2024-11-03 12:04:00
While some group conversations are great (e.g., with close friends), a lot of group conversations are boring, the lowest common denominator, or hijacked by one talkative person. How can you make group conversations more interesting?
Here’s what I’ve found to be useful:
1) Shrink the group
The best group conversations typically happen (I claim) in groups of 3 to 5. If your group is bigger than that, you can split it into smaller groups (e.g., by engaging with the people closest to you). With 7, it’s hard to get a word in or stay on any thread.
2) Introduce a topic
If the group seems to be bored, an easy way to steer the conversation is to wait for a lull and then say, “I’d be curious to hear what the people in this group think about…” and then raise a topic that’s likely to be very interesting and relevant to folks there.
3) Invite an exceptional conversationalist
Some people are very good at keeping everyone engaged. If you can, bring someone like that along who can make the discussions more interesting for everyone. Socially skilled extroverts who really care about others having fun are a good bet.
4) Leave out or inform the obliviously over-talkative
Some people talk a lot but don’t pay attention to whether others are interested (e.g., extroverts who are narcissistic or who lack strong social perception). Just one can ruin a large group conversation (even if they’re fine in other settings). When they are well-meaning and are likely to take the feedback well, you can point out this tendency and hope they improve. If they are unlikely to want to hear the feedback or unlikely to take it well, you could simply not invite them to events focused on group conversation.
5) Encourage interesting introverts
Some people have very interesting things to share but are quiet in group settings due to shyness or not wanting to draw attention to themselves. Involve them by asking for their perspective or directing questions to them (if you think they wouldn’t mind).
6) Keep things on track
Sometimes, a group conversation will be interesting, but then, suddenly, it gets derailed by someone’s stray comment that leads the group in a random direction. Consider jumping in to make a comment or ask a question related to the prior thread to return to the more interesting topic.
I hope some of these ideas help you improve your next group conversation or dinner party!
This piece was first written on November 3, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 7, 2024.
2024-09-28 09:49:00
As you may have experienced yourself, sometimes, when people are chronically ill and go to lots of doctors, the doctors conclude that there is nothing medically wrong. I think it’s important in these cases not to jump to a conclusion too quickly about why it has remained undiagnosed and to take seriously *all three* of these possibilities:
1) Diagnosis Error: It’s a non-standard presentation of a known disease or a rare (or frequently missed or misunderstood) disease, making it hard to get properly diagnosed. In this case, seeking out fantastic doctors (especially those with relevant expertise) may lead to a solution.
For instance, one time, I started presenting with strange symptoms and was getting sicker every week. It turned out to be due to mold! I had just moved into a new home, and there was mold hidden behind a wall about 3 feet from where I was sleeping. Once we located the mold and removed it, I recovered completely in a few weeks.
While it sometimes happens that people misattribute issues to mold exposure, I’m pretty confident that mold actually was the cause in this instance. This was due to the timing of the symptoms starting and stopping and due to the fact that I’ve never had symptoms like that prior to the event or since the event.
As another example, I know more than one person who had a fairly common disorder that doctors tend not to understand very well for some reason. In each case, it took these people quite a lot of time to get the right diagnosis from doctors.
A third example is a friend who has an unusual dietary sensitivity. For some time, nobody could figure out why they had the odd symptoms that they did. Luckily, they discovered that when they remove certain items from their diet, their symptoms completely disappear, leaving them feeling dramatically better.
2) Psychological: It’s a physiological reaction to a psychological phenomenon (such as due to stress or anxiety), or it’s a psychosomatic condition. In such cases, a psychologist may be life-changing. Note that psychosomatic does not mean that the experiences are not really felt. If you feel pain in your stomach, then you have pain in your stomach. The question is, “What is generating that pain?”
To give an example, at one point in my life, when I was going through a tremendous amount of stress, I thought that I had some kind of mysterious medical problem because of strange and intense physical symptoms (e.g., chronic nausea, random tingling in my arms, tightness in my chest). But it turned out to be all just caused by the stress and went away when I improved my coping strategies and the stressful events receded further into the past.
Another example is from someone I know who had bad pain for years. He would try to carefully work around the pain, only to eventually discover that the key to eventually ending the pain was to use his body naturally and not let the pain constrain his behaviors.
3) Unknown to Science: it’s a type of medical issue that medicine hasn’t yet discovered. All currently known disorders were at one time not known about. While there are fewer and fewer of these as science progresses, and it would be nice to think that medicine has figured it all out by this point, the reality is that there are still some things that are mysterious to science. In such cases, symptom management and lifestyle changes (that make it easier to live with the issues) may be the only option.
As an example, I have (for as long as I can remember) had trouble with my sleep, and despite going to numerous doctors, getting numerous tests, and trying numerous remedies, I’ve never resolved it. I’m still open to the possibility that whatever my sleep issue is, it’s of type (1) or (2), but I’ve come to think it’s increasingly likely to be in category (3).
