A new year is an opportunity for a reset, in which many of us resolve to be wiser than we were last year. So, to help you kickstart 2025 a little wiser, I’ve compiled 25 ideas I think will prove useful to you. The ideas come from many times, places, and disciplines; the only thing they have in common is that I think they’re useful, whether by improving your decision-making or helping you understand a crucial topic.
Concision is the goal here, so my descriptions will only give you a summary of each idea. If you want to know more, click on the titles.
Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.
2. Enshittification:
Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows you what it wants you to see.
The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
— Judith Butler, Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time (1997)
Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked – morally, politically, economically, artistically – whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.
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Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.
Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone . . . To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, introduction to Samuel Butler's Erewhon
7. Protege Effect:
The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.
As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages—and prices—in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labor-intensive services like healthcare & college tuition cost more.
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The optimal state of mind is neither optimism, which leaves you unprepared for adversity, nor pessimism, which destroys motivation, but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.
Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.
Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realize poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.
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One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.
13. Pie Fallacy:
Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
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15. Goal Dilution Effect:
We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.
16. Bias Blindspot:
We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people reply to tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.
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17. Blue Dot Effect:
The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.
18. Overview Effect:
Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.
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“[O]n that fragile little sphere … all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.”
— Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell
19. Rumsfeld Matrix:
There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don't know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.
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Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). It’s why students are taught things they’ll never use — what they learn isn’t as important as demonstrating they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.
GLP-1s like Ozempic are threatening limbic capitalism by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with 1+ family members on a GLP-1 is spending ~10% less on chips & cakes. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.
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An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously wouldn’t have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.
Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient's right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).
Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.
“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.
Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion:
Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’ve been presented here to make you think, not as rigid rules to follow in all circumstances.
That’s all for now. For more lists of useful concepts, check out this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
Thanks for reading, and happy new year.
G.