Three hypotheses to consider when a medical issue can’t be diagnosed

September 27, 2024

As you may have experienced yourself, sometimes, when people are chronically ill and go to lots of doctors, the doctors conclude that there is nothing medically wrong. I think it's important in these cases not to jump to a conclusion too quickly about why it has remained undiagnosed and to take seriously *all three* of these possibilities: 1) Diagnosis Error: It's a non-standard presentation of a known disease or a rare (or frequently missed or misunderstood) disease, making it hard to g...

How heritable are human traits like personality, height, mental health, physical health, education, religiosity, and conservatism? (h^2 estimates)

June 12, 2024

Here's my attempt to compile the heritabilities (in the narrow sense of h^2) for many different interesting human traits. Before you read this, however, I recommend you read our piece on the Missing Heritability Problem which provides important context for interpreting this information. We'll first look at estimated heritabilities from five categories: body, mental health, physical health, cognitive/mind-related traits, and personality (including the Big Five personality traits). ...

Valuism and X: how Valuism sheds light on other domains – Part 5 of the sequence on Valuism

July 19, 2023

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2 This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts. In previous posts, I've described Valuism - my life philosophy. I've also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry. Valuism and ...

How can you help friends or family members who are struggling with a mental health challenge?

January 8, 2023

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 say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is ...

How do we predict high levels of success?

September 12, 2021

Below, I outline 13 approaches to predicting high levels of success with differing levels of complexity, including my own mega model at the bottom. Note: here, I use the term "success" merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want "success" in the sense in...

What Are All the Things That Humans Need?

July 28, 2021

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow! I'm defining a "need" here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can't just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people. You might say that you "need an iced tea" on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, s...

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...

On How to Process Your Emotions

December 20, 2020

We’ve all heard that you should take time to “process your emotions” and not “repress them.” But after a bad event occurs, what exactly does it MEAN to process your emotions? I think that, ideally, it involves a mix of these components: (1) Noticing: paying close attention to your negative thoughts instead of pushing them away or trying to ignore the bad feelings. What are the EXACT words running through your mind? How does it feel right now to be you? What do your body and mind feel li...

Dealing with damage before it wrecks you

July 5, 2020

Written: July 5, 2020 | Released: August 6, 2020 Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It's critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what's broken. A car will accumulate damage over time, but even if you don't take good care of it, you can get a new one even...

A Formula for Happiness

July 23, 2017

What does the formula for happiness look like? Here's my attempt at it: happiness = social-acceptance+ self-acceptance+ meaning+ hope+ pleasure+ efficacy+ resilience+ optimism - physical-wants- pain- anxiety- loss and depression Positives social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level feeling that this group accepts you, likes you, and respects you Interventions: exposure therapy if yo...