right, doubling that makes it $4.72, which is a 20% tip. If you want to give less than 20%, you can then just round or nudge this number down (e.g., $4.00 is a 17% tip).

13. Automate savings: decide how much of your income you’d like to save (for long-term use/retirement) each month. If the company you work at or your bank offers it, set up your accounts so that the correct percent automatically ends up in your long-term savings account so that you don’t even need to think about it. Because if you have to remember to do it each month, the chances are that you won’t stick closely to your long-term plan. Now don’t touch that long-term account (other to adjust what long-term investments it’s allocated to). You should seriously consider putting away at least some % of your income each month for longer-term use/retirement / emergencies, even if you’re young.

14. Get a credit card that pays: with a little bit of research, you can find a credit card that will give you 2% cashback on every purchase. If you tend to spend in certain categories (e.g., travel), you can find even better deals than this! If your credit card does not give you this much back (as the vast majority of them don’t), it may be worth investing a few hours in finding a card that does.

15. Make long-term investments: if all of your money is sitting in cash or in a savings or checking account, strongly consider putting some of it into low fee long term investments (e.g., an ETF or low fee mutual fund that tracks the U.S. or world stock markets). Note that such investments can decline dramatically in value (e.g., see historical stock market crashes), so you should only put money in such investments that would not be devastating to lose and that you plan to invest for the long term (e.g., ideally, you want to have a 5-15 year investment horizon). Historically broad low fee stock market investments have been a great investment in the long term (e.g., in nearly every 15 year period since its invention, the U.S. stock market has outperformed nearly every other major asset class). For instance, it has crushed bonds and real estate and gold, and currencies. Broad stock market indices have the appeal properly of basically allowing you to invest in the returns of “businesses in general.” Of course, nobody knows the future or whether future stock market returns will be as good as those in the past 100 years, but we can at least say that your checking account earning you approximately nothing is a good long-term investment. (Of course, what I’m saying here is not to be construed as professional investment advice, invest at your own risk.) For more about the stock market vs. other asset classes and more investment hacks in general, see our clearerthinking.org article on the topic: http://bit.ly/2zIwt8K

Part 5: HOME HACKS

16. Hang stuff: you can dramatically increase your space for storage by hanging stuff, for instance, using a door or wall hanging shoe holder in your closet (e.g., see: http://amzn.to/2BslSvK), or by putting up extra shelves in your kitchen or racks around the top of your closets.

17. Photograph then discard: when you get a document that might be useful (but having the original copy of the document is unnecessary), just take a photo of it, email it to yourself with an easily searchable subject line, and recycle or throw away the document. This will reduce clutter. The Dropbox app even has a “document scanner” mode which turns photos of receipts and things into pretty nice-looking PDFs (many other apps for this purpose exist as well, but you may already have Dropbox installed, and it provides convenient cloud storage for these PDFs). You can even do this with objects/trinkets/mementos that have some nostalgia but which you don’t really want to clutter your house with (you can keep the photos of these in a special folder of “memories”). Here’s one of my articles with many more decluttering and organizing techniques: http://bit.ly/2BhHYAe

Part 6: TIME HACKS

18. Practice phone typing: people spend a lot of time typing on their phones, yet people’s phone typing speeds tend to be extremely low. So it may be worth intentionally practicing faster phone typing (while using good form, e.g., I prefer the phone in vertical mode with one thumb on each side, each thumb covering half of the keyboard). There are plenty of typing practice apps and games on the app stores to help you improve your accuracy and speed, and some are even slightly fun.

Typing on computers is really quite a different skill than phone typing, so it only partially carries over. It’s also useful to learn to rely heavily on your phone’s autocomplete feature (for instance, remembering that you don’t need to get every letter right and just continuing forward, knowing it will correct most of your mistakes automatically). Another speed trick on iPhone is to hit the space bar twice at the end of a sentence instead of hitting the period key. While you’re at it, if you’re not a fast typist on a computer, strongly consider getting some typing practice software and learning proper typing form. Better typing (on both computer and phone) has potential benefits beyond just speed: it may help prevent repetitive strain injury (RSI) in the long term (since good typing form helps minimize motion). For more about the highly prevalent danger of RSI, see my article on dangers we should probably be more worried about http://bit.ly/2AaFTsG

