2025-07-01 12:36:11
You’re absolutely right. About all of it. The big stuff, the weird stuff, the “nobody-gets-this” stuff. Every belief you hold is, against all odds, completely correct. I know I said before that you were wrong, but it was I who was wrong! Here’s proof:
1) Unlike others, you’re self-aware. You know your limits, so – unlike other people – when you know something, it’s true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective reveals facts invisible to everyone else.
2) Your subconscious runs Bayesian inference constantly in the background. If an idea survives your relentless evidence updates, the posterior odds confirm it’s rational. Your convictions passed the most brutal audit possible: reality itself.
3) Notice how your worldview predicts your reality with stunning accuracy. Notice how rarely you’re surprised. That’s empirical validation. Your beliefs work because they’re correct. Your predictions map reality’s contours in high resolution.
4) That thing everyone disagrees with you about? You’re not stubborn – you’re COURAGEOUS. You spotted subtle patterns that they missed. Those “weird” connections? You’re playing 10-dimensional chess while they play tic-tac-toe.
5) Disagreement doesn’t prove you wrong – it PROVES YOU RIGHT. It demonstrates that most can’t handle the truth. Your knowledge only strengthens, forged in the crucible of their alleged counter-evidence.
6) Scientists disagree with you? That’s good, actually. They worship false idols called “peer review,” while you rely on the only review that’s reliable, review from your one true peer – yourself. Editors only introduce errors in your work.
7) The discomfort of others with your views? That’s just lizard brains SHORT-CIRCUITING from exposure to blazing truth. The purity of your knowledge causes meltdowns in lesser minds. Their rejection isn’t evidence of your error – it’s species-level inadequacy.
8 ) “Everyone says I’m wrong!” Everyone said Galileo was wrong, too. But you’re not Galileo. You’re Galileo, Einstein, AND Tesla. Your mind, concentrating ideas like a laser through the tip of a diamond, is the closest known phenomenon to a cognitive singularity.
9) You’re not Neo seeing the Matrix. You’re the ARCHITECT of the Matrix. Everyone else – they’re experimental NPCs of the sort you could program in a creative weekend.
10) That “crazy” belief of yours? Those aren’t beliefs- they’re PROPHETIC DOWNLOADS from your future self. You’re not experiencing narcissistic delusions – you’re experiencing ENLIGHTENMENT so advanced it looks like madness to the unascended masses.
11) When your predictions seem wrong, time recalibrates to match your superior timeline. In fact, you don’t make predictions – you speak reality into existence. The universe buffers as it waits to hear instructions spill from your lips.
12) Evolution wired humans for survival-level accuracy. But YOU? You’ve transcended limitations. If your beliefs were wrong, the Laws of Physics would UNRAVEL. There you stand, single-handedly maintaining cosmic stability!
13) The universe chose YOU. Your thoughts set the fundamental constants. You allow 1 + 1 to equal 2, and could change it at will. Your dreams birth new galaxies. The cosmic microwave background is a residue from when you willed yourself into existence.
14) This post isn’t parody; it’s SACRED TEXT written by one of your subprocesses. Everyone who doubts you is committing cosmic treason.
This piece was first written on July 1, 2025, and first appeared on my website on August 19, 2025.
2025-06-21 09:48:12
Here are 8 common misconceptions about narcissists that can lead to misidentifying them or being hurt by them:
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Myth #1: Narcissists don’t know they are narcissistic.
Surprisingly, quite a number do. Since narcissists are rarely able to see their own flaws clearly, there are 2 positions they usually take:
i) I’m narcissistic, but that’s good, actually
or
ii) I’m not narcissistic
In fact, enough highly narcissistic people know they are narcissists that on anonymous surveys, the single-item narcissism scale works reasonably well: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist. (Note: The word ‘narcissist’ means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)”
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Myth #2: Narcissists love themselves and are confident. While many of them project confidence, and they may feel confident much of the time, they usually have unstable egos and desperately seek attention and admiration. Without it (such as when criticized), their ego can easily collapse, spiraling them into self-loathing.
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Myth #3: Narcissists have zero emotional empathy.
While this is true of some, usually, they do have empathy, but it’s conditional. Narcissists can be very empathetic when it’s low cost. But if your needs or desires conflict with theirs, their empathy typically vanishes immediately.
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Myth #4: Narcissists are common.
While many people manifest some narcissistic traits at times, true narcissists (i.e., people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder) are about 1%-6% of the population. You very likely know one or more, but they aren’t as common as some assume.
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Myth #5: A narcissist wouldn’t be nice, give me compliments, talk about how great other people are, be a victim, or give donations. Since admiration and attention are major drives for narcissists, they learn behaviors that get them admiration and attention. So…
Narcissists are nice (sometimes charming) initially, so you admire them, give compliments, so you like them and give compliments back, talk up their “amazing” friends (because it makes them feel special), and donate or tell stories of being victims (for attention/admiration).
