Importance Hacking: a major (yet rarely-discussed) problem in science

December 19, 2022

I first published this post on the Clearer Thinking blog on December 19, 2022, and first cross-posted it to this site on January 21, 2023. You have probably heard the phrase "replication crisis." It refers to the grim fact that, in a number of fields of science, when researchers attempt to replicate previously published studies, they fairly often don't get the same results. The magnitude of the problem depends on the field, but in psychology, it seems that something like 40% of studies i...

Misjudging Repeated Risk

July 17, 2017

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't necessarily give this difference between doing something one time and doing something T times app...

Which Risks of Dying Are Worth Taking?

October 16, 2013

First, click here to figure out your chance of dying tomorrow. Is it worth taking a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying , in order to experience the novel thrill of sky diving? Is a 1 in 500,000 chance of death worth it to go bungee jumping? It's hard to know whether these risks are reasonable, because numbers like 100,000 or 500,000 feel so abstract to us. To think more clearly about these numbers, it helps to get our intuitions engaged. We can start by figuring out the daily risk of dying that...