19. Cleaning help: if you can afford to have your cleaning and laundry done by someone else (e.g., $15-$35 per hour in the U.S. depending who you hire or whether you use a cleaning company), and you don’t enjoy those activities, and the idea of it doesn’t weird you out, you should strongly consider hiring someone to do them for you on a repeating schedule (e.g., once every 1-3 weeks). Obviously, if you can’t afford this, then don’t do it, but if you do have the money, then I think this is some of the lowest hanging fruit in terms of freeing up time for doing things that are more important to you. You can use our clearerthinking.org “value of your time” calculator to figure out the dollar value that saving an hour of your time is worth to you, and hence at what price getting cleaning help might be worth it: http://bit.ly/2smheJX

20. Write any time: if you enjoy writing (e.g., blog posts, essays, or stories) but don’t seem to find enough time to do it, keep a note file on your phone with an ongoing draft, and whenever you’re waiting for something (e.g., the train, a late friend) pop it open and continue whatever writing you’re working on. For iPhone, I highly recommend the built-in Notes app for this since it will sync with your computer too automatically (just create a new category under iCloud in Notes for all your in-progress writing – I have more than 20 pieces of writing in progress at the moment on Notes, which is way, way too many). For long pieces of writing, keep each section or chapter in a separate note to make it easier to edit just the part you were working on. I’ve come to find writing more meaningful than reading even, so I’ve increasingly been converting reading time into writing time. Keeping all my in-progress writing on my phone in Notes has made this a lot easier.

Try a Cool Reboot!

It layers together six different techniques for feeling awake and only takes 30 minutes.

Ingredients (all optional, skip any that you can’t do now or don’t like):

– a very caffeinated beverage

– a timer with an alarm (e.g., on your phone or alarm clock)

– earplugs and/or eye mask

– a bed or couch

– a bright source of light (e.g., a S.A.D. light, or bright lamp, or sunny day)

– a shower

– a high energy inspiring YouTube music video ready to play (e.g., Upside Down & Inside Out by OK Go, or Level Up by Vienna Tang, or Thunderstruck by AC/DC, or Rise by Katy Perry)

Note: I don’t recommend this technique if you are bipolar or have ever had a manic episode. Also, if you feel weird partway through, stop early. Use at your own risk, and use your best judgment.

Step 1 – Load Up. Chug the highly caffeinated beverage. You’re now going to take advantage of the fact that caffeine takes some time for your body to process.

Step 2 – Power Down. Set a timer with an alarm to go off in 20 minutes, plus however long you think it will take you to fall asleep (or whatever your ideal short nap period is – I suspect 20 minutes works well for many people without causing them to go into a deep sleep, which you want to avoid). Now put your earplugs in and your eye mask on, and go to sleep! If you have trouble falling asleep, don’t worry. Even 10 minutes of non-sleep resting is still good (get up and continue onto the remaining steps when you’re ready!)

Step 3 – Reset. When your alarm wakes you up, hop up immediately and go to your source of bright light. Get close to it WITHOUT staring directly at it, and bask in its intense glow for 1-3 minutes (stop, or back away, or turn your head if it feels uncomfortable – it should not hurt).

Step 4 – Shock. Take a 30 second to 2 minutes very cold shower.

Step 5 – Inspire. Put on clothes, then start the high energy inspiring YouTube video, preferably at a loud volume.

Step 6 – Energize. As it is playing, start doing jumping jacks or dancing (either works well). Begin very slow, and as the music continues, go a bit faster, and then a bit faster still. By the time the song ends, you should be jumping/dancing at super high intensity! If it hurts, slow down or stop, of course.

Congratulations, you’ve done a Cool Reboot! Hopefully, you’re now feeling different than you did 30 minutes ago.

1. I just made a huge mistake; what on earth is wrong with me? How the hell could I be so stupid?

Reframe: I’ll learn so much from this mistake that I’m never going to make one like it again.

2. This bag is too heavy, I have to walk way too far

Reframe: Exercise is healthy, and people pay trainers to get them to lift heavy stuff or go on the treadmill, this is just exercise with the world as my trainer!

