How Companies Can Cause Harm

July 18, 2017

I often have heard it said that if people buy the product a company is selling, then the company must be creating value in the world. After all, why would someone buy a product if that product were not creating value? It would be nice if this were a valid argument (since then more units sold = more societal benefit). Unfortunately, it's not valid. To help put the argument to rest, here's a list of 13 situations where a product that doesn't add net value to the world may still get bo...

Excessive Acquiescence

July 17, 2017

Unfortunately, we humans get used to problems quickly. Too often, when we get used to problems, we stop reflecting on them. When we stop reflecting on them, we stop trying to fix them. Two examples: At first, if one of the burners on your stove stops working (as I personally experienced), you notice it and are annoyed by it. Soon, you find that you've stopped trying to use that burner. You've been trained by annoyance to use a different one instead. Or, to put it another way, you've su...

Misjudging Repeated Risk

July 17, 2017

Some thoughts on how we may massively misjudge the weightiness of decisions that involve doing a risky thing many times: There's a huge difference between riding on the back of a motorcycle once, and buying a motorcycle to ride every weekend, or between buying a cookie and buying a box of 25 cookies, or between taking a boxing lesson once and sparring regularly. Unfortunately, our minds don't necessarily give this difference between doing something one time and doing something T times app...

Tough Questions about Utopia

July 16, 2017

Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers): 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 t...

The Value of the Unsaid Obvious

July 16, 2017

Some thoughts on the, potentially very large, value of ideas that are both obvious and obscure, and why I like to try to state the "unsaid obvious": 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 8x8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece...

What if “Free Will” Isn’t Guaranteed?

July 11, 2017

A useful trick that I've used for years: thinking of myself as having sustained free will for only about the next 5 minutes, and assuming my distant-future self has free will only intermittently. If like most people, you think of yourself as continuously having free will in the future, you may have thoughts like:(1) "I'll have an hour to do this project tomorrow, so I don't need to do it now."(2) "Once I'm back from vacation, I'll start going to the gym every day."(3) "I don't need to make t...

What Makes a Game Fun?

July 1, 2017

I think it's interesting to consider what makes a game fun or boring. What properties make a strategy game better, all else being equal? Here's my list! (1) Variety: the game doesn't end up getting into the same or similar positions most of the time (so that it feels new each time you play) (2) Forgiveness: you don't automatically lose when you make a mistake (which can be frustrating for new players, and unsatisfying to the people that beat them) (3) Simplicity: fewer and easier...

The Problems with Product Ratings

July 1, 2017

Ratings on the internet (on Amazon, Netflix, IMDB, etc.) can be very valuable, but there are also big problems with them that people aren't as aware of as they should be. Here, I'll discuss two major issues with online ratings. Problem 1: The Different People Problem Probably the biggest problem with ratings is that the different people rate different sorts of products. In other words, the people that rate The Selfish Gene (4.5 stars on Amazon) are a somewhat different group of people tha...

Goals are Valuable and Dangerous

June 30, 2017

One of the most dangerous and useful things about goal setting is that it feels good to achieve challenging goals even if they are meaningless, only five minutes old, or created by someone else. Imagine throwing away a crumpled piece of paper in a waste bin. Now imagine doing it again, but assume this time that you set the goal of throwing it in from 6 feet away. As your tossed paper ball sails through the air, you may feel an edge of nervousness. When it falls into the bin, you may feel a s...

Everyone is Fighting a Great Battle

June 29, 2017

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An obvious realization I had a few years ago, that helped me be less judgmental and more compassionate: you never know what kind of challenges a person is dealing with in their life, and their challenges could be much harder than you would ever imagine based on what you know of the person casually. It could be: a medical condition that significantly impacts their quality of life (but that they are really good at hiding), mental health challenges like depression, anxiety or OCD that they face...