Cognitive & Behavioral Science

What you allow your milieu to feed into your mind is what you will be processing. It is what will carve the pathways of your brain. This is perhaps well-understood, in theory if not in practice.

But it is equally important to consider who and what you are sending output to.

Umwelt , as I learned from Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World , is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. How does the organism that is my dad now , not my dad of 5 or 25 or 50 years ago, experience the world? What language assigns itself, or doesn’t, to the surfer and the wave, the son and the daughter? How cold and confused and in... See more

People with an optimistic mindset are associated with various positive health indicators, particularly cardiovascular, but also pulmonary, metabolic, and immunologic. They have a lower incidence of age-related illnesses and reduced mortality levels. Optimism and pessimism are not arbitrary and elusive labels. On the contrary, they are mindsets that... See more

The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our mental and emotional orientation to them, so the moment we dismiss it, we pinch off any further experience. The placebo effect, confirmation bias, and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon are actually the b... See more

Technical debt is a concept taken from software development. Let’s say you’re working on a big complicated program. Robust accounting software, for example. And you need to build a new feature rapidly because customers are up your ass about it. So you build it, and it works, but the build isn’t perfect. There are bugs, it doesn’t fully enmesh with ... See more

Technical debt is whatever “bad” there is in your “good” strategies. It’s the coping mechanisms that are clumsy, the fear that was rational but no longer is, the habit that has outlived its use, etcetera.