2026-03-24 10:55:47
An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the “illusion of the self” and then claim something like “there is no self”.
To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it’s a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all the meaningful senses of that word.
I have two concerns here.
1) An experience of something being a certain way does not itself make it not that way. By analogy, if someone has an LSD trip where they have the experience of “not having a body”, that experience itself doesn’t necessarily imply that they truly don’t have a body. Similarly, the experience of not having a self doesn’t automatically mean the self doesn’t “exist” in any meaningful sense. An experience of something being true is different than the thing being true, even if that experience feels incredibly real and accurate.
2) The “self” refers to more than just the feeling of having a self, or there being a “self” that chooses our thoughts. There are lots of aspects of self, and even if we rule some out, that doesn’t mean there is no self at all; it only means some versions of self don’t hold. For instance, one part of having a self – and of myself being different from you – is that when I prick my finger, I directly feel it, but you don’t. That makes me a self that’s different than you. Meditation doesn’t remove this notion of self. There are many other notions of self as well, such as us existing as a bundle of personality traits, associations, memories, etc., that meditation also doesn’t remove.
On the other hand, to defend meditation practices for a moment, I do think that they can show us that some of our naive assumptions about our experiences are genuinely incorrect. For instance, by causing us to pay a lot more attention than normal to our moment-to-moment experience, medication can lead us to realize that our mind doesn’t work the way we assumed. A good example of this is when we pay close attention to where our thoughts come from and, in doing so, notice that many of them seem to just appear in our minds without us consciously choosing to think them. I believe that’s a valid observation. It’s less “I feel this is true, so it must be” and more “I paid more attention to what’s happening moment-to-moment and noticed things weren’t operating the way I had assumed”. I think, at most, meditation may show that we don’t have a “self” in some particular sense of the word “self” that many people might assume we do have. This may be important (perhaps very important), but it’s different from saying “we have no self,” full stop.
Additionally, I know that people who have nondual experiences (where they experience a lack of self during meditation) often view it as very beneficial. For instance, they may feel it leaves them feeling more deeply okay, more joyous, and less prone to suffering. I believe that some people do have experiences like these, and that that’s awesome. But also, that’s different than saying that “there is no self”.
Finally, I want to clarify that not all non-dual practitioners and teachers make the claims I’m describing above – I’m just reacting to those that do. I also am not saying that none of our naive ideas about the self are confused – some likely are, and some definitions of the self that we might assume exist don’t exist in the way we might think. For instance, if you pay close attention, there is no separate, identifiable, enduring, independently existing controller of our thoughts and actions – and you may well find, upon searching, that every candidate for self ends up just being an object in awareness. And you may even find that the feeling of having a self is itself simply a feeling. Yet, there’s also a lot more to ideas of a “self” than only those things. And saying “something isn’t what appears” or “this one definition doesn’t hold up to careful observation” is different from “this thing doesn’t exist at all”. I think that just claiming “there’s no self” may be more accurately re-stated as “some notions of the self turn out not to make sense or to dissolve when you pay close enough attention.”
This piece was first written on March 23, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 10, 2026.
2026-03-05 09:07:54
We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands due to the fracturing of media, social media and YouTube.
If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come up again and again.
Here’s my speculative attempt at categorizing harmful gurus based on their personalities, motivations, and persuasive styles (but not mental health conditions). Of course, not all harmful gurus are equally harmful (I’ll give a mix of very harmful and less harmful examples). My hope is that these categories may help you spot these patterns more easily:
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Type 1: Sociopathic Gurus – they strategically mix lies with truth to get your trust, promote a specific world view, and (eventually) extract value from you. Those who fail to spot their lies learn to trust them and may even see them as brave truth tellers. They lie to you knowingly and without remorse for personal gain.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Cherry picking: using selective (non-representative) examples that suggest the narrative they want you to believe.
• Paltering: making a series of true statements that purposely lead you to come to a false conclusion.
• Lie laundering: inserting key lies among a series of true statements so that the lies go unnoticed and they appear credible.
• Fabrication: they’re willing to completely make up things that very few people would ever blatantly lie about (such as inventing an experience they had with a specific person), leaving trusting people to assume they must be telling the truth.
