Spencer Greenberg || Effective Altruism, Mental Health, & Habit Change

Sep 10, 2020

In this engaging dialogue, Spencer Greenberg, an entrepreneur and mathematician focused on mental health, shares his insights on Effective Altruism. He discusses innovative approaches to decision-making and mental health, emphasizing the role of emotions. Spencer introduces practical techniques like behavioral activation for managing depression and highlights the power of automatic if-then rules to foster positive habits. He also critiques personality models and offers frameworks for behavior change, making complex ideas accessible and actionable for listeners.

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INSIGHT

Effective Altruism Defined

Effective altruism is a community focused on maximizing positive impact.
It involves evaluating actions' effectiveness and defining "good" to make informed decisions.

INSIGHT

The Role of Emotions

Emotions are important in effective altruism, especially concerning people's well-being.
However, rationality is key in decision-making to avoid emotional biases.

ANECDOTE

Sparkwave and Mental Health

Spencer Greenberg's company, Sparkwave, focuses on mental health, a major source of suffering.
They created Uplift, a depression self-help app, and MindEase for anxiety management.

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Today it is great to have Spencer Greenberg on the podcast. Spencer is an entrepreneur and mathematician and founder of Spark Wave — a software foundry which creates novel software products from scratch, designed to help solve problems in the world using social science. For example, scalable care for depression and anxiety and technology for accelerating and improving social science research. He also founded clearerthinking.org, which offers free tools and training programs used by over 250, 000 people which are designed to help you improve decision making and increase positive behaviors. Spencer has a PhD in Applied Math from NYU with a specialty in Machine Learning. Spencer’s work has been featured by numerous major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Independent, Lifehacker, Fast Companyand the Financial Times.

Check out sparkwave.tech/conditions-for-change where you can apply the results of scientific studies to your habit development, from making a decision to cultivate a habit, to taking action, and finally, continuing that habit.

Time Stamps

[00:01:40] How the Effective Altruism movement works

[00:02:55] The role of emotions in Effective Altruism

[00:04:03] How Spencer applies Effective Altruism in his work and companies

[00:06:27] How cultivating automatic if-then rules can improve your life

[00:10:42] How to handle depression using behavioral activation

[00:12:05] Introversion and the hierarchical nature of personality

[00:14:58] Personality traits that are not captured by the Big Five model

[00:18:04] How it is easier to present a scientific finding compared to explaining that finding

[00:20:20] The “psychological immune system” and the five categories of behaviors for dealing with difficult situations

[00:20:55] Facing reality and clarifying distortions of thinking

[00:21:27] Feeling-based and emotion-based strategies for dealing with difficulty

[00:22:10] Action-based strategies for dealing with difficulty

[00:23:27] Refocusing techniques for dealing with difficulty

[00:23:42] Reframing and finding the silver lining

[00:29:47] Whether or not the Big Five personality traits are inherently valenced (i.e. positive or negative)

[00:31:03] Personality as a distribution of traits

[00:33:22] Finding optimal levels of different personality traits

[00:33:59] Tips for forming new habits

[00:38:22] How to determine why behavioral change is not happening

[00:42:07] Tips and heuristics for sparking structured and unstructured creativity

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