Upgrade Your Life

Join over 300,000 subscribers and get weekly insights to improve your decision-making

Short of time? Read the key takeaways 📰 News outlets are structurally biased toward negativity. Violent, tragic, and catastrophic stories reliably attract more attention and engagement, giving media organizations strong incentives to emphasize bad news even when positive or improving trends exist in the real world. 📉 Consuming lots of negative news can harm mental health. Many studies link exposure to negatively framed news with worse mood and affect, helping explain why f

Short of time? Read the key takeaways 🧪 Most anecdotes about treatments are very weak evidence. Individual stories of improvement are usually explained by misattribution, placebo effects, natural recovery, or random fluctuations. For this reason, anecdotes should generally be treated with skepticism rather than taken at face value. ⚖️ Under rare but identifiable conditions, a single anecdote can provide strong evidence. When an improvement is accurately reported, dramatic, q

Short of time? Read the key takeaways. 💡 People rely on relational dynamics to judge cultishness.  When people rate groups as cult-like, they focus most on signs of control, isolation, and suppression of outside information rather than on unusual predictions or strange practices. 🔍 Discouraging outside information is the strongest red flag.  The clearest single predictor of perceived cultishness is when a group tries to limit members’ access to alternative viewpoints. Peopl