Intersecting advice from highly successful people

January 26, 2021

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash

It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...

The Four States of Distress: how should you comfort a friend or loved one in need?

June 1, 2020

(co-authored with Kat Woods) When a friend or loved one has something bad happen to them, what should you do to help them feel better? This question can be difficult to answer because it seems that at different times people want different things: empathy, problem-solving, optimism, distraction, and so on. See for instance this study where people give divergent answers about what they want from a friend after something bad happens. We propose that there are four general states that a perso...

Coming to Terms with Mortality

September 27, 2017

Here is a list of ideas that helped me have less fear of my own mortality. I hope that you find some of them useful if you're afraid of dying.You've been dead before: you already know what it's like to be dead (i.e., it feels like nothing, it's a total lack of any experiences). You were dead from the moment of the Big Bang (assuming that's when time started) until some time after your conception. If any of the human religions turn out to be correct, then you may even have a chance of continuing...

Accepting Your Error Rate

June 4, 2012

No matter how intelligent, rational, or knowledgeable you may be, you are going to be wrong pretty regularly. And you'll be wrong far more often than pretty regularly when dealing with complex topics like politics, people or philosophy. Even if you've freed yourself from thinking in terms of true and false dichotomies, and made the effort to convert your beliefs to probabilities or degrees of belief, you'll still be wrong by way of assigning high probabilities to false propositions. Most pe...

Still Living with the Emotions of our Ancestors

July 27, 2011

According to evolutionary theory, emotions evolved because they were helpful for survival. Anxiety alerts us to potential danger and makes us wary. Anger motivates us to fight and shows our allies that we need help. Jealousy motivates us to keep our mates to ourselves to help maximize the number of our offspring that survive to child-bearing age. But the environment we live in today is obviously very different from the environment of our distant ancestors for whom these emotions were optimized. ...