In Defense of Kegan

I find Kegan’s model of psychological development extremely useful. Some folks I know disagree on various grounds. These…

Act into Fear and Abandon all Hope

The first time I received truly life-changing advice was when a friend pointed me in the direction of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I was in the middle of getting my graduate degree, struggling to keep up with the demands of school, teaching, friends, and romance…

Debate and Dialectic

Election season is over in the US, but folks are still talking about how divided political conversation is. We hear that…

Narrativemancy 101: Why Paper Beats Rock

The first in (hopefully) a series of posts about using the power of narrative to teach, persuade, inspire, and explain. This entry attempts to provide a model for why narratives are so powerful, relative to personal experience and impersonal evidence.

Crony Beliefs

Credits up front: This essay draws heavily from Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, Slate Star Codex, Robert Kurzban, Robert Trivers, Thomas Schelling, and Jonathan Haidt (among others I’m certainly forgetting). These are some of my all-time favorite sources, so I hope I’m doing them justice here.

The Power of Guilt

“Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.” -Stephen King

Shopping for Happiness

This essay is an edited cross-post from my personal blog, Put A Number On It, in which I aim to change your life using high school math, a bit of rationality and bad puns.

“People who say that money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop.” — One of…

Fluid Decision Making

A lot of folks these days talk about “flow” to mean some kind of mystical state where they experience something like automatic decision making where they get out of their own way and just do. Less mysteriously, other folks use “flow” to describe periods of focused attention. More…

A Foundation for The Multipart Psyche

In a recent post Scott Alexander gives a review of some recent results in neurobiology that suggest a powerful, unifying set of mechanisms for how information is integrated in the brain. I recommend you read his article and the original research if you can, but…

Revealed and Stated Identity

In modern America, many people think of their identity as a thing they own. If I say I’m a Brony, have a…