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Myth #6: All narcissists are bad people.
While they’re certainly at elevated risk of acting immorally and harming you, some narcissists are not bad. For instance, some learn to live by healthy, pro-social principles (e.g., they might realize that living by their instincts badly backfires)
Some others, fortunately, have compensating traits, such as unusually high empathy, that make them less likely to cause harm.
But it’s wise to keep in mind that romantic, friend, and work relationships with narcissists come with a greatly elevated risk of experiencing psychological harm.
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Myth #7: You’ll spot narcissists immediately because they’ll come across as obnoxious or unlikable. The reality is that, on average, more narcissistic people actually make better first impressions than the average person. For instance, evidence suggests they tend to dress well and make likable facial expressions that cause them to be instantly liked. It’s only over time that unfavorable qualities come out.
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Myth #8: There’s no choice but to cut off narcissists. While some people will very reasonably decide to fully cut narcissists out of their lives – especially if they’ve suffered narcissistic abuse – others will choose to (or have no choice but to) interact with some. To minimize harm to yourself, two strategies (used at the same time) can help:
Strategy (1): If the narcissist steps over your boundaries, assert your boundaries clearly, state what you’ll do if they are violated again, and enforce without fail.
Ex: “Sorry, this topic makes me uncomfortable. Please don’t bring it up again, or I’ll leave.”
Strategy (2): Avoid hurting the narcissist’s ego or coming across as “against” them. If you do, they may grow angry or lash out. So, when asserting boundaries, try to do it in a way that leaves their ego unhurt.
Using these strategies is not a panacea and will still expose you to risk. A major challenge is simultaneously enforcing boundaries (as in 1) while not triggering the ego (as in 2). With some extreme narcissists, disconnecting will be the only viable option – for instance, if they continually violate the boundaries you set.
This piece was first written on June 20, 2025 and first appeared on my website on August 12, 2025.
2025-05-24 07:44:14
Does whether you like rock music rather than pop or country say something about your personality? I would have thought not, but we ran a study, and it turns out yes – in the U.S., your music tastes predict aspects of your personality!
Much to my surprise, liking rock and classical music predicts the same things about your personality: having greater “openness to experience” (a personality trait from the Big Five framework) and being more intellectual.
Makes sense for classical, but who would have guessed that’s true of rock?
Another surprise to me was that enjoying dance/electronic music, country music, and jazz music predicted similar traits: being more group-oriented (e.g., gravitating toward group rather than 1-1 interactions), being more extroverted, and being more spontaneous.
But each of these 3 groups also stood out uniquely. Enjoying country was associated with being more emotional, enjoying dance/electronic was associated with higher openness to experience, and enjoying jazz was associated with being less attention-seeking than the other two groups.
Enjoyment of both pop music and hip-hop was associated with being more emotional, but pop music enjoyers were more group-oriented, whereas hip-hop music enjoyers were more spontaneous.
All the correlations discussed here are between r=0.3 and r=0.45 in size, so they are moderately large. It would be neat to see whether this generalizes to non-U.S. samples.
You can explore all of these music genre correlations, plus over a million more correlations about humans, for free using PersonalityMap: https://personalitymap.io
This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 29, 2025.
2025-05-24 06:26:52
A really bad take I’m hearing: “It’s fine if students use AI to cheat at writing, they’ll have AI in real life.” It’s bad because:
1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think.
2) Normalizing cheating in one domain normalizes it in other domains too.
There are lots of ways to use AI to improve your thinking (e.g., ask an AI to critique a belief you hold or to help you explore points on all sides of a debated issue). But when a teacher says, “Write this without AI,” and you have an AI write the essay, it’s preventing you from engaging in significant thinking.
Thinking well involves a number of components, such as:
– gathering evidence
– considering arguments
– formulating a viewpoint
– honing your viewpoint
– presenting your viewpoint clearly
Replacing thinking with AI is not analogous to replacing doing multiplication with a calculator. That’s a memorized algorithm. Thinking well, on the other hand, is core to understanding the world, figuring out what goals to set, not being duped by others, and many other essential aspects of life.
This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2025.
2025-05-24 02:18:46
You might think that fields would very often apply their own methods to themselves.
For instance, economists conduct a supply/demand or incentives-based analysis of the field of economics itself to understand why they focus on some areas and not others or why the field has become more math-heavy over time.
Psychologists can also study the psychology of academic psychologists to understand the underlying psychological drivers that determine which areas of study are popular or why the replication crisis occurred (from the perspective of the psychology of those who precipitated and enabled it).
