On trying new things (plus a list of many possible new things to try):I think it's wise to try things that are substantially new to you nearly every time you have the chance, so long as: The new thing seems likely to be beneficial or enjoyable OR is different enough from things you've done in the past that you don't think you can accurately predict how you'll react to it Trying the new thin...

I’m not a designer or UI/UX person by trade, but I have to think a lot about interfaces and design in my work. Here are the 39 things I’ve learned over the years (including illustrative examples) about how to create nice looking interfaces and an effective user experience. (In my own designs I still have plenty of room for improvement along many of these dimensions.) Keep in mind that even if you...

Mostly people stay the way they are, or change slowly. So what are the reasons that individual human behavior sometimes quickly shifts in a positive direction? Here's my current "theory of change" list. It seems to me that developing a better understanding of behavior change is incredibly important for creating a better world. Some of these categories are, of course, overlapping. OPERANT CONDITIO...

A really important difference I've noticed between people is how their "psychological immune systems" work. In other words: people differ substantially in the collection of strategies that their brains use when bad things happen to prevent themselves from becoming too unhappy or too dysfunctional for too long. This seems like an important part of understanding why some people are happier than othe...

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following: (1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction). (2) massively multiplayer real-tim...

Tips for guessing what distribution a variable (or set of values) might have People often assume that the frequency with which a variable will take on different values (i.e., probability distribution) is likely to follow a bell curve (i.e., a normal distribution); this is often a mistake. Instead, consider these rules of thumb for deciding which probability distribution to use as a model in di...

People often want to know the extent to which a trait is genetic versus environmentally determined (e.g., "nature" versus "nurture"). This distinction is not nearly as clear cut as is usually assumed. Let's consider the obvious example of height in a population, a trait that's well known to be purely hereditary. Many causes of a population's height distribution are not hereditary. For example,...

The Poison-Cactus-Vampire-Ward Problem, an ethics and "fairness" thought experiment I wrote for you in which your moral intuitions are represented as a number between 0 and 100: Suppose there are two villages, "Parvitas" and "Amplus," which are a 5-minute walk apart. Once per month, when the full moon is out, all men, women, children, and wizards of the two villages must meet to conduct the va...

Becoming a great public speaker is hard! To make it easier, here is a list of tricks for giving better talks or lectures, organized by when to use each trick. CREATING YOUR CONTENT Brainstorm Before doing a ton of external research while developing your talk, first get down the parts of the talk that you can pull directly from your mind and memory to give yourself a much faster star...

Opposing parties in debates over commonly-raised questions often fail to focus their arguments on the same concept. These "ambiguous questions" are usually those that are fundamentally unresolvable until one disambiguation of the question is agreed upon. Until that disambiguation is reached, the debate often swirls in circles as different parties effectively argue about distinct topics, seemingly...