Famous example:
Larry Ray
“Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.[24] At first Ray ingratiated himself with his daughter’s friends, cooking dinners and ordering in delivery, and presenting himself as a father figure.”
A psychological examiner’s notes from the time said that Ray was “able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what he does … [He] can be utterly charming, and one can be disarmed by his childlike simplicity and smile. But Mr. Ray is no child; he is a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.”
(source of these quotes: Wikipedia)
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Type 2: Narcissistic Gurus – they’re delusionally convinced of the vast superiority of their ideas and qualities, and do whatever they can to get others to pay attention to and admire them. People end up entranced by their charisma, grandiose vision, and (apparent) confidence. Their huge (but fragile) ego makes it hard for them to learn from (and likely to lash out in response to) valid criticism.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Self-aggrandizement: they tell you how impressive they are or how impressive their ideas are, and some find this convincing.
• Endorsement: they get others to talk up their brilliance and accomplishments, making their claims seem more believable (which are also sometimes mutual exchanges where they talk each other up).
• Obfuscation: using obscure words, ambiguous, smart-seeming remarks, and technical phrases that are hard to understand to seem brilliant and to deflect from having to actually defend their ideas from head-on critiques.
Famous example:
Benny Hinn (prosperity gospel preacher)
Quotes:
“Where in the Bible does it say I have to drive a Honda?”
“When you don’t give money, it shows that you have the devil’s nature”
“The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.”
“Sow a big seed. When you confess it, you are activating the supernatural forces of God”
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Type 3: Apophenic Gurus – they read signals into noise, often in paranoid ways. Even though their theories are usually wrong, they are often interesting, novel, or surprising, which gets people to pay attention and leaves some people captivated. They see tenuous connections as deeply meaningful and are rarely persuaded by logical critiques. Some of them tip into genuine psychotic detachment from reality.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Mystery: they present their ideas as involving a deep understanding of hidden relationships or secret knowledge, and leave the impression that if you just spend enough time consuming their content, you’ll come to grasp these important truths that few understand.
• Web of connections: they talk about a wide range of unrelated ideas and events in rapid succession and treat these as deeply connected, making it difficult to pin down their points and giving them an easy escape valve (by diverting to tangential topics they claim are related) when their perspectives are challenged.
• Just asking questions: they’ll point to things that seem weird or surprising or that aren’t well understood, and imply they have deep significance and support their worldview, even though their proper interpretation is unclear.
• Yes And-ing: incorporating other popular false theories and appealing world-views (such as perspectives of other gurus) into their network of ideas, making them even more appealing, fascinating and familiar seeming.
Famous example:
David Icke (conspiracy theorist)
Quotes:
“The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.”
“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”
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Type 4: Traumatized Gurus – due to being ostracized by a group or very painful life experiences, they’ve come to demonize a group of people or a set of ideas as the source of society’s ills. They’re on a mission to get others to demonize the same group or ideas. Their own pain and fear leads to black and white thinking and blocks their empathy.
Strategies they often rely on:
• Nutpicking: focusing on the most extreme (nutty) perspectives and people related to whatever it is they demonize to make it seem insane and dangerous.
• Catastrophizing on a slippery slope: claiming that some genuine problems related to a group or set of ideas are going to lead to a sequence of events with a cataclysmic or frightening outcome, causing their audience to fear that group or those ideas.
• Motte and bailey-ing: flip-flopping between reasonable criticisms and extreme conclusions based on those criticisms (which may depend on how emotionally disregulated they are at that moment, or what audience they are talking to), such that when their extreme conclusions are changed, they can easily retreat to “I was just saying that [reasonable criticism].”
Famous example:
Brigitte Gabriel
Her home was destroyed by Muslim militants when she was 10 years old, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel.
Quotes:
“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil.. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no soul, they are dead set on killing and destruction.”
“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” (according to the NYT).
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Note that here with this terminology I am not talking about diagnosing mental disorders – I’m talking about how these gurus think, their motivations, and their persuasive styles.
What’s the key difference between these categories? I’d say it’s that they all mislead their audiences, but for different reasons, based on different motivations, and with different levels of self-awareness.
