For my new followers, an overview of what I consider my most important topic areas:
Cognition habitualization: Most cognition can be trained by repetition to be more automatic, less effortful, and eventually less conscious; or untrained by finding ways to either avoid triggering that cognition or to redirect to other cognition, until it becomes less automatic and more effortful. This is well-established in psychology and neurology, but I figured out how to do this on my own as a little kid, so I've seen first-hand that you can take this much further than most people realize. Brains do what they train.
Cognemes: Cognition can be thought of as being made up of pieces that are subject to natural selection, and this is useful for understanding some things in the world and in human experience. There are at least three interacting dimensions of natural selection which are very relevant to us - in biology, in culture, and in the minds - each with different "selectable pieces" - genes, memes, and cognemes.
Cognetic openings: We can end up with arrangements of habitualized cognition that seem fine to us and normally work fine and as expected, but which can go wrong or motivate the wrong action with just a tiny change - such as a single cogneme added or missing at the wrong moment. A lot of problems in people's cognition and choices can be seen as cognetic openings to some cognemes causing bad consequences, and some problems can only be seen with that lens.
The empiric definition of logic: Philosophically, this elegantly frees logic from depending on any arbitrary axioms, and enables what I think is the most sound and justifiable "from first principles" build up to any other right idea. Psychologically, it reveals that our sense of logic is also at least in large part empirically developed. For me, this idea was key to even conceiving of countless other ideas.
Prediction trees: Our brains - and in particular almost all of our emotions, motivations, and reactions - can be explained almost entirely by the brain learning to treat some things as predictive of other things, and then reacting to those predictions preemptively and automatically, before or entirely without any critical review of whether those predictions are accurate in the current situation.
Decision shares: If we iteratively improve on democratic governance and try to solve problems with it, or optimize a benevolent non-democracy that cares about its people, or take money further as a mechanism of coordination, they all converge on a way that we can do thoroughly better as a society in almost every way imaginable.
Idea-fitting, possibility collapse, and "thinking in probabilities": Good thinking involves trying on many different possible interpretations, and ideally striving to hold as many conceivable truths or versions of events in mind, giving them more or less weight based on how much contrivance and unfounded assumptions it would take to make it consistent with your experienced universe so far. Most people miss many, many possibilities in their idea-fitting, and there are lots of thinking techniques and improvements that can make thinking of so many possibilities more practical.










