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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.

If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:
(a) what would you hope people would spend their time doing in this utopia?
(b) how would you incentivize people to actually spend their time in these ways? (or would you just hope they would do these behaviors without actually incentivizing them)
(c) how would you prevent or reduce undesirable behaviors or feelings (e.g., extreme social hierarchy, people destroying the social status of others for amusement, infidelity, feelings of purposelessness or worthlessness, manipulation), or would you not try to prevent things like this?
(d) how would you allocate resources or determine who gets what?
(e) how confident are you that people would actually end up happy and fulfilled in the utopia you described, and that it wouldn’t leave people unhappy or rapidly implode?

My extremely tentative, very partial and probably quite wrong current best guesses for answers to these questions (for a near-term technology utopia) are:

I would hope that people in this utopia would spend their time forming and developing meaningful relationships with each other, helping each other be even happier, shaping themselves into the people they want to be, engaging in creative pursuits they find meaningful, having tons of fun, experiencing a great deal of pleasure and very little suffering, discovering new things, and persistently pursuing numerous projects that are designed to make society at large even better.

Basic needs and goods that are considered nearly universally valuable would be all provided free to everyone (e.g., clean water, comfortable clothes, healthy basic food, effective health care, psychological counseling, pleasant, spacious housing, internet, free education, a computer, access to information, enough income to buy a reasonable but not large amount of stuff, and free training on what is known about how psychology works and what makes humans happy).

On top of that, one possibility is for there to be an (only lightly) regulated market economy for people who desire to buy more than the basics.

There could also be a prize system offering hundreds of thousands of different prizes to give fame, prestige, credentialing, and extra money (at many different levels of prestigiousness and money award sizes) to people who made important contributions to the betterment of all, and a selection committee (with very carefully designed incentives and very strict selection criteria and an evidence-based approach) who would choose the recipients of the prizes based on their contributions. Basically, offering rewards in proportion to how much value people added to society. Other than these numerous prizes to reward behaviors that benefit society, and laws against hurting others, people could largely do what they want.

I have very low confidence, however, that this proposal would actually lead to a stable society. I’d need to spend hundreds of more hours thinking about this and discussing it with others to flesh it out and gain more confidence that it’s on the right track.