pwno

If your 5-year-old seems to have an unhealthy appetite for chocolate, you’d take measures to prevent them from consuming it. Any time they’d ask you to buy them some, you’d probably refuse their request, even if they begged. You might make sure that any chocolate in the house is well-hidden...

Any intuition-dominant thinker who's struggled with math problems or logic-dominant thinker who's struggled with small-talk knows how difficult and hopeless the experience feels like. For a long time I was an intuition thinker, then I developed a logical thinking style and soon it ended up dominating -- granting me the...

I’ve been taking notes on how I empathize, considering I seem to be more successful at it than others. I broke down my thought-patterns, implied beliefs, and techniques, hoping to unveil the mechanism behind the magic. I shared my findings with a few friends and noticed something interesting: They were...

The community’s awareness and strong understanding of status-motivated behavior in humans is clearly evident. However, I still believe the community focuses too much on a small subset of observable status transactions; namely, status transactions that occur between people of approximately the same status level. My goal is to bring attention...

I used to think that, given two equally capable individuals, the person with more true information can always do at least as good as the other person. And hence, one can only gain from having true information. There is one implicit assumption that makes this line of reason not true...

A few weeks ago I made a draft of a post that was originally intended to be about the same issue addressed in MBlume’s post regarding beneficial false beliefs. Coincidentally, my draft included the same exact hypothetical about entering a club believing you’re the most attractive person in the room...

The LW community knows all too well about the status-seeking tendencies everyone has, not excluding themselves. However, the discussion on status signaling needs to be developed further. Here are some questions I don’t think have been addressed: what can we conclude about people who are blatantly signaling higher status? Should...