Written: April 18, 2018 | Released: June 27, 2021 What is the scope of morality? If we look across cultures (including micro-cultures that exist within other cultures), there is a vast number of things that people view as immoral. However, if you eliminate those that are only viewed as immoral because they are believed to lead to other things viewed as bad, the list becomes a lot smaller. ...

What traits, behaviors, or characteristics of a person are the best predictors of whether they achieve extremely high levels of success in their life? For instance, those who have: created billion-dollar companies with huge influence (e.g., Elon Musk)made multiple revolutionary scientific advances (e.g., Einstein)achieved absurdly high levels of skill at sports (e.g., Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who...

Ever wonder what the biggest topics are in academic Artificial Intelligence research, or Gender Studies, or Decision Science, or Dental Hygiene research? Want to figure out whether an academic discipline is actually valuable to society, or see some of the most important insights a field has generated in the last five years? Here's my (relatively) easy method for getting a sense of what an acad...

Written: March 24, 2018 | Released: May 28, 2021 I suggest running experiments every month or two to find new ways to improve your life. The basic procedure is simple:(1) Think of something important you'd like to try to improve (e.g., your fitness, sleep, anxiety, dating life, friendships, productivity, happiness at work, etc.).(2) Come up with a few ideas for something safe you could start d...

Written: March 23, 2018 | Released: June 4, 2021 If we shouldn’t judge a (non-fiction) book by its cover, what should we judge it by? In my experience, highly analytical people tend to reduce non-fiction books to the ideas they contain. From this point of view, most non-fiction is pretty bad. Why bother reading 350 pages just to get 3-6 ideas? Why wade through 20 anecdotes and stories th...

Written: March 8, 2018 | Released: July 2, 2021 Guilds are common and enormously influential today. We're so used to the way that society is organized that it's easy not to notice what a "guild-based" society we have. While guilds provide major benefits, they also come with societal costs that I think are almost always under-appreciated. What I'm referring to here are professional groups th...

People often argue whether depression is, or is not, caused by a "chemical imbalance". Much of what happens in our brains is chemical, why would depression not be? If by "imbalance" we happen to mean "a state of brain chemicals that the patient doesn't want", as opposed to, say, some specific theory that is now discredited like "not enough serotonin" (i.e., the low serotonin myth), then depre...

I’ve noticed that people start with different assumptions about what usually causes large, positive changes in the world. It is rare for us to directly address these differences in worldview, even though they may contribute to difficulties seeing eye-to-eye on how we can make things better. For instance, I think some people believe that large, positive change usually comes about due to one or ...

If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, "Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions," which allows attendees to see each other's (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn. I've included the details of the event format belo...

Books about how to be likable and charismatic often say things like: LOOK make eye contact when people are talking to you (but look away occasionally so as not to be creepy, and look away for a greater proportion of the time when you're talking since that's what people do naturally) REPEAT reflect back to people what they've said to you (e.g., "So you're saying that…") ASK get people tal...