Sociopathic Gurus often mislead on purpose, knowingly, to gain something.
Narcissistic Gurus often mislead due to their egos, and an inflated sense of their own importance and the superiority of their ideas.
Apophenic Gurus often mislead due to seeing false connections, and due to jumping to paranoid conclusions.
And Traumatized Gurus often mislead due to the way their beliefs were shaped by pain or fear, which has caused them to oversimplify, mischaracterize and demonize a particular group or set of ideas.
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Of course, not all gurus can be classified in these ways – some are idiosyncratic.
And, in practice, many gurus combine multiple elements from the above categories, especially the most harmful gurus – for instance, I think that Sociopathic + Narcissistic, and Narcissistic + Apophenic are common combinations among cult leaders in particular. Perhaps having multiple of these tendencies rather than just one (or even having all of these tendencies, though likely to different degrees) is common among the most popular such gurus.
The reason I’m proposing these categories, despite their porousness, is that I think they are useful for thinking about different personalities and tactics common among gurus.
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Here are some examples of what I think are mixed type harmful gurus and how I’d classify them using this framework based on what I know about them (of course, it’s hard to be certain of their true traits beyond their public portrayal of their traits):
• Andrew Tate: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “Andrew Tate once called his sexually explicit webcam business a ‘total scam’ and boasted on his website that he lured women in by getting them to fall in love with him. The 36-year-old influencer also boasted on a podcast that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and ‘got away with it.'” (NBC)
• Alex Jones (radio host): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru – “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” and “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”.
• Elliot Rodger (mass murderer, became influential post-death): Traumatized + Narcissistic Guru – “All I have ever wanted was to love women, but their behavior has only earned my hatred. I want to have sex with them, and make them feel good, but they would be disgusted at the prospect. They have no sexual attraction towards me. It is such an injustice…Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed.”
• L. Ron Hubbard: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!” (part of his “self-hypnosis”)
• Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult leader): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru
• Charles Manson (Manson Family cult leader): Sociopathic + Apophenic Guru – “Total paranoia is just total awareness.” and ” I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man; I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards.”
• Warren Jeffs (FLDS polygamous offshoot of Mormonism): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru
• Keith Raniere (NXIVM cult leader): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru
This piece was first written on March 4, 2026, and first appeared on my website on March 30, 2026.
2025-12-29 11:54:23
I think that people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the legal system (in the US, at least). For instance, many people think the US legal system is a good way to get justice when someone has committed a crime. In my experience, it’s very hard to get the police to arrest someone who has committed a crime, unless the police showed up when the crime was actually in progress.
While certain laws are overenforced (e.g., some drug use-related crimes, minor traffic violations) and some very serious laws are appropriately enforced (e.g., if someone commits a major bombing, substantial resources will go into tracking that person down, and the police do make some effort with murders generally), mainly, laws are not really enforced.
The civil system is no better: when you’re in the right, lawsuits are very rarely worth it because of the incredible monetary cost and investment in time and mental energy of using the legal system. This is really a great loss: someone can screw you over, and you have a legal right against them, but the system is so slow and expensive that it’s irrational to try to claim that legal right. Of course, there are exceptions: situations where you can use a small claims court for a fast result, or where the size of the damages is so great and the probability of winning so large that it’s worth it, or where a lawyer will take the case on contingency.
On the flip side, wealthy bullies and large companies can use the system very effectively because merely by suing someone, they inflict tremendous waste of money and time on that person. As they say, “the process is the punishment.” Unless a case is truly ridiculous or obviously invalid, it’s likely to waste a lot of the defendant’s time and money.
So basically, it’s a system that is often rational for abusers of it to use and rarely rational for victims to use.
In my view, the main value in the justice system for individuals is that the police will come if you call, and if they literally see someone committing a crime, they will arrest them (or if the crime is sufficiently serious AND the trail of evidence is ridiculously easy to follow to the perpetrator, they may be willing to follow it).
And that’s actually worth A LOT! The police being willing to come (hopefully!) fairly quickly when called and arrest someone they see committing a crime or who obviously carried out a crime (which is not true in every country) actually reduces crime tremendously (compared to the counterfactual), and provides us all with an extremely useful resource when crime is being committed. So that’s worth using whenever we need it!
