Psychology

Why the Problem of the Criterion Matters

I think the problem of the criterion is really, really important. So important that I’m willing to risk annoying people by bringing it up all the time. I think it matters because a failure to grok it is at the heart of why we fail to notice we’re confused and…

You are Dissociating (probably)

You are probably dissociating all the time and don’t realize it. Let’s look at just what I mean by this bold claim.

Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional, and although I’m talking about “dissociation” here I definitely don’t mean to give…

A Model of Ontological Development

In this post I present a model of human psychological development based on increases in the structural complexity of ontology. Or more simply, it’s a model about how human minds grow in terms of how complex their models of the world are. It breaks down development into…

Let Your Mind Be Not Fixed

When I was a teenager, I knew my mind was not like adults.

Normalization of Deviance

An important, ongoing part of the rationalist project is to build richer mental models for understanding the world. To that end I’d like to briefly share part of my model of the world that seems to be outside the rationalist cannon in an explicit way, but which I think is known well…

Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis Revisited

Exactly two years to the day I started writing this post I published Map and Territory’s most…

Scope Insensitivity Judo

It’s easy to bemoan scope insensitivity, a special case of that phenomenon where we mere humans end up caring more…

Akrasia is confusion about what you want

Many people I know might describe this as a case of akrasia…

Cognitive Empathy and Emotional Labor

The concept of emotional labor has been popularized in the last couple years as a way of…

Recognizing vs Generating: An Important Dichotomy for Life

Today we’re going to be talking about a useful dichotomy that I think gets overlooked quite often. It’s the distinction between Recognizing and Generating. The words by themselves don’t explain too much, so here are some…