My best guess is that fairly common conditions that end up grouping patients together by their symptoms (without medicine understanding the underlying causes), with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome being the classic example, typically end up being a mix of (1), (2) and (3) depending on the patient. Some such patients probably have a known disease that has been misidentified, others may have a psychological origin of their fatigue (such as from anxiety or depression), and others may have a medical problem that is not yet known to science.
If you or a loved one has been ill for a while, and you still don’t have a helpful diagnosis despite seeing a number of doctors, I definitely recommend staying open-minded to all three of the above possibilities. I think that people often jump to conclusions too quickly because they assume it can’t have psychological origins (because they think it wouldn’t “feel so real” if it was psychological), or they assume if doctors say they are healthy, that there really isn’t a medical explanation for their symptoms.
It’s also very worthwhile to be careful in these situations because there are numerous peddlers of fake treatments who make their living on people in exactly these kinds of situations (especially after desperation sinks in). Most (but not all) of those peddlers actually believe in their own cures, which makes them even more convincing salespeople for their useless (and sometimes actively harmful) “remedies.”
This piece was first written on September 27, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 27, 2024.
2024-09-18 18:05:00
Consider the quote:
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
-Albert Einstein
Of course, that’s not the definition of insanity, and Einstein didn’t say it (despite the quote often being attributed to him). For those reasons, it sounds pretty stupid. But I would argue there is something wise about the quote and that it’s worth paying attention to.
If we are in a situation that’s deterministic and static – that is, nothing is changing, and nothing is random – then it’s absolutely true that doing the same thing over and over again won’t lead to different results. And, while real life is never perfectly static, and there’s an element of uncertainty in much of what we do, we sometimes do find ourselves in situations that are static and deterministic enough that trying the same thing we’ve always tried would be foolish.
And yet, it’s not so uncommon for people to continue using the same failed strategies over and over again. Let’s call these situations “Futility Loops” – where we try the same strategy over and over even though it has failed every time, and we have ample evidence to suggest it will continue to fail.
Here are a few examples I’ve witnessed myself:
•Someone trying to get a family member to change a harmful behavior by nudging them in the same way, year after year, even though it never works. For instance, by making the same kind of remarks that bother the other person but never get them to alter their behavior.
• Someone who is depressed and stuck in a bad life situation, making the same life choices again and again that leave him stuck in that same spot. For instance, by not taking any actions that could plausibly improve his depression.
• Someone who makes the same sort of bad relationship decisions again and again with each new relationship. For instance, getting into relationships with a certain type of personality that they are attracted to inevitably badly hurts them.
These are fairly obvious examples of Futility Loops, but I also see much more subtle examples (which I’ve engaged in myself): where your behavior isn’t exactly the same, and the situation isn’t exactly the same, so it is easy to miss the fact that it’s a Futility Loop. But the situations and your behaviors rhyme each time – effectively, you keep trying to apply a strategy that the world keeps telling you doesn’t work, but you don’t realize the pattern because each situation feels different enough not to notice.
In Futility Loops, whether the more obvious kind or the more subtle kind, a person repeatedly does the same behaviors that have never worked before, and of course, it doesn’t work this time either, leaving the bad situations to endlessly repeat – there does seem to be something insane about the behavior like the fake Einstein quote suggests.
But if we adopt another frame, where we view the person involved as part of the situation itself, the behavior is understandable and not really insane at all. The person themself hasn’t changed, so when they are thrust into the same bad situation, they engage in the same useless behavior. They have static habits, instincts, emotions, reactions, and so on, so when the same situation arises, their behavior is just what it was before – they are static, and the situation is static, so their behavior is static.
From this point of view, we see that they will be stuck in the Futility Loop until something changes: either something in the situation or something within themselves. But if they aren’t willing to wait until the situation luckily changes on its own, that leaves only one option: self-change.
Thankfully, the self-change doesn’t have to be profound to break out of this sort of loop. All you really need to do is recognize that:
(a) what you have been trying so far hasn’t worked
(b) if you try the same thing again, it’s likely to lead to the same outcome, and
(c) as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it: “Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change; you can’t do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY.”
Then you just need to try a different strategy. And if that strategy proves itself not to work, don’t get stuck on that one either – try yet another strategy. And so on.
It may be worth taking a moment to reflect: which situations may be a Futility Loop for you? Is there a type of bad situation that keeps repeating – and could it be that you’re trying to solve it each time with a strategy that doesn’t work? For instance, is there a person whose behavior you keep trying to nudge in the same way, even though it never helps? Is there a kind of person you keep being drawn with predictably bad outcomes? Is there a type of decision you routinely have to make where you apply the same ineffective approach?
The first step to breaking out of our Futility Loops is to identify them.
This piece was first written on September 18, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 3, 2024.