3. This train/bus/line is taking forever, what a pain!

Reframe: This is a great time to read an interesting article, listen to one of my favorite songs, text a friend that I haven’t spoken to in a while, think about the big decision I have to make soon, or recall what I learned in that book I read recently

Note: For your safety, don’t do these things if you are driving

4. I’m badly losing this argument; this is irritating. I need to work harder to prove I’m right.

Reframe: I’ll end up with more accurate beliefs and prove that I’m the sort of person that can change my mind if I acknowledge that the other person has made a good argument, and it may even make them think better of me (compared to desperately trying to prove their good argument wrong).

5. That person I thought I had a good conversation with never replied when I contacted them, I must have done something offputting.

Reframe: There are numerous reasons why someone wouldn’t reply (email went to spam, forgot to reply, personal crises, didn’t have a great first impression of me, not looking to make friends, went traveling, etc.), and this person doesn’t know what I’m really like, so it can’t be deeply personal, but I can certainly work more at making a great first impression to reduce the chance it happens in the future

6. I failed at this thing I tried really hard at; there must be something wrong with me.

Reframe: If I never fail, I’m not trying things that are hard enough to challenge me, and each time I try something hard, I will have some chance of success and some chance of failure, so failure is totally expected and normal, though I should try my best to diagnose why it happened so I can improve.

7. This is so incredibly unfair; I can’t stand it.

Reframe: This is something I really don’t like, and that might make a lot of people unhappy. I should definitely try to change it if I can, but there is no rule that says the world is fair; the universe owes me nothing. I’ve withstood plenty of bad things in the past, and I can and will withstand this, as I work to make the thing better.

8. That random bad thing I just thought of might just happen, that would be bad if it did; I’d better mull that possibility over in my mind.

Reframe: [if it’s minor], so what if it does happen? I’ll get through it easily or [if there’s something I can do about it] I’ll plan to do this thing now or as soon as possible to reduce the risk or (if there’s not much of anything I can do) I could spend my whole life worrying about things I can’t change that might happen, but that would just make me miserable and not help anything so I should focus on something else now that will distract me.

9. I can’t believe my friend flaked out on me/did that annoying thing, it’s so disrespectful.

Reframe: [if I think they are unlikely to do this sort of thing again] that is not characteristic of this person, and everyone messes up sometimes, I’ve certainly messed up before, this is probably just a fluke, and I should forgive it, or [f you think they are likely to do this sort of thing again] I should make sure they know I don’t like when they behave like this, but beyond that, I then need to decide whether I want to be friends with someone who is prone to behave this way.

10. I can’t believe I did that bad/shameful thing many years ago, I still feel guilty about it.

Reframe: [if I’m no longer the sort of person who would do that thing] I did that long in the past, and the person I am now would never do it again, so it’s time to forgive myself, or [if I still am the sort of person who might do that thing] I’m still prone to doing things like that, I should deeply consider why that is, and what the next, concrete step I can take is towards no longer being better.

It’s tough to make real-life disagreements productive, but here are my favorite techniques for making it easier to do so. These help more if you are significantly motivated to use the disagreement to deepen mutual understanding of the issue.

I’m assuming here that you have control over your own behavior, but not over the other persons, because that’s the reality of almost all such situations. I’m not assuming that the other person is motivated to figure out the truth (e.g., they may be mostly motivated by “winning” the debate).

TIPS FOR HAVING MORE PRODUCTIVE REAL LIFE DISAGREEMENTS

(1) Avoid debates in front of others – if others are watching, it tends to create unproductive social dynamics. You or the person who disagrees with you may want to look good in the debate in front of those other people, which tends to push in the opposite direction of being open-minded and conceding when the other person has made a good point. What’s more, having other people involved increases the chance that the conversation gets derailed.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “Bob, what do you think about what we’re discussing?”

PRODUCTIVE: “Want to sit over there with me and discuss this in more detail?”

(2) Stay on topic – very often, the topic of disagreement will start to drift. Resist the urge to go follow tangents or switch what the debate is about, or you’ll lose focus. If someone says something new that you disagree with, resist the urge to address it if it isn’t related to the main point of contention.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “You’re wrong about that too.”

PRODUCTIVE: “We can discuss that point of disagreement later, but I’d be interested in returning to the subject we were discussing if you don’t mind.”