But, unfortunately, beyond that one very useful function, in my opinion, the system does quite a bad job at producing justice.
In my personal experience, when serious crimes have been committed against people I’m close to, I can’t think of a single case where the legal system brought justice.
If we look at statistics broadly (based on a couple of different sources from 2020-2025), here are the appalling numbers of what percent of reported offenses are cleared in the US (where “cleared”, most of the time, means that someone is arrested, charged, and turned over to the court for prosecution):
The reality is even more grim than these reported numbers, though, because (not including murder) a high percentage of crimes go unreported, and the above apply just to the selection that have been reported. For instance, by some estimates, more than 50% of violent victimizations and burglaries go unreported, and an even larger percentage of sexual assaults go unreported. That means that the probability that a crime leads to an arrest is substantially lower than the official clearance rates (which are already pretty depressingly low). For instance, the real clearance rate for burglary may be more like 6%.
The vision of the justice system that TV portrays – of police and district attorneys that spend tons of time on individual (non-murder) cases and doggedly pursue making sure that criminals get justice, while occasionally true, is usually a misleading distortion of the status quo. In real life, even with murder cases, more than 40% of them don’t lead to arrests.
I also want to make it really clear that while there are, of course, some incompetent people and some immoral people in the justice system (as there are in any system), for the most part, individuals are not to blame for these problems – police officers, judges, prosecutors, etc., are mostly genuinely trying to do their jobs well. These are systemic issues that are way beyond the ability of any individual to change.
It’s also worth noting that many people who commit crimes are repeat offenders, and so some of them actually do come to justice eventually (when they finally get caught for one of their crimes and are punished), it just may take a while. They roll the dice enough times that it finally catches up to them.
I hope I am not discouraging you from reporting crimes – you should absolutely report them. Just don’t assume that the legal system is likely to bring justice – clinging to that hope can be quite detrimental.
This piece was first written on December 28, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 21, 2026.
2025-12-28 10:08:19
Correlations provide a very useful, quick way to summarize the relationship between two things (as a single number between -1 and 1). For instance, if we find that self-reported anxiety and self-reported depression have a high correlation (which they, in fact, do), then this suggests a substantial link between the two conditions.
But something odd happens when we calculate correlations involving rare traits: the correlation usually has a small magnitude (i.e., is close to zero)!
To illustrate this, let’s imagine we have some rare trait, Y, which you either have (Y=1) or you don’t have (Y=0). It could be, for instance, whether or not someone has a rare disease (1 means they have it, 0 means they don’t).
Furthermore, let’s suppose a discovery is made that there’s an important link between that disease and a numerical trait, which we’ll call X. X could be, for instance, the percentile a person gets on a certain blood test that relates to the disease. So let’s suppose that X can take on integer values from 0 to 100. Moreover, imagine that it’s discovered that X ALWAYS equals 100 when a person has the disease, but when the person doesn’t have the disease, X can take on any value from 0 to 100 (uniformly at random). In this setup, it seems like X and Y should be strongly correlated – after all, X is always 100 for people who have the disease, and very rarely 100 for people who don’t. But do we find a substantial correlation between X and Y in this case? Well, it depends on the rarity of the disease. So let’s examine the correlation between X and Y (via simulation) as we vary the disease’s rarity from 1 in 2 (a probability of 0.50 of having the disease) all the way down to about 1 in 32,000:
As we can see in the table and chart, when Y is not rare (i.e., 1 occurs with reasonably high probability), then the correlations between X and Y are high. For instance, if the trait occurs in 1 in 2 people, then the correlation between X and Y is r=0.77. But as the trait gets rarer, this correlation drops, until we get to a rarity of about 1 in about 32,000, at which point the correlation between X and Y is minuscule, at r<0.01.
Situations like this can pose a big problem in research using correlations. If we are studying rare traits, we may use correlations to examine what they are associated with. But, as in the example above, using correlations can make rare traits look like they aren’t really meaningfully linked, even to other traits they’re highly related to!
But is the problem I described really a general problem of rare traits, or does it only apply in specific instances, such as the one we simulated above?
