• Coherence is the enemy: resist the urge to surrender to convenient answers to life's irreducible paradoxes.

• Many copes are retreats from dissonance

  • Woo woo stuff: vague concepts are molds to accept vague feelings. Their evidence works by recruiting availability and confirmation bias. They are never predictive. If you took them seriously you'd rearrange your life the way a religious fundamentalist does. At best you are hacking the salutary effects of placebo at worse you are uncalibrating yourself leading to bad decisions not to mention wasting your time and attention of pseudoscience. Tetlock: vague wording is elastic, stretched to fit over one’s self-image.
    • This Is Why You Shouldn’t Humor Woo Woo (it’s actually condescendingly privileged to humor it because if you know better you don’t bear the cost of it)
  • "Mind is so powerful as evidenced by placebo effect. The link between expectations and beliefs is astounding"- Dan Ariely
  • Anti-nihilism: Good taste and values, If everything is good then nothing is good.

• "True confidence is living in uncertainty. The winner is not the one who always makes the best decisions or looks the best...the winner is the one who takes the risk, will interact with some degree of faith and then eats the consequences." ~Phil Stutz

• The practitioner’s knowledge seems to be happily incomplete, inchoate and often illegible, while producing better results than the more rigorous, complete and predictive theories of the theorists. — Rohit Krishnan

• Pragmatism: “Figuring it out is kind of helpful but actually behaving differently is hugely helpful” Dave Evans:

  The Slatestar story:

  A patient was crippled by OCD. Every time she left the house she needed to go home because she thought she left the hair dryer on. The doctors racked their brains trying to get to the origin of the problem until someone suggested a highly effective but, seemingly unsatisfying solution — she could just bring the blow dryer with her:

  Approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,…But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.

Antidotes to Paradox

• “name it to tame it” and move on
• You can’t just tear down and destroy leaving a vacuum. You build scaffolding first, create a replacement, give something beautiful for everyone to behold. You won’t need to tear down the old. You can’t anyway. It just crumbles.
• Recognize Nash Equilibriums (no better strategy even if you knew others changed their action). People focus on short-term incentives leading to multi-polar traps (Moloch). Suppose you live in a house with strangers. This is vulnerable to classic coordination problems like freeriding and tragedy of the commons. It’s typical to designate responsibility with a chore wheel. But what if we re-framed the responsibility as a “brag sheet”? This framing nudges the cultural values of the group towards more pro-social behavior. The approach is worth considering whenever trying to align a group. Perhaps such experiments do not make sense at scale but at local scales we should avoid lazily accepting large-scale models that are forced to make costlier compromises.
• The seduction of “why”