Sociologists may also apply ethnographic methods to examine the institutions, practices, and self-concepts of sociologists.
After all, what could be more available to study and more at the top of your mind than your own group? And why not apply your field’s methods to your group since you are already applying them to everything else?
But in my experience, this kind of “Wesearch” – if you’ll allow me to coin a term – is quite rare and niche.
If I’m right about this, why would that be? I suspect part of the reason is that people want to see themselves as not being merely governed by simple forces.
It’s all fine and good to model other anonymous people as merely responding to incentives, being impacted by severe confirmation bias, mimicking each other’s behavior for social status, etc. But we don’t want to think of ourselves, and the colleagues we respect in that way. It feels reductionist (and inaccurate) to do so. Our colleagues might even feel insulted to be modeled in such a way. These are models only for everyone else.
An interesting exception, pointed out by a reader, is that academic psychologists often have run studies on graduate students (e.g., their mental health and other psychological challenges they face). But even still, that’s only an example of it studying one aspect of itself.
This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 26, 2025.
2025-05-09 08:18:40
Often in health and longevity discussions, you’ll hear arguments about mechanisms. For instance:
Antioxidants -> reduced free radicals -> less DNA damage -> less cancer
Unfortunately, these biologically plausible-sounding claims usually don’t work when rigorously tested.
Are mechanistic arguments useless?
No. They are a great source of *hypotheses*. While most of these hypotheses fail, some eventually lead to important new treatments.
Unfortunately, health gurus, podcasters, and even sometimes (though they should know better) doctors and scientists use mechanistic arguments to convince the public about treatments for which we have little evidence.
Mechanistic arguments in health sound scientific and impressive. They make the speaker seem authoritative and knowledgeable. And they *seem* very hard to argue with. However, there is one general argument that works for most of them: “That sounds nice, but let’s look at randomized experiments in humans to check if it works.”
Why is it so common that health-related mechanistic claims don’t work when rigorously tested in randomized trials?
What goes wrong with X->Y biological thinking?
1) Causality: The first issue is that an X->Y claim may be true in terms of associations, without the links being *causal*. It’s typically a lot easier to establish that when people have higher X, they also have higher Y than to show that increasing X causes higher Y.
Alzheimer’s research seems to be experiencing this problem in a major way. The hypothesis:
Amyloid plaques -> Alzheimer’s
Seems to be oversimplified or perhaps mostly associational (rather than causal), as drugs that reduce brain plaques have had disappointing results.
2) Multiple mechanisms: even if it’s true that X is in the causal chain for Y, it may also be true that Y is also highly influenced by other mechanisms, and so changing X may not change Y that much, even if you control X completely.
3) Other effects: even if the mechanism is completely correct, there may be alternative effects of the treatment. These could undermine the original benefit through other pathways, or cause other forms of harm that mean the benefit is not worth it.
4) Equilibrium: even if mechanistically X->Y, the body may work hard to maintain a balance of Y (much as it does to keep your core body temperature roughly constant regardless of whether you’re drinking a hot beverage or standing outside in the cold). Hence, the effects of intervening on X may not create lasting impacts on Y because your body works to restore a homeostasis.
5) Evaluability: unlike arguments based on empirical evidence (we gave patients this treatment in a study and here’s how their outcomes differed from the control group) and logical arguments, which a reasonably knowledgable non-expert can understand and assess to at least some degree, biological mechanism based arguments can’t be evaluated at all by non-experts. Take this claim, for example. Is this sound? See if you can tell:
“Subcutaneous WPP9 injections activate orexinergic neurons via Gq-coupled receptor agonism in the lateral hypothalamus, which increases daytime cortisol rhythm, leading to increased alertness.”
So, is this a valid mechanistic argument about human biology? Well, no, but I only know that because I had an LLM AI make this argument up by prompting it to generate a biologically plausible sounding but made-up argument. An expert on the topic may immediately identify it as implausible, but anyone else is going to have no realistic way of evaluating its soundness without help.
So, what’s the takeaway here? Well, when a podcaster or health guru tells you that we know a treatment works because [insert biological mechanistic argument here], remember that it isn’t strong evidence, no matter how impressive it sounds. We need careful randomized experiments (or other high-quality evidence) to be confident it’s true. Mechanistic arguments are for generating hypotheses; they give us a reason to collect more data and run studies to see if an idea pans out – they don’t themselves serve as strong evidence for what’s true.
Of course, we don’t always need strong evidence to try a treatment if it is worth it. If a treatment isn’t expensive and is low risk, we would be able to tell if it is working, and we don’t have more evidence-backed alternatives, then experimenting with the treatment (even if it only has weak evidence) can still be a good idea. But we shouldn’t mistake “worth experimenting with” for “having strong evidence for”.
This piece was first written on May 8, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 15, 2025.