Restaurants I wish Existed

September 14, 2017

Here is a list of ideas for wild and wacky restaurants that I hope someone will create someday. Note: If you're a creator of wacky-concept restaurants, feel free to steal these ideas, just please invite me to the opening! No Spoons (a.k.a. Soup Flight)The entire menu always consists of 30 soups (most hot, some cold, most savory, a few sweet, most classic, a few experimental). They are only served in 1.5 ounce shot glasses, which you sip the soup from; no bowls or spoons. Anyone who brings...

Mind-Bending Probability Questions

September 11, 2017

Watch as your mind is thoroughly broken by these easy to state probability questions. intuiting probabilities = too hard for us mortals Problem 1 - That Tuesday Boy Is Your Bane Ajax has exactly two children. For no reason, in particular, you decide to ask Ajax, "is at least one of your children a male that was born on a Tuesday?" and he truthfully replies, "yes". Given this information you just learned, what's the percentage chance that both of Ajax's children are male (assuming a ran...

Ways to be a Better Friend

September 9, 2017

A list of simple ways you can be a better friend to the people you care about most (including close friends, family members, and romantic partners): INTERACTION - Avoid devices: don't use your phone when with your friends - Give focus: try to focus fully and completely on what your friend is telling you and, if you are momentarily distracted, return your full focus to your friend as soon as you notice that your attention has wandered - Rephrase for understanding: if your friend say...

Useful Methods for Optimizing Space

September 7, 2017

Consider this list of useful methods I aspire to use when organizing, optimizing, and decluttering my home and workspaces: DISCARDING Consider true replacement cost: if an item is rarely used, will never be needed urgently, and is not hard to get (i.e., you can easily order it online or go get it at a store if you ever need it) then the true replacement cost is the probability that you'll need it times the price of rebuying it. If the replacement cost is low, consider giving it away or di...

Vacation Memories

September 5, 2017

Right after you get back from a trip or action-packed vacation, I highly recommend the following: think through each day of the trip, one by one, and write a list of all the things you did. Visualizing each activity as you write it down. To ensure more detail, you can also do this at the end of each day of the trip, rather than waiting until the end. This will greatly improve your memory of your trip and make it a more valuable experience. It also makes it much easier to reminisce, and to co...

Trying New Things – Why to do it and Many Things to Try!

September 4, 2017

On trying new things (plus a list of many possible new things to try):I think it's wise to try things that are substantially new to you nearly every time you have the chance, so long as: The new thing seems likely to be beneficial or enjoyable OR is different enough from things you've done in the past that you don't think you can accurately predict how you'll react to it Trying the new thing doesn't require a substantial investment of time or resources AND is extremely unlikely to cause y...

Design for Non-designers – 39 Principles for Designing Effective Interfaces

August 25, 2017

I’m not a designer or UI/UX person by trade, but I have to think a lot about interfaces and design in my work. Here are the 39 things I’ve learned over the years (including illustrative examples) about how to create nice looking interfaces and an effective user experience. (In my own designs I still have plenty of room for improvement along many of these dimensions.) Keep in mind that even if you don't do design FOR your work, you may still need to do design IN your work, whether you're making ...

The Theories of Change List: Causes of Behavior Quickly Shifting in a Positive Direction

August 23, 2017

Mostly people stay the way they are, or change slowly. So what are the reasons that individual human behavior sometimes quickly shifts in a positive direction? Here's my current "theory of change" list. It seems to me that developing a better understanding of behavior change is incredibly important for creating a better world. Some of these categories are, of course, overlapping. OPERANT CONDITIONING Rapid small rewards: your friends respond very positively when you crack jokes, so you end up ...

Psychological Immune Systems – the List

August 23, 2017

A really important difference I've noticed between people is how their "psychological immune systems" work. In other words: people differ substantially in the collection of strategies that their brains use when bad things happen to prevent themselves from becoming too unhappy or too dysfunctional for too long. This seems like an important part of understanding why some people are happier than others, even in the face of difficult challenges. Here is my list of the different psychological immune...

Amazing Possibilities in Virtual Reality

August 23, 2017

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following: (1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction). (2) massively multiplayer real-time environments (with fast internet and computers with state of the art GPUs, this is fairly doable a...