Global Optimum

This episode features:

-What proportion of effective altruists decrease their involvement over time?

-Why do people decrease their involvement with effective altruism?

-Why effective altruist values are particularly vulnerable to drift

-Should you expect your values to get better or worse over time?

-Should you try to prevent value drift?

-How you can use nudges and commitment devices to prevent value drift

-How the "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon might push you towards doing good now, even if your impact is small

-Should you choose effective altruist projects based on selfish considerations?

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Cross, K. P. (1977). Not can, but will college teaching be improved?. New Directions for Higher Education, 1977(17), 1-15.

Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 195.

Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The end of history illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96-98.

Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin.

Van Gestel, L. C., Kroese, F. M., & De Ridder, D. T. D. (2018). Nudging at the checkout counter–A longitudinal study of the effect of a food repositioning nudge on healthy food choice. Psychology & Health, 33(6), 800-809.

EA Survey 2018 Series: Community Demographics & Characteristics

Empirical data on value drift

Concrete Ways to Reduce Risks of Value Drift

Check This Rec:

Wrangham, R. (2019). The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution. Pantheon.

This episode features:

-How do our values change as we age

-How does empathy shape values

-Why are we so conformist?

-Why we underestimate our risk of corruption

-Why many people argue that death is good/necessary

-How ethical slippery slopes lead to severe moral transgressions

-How evil behavior leads to worse values

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Crane, W. (1887). The Baby's Own Aesop.

Gouveia, V. V., Vione, K. C., Milfont, T. L., & Fischer, R. (2015). Patterns of value change during the life span: Some evidence from a functional approach to values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(9), 1276-1290.

Paul, L. A. (2014). Transformative experience. OUP Oxford.

Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The end of history illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96-98.

Shu, L. L., Gino, F., & Bazerman, M. H. (2011). Dishonest deed, clear conscience: When cheating leads to moral disengagement and motivated forgetting. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 330-349.

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of personality and social psychology, 39(5), 806.

Welsh, D. T., Ordóñez, L. D., Snyder, D. G., & Christian, M. S. (2015). The slippery slope: How small ethical transgressions pave the way for larger future transgressions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(1), 114.

In U.S., 87% Approve of Black-White Marriage, vs. 4% in 1958

Impatient Idealism

Bernie Madoff's Secretary Spills His Secrets

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Obedience (documentary)

This episode features:

-Do you need 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert?

-What is the connection between creativity and mental illness

-Can drugs make you more creative?

-Can electrically stimulating your brain make you more creative?

-Are smarter people more creative?

-How do psychologists measure creativity

-Which personality trait predicts creativity

-Techniques for enhancing creativity

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Chi, R. P., & Snyder, A. W. (2012). Brain stimulation enables the solution of an inherently difficult problem. Neuroscience letters, 515(2), 121-124.

DeYoung, C. G., Flanders, J. L., & Peterson, J. B. (2008). Cognitive abilities involved in insight problem solving: An individual differences model. Creativity Research Journal, 20(3), 278-290.

Kaufman, S. B., & Gregoire, C. (2016). Wired to create: Unraveling the mysteries of the creative mind. Penguin.

Simonton, D. K. (1988). Scientific genius: A psychology of science. Cambridge University Press.

Stanley, K. O., & Lehman, J. (2015). Why greatness cannot be planned: The myth of the objective. Springer.

Nine dot problem

Want Some Creativity? Crank-up the Constraints

Deep Habits: Think Hard Outside The Office

Deep Habits: Three Tips for Taming Undecidable Tasks

Check This Rec:

Plomin, R. (2018). Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are. MIT Press.

This episode features:

-What to consider when choosing a graduate program

-Why I was told to avoid getting A's in my classes, and why it might be a good idea for you as well

-What are your chances of graduating from grad school

-What are your chances of getting an academic position after grad school

-How to avoid being corrupted by the academic incentive structure

-How is grad school different from undergrad?

-Tips for succeeding in grad school

-How to avoid being bitten by the Curse of Knowledge

Full transcript

-References-

Career Frontier:

PhD completion rate data

Data on tenure-track appointments after PhD

Science PhD Career Preferences: Levels, Changes, and Advisor Encouragement

Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks

Allocating Risk Mitigation Across Time

80000 Hours interview with Owen Cotton-Barratt

80000 Hours survey of organizational leaders

80000 Hours career review of academic research

80000 Hours pros and cons of grad school

80000 Hours Should I Help Now or Later?

Check This Rec:

Bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Diana Fleischman and Robert Wright

This episode features:

-Can political symbols change political beliefs?

-What makes pseudoscience appealing

-How to evaluate futurism

-How do chronically accessible concepts change our perception

-How to think about the complexity of theories

-Priming: fact or fiction?

-Can barely-noticeable changes in the environment have big effects on behavior?

Full transcript

-References-

Unapplied Rationality:

Carter, T. J., Ferguson, M. J., & Hassin, R. R. (2011). A single exposure to the American flag shifts support toward Republicanism up to 8 months later. Psychological science, 22(8), 1011-1018.

Klein, R. A., Ratliff, K. A., Vianello, M., Adams Jr, R. B., Bahník, Š., Bernstein, M. J., ... & Cemalcilar, Z. (2014). Investigating variation in replicability. Social psychology.

Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Sperber, R. D., McCauley, C., Ragain, R. D., & Weil, C. M. (1979). Semantic priming effects on picture and word processing. Memory & Cognition, 7(5), 339-345.

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

Check This Rec:

Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching fire: How cooking made us human. Basic Books.

Announcement:

I will not be releasing episodes in December. The next episode will come out in January.

