Life Experiments and Philosophical Thinking (with Arden Koehler)

1. Focus Career on Doing Good

Arden Kaler, a researcher at 80,000 Hours, advises focusing your career on doing as much good as possible. This approach helps you make the most difference in the world by addressing global issues.

2. Combine Personal Fit with Impact

When choosing a career, integrate your personal interests, skills, and what you’re good at with high-impact opportunities. This ensures both success and significant positive contribution.

3. Invest More Time in Career Planning

Dedicate a greater proportion of your time to the “deciding phase” of your career, considering both personal preferences and global impact. This initial investment can make the subsequent “doing” phase much easier and more fulfilling.

4. Actively Seek Career Opportunities

Instead of only considering visible job openings, proactively search for and create new opportunities. This involves looking beyond official channels and exploring “hidden doors” that might not be immediately apparent.

5. Proactively Create Job Opportunities

Reach out directly to companies or individuals, even if no official positions are advertised, to explore potential roles. This involves initiating conversations and demonstrating your skills to potentially create a new position.

6. Start Doing Desired Work First

If you aspire to a specific career, begin performing aspects of that work before seeking formal employment or payment. This allows you to gain experience and test your fit for the role.

7. Conduct Cheap Career Experiments

Before committing to a career path, perform low-cost experiments, such as spending a few hours a week trying out the work. This provides a more realistic understanding of the daily tasks and challenges.

8. Focus on Daily Details of Careers

When researching career paths, inquire about the typical day-to-day activities and time allocation of people in those roles. This helps avoid being misled by abstract concepts and understand the practical realities.

9. Run Life Experiments Regularly

Continuously conduct small experiments in your life to test assumptions and discover new insights about yourself and the world. This fosters a mindset of continuous learning and adaptation.

10. Formulate and Test Explicit Hypotheses

Make explicit predictions about outcomes and then actively seek to confirm or disconfirm them through experience. This practice helps in learning and updating your understanding of the world.

11. Prioritize Doing Right Over Perfection

Shift focus from obsessing over the quality of an argument or project to ensuring it aligns with doing the right thing and creating value. This encourages pragmatic action over endless refinement.

12. Adopt an MVP/Iterative Work Style

Develop a minimal viable product (MVP) or initial version of a project, even if imperfect, to gather feedback and learn quickly. This approach allows for rapid iteration and improvement rather than striving for perfection upfront.

13. Differentiate Argument Games from Truth

Recognize the distinction between winning an argument or being persuasive and genuinely seeking the truth about reality. This helps in focusing efforts on what truly matters.

14. Interrogate All Arguments

Develop the skill to critically question every premise and conclusion in an argument. This helps in identifying potential flaws and assessing the true strength of a claim.

15. Develop Pattern Recognition for Flaws

Learn to intuitively spot common logical fallacies and cognitive biases in arguments. This allows for quicker identification of potentially unsound reasoning.

16. Study Logical Fallacies and Biases

Actively learn about various logical fallacies and cognitive biases to recognize their patterns in real-world arguments and information. This enhances critical thinking and helps avoid manipulation.

17. Practice Argument Critique with Others

Engage in conversations where you and others actively challenge and poke holes in each other’s arguments. This hands-on practice helps in internalizing critical thinking skills.

18. Deconstruct Own Persuasive Arguments

Regularly review and critically analyze your own strongly held beliefs and the arguments you use to support them. This practice, like tearing apart an old essay, helps identify personal biases and fallacies.

19. Treat Persuasive Arguments as Mysteries

If an argument is highly persuasive but leads to a surprising or seemingly impossible conclusion, view it as an indicator of an underlying mystery to be solved. This encourages deeper investigation rather than immediate acceptance or rejection.

20. Update Beliefs Cautiously

When encountering a persuasive argument for a surprising conclusion, update your beliefs incrementally rather than immediately committing. This acknowledges the human tendency for reasoning errors.

21. Compare Conclusion Strength to Argument

Evaluate the strength of your belief in an argument’s validity against the strength of your belief that its conclusion is wrong. This helps in deciding how much to update your views.

22. Resist Immediate Persuasion

Be wary of immediately accepting arguments from highly persuasive individuals, especially if your intuition signals something is amiss. This protects against manipulation and allows for independent verification.

23. Embrace Heuristics and Shortcuts

Recognize the value of practical shortcuts and rules of thumb for navigating complex situations in life. These “fast and loose” methods are often more useful than striving for perfect logical validity.

24. Value Empirical Examples as Evidence

Accept that in many real-world scenarios, a collection of examples demonstrating a pattern can serve as valuable evidence, even if not a logically valid proof. This helps in understanding messy, difficult-to-think-about problems.

25. Use Flexible, Useful Mental Models

Develop and apply simple, flexible models of how things work, understanding that while they are technically “wrong,” they can be incredibly useful for navigating life. This approach prioritizes utility over formal correctness.

26. Research and Consult Doctor Before Supplements

Before trying any new herbs or supplements, thoroughly research potential side effects, best brands, and interactions with existing medications, and always discuss plans with your doctor. This ensures safety and informed decision-making.

27. Experiment with Supplements Cautiously

Approach trying new herbs or supplements with an experimental mindset, observing effects on your body, but always with caution and prior research. This allows for personal discovery while minimizing risks.

28. Acknowledge Biological Individuality

Recognize that people’s bodies can react very differently to medications, supplements, and nutritional changes. This explains why universal advice may not apply and why personal experimentation is valuable.

29. Distinguish True Effects from Placebo

When evaluating the effect of a substance, consider how unlikely the observed effect is to occur naturally. A highly unusual and reliable effect is stronger evidence against it being merely a placebo.

30. Understand True Placebo Effect

Recognize that a true placebo effect is caused by the expectation of feeling better, distinct from other factors like regression to the mean or reporting bias. This clarifies its actual power.

31. Leverage Placebo for Mental States

Understand that the placebo effect can genuinely reduce anxiety, decrease hopelessness, make pain less unpleasant, and change attitudes or interpretations of sensations. This highlights its utility for mental well-being.

32. Recognize Placebo Limitations

Be aware that placebos are unlikely to cure physical ailments like viruses, bacteria, or cancer, or to directly treat mental or physical disorders. This sets realistic expectations for their power.

33. Practice Cold Meditation for Pain Reinterpretation

Engage in practices like “cold meditation” to experience raw sensations without immediately labeling them as unpleasant or bad. This trains the mind to reinterpret pain and reduce suffering.

34. Explore Mind-Body Connection Through Self-Experimentation

Experiment with your own mind’s ability to influence bodily sensations and perceptions. This can lead to a deeper understanding of the mind-body connection and introduce you to practices like meditation.

35. Practice Multi-Sensory Mental Imagery

Go beyond visual imagination and practice mentally simulating other sensory experiences, such as sounds, heat, smells, or even an itch. This expands your mental capabilities and awareness.