(3) Investigate first, don’t attack – when someone says something we strongly disagree with, we can be tempted to immediately attack their position. However, doing so sets up the discussion as a war. If the goal is to have a productive debate (where both you and the other person have a reasonable chance of making your views more accurate), then it’s much better to set the conversation up as a discussion where you can learn from each other instead. Avoid immediately jumping into attacking the other person’s position so that they aren’t put on the defensive and so that the conversation isn’t framed in terms of winning. This relates to Julia Galef’s concept of Scout Mindset (see: http://bit.ly/2fPYRJI), which I think is the right mindset to have when entering into a disagreement. You should be trying to understand the lay of the land, not firing cannons. If you fire cannons, you can expect cannon fire right back at you.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “There are at least three reasons you’re wrong about that.”

PRODUCTIVE: “Could you tell me more about that?”

(4) Clarify the other person’s claims – it’s surprisingly easy to have a long disagreement without fully understanding what the other person really meant. Typically you’ll need to ask a lot of clarifying questions early on so that you really understand what’s being claimed. If you refute the other person’s points, without having clarified, there is a good chance that you are arguing against something that isn’t quite what they believe. One of the best ways of making sure you’ve understood the other side is to repeat back the other person’s claims in your own words and ask if you’ve accurately reflected what they are saying.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “But X is not true because…”

PRODUCTIVE: “I think that what you’re saying is X, am I understanding that right?”

(5) Clarify definitions – language tends to be quite ambiguous. If the points you are making hinge on someone understanding your definition of a word, then take a moment to clarify what you mean by it. Or, if you notice that the way the other person is using a word may not be quite the way you use it, stop for a moment to explain your usage and to ask them to clarify their own. If you and the other party mean different things by word, it’s very hard to constantly keep that in mind without getting confused. It’s typically much better to either decide to switch over to the other person’s definition (once you’ve asked them to explain it) or to ask to switch to another word entirely that you both agree on the definition for. It’s a lot harder to get someone to successfully switch over to your definition than to simply resolve to switch over to theirs.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “We obviously don’t have free will because we don’t choose the things we fundamentally want.”

PRODUCTIVE: “Could you elaborate on what you mean by the phrase ‘free will’? I’m not sure I understand what you are using that phrase to mean.”

(6) Identify reason(s) for belief – don’t just stop at understanding what the other person is claiming. If you actually want to make progress in the debate, you’ll need to dig into the reasons behind their beliefs. Knowing why they believe what they do may cause you to agree with the other person more (because it helps you understand their reasoning) but, even if it doesn’t, it can also help you understand where the debate needs to focus in order to make progress. Without knowing why they believe what they do, you don’t know what points are most critical to discuss.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I don’t think X is true because….”

PRODUCTIVE: “What are the main reasons that you think X is true?”

(7) Gently probe the reasons you’re given – if someone tells you that the reason they believe X is Y, don’t assume that if you were to change their belief in Y, then belief X would change too. First of all, we are not always aware of the reasons we believe things, so while the person might think Y is the reason they believe X, they might be wrong (it could just be their best on the spot guess or the first argument their brain could put together – they may have even forgotten what caused them to believe X). Second, our beliefs may be propped up by multiple other beliefs, so even if the other person really does believe X because of Y, there may be other beliefs P and Q that would need to change at the same time for the other person to stop believing X. What’s more, a person may have an emotional attachment to X that isn’t really supported by conscious “reasons” at all (e.g., the idea of not believing X causes them anxiety, so if they start to sense that X is being challenged they try to defend it with whatever argument comes to mind first). So if the main point of contention in your debate is whether X is true, and the other party says they believe X because of Y, you’ll want to gently probe Y to understand better what’s really going on. This can be done with questions such as:

-“Is Y the main reason you believe X, or are there other important reasons you believe X as well?”

-“If you were no longer convinced of Y, do you think that would be enough to cause you to stop believing X?”

-“If it turned out that X was true, would you see that as a bad thing? Why?”

UNPRODUCTIVE: “But Y is not a convincing reason to believe X.”

PRODUCTIVE: “If you stopped believing that Y was true, would that change your mind about X?”

(8) Look for the critical points of disagreement – there may be a lot of reasons that you and the other person disagree, but they are unlikely to be equally important. Chances are, there are a small number of important points of contention that the disagreement hinges on. (see CFAR’s “double crux” technique: http://bit.ly/2xYjqOI for more about finding these “crux’s”). It can be helpful to frame finding the core points of disagreement as an explicit goal in the conversation and to enlist the other person’s help in figuring it out.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “Let’s go one by one through all the reasons we disagree.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I think our main point of disagreement is actually just Y. does that seem right to you? If not, I’d be really interested in finding out what our core points of disagreement really are.”

