Here's my list of 23 high-impact ideas (for work, fun, health, etc.) that I've internalized over time: Health If you don't like exercise, instead of forcing or avoiding it, find ways to make it fun so that you actually want to do it (e.g., find a different type , such as a sport that engages you, or allow yourself to watch your favorite TV show or listen to your favorite podcast only while...

Here's my favorite philosophy of mind thought experiment that challenges pur view of personal identity or "self". It takes a while to explain but is quite a mind fuck, so bear with me. THE SETUP It feels, to nearly everyone, on a gut level, that I am 'me' and you are 'you', and consciousnesses are distinct from each other and easy to separate. Moreover, the vast majority of people acc...

It's not often discussed, but I believe that pre-cursors to commonly-diagnosed mental disorders often come with some benefits (as well as "flip side" costs that are linked to those benefits). As these traits become more extreme in nature (e.g., sufficiently far in the direction of what would be considered a diagnosable clinical disorder), these "flip side" costs (as well as other costs not associ...

I've been trying to better understand and resolve two seemingly contradictory (yet I think critically important) facts about human nature: (1) Human groups have pretty much always done unspeakably horrible things to other groups (e.g., think mass murder and numerous forms of oppression). And fairly often, while it is happening, this evil seems to be condoned, supported, or only passively oppos...

What does the formula for happiness look like? Here's my attempt at it: happiness =    social-acceptance+ self-acceptance+ meaning+ hope+ pleasure+ efficacy+ resilience+ optimism - physical-wants- pain- anxiety- loss and depression   Positives social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level fe...

I often have heard it said that if people buy the product a company is selling, then the company must be creating value in the world. After all, why would someone buy a product if that product were not creating value?  It would be nice if this were a valid argument (since then more units sold = more societal benefit). Unfortunately, it's not valid. To help put the argument to rest, her...

Unfortunately, we humans get used to problems quickly. Too often, when we get used to problems, we stop reflecting on them. When we stop reflecting on them, we stop trying to fix them. Two examples: At first, if one of the burners on your stove stops working (as I personally experienced), you notice it and are annoyed by it. Soon, you find that you've stopped trying to use that burner. Y...

Some thoughts on how we may massively misjudge the weightiness of decisions that involve doing a risky thing many times: There's a huge difference between riding on the back of a motorcycle once, and buying a motorcycle to ride every weekend, or between buying a cookie and buying a box of 25 cookies, or between taking a boxing lesson once and sparring regularly. Unfortunately, our minds don...

Some tough questions for you about utopia (along with my very tentative and very likely wrong guesses for answers): If you were attempting to design a true utopia for ten million people on an obscure island deep out in the ocean, and you had total control over institutions and unlimited money, but you could NOT change human nature or human psychology then:(a) what would you hope people would ...

Some thoughts on the, potentially very large, value of ideas that are both obvious and obscure, and why I like to try to state the "unsaid obvious": The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn't begin to scratch the surface. As a simple example, let's consider the number of two-player c...