Well, first it’s worth noting that it’s POSSIBLE for even an extremely rare trait to have a strong correlation with a separate variable. For instance, if we modify the example above so that, as before, when Y=1 we have X=100, but unlike before, when Y=0 we have X be 0, then we always get a correlation of 1 regardless of how rare it is for Y to be 1. This case is easily explained because here, X and Y perfectly mirror each other, with X simply being 100 times Y.
Let’s consider another example. Suppose that, as before, X=100 whenever Y=1, but now let’s make it so that when Y=0, X has a 50/50 chance of being either 0 or 1. In that case, we get a correlation (r) between X and Y of almost 1 if Y has a 1 in 2 chance of being 1, and a correlation of r=0.41 when Y has only a 1 in 131072 chance of being 1.
We therefore see that this is not a universal phenomenon – it’s possible for a variable to have a high correlation with a rare trait, even though rare traits have a tendency to create low correlations.
What can we say about when these low correlations with rare traits will occur?
We’re going to look at this from two perspectives.
First, let’s consider the special case where X, like Y, is also a binary variable (i.e., it only takes on the values 0 and 1). Furthermore, in this setup, let’s suppose that X is guaranteed to always give half 0’s and half 1’s. For instance, it could be that X represents sex assigned at birth (X=1 corresponds to female, and X=0 corresponds to male, with each occurring about half the time) and Y is whether a blood test came out positive for a disease that only females can get (Y=1 for a positive test result, Y=0 for a negative result).
In this setup, what can we say about the correlation between X and Y, and how does this vary with the rarity of Y=1 occurring? Well, it turns out that the size of the correlation between X and Y in this setup is strictly bounded based on how often Y takes on the value 1 (let’s refer to the probability that Y takes on the value 1 using the symbol “p”). Then, we have this upper bound on the correlation, r, that I derived:
In other words, if X is forced to take on 1 half the time and 0 half the time, the rarer it is that Y takes on 1, the tighter the restriction on their correlation. In that situation, if Y takes on 1 only rarely, then they can’t have a big correlation. Here is a plot of what this upper bound looks like as p varies, showing the maximum possible correlation for each such p:
Why does the rarity of Y=1 place an upper bound on the correlation in this situation? I think it’s because Y is almost always equal to 0 (due to 1 being rare), but since X is restricted to take on the value 0 only 1/2 of the time, that means it has to give a 1 on close to half of Y’s, meaning that it can’t match Y all that often. The less rare that Y=1 is, the less this is a problem.
What about more general cases, though, where Y is still binary but X is a numerical variable that’s unrestricted (unlike the setup above)?
Well, for this, we have a different upper bound on the correlation that I derived. It is only guaranteed to hold when p is sufficiently small (relative to the other terms) – it may be violated if p isn’t small enough. But under those conditions, we have this upper bound on the correlation:
The variables in this equation are two conditional means: the mean value of X that occurs when Y=1, and the mean value of X that occurs when Y=0. There is also a conditional standard deviation: the standard deviation of X when Y=0 (i.e., how much X varies when Y takes on its more common result, which is 0).
If we treat the conditional means and conditional standard deviation of X as fixed, and consider what happens then as p (the probability of Y being 1) shrinks, then we see that this upper bound on the correlation (which, recall, only applies for p small enough) applies a multiplicative factor of sqrt(p(1-p)). That factor sqrt(p(1-p)) is always less than 1, and it approaches 0 as p approaches 0, effectively putting a cap on the size of the correlation. Here’s a chart of the multiplicative effect that sqrt( p (1-p)) has on the equation, forcing a lower correlation as p shrinks:
This bound won’t always be informative, because it’s possible for the first factor to be so big that the whole equation gives an upper bound greater than 1, which means there is no restriction on the correlation. But when the first factor is moderate in size, and p is small enough, this really does enforce a bound on how big the correlation between X and Y can be based on how rare it is that Y takes on the value 1. It’s also worth noting that when p is small, sqrt(p*(1-p)) falls, as a function of p, approximately like the simpler formula sqrt(p).