(9) Find common ground – agreeing tends to make people feel closer to each other and to make a debate feel less heated and awkward, so it’s good to point out the things that you do already agree on. Pointing out what you think you already agree on can also be helpful for clarification because you may discover hidden points of disagreement that you didn’t even realize were there.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “It looks like we really don’t agree on this topic.”

PRODUCTIVE: “It looks like we already agree on a number of things, including…”

(10) Look for ways you can learn – one of the best things about a disagreement is that it presents an opportunity to make your own views more accurate. Even if you are right overall on the topic, you can still correct minor errors in your beliefs and arguments and hone them for the future. Chances are the other person has at least SOME good points. Try to learn as much as you can from them. At the very least, you can learn about how someone gets to the point of believing something that you disagree with on this topic, which is useful to understand in its own right. On complex, controversial issues, it is almost always the case that both sides have some reasonable points. It’s valuable to know what the reasonable points on the other side are. Keep in mind also that, like everyone, you are totally wrong about some of the things that you strongly believe in. This might just be one of those topics. If that’s true, it’s better to find out now and then start being right about it, rather than continuing being wrong about the topic indefinitely.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I’m still not convinced.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I’d be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on Z because I’ve never thought about Z the way you’re presenting it.”

(11) Give credit when a good point is made – if the other person makes a good point, or changes your mind about something, tell them that. This might feel like conceding ground in the “battle,” but if you’re viewing the disagreement as a battle, then you are probably already not in a productive mode of discussion. Telling the other person that they made a good point or that they changed your mind about something shows good faith. It demonstrates that you are actually interested in listening to what they say and that you are not simply trying to beat them. That tends to make the other person less defensive, more open-minded, and more likely to be willing to admit that you changed their mind as well. It can help to frame the entire discussion as a collaborative enterprise to figure out the truth, rather than as a conflict between two people. Remember that finding out you are wrong about something is a gift that makes you more powerful because, the next time around, you’ll have truer beliefs and better arguments, as well as a deeper understanding of the world.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “What you said was not 100% true.”

PRODUCTIVE: “You made a great point about Z, which helps me understand this topic better.”

(12) Keep your ego out of it – if your ego is invested in coming out on top in the disagreement, or at least in not having your points refuted, then you are less likely to learn and more likely to turn the disagreement into a battle where the goal is winning. One nice trick for keeping your ego off to the side is to put forward claims without saying that you necessarily believe them. For instance, to keep an argument that you have uncertainty about at arm’s length, you can say, “Some people argue that Z, what do you think of that claim?” or if you aren’t sure you believe something, say “I’m not sure yet what I think about this yet, but one thing that comes to mind is Z.” You can also bring up the views of other people, as in “I was reading an article that said Z. What’s your reaction to that?” Using softening language can help too, such as “I’m thinking that” rather than “I believe that” or even worse, “I’ve always believed that.” The more your language makes the belief seem like a core part of your identity, the harder you may later feel it is to back down, even if you turn out to be totally wrong.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I believe in Y.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I’m still figuring out what I think about Y. Some people say Z about it; what do you think of that argument?”

(13) Keep the other person’s ego out of it – if the other person’s ego is invested in winning (or at least not losing), it is likely going to tend to reduce the quality of the discussion. Make it as easy as possible for the other person to concede a point, for instance, by acknowledging that you understand why they think the thing and explaining how you see someone might come to that conclusion, or by emphasizing that another point they made was really good while you’re pointing out that this other point they made is weaker. Mentioning ways that you realize your own views were wrong can also be helpful, as it neutralizes the embarrassment of being wrong. If you used to believe the same thing that they do (but changed your mind about it), it can be helpful mentioning that as well to show that you understand why someone would take their side.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “You’re wrong about X.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I can understand why you said X, and you made a lot of good points about it. I think, though, that there is an important consideration that the argument you gave isn’t taking into account.”