This episode features:

-Are smart phones causing young people to be more lonely and depressed

-How can the supplement industry stay afloat if so many supplements are useless

-Discussion of how a paper on psychic powers got published in a top psychology journal

-Why people are often less incompetent than you think

-Why so many professors are bad teachers

-What style of thinking is associated with making successful predictions of the future

-Why do so many people still reject evolution

-Does eating chocolate make you more likely to win the Nobel Prize? (No.)

Full transcript

-References-

Unapplied Rationality:

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(3), 407.

Creswell, J. D., Welch, W. T., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T. L., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16(11), 846-851.

Kelemen, D. (1999). The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition, 70(3), 241-272.

Lindbeck, A. (1972) The Political Economy of the New Left. New York: Harper and Row.

Maurage, P., Heeren, A., & Pesenti, M. (2013). Does Chocolate Consumption Really Boost Nobel Award Chances? The Peril of Over-Interpreting Correlations in Health Studies, 2. The Journal of nutrition, 143(6), 931-933.

Tetlock, P. E. (2017). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?. Princeton University Press.

Twenge, J. M. (2017). IGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us. Simon and Schuster.

Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

In U.S., Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low

Letter: A riddle about liberals

Let's call the pro-lifers what they are: pro-death

Self-affirmation Wikipedia

Secret to Winning a Nobel Prize? Eat More Chocolate

Teens: This is how social media affects your brain

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Science, Technology & the Future

This episode features:

-A quiz to test your intuitions about which studies replicate and which don't

-An effective altruist origin story

-Heuristics for evaluating scientific research

-The role of incentives in the replication crisis

-What should your prior be for whether research will replicate

-Which subfield of psychology has the worst replication rate

-Why it's a mistake to conceptualize glucose as a willpower resource

-Problems with interpreting studies of the dictator game

Full transcript

-References-

Did It Replicate?:

Baker, M. (2016). 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature News, 533(7604), 452.

de Bloom, J., Ritter, S., Kühnel, J., Reinders, J., & Geurts, S. (2014). Vacation from work: A 'ticket to creativity'?: The effects of recreational travel on cognitive flexibility and originality. Tourism Management, 44, 164-171.

Kurzban, R. (2010). Does the brain consume additional glucose during self-control tasks?. Evolutionary Psychology, 8(2), 147470491000800208.

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716.

Winking, J., & Mizer, N. (2013). Natural-field dictator game shows no altruistic giving. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(4), 288-293.

Replication attempt 1

Replication attempt 2

Replication attempt 3

Replication attempt 4

Replication attempt 5

Replication attempt 6

How to Build Your CV

Story Time:

The mechanics of my recent productivity by Nate Soares

On saving the world by Nate Soares

Check This Rec:

Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Random House.

This episode features:

-Why breakups are always the other person's fault

-Why does love cause us to see our partner as better than they really are

-How much do people lie

-What do people lie about in their online dating profile

-Is it possible to detect lies

-What traits make somebody likable vs unlikable

-How do we deceive ourselves

-Why we often don't understand our own motivations

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Anderson, N. H. (1968). Likableness ratings of 555 personality-trait words. Journal of personality and social psychology, 9(3), 272.

Bond Jr, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006). Accuracy of deception judgments. Personality and social psychology review, 10(3), 214-234.

DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to deception. Psychological bulletin, 129(1), 74.

Helweg-Larsen, M., Sadeghian, P., & Webb, M. S. (2002). The stigma of being pessimistically biased. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 21(1), 92-107.

Kurzban, R. (2011). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite: Evolution and the modular mind. Princeton University Press.

Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2017). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press.

Tetlock, P. E. (2017). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?. Princeton University Press.

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of personality and social psychology, 39(5), 806.

OKCupid data on lying in online dating profiles

Deflategate poll data

Check This Rec:

Edge.org

This episode features:

-Why men perceive more sexuality in women's behavior than women say they intend

-Several opportunities to test your own biases

-Examples of how both evolutionary psychologists and social psychologists have explained bias the wrong way

-Why it's unsatisfactory to say that we have false beliefs in order to "make ourselves feel good"

-Why do people ignore basic probability theory

-Why are people bad at abstract logic

-How to make people much better at logic problems

-An explanation of the famous "Linda Problem"

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Brown, J. D. (2012). Understanding the better than average effect: Motives (still) matter. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 209-219.

Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31(3), 187-276.

Cosmides, L., Barrett, H. C., & Tooby, J. (2010). Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 200914623.

Fiddick, L., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). No interpretation without representation: The role of domain-specific representations and inferences in the Wason selection task. Cognition, 77(1), 1-79.

Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81–91

Haselton, M. G., Nettle, D., & Murray, D. R. (2015). The evolution of cognitive bias. The handbook of evolutionary psychology, 1-20.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin Books.

Perilloux, C., & Kurzban, R. (2015). Do men overperceive women's sexual interest?. Psychological Science, 26(1), 70-77.

Positive Illusions Wikipedia

Check This Rec:

Carroll, S. M. (2018). Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.02231.

This episode features:

-How to get outside of your head

-Why optimal performance sometimes requires "not trying"

-What are the psychological traps that can make us dull and uncreative

-A framework for overcoming bias

-Examples of how to correct for the planning fallacy and confirmation bias

-The phenomenology of creativity

-How do artists reconnect with their creativity when they hit a roadblock

-What cognitive process leads to great artwork and scientific discovery

Full transcript

-References-

Apply Psychology:

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin Books.

Nelson, B., & Rawlings, D. (2007). Its own reward: A phenomenological study of artistic creativity. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 38(2), 217-255.

Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of personality and social psychology, 37(3), 322.

Thomson, K. S., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2016). Investigating an alternate form of the cognitive reflection test. Judgment and Decision Making, 11(1), 99.

Thinking Fast and Slow Wikipedia

Check This Rec:

Miller, G. (2009). Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior. Penguin.