Tag: #psychology
Writing on GPUs, LLMs, MLOps, Kubernetes — and mindset · 80 posts
80 posts are tagged #psychology; the most recent was published on 2026-08-16.
Often tagged together: #culture 24 #relationships 19 #mindset 18 #communication 16 #paper-review 16
Most read in the last 90 days:
The Power of Small Habits — The 21-Day Myth, the 66-Day Median, the 18-to-254-Day Reality
The claim that a habit takes 21 days has no research behind it. That number came from a plastic surgeon's observation in 1960. The most-cited habit-formation study, from Lally and colleagues, actually reported an average
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#habits#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08How Not to Wait for Motivation — Drive Is Not So Much the Cause of Action as, Often, Its Result
Why does the plan to start once the drive arrives fail structurally? The order of action and mood as shown by a behavioural activation meta-analysis, the autonomy, competence and relatedness of self-determination theory,
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#motivation#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08Metacognition — The Gap Between Feeling You Know and Knowing
Metacognition lost its definition as it became a buzzword. This post returns to the original definition of monitoring and control, and sets out the way the feeling of knowing is manufactured from fluency as a proxy signa
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#metacognition#learning#psychology#2026-08People Do Not Change Easily, and People Change — The Evidence and Speed of Personality Change
The statement that people do not change and the statement that people can change are both true, and that tension is the subject of this post. The rank-order stability of the Big Five that holds throughout adulthood, the
2026-08-16 · 12 min read #mindset#personality#psychology#self-improvement#2026-08Is Comfort From a Machine Real? — Why We Need to Change the Question
People really do feel better after talking to an AI. Dismissing that as an illusion isn't just rude — it's inaccurate. This piece looks at why responsiveness feels like being cared for, and digs into what chatbot-based m
2026-08-02 · 14 min read #humanities#ai#psychology#loneliness#relationshipsThe Structure of Persuasion — It's Sequence, Not Eloquence, That Moves People
Persuasion fails at the level of structure long before it fails at the level of phrasing. This post is organized around four axes: establishing a shared premise before you make your claim, putting your strongest evidence
2026-08-02 · 17 min read #career#persuasion#communication#influence#psychologyHow the Stanford Prison Experiment Fell Apart — What the Archives Revealed
The 1971 prison experiment run by Philip Zimbardo entered textbooks and feature films as the story of ordinary students who became brutal guards in six days. Yet the original data appeared not in a top-tier journal but i
2026-07-26 · 9 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#replication#research-ethicsThe Experiment Where One Dollar Beat Twenty — Cognitive Dissonance and Sixty Years of Rebuttal
Participants were made to do a deliberately boring task, then asked to lie about it. One group was paid one dollar, the other twenty dollars. The people who later rated the task as more enjoyable were the ones who had be
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#decision-making#mindsetThe Milgram Obedience Experiment Reexamined — the Other Side of That 65 Percent
The Milgram experiment, begun at Yale in 1961, has been summarized in one sentence for decades: 65 percent of participants went all the way to the maximum voltage. But that figure is the value from one of some 24 variati
2026-07-26 · 11 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#obedience#research-ethicsThe 38 Were Never There — The Myth of the Bystander Effect and the Real Experiment
The 1964 New York Times article reporting that 38 neighbors merely watched while Kitty Genovese was murdered gave birth to the concept of the bystander effect. Then a 2007 review in American Psychologist established that
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #psychology#paper-review#social-psychology#ethics#communicationOn Getting Older — Where the Common Story and the Data Come Apart
Across data from many countries, the age at which life satisfaction is lowest sits somewhere around forty-seven, and after that it mostly rises. The U-curve does have serious critics, though. This post walks through the
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#aging#psychology#life#healthHow to Decide Well — A Good Decision and a Good Outcome Are Not the Same Thing
When the last pass of the Super Bowl was intercepted, everyone called it the worst call in history. But grading a decision by its outcome erases almost everything there was to learn from it. Here is the idea of resulting
2026-07-26 · 12 min read #mindset#decision-making#psychology#productivity#self-improvementLosses Hurt Twice as Much as Gains — The Prospect Theory Original and the 45 Years Since
The sentence "people feel the pain of a loss twice as strongly as the pleasure of a gain" has become a fixture of negotiation textbooks and pricing memos. Open the source — the 1979 Econometrica paper by Kahneman and Tve
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #psychology#paper-review#behavioral-economics#decision-making#moneyWhy Being Scared Feels Good — The Psychology and Grammar of Horror
People pay money to be frightened. This piece starts with three accounts of that paradox — the excitation transfer described by Dolf Zillmann, threat simulation inside a safe environment, and a study that measured real h
2026-07-26 · 13 min read #storytelling#horror#psychology#film#cultureThe Dunning-Kruger Effect — That Famous Graph Is Not in the Original Paper
The Peak of Mount Stupid graph that circulates online appears nowhere in the 1999 paper by Dunning and Kruger. The original was four studies that gave Cornell undergraduates tasks in humor, logic and grammar and compared
2026-07-26 · 9 min read #psychology#paper-review#metacognition#self-assessment#statisticsDoes Willpower Really Run Out — From the Radish Experiment to the Replication Crisis, with Publication Bias in Code
"Willpower drains like a muscle." The ego depletion theory once looked like one of the most solid ideas in psychology. From the 1998 experiment in which students who ate radishes in a room full of chocolate aroma gave up
2026-07-20 · 7 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#willpower#replicationHow Far Do Income and Happiness Rise Together — The Full Story of the 75,000 Dollar Debate
"Beyond an annual income of 75,000 dollars, happiness stops rising." Kahneman and his 2010 study turned that into common sense. Then in 2021 Killingsworth, using real-time smartphone data, reported the exact opposite — h
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#happiness#moneyGrowth Mindset, Between Hype and Truth — From the Praise Experiment to a Nation-Scale Test
Growth mindset — the idea that believing ability can change makes grades go up — swept through education, and the hype grew just as fast. This post restores the starting point, the 1998 praise experiment by Mueller and D
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#growth#educationThe Original Paper Behind the 10,000-Hour Debate — Berlin Violinists and the 12% Truth
Open the 1993 Ericsson paper where the 10,000-hour rule was born, and you find a picture quite different from the one the bestsellers told. This installment reads, in order, the actual design of the Berlin music academy
2026-07-20 · 6 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#deliberate-practice#expertiseDo Not Reread — Close the Book and Recall: The Original Testing-Effect Paper and the Spaced-Repetition Algorithm
Rereading your notes feels like knowing, but the exam exposes the gap. Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiment shows exactly why: rereading wins a test five minutes later, then loses badly to repeated retrieval (testing
2026-07-20 · 7 min read #psychology#paper-review#mindset#learning#memory