Many years ago, I made a questionable bet. One afternoon, after school, a group of friends and I were huddled in my room, working on a project. Like every other group of kids gathered under the pretense of doing something productive, not much was getting done. As we were talked…

I became interested in experimental psychology after reading a book on how people pursue happiness. Back then, I was fascinated by how researchers could take this completely abstract concept that existed in people’s heads, and not only measure it, but manipulate it, by tweaking the environments their research subjects were…

My favorite professor in graduate school once said (I’m paraphrasing): “Whenever you analyze data and are happy with the results, dig deeper until you’re no longer happy — then you’re probably actually right”. Coming from this intellectual tradition, the number of people who walk around every day, happy with their…

N.B.: Anyi Sun, Jeremy Watssman and I took part in ProtoHack on April Fool’s 2017. The theme was “Evil Genius Ideas”. This was our winning idea. Our initial research revealed that the vast majority of super-villains fail at global domination because of their hired help. 0% of comic book henchmen…