2024-09-14 11:37:00
A weird thing about anecdotes: there are so many humans, and each human has so many things happen to them, that for a great many simple stories, you might make up (as long as it is within the bounds of physics/current technology/human capacity, and isn’t too specific), something similar has happened to somebody.
For instance, I just made up these stories that I’ve never heard of ever happening:
• a young child stealing their mother’s car
• a dog discovering buried treasure
And indeed, with a quick search I can confirm that these things seem to really have happened!
Though, of course, this won’t always be the case since the number of human events still pales in comparison to the number of concepts that can be mixed – for instance, I couldn’t find even one documented case of “a clown being killed by bees” (though I’m confident that at some point in history, someone was dressed in a clown suit when a bee stung them).
In any event, the preponderance of events on our planet means that something happening one single time tells us almost nothing. Having happened once is a very low bar.
And yet, to make a point in a way that people find compelling, it’s sometimes mandatory (or close to it) to give real-world examples that demonstrate the point.
This creates an awkward tension where a single real-world example often has almost no evidentiary value but has substantial persuasive power.
There are some special cases where an anecdote can provide meaningful evidence. For instance, when the anecdote is so well documented or reliable that you know it happened AND the outcome couldn’t reasonably have been caused by anything other than through the explanation the anecdote provides – such as a case study in a hospital where some experimental new treatment saves a patient with a previously incurable disease. Or when you yourself have tried something once (e.g., a self-help technique), and it seemed to work well, and that is sufficient justification for trying it again.
But in most cases, despite their usefulness in making a compelling point, anecdotes should be thought of as a way to imagine something more vividly and see more clearly specific ways it can manifest, not as evidence for something being true. They are important when explaining a concept, but usually not because they provide evidence of its validity.
This piece was first written on September 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 11, 2024.
2024-09-13 20:47:50
Why do smart people fall for stupid things? Here is what I think is an important part of the answer that almost never gets discussed.
It’s easy to look around at the stupid seeming things that other people believe (e.g., people who join harmful cults, get scammed by a con artist, become vocal evangelists for a placebo treatment, or jump on the hype train of some outrageous new bubble) and wonder: “How on earth can they be so dumb?”
The answer, a lot of times, is simply the trust they have in someone else.
In other words, if a person were to evaluate the bad idea itself – call it X – they may well see it as dumb, dangerous, or full of hot air.
Instead, someone that person sees as impressive and totally trustworthy (or someone they just really like and respect) tells them that X is the next big thing. Or that X will change their life. Or that X will make them rich. Or that X will solve a problem for them that they desperately want solved.
This puts their brain in a predicament. They can either believe:
(1) That this impressive person who they deeply trust is deceiving them
Or
(2) That his impressive person who they trust is right – and their life will be way better off because of it!
If their trust in the person is great enough, or, at least, greater than their level of skepticism, (2) may win them over simply for that reason.
But (2) may also win them over for one or more of these reasons:
In other words, there are a great many dumb things that even smart people end up believing in simply because people believe people. To be clear, this is not the only mechanism by which smart people fall for dumb things. Being smart is not the same as acting rationally all the time. But this trust-based force is, I think, an important mechanism.
While a belief in others is wonderful and admirable in many instances, it can also be a chink in our skepticism and rationality. It can lead us to believe in crazy and dangerous things that we wouldn’t be likely to believe without that trust. We see this when people get scammed by their favorite influencer or when they become true believers in quack cures because they have a friend who says it changed their life.
While this effect often happens when one person we trust causes us to believe in X, the effect is magnified when more people around us believe. Being recruited into a harmful cult by a trusted friend can be difficult, but leaving a cult – at which point all of our close friends are believers in X – is far more difficult. And growing up in an authoritarian regime – where EVERYONE we’ve met seems to believe in X, makes X that much more impossible to resist.
When rationality is discussed, it’s often talked about at the level of the individual. But quite a bit of our thinking we necessarily outsource to others – we can’t make sense of everything ourselves. When we allow someone into our circle of trust who doesn’t deserve to be there, that can jeopardize our rationality. Hence, an important meta-skill of rationality is knowing who to trust – and not being suckered into trusting those who don’t deserve it.
Almost everyone is susceptible to this phenomenon of being duped because of our trust in people, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.
One thing that I think helps is to treat trust as being multi-factor. I can trust a person in one way or in one domain but not another. Or, put another way, earning trust is multi-dimensional. I can see someone as trustworthy because:
Being strong in one of these domains doesn’t automatically make someone strong in another. So, viewing someone as trustworthy in one of these domains shouldn’t cause you to view them as trustworthy in the other ones. And yet, that’s what many people do.
If you track trust in a one-dimensional way, it puts you at a lot of risk because someone you trust may have a very bad idea that they really want you to believe in. It may be hard to reject that idea because you trust them so much – and that may mean joining a harmful cult, buying into the peak of the next bubble, putting stock in an ineffective treatment, or being scammed.
This piece was first written on September 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 22, 2024.