2025-08-03 01:30:00
Circling, for anyone who hasn’t tried it, is an unusual kind of “authentic relating” group activity that can help people better understand each other and themselves. Thinking about it got me wondering – what other similar activities can a group do together that can accomplish different results (that might have their own unique strengths and weaknesses)? Here’s my brainstormed list of Circling alternatives.
I’ll start with Circling itself, for those who are not familiar. Note: if you plan to try any of these, be careful and make sure everyone involved knows what rules will be used (in advance) before they agree to participate. For all of these, I’d suggest stating a time limit up front and using a timer to end it at that time (of course, when the timer goes off, the group can decide to do it again if they want).
(1) Circling: a group conversation where the topic of the conversation is limited to what’s happening right now, during the experience itself. As Duncan Sabien explains it: “‘Circling’ is a special kind of conversation, in which the topic of the conversation is the subjective experience of the conversation, as it’s happening., i.e., the thing you are all talking about is what it is like for each of you to be present in the conversation as it unfolds. What you’re noticing, what you’re feeling, the impressions and stories you have of the other people, the shifts in your own physical and emotional state. You take the flurry of second-to-second thoughts, feelings, and reactions that would normally shape and inform what you would say next, and instead just talk about them directly, e.g., “Oh, huh—while I was listening to what you just said, I noticed I felt an impulse to [whatever].”
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(2) Hot Seat Circling: like circling, but the focus of the conversation and attention is one pre-determined person who sits in the middle. (This is a known variant of Circling, not something I came up with.)
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And here are my brainstormed ideas for alternatives:
(3) Clear-ing: everyone sits quietly and clears their mind. Each person tries to notice the very first thought that pops into their mind, and then says it aloud to the group. Then the group resets and does it again (I suggest doing this only for a short amount of time – say, 5 minutes).
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(4) Past-ing: the focus of the conversation must be on the past only. For instance, “Hearing you say that, I’m reminded of a time when…”
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(5) Future-ing: the focus of the conversation must be on the future only. For instance, [in response to what someone else said] “That reminds me that I hope to one day…”
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(6) Echo-ing: the focus of the conversation must be the last thing that was said. You start by repeating (or summarizing what the other person said), and then you react to it (and the next person repeats what you said and reacts to it, and so on).
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(7) Feelings: the only topic of the conversation is the feelings or emotions of attendees. It can be their current feelings, past feelings, or feelings in response to feelings, etc.
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(8) Role-ing: each person in the circle has only one thing they are allowed to do. Every 5 minutes, the roles rotate so that participants get to play different roles:
Role 1: You can only express how you feel or what emotions you’re having.
Role 2: You can only express your cognitive/analytical thoughts about what’s happening right now.
Role 3: You can only ask questions (but people must still stay within their role to try to answer).
Role 4: The only thing you can do is guess what you think others are thinking or feeling.
Role 5: The only thing you can do is ask others to elaborate on what they said.
Role 6: You’re doing normal circling (i.e., you can only talk about what’s happening here and now, but you can talk about any aspect of it that you want).
With smaller or larger groups, you can decide which roles you want and how many of each. You can also have a visual marker in front of each person to indicate what role they are in.
An alternative to Role-ing would be that everyone is in the same role at the same time (e.g., everyone starts in Role 1), and every 5 minutes, everyone switches to the next role.
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(9) Weird-ing: you can only talk about things that normally would not be said, or that normally would be unusual, odd, awkward, or inappropriate to talk about.
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(10) Limit-ing: it starts as a normal conversation. Every 5 minutes, someone suggests a new type of thing you’re not allowed to talk about or a new constraint on conversation (e.g., “you can’t talk about the future” or “everything you say must be at least slightly vulnerable”), then there is a vote. If accepted by a unanimous vote, it gets added to the list of rules (if not, someone else proposes a rule, going around the circle until a rule is accepted by a unanimous vote). If no rule is accepted, then continue for 5 more minutes with no new rule additions. Each time a new rule is added, it gets written on a piece of paper or whiteboard that everyone can see, so it’s clear what all the rules are. Each voting round starts with the person after the one who proposed the last accepted rule.
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(11) Squaring (Sam Rosen’s alternative): “Squaring is also an authentic relating game, but it’s less focused on the here and now. It’s about focusing on and discussing true dynamics that exist between people through time. Some examples of squaring would be:
• Hey, I am surprised we aren’t closer friends. Do you know what’s going on there?
