Predictors of Extreme Success

April 16, 2018

What traits, behaviors, or characteristics of a person are the best predictors of whether they achieve extremely high levels of success in their life? For instance, those who have: created billion-dollar companies with huge influence (e.g., Elon Musk)made multiple revolutionary scientific advances (e.g., Einstein)achieved absurdly high levels of skill at sports (e.g., Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who set the long-standing world record in the seven-event Olympic sport "Heptathlon")reached extraordin...

Testing a Theory Without an Experiment

January 25, 2018

You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I aspire to use this approach significantly more often than I do now. How to Test a Theory Without...

Predicting Depression

May 12, 2017

I created simple statistical model (on a sample of people in the U.S.) to help predict how depressed someone is, based on 91 variables about them. I was attempting to predict the severity of the depression by their PHQ9 score, a simple subjective scale that averages scores on 9 common symptoms of depression. For instance, it asks how often you have experienced feeling "down, depressed, or hopeless" and how often you have experienced feeling "tired or having little energy" in the past two weeks....