I've noticed that a significant amount of friction is created among friends and in romantic relationships due to inaccurate models of how the human mind works, and due to unrealistic expectations of the brain. Usually, these involve assuming that someone did something that you don't like on purpose when it would be more accurate to say they did the thing automatically (and they may need signi...

The correlation coefficient as a gateway to radical skepticism:Suppose you calculate that two variables are moderately correlated. For instance, you find that self-reported happiness has a correlation r=0.32 with self-reported willpower, as I found in one of my studies. What are the possible explanations for (or causes of) this? A Causes B - Increasing A is a cause of increasing B but not...

If you were redesigning high school education from scratch, what material would you include in the curriculum (assuming it's a well funded high school), that is generally not taught in high schools today? Some classes that I might want to include are: Thrive: staying happy and healthy. This could include:  Cognitive-behavioral therapy skills training (to help ward off depres...

A lot of people don't realize that there are general purpose problem solving techniques that cut across domains. They can help you deal with thorny challenges in work, your personal life, startups, or even if you're trying to prove a new theorem in math. Below are the 26 general purpose problem solving techniques that I like best, along with a one-word name I picked for each, and hypothetical ...

I created simple statistical model (on a sample of people in the U.S.) to help predict how depressed someone is, based on 91 variables about them. I was attempting to predict the severity of the depression by their PHQ9 score, a simple subjective scale that averages scores on 9 common symptoms of depression. For instance, it asks how often you have experienced feeling "down, depressed, or hopeles...

Here's an approach for how to use Facebook (and other social media sites) in a way that makes your life better: Start clicking and liking based on what you'd like to see in the future, rather than based on what you feel like clicking on right now. As you know, Facebook (and similar sites) monitor all your clicks and likes to determine what to show you. You can reduce the amount of clickbait...

Although self-help techniques, when tried in isolation, usually fail, I occasionally hear about an extreme intervention that had a permanent and exceptionally positive effect on the person who tried it. One notable feature of extreme improvements, as opposed to medium-sized ones, is that they probably won't just happen to you by chance. Medium-sized improvements can occur randomly, so it's har...

Naively, one might assume that people do what it benefits them to do. In fact, that's an assumption commonly made in economics. Yet it's clear that our behavior is not always in our own self-interest. People frequently buy fake supplements, try drugs they know are highly addictive, eat things they know they'll later regret, drive away the people they love most, procrastinate on really important t...

Nearly all large events use a combination of only these four simple formats for human interaction: lectures, group discussions, panels, and mixers. Yet there are more than 45 structured ways that groups of people who don't know each other can come together to interact, bond, learn, and help each other (see my full list at the bottom of this article, or click here for a spreadsheet version). Unfort...