• I notice you plausibly deny flirting with my girlfriend. And it’s not a big deal, and I still love you, but I’d like it if you did it slightly less.
• In our past conversations, I’ve felt you weren’t that curious about what I had to say. Am I imagining this, or am I actually boring you?
• I think you are really insightful, and I don’t think you get enough credit for that, so here’s me giving you credit.
In squaring, you should try to give people your best model of yourself. You should focus on the information you think would be useful to the person you are talking to.”
This piece was first written on August 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on September 29, 2025.
2025-07-09 02:13:00
For years, whenever I’ve encountered a word for a fascinating concept that my computer’s built-in dictionary didn’t recognize, I’ve added it to a collection I keep of “Fascinating Obscure Concepts.” Here’s the first part of my list of these unusual concepts you may never have encountered before:
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LITTLE-KNOWN SELF-IMPROVEMENT CONCEPTS
1) Musterbating: Albert Ellis’ term for rigid, self-imposed ideas that many people hold that “I/you/they absolutely must (or should) do X.” Rather than seeing these as preferences or nice-to-haves, they see them as absolutes, which fuels irrational belief and negative emotions.
2) Hormetic exposure – Exposures that are beneficial precisely because they are mild stresses (e.g., exercise, fasting, hot/cold therapy). By putting the body under stress, in some cases, you can trigger helpful adaptive over-compensation (hormesis).
3) Healthspan – The length of time you spend in good health, free from chronic disease and disability (not merely alive). For some who see themselves as wanting to increase their lifespan, their values might be more accurately captured by aiming to increase their healthspan.
4) Valuism – Okay, this is mine. A personal life philosophy with 2 parts:
(i) figure out what you intrinsically value
(ii) seek to use effective methods to create more of what you intrinsically value.
It’s a framework for living without requiring belief in absolute moral truth.
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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS RELATED TO CRITICAL THINKING
5) Paltering – Misleading an audience by selectively stating only true facts that nonetheless foster a false overall impression. Some of the most effective public manipulators mainly palter instead of lying.
6) Deepity – A term coined by Daniel Dennett (piggybacking off of its usage by an unspecified friend of his teenage daughter) to refer to statements that seem profound by exploiting ambiguity: they have one interpretation by which they are trivially or boringly true and another interpretation by which they are meaningless or false (but where it would seem profound if true). Our brains can accidentally mix these interpretations together, leading to the mistaken impression that the statement is both true and profound (e.g., “Love is just a word.”)
7) Epistemics – The norms, methods, and quality standards governing how beliefs are formed, updated, and justified. If you think that society is bad at figuring out what’s true, you may want people to work on improving their epistemics.
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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS FOR THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD
8 ) M.E.C.E. – A useful principle for structuring information by dividing it into categories that are mutually exclusive (there’s no overlap between categories) and collectively exhaustive (no items are left out; everything has a category).
9) Hyperstition – A term coined by Nick Land for a narrative or idea that becomes true (or shapes reality) precisely because people believe and propagate it. For instance, if people believe a company to be very valuable, that can make it become very valuable, or if people believe a handbag is very popular (even if at that time it isn’t actually), that can make it become very popular.
10) Superstimuli – something that is optimized by human ingenuity to stimulate our naturally evolved reward circuits more than they could be stimulated by things in our natural environment. For instance, junk food is a food superstimulus, or social media is a social superstimulus.
11) Bezel – Galbraith’s term for the illusory wealth created by fraud or embezzlement before it gets discovered. It’s the gap between the perceived and real asset value. The bezel makes the defrauder and defrauded both have a psychological perception of wealth.
12) Gamable – Able to be strategically manipulated or “gamed,” i.e., its rules allow actors to extract advantage without fulfilling the system’s intended purpose. One of the most important aspects of system design in high-stakes situations lacking trust is that systems should be ungamable. Otherwise, the system will be exploited or not achieve its intended purpose.
13) QALY – A quality-adjusted life year (related to healthspan but in the context of improving the lives of others): a way of quantifying the benefit of any intervention designed to help people live longer or improve their health that takes into account both the number of extra years of life produced AND the quality of those years of life. So, 1 QALY is one extra year of life lived in full health.
14) Longtermism – An ethical view that “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.” Sometimes, it’s justified by arguing that the importance of actions may lie in their effects on the far future, given the vast potential number of future lives.
