Spencer Greenberg, founder of ClearerThinking.org, shares insights from a study on habit strategies. They discuss the accuracy of personality tests, techniques for hacking habits, the importance of aligning actions with values, the role of intuition in decision-making, defining wisdom, and the motivations behind evil actions.

They discuss the connection between money and happiness, the significance of hype in impactful projects, spotting untrustworthy individuals, and the value of collective wisdom in research. Also covered are insights on decision-making errors, reproductive science integrity, and finding meaning in parenting.

Read the full transcript here. How can we leverage our own limitations? Why does converting the average human lifespan from years to other units (like weeks) give us such a shock? What are the most useful kinds of reactions to contemplating our own mortality? What causes our feeling that time speeds up as we age? What is the "importance trap"? How should we handle the frustration or disappointment caused by our inability to do everything we want or need to do? Why is patience important in the world today? What information sets are available to us in various communication media? Is there — and should there be — a disconnect between the "meatspace" world and the internet world? Which kinds of self-help advice are actually useful?Oliver Burkeman's new book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, published in the US on August 10, 2021. He is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and he wrote a long-running weekly column on psychology, productivity, and self-help culture for The Guardian newspaper called "This Column Will Change Your Life." His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can pre-order Four Thousand Weeks and sign up for Oliver's email newsletter "The Imperfectionist" at oliverburkeman.com or find him on Twitter at @oliverburkeman. StaffSpencer Greenberg — Host / DirectorJosh Castle — ProducerRyan Kessler — Audio EngineerUri Bram — FactotumJanaisa Baril — TranscriptionistMusicBroke for FreeJosh WoodwardLee RosevereQuiet Music for Tiny Robotswowamusiczapsplat.comAffiliatesClearer ThinkingGuidedTrackMind EasePositlyUpLift[Read more]

Spencer Greenberg and Eric discuss how to integrate behavior change with your values. They explore the importance of focusing on the process rather than the end goal and share practice strategies for forming habits that will help you live according to your values. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Identify the underlying values that lead to your decisions, and build a strategy around them Recognize the crucial role regular self-reflection plays in cultivating these improved practices Understand the significance of prioritizing the process, not just the end goal in forming habits Navigate the next steps when facing conflicting values Understand the various frameworks for behavior change and the ten conditions for change To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same result if the experiments are repeated.Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they're actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because journals are more likely to publish positive than negative results, you might be reading about the one time an experiment worked, while the 10 times was run and got a 'null result' never saw the light of day. The resulting phenomenon of publication bias is one we've understood for 60 years.Today's repeat guest, social scientist and entrepreneur Spencer Greenberg, has followed these issues closely for years.Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. He recently checked whether p-values, an indicator of how likely a result was to occur by pure chance, could tell us how likely an outcome would be to recur if an experiment were repeated. From his sample of 325 replications of psychology studies, the answer seemed to be yes. According to Spencer, "when the original study's p-value was less than 0.01 about 72% replicated — not bad. On the other hand, when the p-value is greater than 0.01, only about 48% replicated. A pretty big difference." To do his bit to help get these numbers up, Spencer has launched an effort to repeat almost every social science experiment published in the journals Nature and Science, and see if they find the same results. But while progress is being made on some fronts, Spencer thinks there are other serious problems with published research that aren't yet fully appreciated. One of these Spencer calls 'importance hacking': passing off obvious or unimportant results as surprising and meaningful. Spencer suspects that importance hacking of this kind causes a similar amount of damage to the issues mentioned above, like p-hacking and publication bias, but is much less discussed. His replication project tries to identify importance hacking by comparing how a paper’s findings are described in the abstract to what the experiment actually showed. But the cat-and-mouse game between academics and journal reviewers is fierce, and it's far from easy to stop people exaggerating the importance of their work. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rob and Spencer discuss the above as well as: • When you should and shouldn't use intuition to make decisions. • How to properly model why some people succeed more than others. • The difference between “Soldier Altruists” and “Scout Altruists.” • A paper that tested dozens of methods for forming the habit of going to the gym, why Spencer thinks it was presented in a very misleading way, and what it really found. • Whether a 15-minute intervention could make people more likely to sustain a new habit two months later. • The most common way for groups with good intentions to turn bad and cause harm. • And Spencer's approach to a fulfilling life and doing good, which he calls “Valuism.” Here are two flashcard decks that might make it easier to fully integrate the most important ideas they talk about: • The first covers 18 core concepts from the episode • The second includes 16 definitions of unusual terms.Chapters:Rob’s intro (00:00:00)The interview begins (00:02:16)Social science reform (00:08:46)Importance hacking (00:18:23)How often papers replicate with different p-values (00:43:31)The Transparent Replications project (00:48:17)How do we predict high levels of success? (00:55:26)Soldier Altruists vs. Scout Altruists (01:08:18)The Clearer Thinking podcast (01:16:27)Creating habits more reliably (01:18:16)Behaviour change is incredibly hard (01:32:27)The FIRE Framework (01:46:21)How ideology eats itself (01:54:56)Valuism (02:08:31)“I dropped the whip” (02:35:06)Rob’s outro (02:36:40) Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell and Milo McGuire Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Read the full transcript here. Why are colleges and universities valuable to societies? Why does formal post-secondary education seem unnecessary for some fields like programming, where a person can learn everything they need from internet resources? Do universities have a monopoly on credentials? If so, is that monopoly warranted and desirable, or does it stifle innovation and reduce competition? Why have tuition costs been skyrocketing over the past few decades? How does the quantity and quality of university research compare to military and private research? Are universities too political? Should the humanities still be taught in universities? How must colleges and universities evolve to keep pace with technological and economic change?Nicholas Dirks, President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, is an internationally renowned historian and anthropologist. He leads the Academy in promoting science-based solutions to world challenges, including pandemics and global warming. His work at the Academy facilitates the dissemination of scientific information, supports broad access to science education, studies counter bias in academia and the laboratory, and supports scientists across all stages of their careers. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has taught at UC Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. StaffSpencer Greenberg — Host / DirectorJosh Castle — ProducerRyan Kessler — Audio EngineerUri Bram — FactotumWeAmplify — TranscriptionistsMiles Kestran — MarketingMusicBroke for FreeJosh WoodwardLee RosevereQuiet Music for Tiny Robotswowamusiczapsplat.comAffiliatesClearer ThinkingGuidedTrackMind EasePositlyUpLift[Read more]

The host discusses his key takeaways after 200 episodes, focusing on improving conversations, updating views, and asking great questions. Listeners are thanked for their support, and feedback is encouraged through a new survey.

Spencer Greenberg discusses causation without correlation, money and happiness, hype vs value, and more. Topics include balancing hype and value for success, recognizing acclimated problems, exploring values in decision-making, and supporting individuals with false perceptions or delusions.

In this episode we sit down with Spencer Greenberg to discuss how to be better critical thinkers using his FIRE method and other insights from his website, ClearerThinking.orgPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

Spencer Greenberg, an expert on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals, discusses the need for better research practices in social science, such as data sharing and replication projects. He also explores the concept of importance hacking in science practice and introduces the FIRE framework for making decisions. Other topics include strategies for changing habits, factors contributing to success, and the challenges of studying success.