People often assume that the frequency with which a variable will take on different values (i.e., probability distribution) is likely to follow a bell curve (i.e., a normal distribution); this is often a mistake. Instead, consider these rules of thumb for deciding which probability distribution to use as a model in different situations:

(1) Binomial – when flipping coins

Number of occurrences out of a fixed number of tries: if the variable represents the number of times something happened out of a certain fixed number of trials that are at least mostly independent from each other (e.g., the number of times a team wins out of a fixed number of games, or the number of people on your mailing list that opened the last email you sent) then try modeling the probability of outcomes with a binomial distribution. Note that when the number of trials is large, and the rate of success is not too close to 0% or 100%, then this can be approximated with a normal distribution, but when the number of trials is small, or the rate of success is close to 0% or 100% a normal distribution may fit it very poorly.

(2) Poisson – when watching the clock

Number of occurrences in a fixed amount of time: if the variable represents the number of things of a certain type that happen within a fixed amount of time (e.g., 1 hour) and that time shouldn’t be affected by the time that’s elapsed since the last instance of the thing happening (e.g., the number of burglaries that will happen in a given city in a day, or the number of emails that you get on a Monday between 9 am, and 10 am) then try a Poisson distribution. Instead of fixed amounts of time, it can also be applied to fixed amounts of space or stuff, such as the number of mutations in a fixed-sized region of DNA once a given dose of radiation is applied.

(3) Exponential – when luck fades

Positive variables where larger values are always less likely than smaller values: if the variable is constrained to be positive and it’s reasonable to assume that higher values are always less likely than lower values, then the Exponential distribution may be a reasonable choice. It can also be applied to cases where the variable is constrained to be above a certain value rather than strictly positive (if we’re willing to shift the mean of the Exponential distribution). Exponential distributions are an especially good choice when modeling the time until an event if the estimated amount of time remaining until the event occurs is not affected by the amount of time elapsed so far (e.g., the amount of time until the next telephone call at a call center around a fixed time of day, say 2 pm). It is also the right choice when modeling how likely the thing is to occur when, with each amount of passing the time, the chance of the thing happening falls by a fixed percentage (e.g., the chance that someone has NOT gotten an injury after their nth day of riding a motorcycle if we can assume roughly a fixed chance of injury each day). Another application of the Exponential distribution is when you know a variable must be positive, but its maximum value is unlimited, and you know its mean value must be set in stone, but otherwise, you have the maximum uncertainty possible about outcomes of the distribution (i.e., you want to use the maximum entropy distribution for a known mean).

(4) Gamma – when anything could happen (but it’s got to be positive)

Positive variables that don’t have a clear maximum value – when the restriction of larger values being always less likely than smaller values is not necessarily valid (but you still have an unbounded variable that must be positive), then the Gamma distribution can be a reasonable choice. It generalizes the exponential distribution to a wider range of cases and also includes as a special case the famous chi-squared distribution. The Gamma distribution is useful for modeling things such as the total amount of rainfall in a certain country in a certain year (it must be a positive number, and we can’t say for sure that the maximum rain that has ever occurred is truly the maximum that could occur). Another example application would be the amount of time between one random car passing a certain point and the next car passing that point, which again must be positive but doesn’t have a clear maximum value.

(5) Normal – when things just add up

Sums of variables: if the variable can be thought of as a sum or average (or weighted average, where no one variable gets most of the weight) of other variables that aren’t that correlated to each other (e.g., human height, which can be approximated as being affected by a weighted average of different effects from different genes, or IQ test scores, which can be thought of as a sum of many different components of intelligence such as working memory, verbal comprehension, spatial reasoning, processing speed, practice taking such tests, focus, etc.) then try a Normal distribution (a.k.a. bell curve). Regarding human height, a Normal distribution fits it quite well if you consider adults, but even better if you just consider males or just consider females (since the male/female chromosome difference causes a relatively large change, which can be thought of as a variable with excessively large weight in the weighted average). A Normal distribution is also a good choice when you know that the center (e.g., mean or median) and width (e.g., standard deviation) are set in stone, but other than that, you have the maximum amount of uncertainty about what outcomes can occur (i.e., you want the maximum entropy distribution for a known mean and standard deviation), or when you’re trying to pick a reasonable prior distribution for the mean value of something (e.g., you want to express uncertainty about the mean of another probability distribution).