15) Familicide – Murder of one’s family (typically spouse/partner and children), often followed by suicide. Why bother having a word for this upsetting concept at all? Well, bizarrely, it’s statistically the most common form of mass murder (i.e., where three or more people are killed during one event).
16) Superorganism – A coordinated collective (e.g., an ant colony or tightly integrated human society) that functions as a single organism despite being composed of many organisms. Interestingly, even the human body is a superorganism since we’re composed of distinct living organisms.
17) Umwelt – An organism’s perceptual experience of the world or the slice of reality created by a particular creature’s unique sensory and cognitive apparatus. For instance, the Elephantnose Fish apparently gets a 3d sense of its surroundings by creating an electric field – their umwelt must be nearly unimaginably different than our own.
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LITTLE-KNOWN EMOTION-RELATED CONCEPTS
18) Alonely – negative feelings caused by not getting enough time alone (the opposite of loneliness).
19) Ego-syntonic – Experienced as consistent with one’s self-image, values, and goals. For instance, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is usually ego-syntonic, meaning that insofar as they’re willing to accept their traits, narcissists usually don’t see them as problematic.
20) Mudita – Buddhist “sympathetic joy,” that is, genuine happiness at another’s good fortune, which can be viewed as the inverse of envy or schadenfreude.
21) Compersion – Empathic pleasure or happiness felt when a loved one experiences pleasure or happiness. This word usually crops up in polyamorous circles, indicating feeling happy at the fact that one of your partners is experiencing happiness with another romantic or sexual partner. Some see it as the near opposite of jealousy.
22) JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) – Positive satisfaction you get from deliberately skipping social or popular activities in favor of using time for something more personally valuable (such as time with loved ones). Some see it as the near opposite of FOMO (fear of missing out).
23) Alexithymia – A condition where you struggle to identify, describe, and/or differentiate your emotions. If you often can’t tell how you feel or usually can’t put your emotions into words, you may have Alexithymia.
24) Defusion – The skill of viewing thoughts as transient mental events rather than literal truths – such as by viewing them from an external perspective – which reduces their emotional power over us. For example, instead of just having a thought X and being “inside” it, you observe that “you’re having the thought that X” or even “I’m noticing that I’m having the thought that I’m having the thought that X.” You can ask yourself about a particular thought: are you “fused” with that thought (living inside of it, treating it as the truth) or defused from it?
25) Pronoid – A pervasive conviction that other people or the universe at large are conspiring for your benefit. It is the optimistic mirror-image of being paranoid: where a paranoid expects hidden threats, a pronoid expects hidden aid. Thanks to Andreea Alexuc for introducing me to this concept.
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LITTLE-KNOWN CONCEPTS FOR THINKING ABOUT PEOPLE
26) Wamb – A term coined by John Nerst, which means the opposite of “nerd.” Things that are wamb tend to be socially mainstream, trendy, cool, and non-intellectual. Jock, prom king, football players in high school are often the epitome of wamb. We can also think about a wamb-to-nerd spectrum that people and things can be placed on.
27) D.A.R.V.O. – A tactic often used by abusers when they are accused of wrongdoing: (1) Deny wrongdoing, (2) Attack the accuser, and (3) Reverse Victim and Offender (so as to make the abuser appear to be the victim)
28) Mimophant – Someone who is simultaneously aggressive, forceful, or insensitive to other people’s feelings (charging forward like an elephant) yet hypersensitive to criticism or has their own feelings easily hurt (like a mimosa plant, which quickly retracts its leaves when touched).
29) Apophenia (Spectrum) – Apophenia is the cognitive bias of perceiving meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. I prefer, though, to adapt this concept to use it as a spectrum applied to people. I use it to indicate the extent to which you spot patterns and connections. Those who are high in apophenia find real patterns that others miss but also see more false patterns, whereas those who are low have fewer false patterns but may miss real patterns. There’s a fundamental trade-off related to pattern identification – some people have more false positives, whereas others have more false negatives. People with schizophrenia tend to be very high in apophenia.
30) Lightgassing – The opposite of gaslighting – when someone reinforces your false misconceptions about the world (e.g., “You’re right, your girlfriend [who broke up with you] is a terrible person and doesn’t deserve you.”) This is another one by me.
This piece was first written on July 8, 2025, and first appeared on my website on September 15, 2025.
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.