How do we make our group conversations better?

November 3, 2024

While some group conversations are great (e.g., with close friends), a lot of group conversations are boring, the lowest common denominator, or hijacked by one talkative person. How can you make group conversations more interesting? Here's what I've found to be useful: 1) Shrink the group The best group conversations typically happen (I claim) in groups of 3 to 5. If your group is bigger...

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Three hypotheses to consider when a medical issue can’t be diagnosed

September 27, 2024

As you may have experienced yourself, sometimes, when people are chronically ill and go to lots of doctors, the doctors conclude that there is nothing medically wrong. I think it's important in these cases not to jump to a conclusion too quickly about why it has remained undiagnosed and to take seriously *all three* of these possibilities: 1) Diagnosis Error: It's a non-standard presentati...

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Breaking out of Futility Loops

September 18, 2024

Consider the quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." -Albert Einstein Of course, that's not the definition of insanity, and Einstein didn't say it (despite the quote often being attributed to him). For those reasons, it sounds pretty stupid. But I would argue there is something wise about the quote and that it's worth...

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Has every made-up anecdote already happened?

September 13, 2024

A weird thing about anecdotes: there are so many humans, and each human has so many things happen to them, that for a great many simple stories, you might make up (as long as it is within the bounds of physics/current technology/human capacity, and isn't too specific), something similar has happened to somebody. For instance, I just made up these stories that I've never heard of ever happening...

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A major (overlooked) reason why smart people fall for stupid things

September 13, 2024

Why do smart people fall for stupid things? Here is what I think is an important part of the answer that almost never gets discussed. It's easy to look around at the stupid seeming things that other people believe (e.g., people who join harmful cults, get scammed by a con artist, become vocal evangelists for a placebo treatment, or jump on the hype train of some outrageous new bubble) and wond...

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How are personality traits distributed in the most popular personality frameworks?

September 12, 2024

How are personality traits distributed? Let's take a deep dive into the distribution of personality traits on Myers-Briggs-style tests, Big Five personality tests, and Enneagram tests, based on data we collected on 23,000 people globally: This bell-curve-like shape is a problem for MBTI-style tests because they want to classify each person as either Extraverted or Introverted, either Sensi...

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Squeeglee – a missing emotion word in English for when you experience something that’s cute

September 5, 2024

A new word for an emotion that, very oddly, previously had no word in English:Squeeglee - "the emotion people experience when perceiving something as cute, such as a baby or puppy."Noun: "When a cat wears a hat, it fills me with squeeglee."Verb: "I squeeglee that kitten."This word is the winner of a poll where I proposed four ideas for what to call this emotion of finding something (non-sexually)...

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Conducting Instantaneous Experiments

August 24, 2024

Have a hypothesis about the world, society, human nature, physics, or anything else that nobody has directly tested before? It might seem like conducting a costly experiment would be required to find out whether it's true. But a lot of the time, you can check your hypothesis easily using what I call an "Instantaneous Experiment." How to do an Instantaneous Experiment: Step 1: Think of a...

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What happens when your beliefs can’t change?

August 13, 2024

This is part 2 in my series about "anchor beliefs" - but you don't need to read part 1 in order to understand it. I think that almost everyone has beliefs that are essentially unchangeable. These don't feel to us like beliefs but like incontrovertible truths. Counter-evidence can't touch them. They are beliefs we can't change our mind about. I call these "Anchor Beliefs." When Anchor Belief...

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Companies shirking their responsibility to make AI text detectable

August 4, 2024

It's really a shame that OpenAI hasn't deployed its technology for detecting whether text was generated using ChatGPT, despite it being developed 2 years ago. They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI's inaction damages the academic environment - especially for the non-cheating students, ...

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