Self Improvement

Akrasia is confusion about what you want

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

Suffering and Intractable Pain

I’ve been writing a lot about AI alignment lately, so let’s take a break from that to talk about a lighter subject: suffering.

Suppose you contract the rare and as yet untreatable disease boneitis. The doctors estimate you have one year to live. In…

Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis

Ancient Greek famously made a distinction between 3 kinds of knowledge: doxa, episteme, and gnosis.

Doxa is basically what in English we might call hearsay. It’s the stuff you know because someone told you about it. If you know the Earth is round because…

The Personal Growth Cycle

We encounter psychology in our lives mainly through dysfunction. That is, people generally go to see psychologists…

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…

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…

Why giving humans bug reports is easier than giving feature suggestions

I spent this past weekend at a case study competition called UW Apprentice, which was unique among events I’ve attended in two ways. One is that the cases were fresh from real startups that came in and…

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…