It’s also worth thinking for a moment about what this upper-bound formula means, on an intuitive level. If the standard deviation of X is small conditioned on Y=1 (that is, when Y=1, there is little variation in X), then the denominator will be small, so the upper bound will not be informative (any correlation is possible). On the other hand, if the standard deviation of X conditioned on Y=1 is large (relative to the gap between the mean of X when Y=1 and the mean of X when Y=0), then our bound will come into effect, and as p (the frequency of Y=1) shrinks, we’ll have a tighter and tighter maximum possible correlation. This means that a critical factor here in the maximum possible correlation is how much variation there is in X when Y is fixed to take on its most common class (that is, when Y=0).
Putting this all together: while rare traits aren’t guaranteed to have low correlations to other variables, they often will be forced to have low correlations to other variables merely as a consequence of being rare traits! And the rarer the trait is, the smaller those correlations with other variables will typically be.
But what should you do when this happens? Well, one simple approach is to switch from measuring correlation to calculating Cohen’s d instead. It gives you the “effect size” of the binary variable Y on your other variable X – in other words, it calculates how much bigger X is, on average, when Y=1, compared to how big X is, on average, when Y=0, measured in units of standard deviations. This removes the effect of rarity – with Cohen’s d, it doesn’t matter how often Y takes on 1 vs. 0. Here’s the formula for it, where s is the “pooled standard deviation”:
But could a problem similar to the one we’re describing happen for variables Y that are not binary? So far, we’ve only thought about “rarity” in terms of a binary variable Y, where the value 1 occurs rarely. But there are other ways that a variable could be similar but non-binary. For instance, suppose that Y is a continuous numerical variable, but that it almost always takes on the value 0, with a small probability it can also take on other values in the range 1 to 100. An example of this kind of variable might be responses to a question like “How many days during the past 30 days did you drive a motorcycle that you own?” The vast majority of respondents will respond with 0, whereas a small fraction will give responses in the tens, twenties, or even say 30 if they ride every day.
In that case, could we have a similar situation where, because the variable is 0 so often, it behaves like the binary variable Y we’ve been discussing above, and usually ends up with lower correlations to other variables? The answer is: probably yes! And, unfortunately, the Cohen’s d strategy won’t work for that situation, because Cohen’s d, as it’s usually conceived, requires that one of the variables is binary.
What is one to do in that case? Well, in the case where our Y variable is bounded (i.e., it is known it can’t go below some fixed value Y_min and can’t go above some maximum value Y_max), one approach is to use this “Cohen’s d” like formula that I derived which, unlike normal Cohen’s d, can be applied when neither variable is binary. I’ll call it the “Generalized Cohen’s d.” It’s given by:
Here, sigma_Y is the standard deviation of Y. Additionally, r is simply the regular correlation between X and Y. A neat aspect of this formula is that in the special case where Y is a binary variable, it simply becomes the formula for calculating Cohen’s d using the correlation, r. Here is the standard formula for converting a correlation, r, to a Cohen’s d for a binary variable Y that takes on the value 1 with probability 1/2 and 0 with probability 1/2:
And here’s the more powerful r-to-d conversion formula for a binary variable Y that takes on the value 1 with probability p and the value 0 with probability 1-p:
What do we take away from all of this?
Well, if you’re studying rare traits and what other variables they are linked to, it can be very misleading to use correlations to do so. You may find that the correlations are low even with variables that have a strong link to the rare trait. In that case, you can switch to Cohen’s d, or when the original trait is not binary (but still mostly just takes on one value), you can try the Generalized Cohen’s d that I introduce in this article.
Please let me know if you find any errors in this article – I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to check all the formulas. I’d also be very interested to know if you have other good ways of handling these sorts of situations.
2025-12-25 07:56:15
It’s fascinating how, with a slight adjustment to our focus and perspective, we can enjoy a positive moment more, which means more enjoyment in our lives at essentially no cost (other than the effort of learning and practice). In other words, we can derive more enjoyment from positive experiences without changing anything about our lives. While it’s of course also often beneficial to make actual changes to our lives, I think most people underestimate how much we can enhance our lives through subtle focus and perspective shifts without other changes.
