It's easy to underestimate how remarkably different our psychological experiences can be. "Psychological outliers" may be much more common than you think because there are so many ways a person can be an outlier. If you are a psychological outlier in some way, you may assume others are more similar than they really are (much the way that synesthetes, who experience a combination of different sens...

You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I...

There is a surprising lack of consensus on how to do statistics, especially as applies to science. As the tool that underpins the scientific enterprise, you'd think we would have figured it out by now. You'd be wrong. The mathematical proofs are, of course, very rarely disputed. The use of mathematics is much more often disputed. Why do these disputes arise? I've observed five different typ...

Nearly all controversial issues (i.e., nuclear power, marijuana legalization, and minimum wage increases) have both benefits and drawbacks. Yet our brains resist seeing issues that way. It’s easy for us to believe that our side is fully right, and therefore that the other side is completely wrong. That’s typically what both our own side and the other is convinced of, and usually, we’re all mis...

What do people want more than anything else in the world? I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote u...

Possible solutions to a harmful situation you are in can usually be categorized into just four types. You can: Exit, Alter, React, or Reframe. To elaborate, if a situation is causing you harm, you can: (1) EXIT the situation so that it can’t harm you anymore. For instance, if you’re in a burning building, you can try to leave the building. (2) ALTER the nature or characteristics of t...

Personal freedom (often part of liberal and libertarian perspectives): (1) People seem better at understanding what is good for them, as individuals, than regulators are at figuring out what those same people need, so I think personal freedom to do what you like should be the default position unless there is a good reason to deviate from it. (2) I think it makes our society better, on avera...

100/0 rule - you should be 100% certain 0% of the time. 80/20 rule - 80% of output is caused by 20% of effort (not literally true, but true in spirit most of the time). 77/23 rule - the poorest 77% of the world’s population accounts for approximately 23% of the world’s income (GDP figures 2010) [1] 75/25 rule - not more than 25 percent of the total unlicensed seaman on board a documented...

Here's my list common differences between people that are so large that those at the extreme opposite ends of the trait (say, the 5th percentile vs. 95th percentile) have a very hard time understanding and relating to each other. What would you add to the list, and what am I getting wrong? Note: each of these examples is supposed to illustrate a somewhat extreme form of each trait for clarity ...

Part 1: LEARNING HACKS 1. Crowdsource improvements to ideas: when you come up with a new idea or are mulling over a complex idea and still find yourself uncertain or confused about it, post to Facebook explaining the idea, and explain that you're curious to hear what other people think about it, or whether they agree or disagree and why, or what their own theories about it are. Crowdso...