(6) Log-normal – when luck is compounding

Products of variables: if the variable can be thought of as a product of (as opposed to some of) positive variables that are at least mostly independent, or thought of as an accumulation of small percentage changes (from a positive starting point) due to different unrelated causes, then consider using a Log-normal distribution (a.k.a. Galton distribution). Examples where these assumptions seem to work reasonably well include, e.g., the income distribution of a large population (if we cut off the top 3% or so richest as that top tail may be better modeled as a Pareto distribution), or the distribution of populations of cities, or perhaps people’s total “success” in life by some fixed metric (excluding the very, very highest of achievers). The Log-normal distribution can also be a reasonable choice when a variable represents percentage changes in a thing from a fixed starting point of 1 (where 0 is the lowest possible value since it would indicate the thing is totally gone) when there is not a clear maximum (e.g., the distribution of returns for a diversified asset portfolio – though this distribution will leave out the extreme outlier tail risk caused by black swan events such as the world being hit by a huge Asteroid or a world-altering new technology). The log-normal distribution is also a reasonable choice when trying to set a prior distribution for a scale parameter (e.g., you need to use a probability distribution to model the uncertainty in the standard deviation of some other distribution) or if you expect the number of orders of magnitude of a thing to be well modeled by a normal distribution (so that the thing itself is the exponential of a normally distributed variable). When the mean is much larger than the standard deviation, a Log-normal distribution approximates a Normal distribution.

(7) Beta – when possibilities are penned in

Continuous variables constrained to be in a certain range: if the variable you’re trying to model the probability distribution of is a continuous variable that is only allowed to be in a bounded range (e.g., a corruption score that can be any value from 0 to 1 or a quality score in the range of 1 to 1000) consider using a Beta distribution (rescaled and/or shifted to cover the range of allowed values of your variable since by default the Beta distribution has the range 0 to 1). The Beta distribution works especially though well when the variable you’re trying to model the probability distribution of is itself a probability (which by definition is always going to be in the range of 0 to 1) or if you need a prior distribution for a variable that represents a probability. The Beta distribution can also work well when trying to model how likely the median value (or, more generally, the path percentile value) of a set of values is to take on different values if the original values are approximately uniformly distributed in the range 0 to 1. The commonly used uniform distribution, which assigns an equal likelihood to each value within the range 0 to 1 (and no chance to anything outside of that range), is a special case of the Beta distribution.

(8) Pareto – when outcomes are driven by outliers

80/20 type rules for positive variables: if you expect that the top X% of the outcomes will contribute Y% of the total, but ALSO that X% of those top X% will contribute Y% of the total of just that top group of outcomes, and X% of the top X% of the top X% will contribute Y% of the total of that top group of the top group, and so on and so forth, then consider using a Pareto distribution (a.k.a. power law). Many people believe this is the right model for the total value of startups or the amount of total funds raised by startups. The Pareto distribution also is a good choice when you are modeling the total outcome value of a thing that occurs over time, and a reasonable estimate for the value remaining to be added is proportional to the amount of value accumulated so far. So for instance, if a reasonable estimate for the final equity valuation of startups is 15% higher than the valuation at their last equity sale, then a Pareto distribution might be a reasonable choice to model equity valuation for startups. Or, to give another example, if the average time remaining for a project to finish is proportional to the amount of time elapsed so far, then the completion times of projects might follow a Pareto distribution. Pareto distributions can be good for modeling things where a lot of the total of all the outcomes is driven by really extreme outliers. Relatedly, Pareto distributions have the funny property that they can have infinite variance or even infinite mean for certain parameter values. Things in the real world don’t really seem to have infinite means or variances as far as we can tell, but in some cases, it could still be a reasonable model of real-world phenomena. As statistician George Box said, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

(9) Gumbel – when you’re studying the worst-case scenario

The maximum of a large number of values: if you are trying to model something characterized by a maximum (or minimum) of many values, such as the max amount of rainfall in a city / the max daily stock market decline / the maximum worldwide earthquake strength in any day over a ten year period, consider using a Gumbel distribution, Weibull distribution, or Fréchet distribution. Which to use depends on details about the “tails” of the distribution from which each individual value is drawn. See here for more details about “extreme value theory,” which characterizes what sort of distributions the maximum can have (when the maximum is taken over a large number of random values drawn from some distribution): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_value_theory…