With that in mind, here are the four ways I know of for getting more enjoyment from a positive moment without changing the circumstances of that moment:
1) Gratitude. Think about the fact that you have this nice thing, that there is a possible world where you don’t have it, and aim to feel thankful for having it. For instance, if you’re enjoying a cup of tea, you can remind yourself how nice it is to have tea whenever you want, and how much more difficult it was to acquire tea hundreds of years ago.
2) Presence. Try to pay as much attention to the present moment as you can. For instance, rather than being 20% focused on what you’ll be doing later, or having stray thoughts about something else while you’re sipping your tea, focus fully on the experience of your tea.
3) Focus. Narrow your focus from this full moment to the very best aspects of this moment. For instance, focus on the tiny spot in your mouth where the tea tastes most delicious.
4) Acceptance. Stop resisting *everything* that’s imperfect about this moment. If we pay close attention, we can usually find something about any moment that feels imperfect, and it’s that desire for things to be different and that label assigned to aspects of this experience (that things aren’t what you want) that you’re letting go of. Relax all judgment and accept every last detail about this moment without wanting any aspect of it whatsoever to change. When your brain labels something as imperfect, or you notice a desire for something about this moment to change, note the thought or desire and let it go. For instance, fully accept that your face is slightly itchy, that you’re seated in a slightly awkward position, and that your tea tastes exactly as it does, without wanting those aspects of this moment to be any different. One way to do this is to think of this moment as a perfect snapshot of a moment in your life – and you want that snapshot to be exactly as it is to capture this exact moment, not a snapshot of a different moment.
Are there any other approaches to enhancing positive moments that I’m missing here?
This piece was first written on December 24, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 12, 2026.
2025-12-12 04:40:06
A lot of psychological terms don’t mean what people think they mean (at least, not according to psychologists).
There’s an increasing drift between how they get used colloquially in everyday language and the commonly accepted definitions among psychologists. There’s a sense in which the lay usage is “wrong” (in that it doesn’t match more scientific, precise, or technical usage), but of course, language has always been and always will be in flux. At the end of the day, a word does mean what people widely use it to mean. So I think it’s useful to be aware of both definitions for psychological concepts. The everyday concept helps us understand others, whereas the more technical definition is usually more helpful for helping us understand the way the world works. Here’s a list of examples:
1) Gaslighting
Everyday usage: Someone invalidating your perspective or lying to you in order to manipulate you
Precise usage: Manipulation that specifically causes someone to doubt their own senses or their ability to reason
2) Negative reinforcement
Everyday usage: Something bad happens when you do a behavior, so you do it less
Precise usage: Removal of an aversive stimulus after a behavior is engaged in, causing that behavior to increase (not a form of punishment). This is in contact with positive reinforcement, which adds a desirable stimulus after a behavior (which is a different way to get a behavior to increase).
3) OCD
Everyday usage: being a neat freak or someone who needs things done in a specific way
Precise usage: A disorder involving repetitive, intrusive obsessions and/or compulsions (behaviors performed to reduce anxiety) that are time‑consuming or impair function.
4) Depression
Everyday usage: feeling sad a lot
Precise usage: an ongoing near-daily pervasive depressed mood (sadness, emptiness, and/or hopelessness) or loss of interest or pleasure, that coincides with symptoms like fatigue, suicidality, poor concentration, weight change, or feelings of worthlessness.
5) Antisocial
Everyday usage: a desire to avoid being around other people
Precise usage: a personality disorder (ASPD) involving pervasive disregard for or violation of the rights of others, typically involving deceit, manipulativeness, aggression, and a lack of empathy/remorse.
6) Narcissist
Everyday usage: someone who is self-centered or very vain
Precise usage: a personality disorder (NPD) involving a grandiose sense of self-importance and superiority, need for admiration, and reduced empathy.
7) Trauma
Everyday usage: A very upsetting experience
Precise usage: Exposure to someone dying, serious injury, or sexual violence (DSM), or another extremely threatening or horrific event that has a long-lasting negative impact on a person’s mental function.
While there’s a time for going with the flow of culture, and using words however people casually use them, there’s an important role for more technically precise terminology as well. In the cases above, I believe the technical versions of these words are worth knowing about and understanding.
This piece was first written on November 7, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 11, 2025.