The Question Looping Process: how to build great products by asking the right questions

November 23, 2019

If you want to build a great product, project, or service, then the "Meta Question" - "What don't I know that I must know?" - should be your obsession. The answer to the Meta Question is itself a question (the "Product Question"). The Product Question might be: "Why do our best users return to our product again and again?" And to answer this question, you ask the Tool Question ("What tools in the tool belt will most effectively and efficiently answer this Product Question?"). These three questi...

Anonymized Responses to Taboo Questions – A Social Experiment

February 14, 2018

If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, "Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions," which allows attendees to see each other's (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn. I've included the details of the event format below, including materials you can use to throw your own version of it. Important Note: this event fo...

What People Want Most

January 14, 2018

What do people want more than anything else in the world? I explored this question by running two little studies across two different populations: mechanical turk (“mturk,” n=49, all U.S.) vs. my Facebook friends (“FB,” n=111, who tend to be in the U.S.) with different approaches, me hand categorizing written responses vs. participants selecting the category that best matches what they wrote using 24 categories in random order developed from the first study, including an “other” option. A...

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....

What is the REAL effect of circumcising men?

January 27, 2014

Those who grow up in the U.S. are often surprised to find out that in many European countries almost no men are circumcised. In the U.S., where the majority of men have had the procedure performed on them, it is pretty common to hear people say that foreskin is unclean, ugly, or even unhealthy. On the other hand, Europeans tend to find the idea of circumcision bizarre. "Why would you cut off a healthy part of your body?", they wonder. And "How would you feel about a culture that cut off their ch...

How Journalism Distorts Reality

April 7, 2012

Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading their articles than before you began. What causes journalistic distortion? 1. Equal time to eac...