Does astrology work? We tested the ability of 152 astrologers to see if they could demonstrate genuine astrological skill.

Here is how the study was designed and what we found (including a result that really surprised me):

🧵 Back in January, we ran a study trying to predict 37 facts about people's lives using their astrological sun signs (whether they are Pisces, Aries, etc.) While personality tests were able to predict these facts decently well, sun signs couldn't predict even a single 1 of them...

There’s a really interesting debate raging in the field of genetics about how heritable different human traits are. It could end up overturning 100 years of research:
🧵 First off, what is heritability? It’s the fraction of the variance of a trait (in a particular population) that’s caused by genetic differences.

Everyone agrees that height is at least fairly heritable since, in most populations, much of the variation is attributable to genes.

Are there false memories that many people share (i.e., a "Mandela Effect")? For instance, is it true that people systematically misremember which of these is the actual "Mr. Monopoly" man? We recently ran a replication of a study designed to test these claims:

[megathread]🧵 Before I get into the results of the study, here's a pop quiz. See if you can tell which of these is real and which is a collective delusion (the answers are at the bottom of the thread):

(1 of 6) Which one is the real C-3PO?

How genetically heritable are human traits such as height, physical health, mental health, education, religiosity, conservatism, IQ, and personality, and what do these heritabilities actually mean?

[heritability megathread] 🧵 We all know that some things are determined by our genetics (nature) and some by our environment (e.g., nurture). But most things are somewhere in between.

Where do things like physical health, mental health, and personality fall on this spectrum from nature to nurture?

Important but often overlooked: when groups differ a small amount in their means, they may differ *dramatically* in their tails.

For instance, in a personality study, we found males to have a little bit lower average compassion score than females (1.4 vs. 2)

[tails thread] 🧵 Small differences like this in averages are typically not noticeable or important. Most people are not in the tails.

If you knew only someone's compassion level and had to guess their sex from it, you'd be wrong more than one-third of the time (predicting optimally)!

Sometimes, groups are genuinely found to differ a bit, on average. For instance, it may be found that men are a bit more dishonest than women or that Chinese kids outperform Americans at math.

At this point, people tend to go off the rails in one of 2 ways:

🧵 Group 1: Oversimplifiers. These are people who greatly exaggerate the difference.

They ignore that the gap is (i) small and (ii) only a difference in averages (not applying to all individuals). They go around saying it's proven that "X's are like this" (e.g., men are liars).

Four widely believed numbers that claim to be scientific but which actually aren't:

[bullshit 'scientific' numbers megathread🧵] 1) "10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve world-class performance in anything."

This false idea was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in "Outliers." The scientist whose work it's based on (Anders Ericsson) has explained it's a misinterpretation of his work. What's true?

Before Twitter locked down its API, I started an analysis to figure out (empirically) "the 'greatest' tweets ever from intellectuals."

Here's an abbreviated version based on the analysis I was able to do:

[24 'greatest' tweets from intellectuals megathread] 🧵 1) 🥇 Award for the best "adorable personification of an animal" goes to @juliagalef

Fake experts are everywhere on the internet. How do you spot a reliable expert and differentiate them from unreliable fakes?

Here are 12 signs to look for, each of which can provide evidence of a proclaimed "experts" reliability:

[expertise megathread] 🧵 1) 🦉They have deep factual knowledge

Experts possess extensive knowledge of relevant information, demonstrating a command of the (non-disputed) facts. It's far easier to tell if someone knows the non-disputed facts than to evaluate whether they are right on the disputed points

Can you tell whether a correlation between two things is meaningful from a scatter plot? Well, take a look at this example (see image).

Do you see a meaningful relationship between x and y?

Take a look at the thread below for the "answer": The scatter plot above reflects a correlation of r=0.2.

Okay, but is that a "meaningful" correlation?

