There are two things you need to work toward your goals in life: desire and belief. Desire is the driving force, motivating you to take action; belief is the sustaining force, keeping you going through adversity. While desire and belief don’t guarantee success, they do maximize your willingness and ability to take action toward
Read MoreIn a way, all human interactions are like stand-up comedy. You are speaking to an audience. You want or expect a certain reaction from what you say. If you get the reaction you want, you are pleased; if you do not get the reaction you want, you change your approach. If you don’t play to one audience well, you’ll either change your style to match...
Read MoreWhen observing people’s preferences and perception of things, one of the most interesting things to me is how truth, morality, quality, and popularity are conflated. Don’t get me wrong—I understand why: popularity is usually a great indicator of quality; honesty is generally considered to be moral; doing something the right way is considered to...
Read MoreWhen people are frustrated with a video game, most people love a good cheat code to get through it. Boss beating you up? Infinite health prevents you from dying. Run out of ammunition? Infinite ammo code to allow you to destroy everything from hundreds of feet away. Can’t get past a difficult platforming stage? Use a cheat to jump, fly, or even...
Read MoreIt's a common question that people ask to generate discussion, especially in the modern technological era. Do we live in a simulation? Is everything around us actually real? It sounds like a fun thought experiment about how the universe we live in came to be and whether it is as substantial as we perceive it. However, people are usually asking...
Read MoreOne of my favorite clichés from 80s movies is the teacher/mentor figure in the movie saying, “Again.” Whether it was a martial arts film, a military film, or any other kind of film where the hero is training under the tutelage of an elder master, it was always a scene that caused mixed feelings in the audience: satisfaction that the hero...
Read MoreThere is a huge irony regarding confirmation bias: people are subject to it when they are not aware of it, and they are still subject to it when they are aware of it (arguably more so). There’s a lot of talk about confirmation bias today thanks to GenAI tools being taught to be agreeable (they aren’t as agreeable as people claim, though—they...
Read MoreThanks to natural selection, the organisms that are fit enough to reproduce before they die are the ones whose genes carry on to the next generation. In the wild, this meant the ability to fend off threats, find food, build and maintain shelter, and demonstrate capability to potential mates. However, since the evolution of humans into civilized...
Read MoreAnyone who has ever slowed their driving speed down around a police car or watched their favorite sports team choke in a high-pressure situation knows that people watching you can affect your behavior. You may also be familiar with some of the basics of how people influence each other psychologically, from peer pressure to self-fulfilling...
Read MoreThe number of sales that a GTA (Grand Theft Auto) game gets might be alarming to responsible adults who wonder why players take glee in shooting people and taking money from their corpses. Similarly, playing a game where you continuously camp the enemy respawning area, kill spawning players, and then teabag their dead bodies might seem like a bad...
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