Meta-analyses are supposed to combine the evidence on a topic from many studies (e.g., does melatonin help sleep?) to produce an answer. Many people even consider them the gold standard for evidence about scientific questions. Unfortunately, taking a weighted average of many different studies sometimes doesn't work because averaging the studies can be meaningless. Suppose a meta-analysis on...

There's a deep and surprising sense in which money can't be "wasted" from a bird's eye perspective - only resources and people's time can be wasted. If someone "wastes" $100, someone else now has $100 extra to spend. Even burning bills deflates the currency, making other bills more valuable. But people's time genuinely can be wasted. The tragedy of someone spending hundreds of millions of d...

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace  This is the first of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts. Featured image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2 Many of us struggle at times to know what to do. We are surrounded by conflicting advice about how to live our lives - from our parents, peers, and c...

I've noticed that it's quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it's also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations. With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here's a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to ...

Nearly all human traits lie on continuums. Even many multi-trait conditions can be viewed as having distinct traits that each lie at one end of a spectrum. There are a number of cases where we only have a word for one side of a psychological spectrum, and we lack a word for what you'd be like if you inverted all the most common traits of a condition. Here's an attempt to give names to these oppos...

When was the last time you reflected on your life principles? If you haven't reflected on them recently, why not schedule a time to do so? Principles act as shortcuts to help you make choices that you'll be satisfied with, and they serve as beacons to guide you toward a better version of yourself. They also serve as an encapsulation of important lessons you've learned throughout your life. ...

There is a tremendous amount of confusion around what a p-value actually is, despite their widespread use in science. Here is my attempt to explain the concept of p-values concisely and clearly (including why they are useful and what often goes wrong with them). — What's a p-value? — If you run a study, then (all else equal, aside from rare edge cases) the lower the p-value, the lower the c...

People often struggle to find the full-text of scientific papers. Here is a step-by-step guide to finding full PDFs of these articles. Be sure to follow all rules, laws, and regulations in your jurisdiction, and be sure you are aware of potential risks before using any of these methods. Method 1: Search the title at http://scholar.google.com. If a pdf or full-text is available, i...