Why “nature plus nurture” is sometimes the wrong way to think

April 28, 2021

People who sit here and then chat with someone might get happier…but whether they sit here in the first place probably also depends on their personality and their baseline mood. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash.

It's common to try to explain things as either due to nature OR nurture. Or, at best, we say: some percentage of the variation in outcome is due to genes, and some percentage is due to the environment. It's important to remember, though, that outcomes can be a complex interaction between the two. Consider this: Our genetically-influenced traits impact what environments we seek out and find ourselves in. For instance, risk-taking seems to have moderate heritability, and it in...

The many possible causes of large, positive changes in the world

February 24, 2018

I’ve noticed that people start with different assumptions about what usually causes large, positive changes in the world. It is rare for us to directly address these differences in worldview, even though they may contribute to difficulties seeing eye-to-eye on how we can make things better. For instance, I think some people believe that large, positive change usually comes about due to one or more of the following: (1) Progress - technological and scientific advancement causing a ris...

A simple way to estimate confidence intervals that most people don’t know about that can also be used to estimate sample sizes or as an alternative to power calculations

April 25, 2017

Whenever you are looking at an average of something, it's useful to ask yourself, "plus or minus what?" Averages nearly always have uncertainty associated with them because they are calculated based on a sample of a larger population. For instance, if you want to know how happy people in the U.S. are, on average, you could try to figure it out by asking them, "On a scale from 0 to 100, how happy are you?" But of course, you can't pose that question to everyone in the U.S., so instead, ...