A lot of times, when people are upset, they want their friends and loved ones to "validate their feelings." I think there is a lot of confusion about what it really means to "validate feelings," and I also believe there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of doing this validation.  Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation  I would say that the main difference between the health...

I have a few rules that I aim to use when I run studies. By considering what it looks like when these rules are inverted, they also may help guide you in thinking about which studies are not reliable. (1) Don't use a net with big holes to catch a small fish That means you should use a large enough sample size (e.g., number of study participants) to reliably detect whatever effects you'r...

Did you know that fairly often, there will be multiple extremely different stories you can tell about identical data, none of which are false? In other words, the mapping from statistical results to true stories about those results is not unique. This leads to a lot of confusion, and it also implies that claims about "the reason" behind a complex social phenomenon should be interpreted with ca...

A major mistake scientists sometimes make in public communication: they state things science isn't sure about as confidently as things it is sure about.   This confuses the public and undermines trust in science and scientists.   Some interesting examples:   1) As COVID-19 spread early in the pandemic, epidemiologists confidently stated many true things about it that were scientifically measured (...

I've come to think that you can somewhat reduce your chance of chronic injury (and improve chronic pain you already have) by learning to notice and pay close attention to pain right at the moments when it crops up. By doing so, you can learn to immediately adjust how you move to take the pain into account (not avoiding the action, but changing the way you engage in the action). The goal is to ...

Good things often get taken too far. They can take on a life of their own through self-perpetuation, get over-zealously applied, or become hijacked. This often turns good things into mixed things and sometimes even corrupts them into bad things. Here are four interesting examples: (1) Zoning laws in the U.S. helped solve problems (like keeping pollution-spewing factories away ...

Becoming wiser seems like one of the most important things we can aim for. Yet, there's something extremely odd about wisdom: nobody agrees on what it means. Here are six thought-provoking definitions of wisdom that l find it useful to reflect on: 1) Wisdom as self-consistency:  Wisdom is an equilibrium where you find alignment between all combinations of your: • values ...

Even many of the smartest people that have ever lived convinced themselves of false things (just like the rest of us). Here are some fun and wild examples: (1) Linus Pauling won TWO Nobel prizes - one in peace and one in chemistry. Unfortunately, he eventually became obsessed with and widely promoted the false (and sometimes still repeated) idea that high-dose vitamin C cures many disease...

Some people claim that the idea of technology or science being slowed down is ridiculous - that they march forward at their own pace. But this is not always true - there are a number of interesting examples of tech, tech adoption, and science being greatly slowed down: 1) Psychedelics: In 1966, LSD was banned in CA, and in 1968, a U.S. law came out banning psilocybin (the chemical in "magic mu...