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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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, ...

Looking for a fun but unusual and somewhat boundary-pushing activity to do with a small group of friends that requires almost no preparation? I made a little collaborative scavenger hunt designed to be done in any city. I completed it recently with friends, and it went well! Depending on the city, it may be more difficult or less difficult, but we did it in Manhattan. It's designed so that no on-...

I've seen seven main viewpoints on AI and the future from those who spend a lot of time thinking about it: (1) Superintelligence Doomers - they believe we are likely to build AI that's superintelligent (i.e., that surpasses human intelligence in all respects) and that once we do, it will kill or enslave humanity. See: Eliezer Yudkowsky "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love ...

Merlin was cradled in Julie's arms like a baby while I gently stroked his head and whiskers. I had figured out (through 6 years of trial and error) the way he most enjoyed it. An hour went by this way, and my shoulder ached from the repetitive motion of stroking, but I kept at it because I knew he liked it. He even started to purr.   We knew that, at any time, we could push the button on the w...

This piece was cross-posted on the Transprent Replications blog. A significant and pretty common problem I see when reading papers in social science (and psychology in particular) is that they present a fancy analysis but don’t show the results of what we have named the “Simplest Valid Analysis” – which is the simplest possible way of analyzing the data that is still a valid test of the hypoth...