Psychology has long stank of fake results that don't replicate. But it's not hard to sniff out the bad science with a few simple rules, and that gives reason to hope that the field will improve.
Author: Jacob Falkovich
I tried to be a magazine writer, mathematician, and stand up comedian. Now I just write a blog with math and jokes.
I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler My consciousness encompasses itself in many meta layers
Things I learned from a game theory party: why prisoner's dilemmas are not what they seem, why being smart is often worse than being the dumbest, and the virtues of trolls.
If someone is worse at their job than a drunk person with Google, why do they still have their job?
A photographic journey in Colombia.
Everything I believe in explained by a single chart I don't understand.
Should you pay off debt or invest the money instead? To answer this it's useful to think of debt as the opposite of a risk-free investment, and to put a number on the risk.
The third part of an extensive interview with Dr. Geoffrey Miller covers jealousy, polyamory, marriage, and mating.
The second part of an extensive interview with Dr. Geoffrey Miller covers troublesome research and troublesome ideology in psychology.
The first part of an extensive interview with Dr. Geoffrey Miller covers effective altruism, AI, and rationality.
Monty Hall isn't just a curious probability puzzle. It's a widely applicable demonstration of Bayesian thinking and rationality.
My first essay for Quillette builds on "The Context is Conflict" to explore the clash between decouplers and contextualizers, why everyone is a hypocrite, who's whose outgroup, how tribalism makes smart people less rational, and what the Intellectual Dark Web can learn about overcoming bias.
Some people think that there's always group conflict, some people don't. When the former meets the latter, there's group conflict.
Should we believe what is useful to believe over what it true? I attack this question from various angles: wrong "wrongness", murder-Gandhiism, the Gorilla Channel, and fake glasses.
[Caution: experimental].
Should I keep trying one diet after another or just accept my figure as it is? I let the voices in my head hash it out.
A guest post offering a window into the world of transactional dating.
Should secular liberals try to get in the head of a conservative philosopher of religion? Yes, if it's all in the pursuit of truth.
A review of Galileo's Middle Finger: a flawed book, a fascinating memoir, and an important manual on defense against the Dark Arts.
Antinatalism isn't just bad philosophy, it's partly based on bad economics. I argue that having kids isn't just good for the kids, it makes the whole world better off.
PUTANUMONIT 