Did You Experience Childhood Trauma?

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There's also an incentive for the people writing the paper to make it sound really interesting, right? And then you have to get accepted in a journal and essentially one of the main criteria is like, is this an interesting finding? When they're describing what they found, the description makes that way more interesting than the actual thing itself when you kind of read in detail. I remember one paper on whether people who had experienced trauma in childhood were less likely to explore if they had the option to explore. It was an Apple picking video game where it was actually like seemed like the most boring game ever. Then it was like, oh, people had childhood trauma, like switch trees more often. Like

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Why should we not optimize some things in life? Should some things (e.g., interpersonal relationships) be "off-limits" for optimization? How much time spent being unproductive is good for us? What can we learn by paying attention to our moods? Does science make progress and produce knowledge too slowly? Why is research methodology applied so inconsistently, especially in the social sciences?

Christie Aschwanden is author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, and co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She's the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian, Popular Science, New Scientist, Discover, Science, and NPR.org. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and has received journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Carter Center, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Greater Good Science Center. Learn more about her at christieaschwanden.com or follow her on Instagram at @cragcrest or on Mastodon at @cragscrest.

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