Whether a correlation is "meaningful" depends on two things:

What are IQ test questions that people get right at different IQ levels (e.g., 100, 110, 120, 130, etc.)? Some folks have asked me to pull up data about this from a big study we ran on intelligence. These are all very rough approximations, but here you go:

IQ question thread 🧵 A question indicative of (very approximately) 100 IQ

Are people who make more money happier? Let me tell you a tale with many twists and turns about the scientific investigation of this question - along with a surprise ending that you're unlikely to uncover even if you read the papers on this topic

Income/happiness mega thread 🧵 One way to measure "happiness" is to ask questions like "How satisfied are you with your life?" or "On a ladder numbered 0 to 10, where 10 is the best possible life for you, and 0 is the worst, where do you place yourself?"

Questions like these measure "life satisfaction."

Gaslighting, where someone causes another person to doubt their feelings and senses, can cause psychological damage.

There's an opposite thing, though, that can also be damaging. As far as I know, it has no name. I call it Lightgassing.

Here's how it lightgassing works:
🧵 Lightgassing is when one person agrees with or validates another person's false beliefs or misconceptions in order to be supportive.

Unlike gaslighting, a tactic of jerks and abusers, lightgassing is an (unintentionally harmful) tactic of friends and supporters.

A worldview typically consists of at minimum 4 components involving answers to these questions:

1) What is good?
2) Where do good and bad come from?
3) Who deserves the good?
4) How can you do good or be good?

Here's a mega thread to help you understand 10 common worldviews:
🧵 2) New Atheists

I just encountered a dramatic, real-life example of Simpson's paradox!

In our giant intelligence study, we found a perplexing result: a negative correlation (r=-0.27) between how much effort participants reported putting into doing the tasks and their IQ scores. What gives?
🧵 Of course, normally, you'd think that more effort means better scores on a test, so why the negative correlation?

Perhaps, we reasoned, people with higher IQs are putting in much less effort, which produces the counterintuitive finding?

But then we found another surprise:

People often interpret p-values as indicating the chance a hypothesis is true. This isn't valid. But the chance a hypothesis is true, given that you found a statistically significant (p<0.05) result, is a very reasonable thing to want to know! See the image for the answer!

🧵 Some takeaways from the image:
• the biggest problem with small sample sizes is that they lead to lower "power", meaning that you'll fail to find many true hypotheses

12 metaphors to give the flavor of why sufficiently advanced A.I. could be extremely dangerous:

1. Suppose a new species evolves on earth with the same intellectual and planning abilities relative to us that we have relative to chimps. Do chimps continue to run the show?
🧵🧵🧵 2. Suppose aliens show up on earth that are 1000x times smarter than the smartest among us at all cognitive tasks. They have specific goals that aren't fully aligned with ours, are completely unconstrained by human morality, and don't value our survival. What happens next?

I've been thinking that an interesting way to see what someone famous believes and how their beliefs and priorities have changed over time is to look at their popular tweets year by year. As a test case, I attempted this with the tweets of Jordan Peterson (@jordanbpeterson):

🧵 Jordan Peterson in 2016, Part 1

"Lesson from The Tower of Babel: You can't maintain a culture on diversity because every person will speak his/her/their/zher own language."

"Postmodernism: institutionalized state supported ingratitude and resentment."

What makes some people look younger than others as they age? In a fascinating study, researchers took photos of 186 pairs of identical twins, guessed their ages, and looked at what lifestyle factors correlate with one identical twin being perceived as older.

The results: 🧵 One of the strongest associations with perceived age was whether a person smoked: every 10 years of smoking was associated with a 2.5-year older appearance. See attached plot and facial images.

Here are 11 of the most valuable things we created (at ClearerThinking.org) in 2022. All of them are free, and you can use them now if you're interested!

-- INTERACTIVE TOOLS --

1. Surpass Self-Limiting Beliefs - programs.clearerthinking.org/surpass_self-l… 2. Uncover Your Guiding Principles -
programs.clearerthinking.org/uncover_your_g…

3. Replace unhelpful coping strategies - programs.clearerthinking.org/replace_unhelp…

I'd like to tell you about one of the biggest and most effortful studies on behavior change ever conducted and its strange findings (that may not even be obvious if you read the paper - I only realized its implications on my 2nd reading!)

Let's begin:

[study megathread]🧵 The study had 61,000 participants, all with gym memberships. 30 scientists worked in small teams to develop interventions, each aiming to increase gym attendance over 4-weeks. This resulted in 53 interventions to test. A promising setup to figure out what truly changes behavior!