Spencer Greenberg | Optimize Everything

Thanks for coming to my site! I'm Spencer, a mathematician and entrepreneur. This is where I record my thoughts about decision making, rationality, education, philosophy, science, and other subjects that I enjoy thinking about. I especially love exploring topics like "How can we modify our expectations to be happier?", "Why do smart, knowledgable people disagree so often?", and "How can we become more rational decision makers?" This site now has 50 articles, all of which can be read below. Hope you enjoy!

Suppose that you have to make a decision that will significantly alter the course of your life. For instance, imagine that you are trying to: decide whether to marry your boyfriend or girlfriend choose between two job offers in different fields decide ...

There are an incredible range of subjects that people disagree about, but only a small number of core reasons that people disagree. When we encounter complex and difficult to resolve disputes, it can be helpful to break them down in terms of these reasons. Thi...

One of the most powerful methods for changing how well you get along with others is to learn to adapt your expectations to how people are likely to behave. In fact, this simple trick is so powerful that it makes it possible for you to have satisfying and mutua...

Does warm water sometimes freeze faster than cold water when placed in the same conditions? "Absolutely no way," I said, a mere minute after I heard the claim. "People sometimes claim that NASA faked the moon landing too," I thought to myself. I pointed out why this claim is impossible. As warm water cools it must eventually reach the same temperature that the cool water started at. From that point on, the warm water will behave just like the cool water, but it will have taken the warm water a while to even get into that state. Freezing occurs at the same temperature for both warm and cold...

You have control over yourself for the next eight seconds. Maybe even the next three minutes. Right now you can choose to go to the gym right now. Right now you can choose to start something difficult (but valuable) that you've been putting off for a long time. But right now you can't choose to go to the gym tomorrow. You definitely can't choose to quit your job a year from now. Because tomorrow if you don't feel like it, you're not going to go to the gym, regardless of what the you of today decided. And a year from now, who the hell knows what you'll want to do. By that point, you may have gi...

Those who grow up in the U.S. are often surprised to find out that in many European countries almost no men are circumcised. In the U.S., where the majority of men have had the procedure performed on them, it is pretty common to hear people say that foreskin is unclean, ugly, or even unhealthy. On the other hand, Europeans tend to find the idea of circumcision bizarre. "Why would you cut off a healthy part of your body?", they wonder. And "How would you feel about a culture that cut off their children's ear lobes?" Even medical experts in the U.S. and Europe can't seem to agree about the bene...

If you live in a building with doormen or doorwomen in New York City (Manhattan, Brooklyn, etc.), you are probably confused right now about how much you are expected to tip them for the holiday season. Nobody I've spoken to seems to really be confident in their answer to this and articles give conflicting advice on what a reasonable bonus is. That's why I made this little program to help solve the problem. Just click below, and answer a few quick questions in order to get an estimate of how much you should tip your doormen. You'll also get a fully automated explanation of how the calculation ...

A while ago I wrote a post about the incredible value of seeking criticism. Today, someone asked me how we should decide when to seek criticism. Or, as he put it, when should we expect other people to have a better understanding of us than we ourselves do? Here are some rules of thumb. It’s generally a good idea to seek criticism from others when: You care about having an accurate understanding of how others perceive you. It is easy to go for decades without realizing that your posture makes you seem like you lack confidence, or that people find the speed at which you talk hard to fol...

I was recently having a conversation with Geoff A. and Jana G. about how to systematically generate surprising ideas.  I then sat down and created this program with them based on our discussion. Take a minute to try it, and generate some insight that you've never considered before! Click here to run Contradictory Insight!

First, click here to figure out your chance of dying tomorrow. Is it worth taking a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying , in order to experience the novel thrill of sky diving? Is a 1 in 500,000 chance of death worth it to go bungee jumping? It's hard to know whether these risks are reasonable, because numbers like 100,000 or 500,000 feel so abstract to us. To think more clearly about these numbers, it helps to get our intuitions engaged. We can start by figuring out the daily risk of dying that we automatically face every day. My "death calculator" tool above will compute yours, as estimated ...

Would you be satisfied believing merely what it's trendy to believe? If so, you can adopt the beliefs of the people of your country, city, and friend group. But if you want to reliably have truer beliefs, you're going to have to use different methods than most people do. Selecting which "epistemic methods" to rely on may be one of the most important decisions you make. Your epistemic methods may determine the career you choose, the political party you vote for, the God or Gods you worship, whose health advice you trust, and whether the money you give away helps people or accomplishes nothin...

We over value the things we have, overreact when we can't have something anymore, and resist change. In other words, we hate loss. But because loss is frequent and inevitable, our hatred of it guarantees that we suffer. Let's take a look at the psychological mechanisms that make us act this way. The Endowment Effect Suppose that Nathan and Mae are two students at the same school. It is randomly determined that Mae will be given a school mug, which she gets to keep. Mae then writes down the least she would have to be paid to be willing to sell the mug. Nathan, likewise, writes down the most ...

Suppose that mega-corp, a large corporation, has hundreds of employees, hundreds of thousands of customers, tens of millions of dollars of cash, a recognized brand, and an experienced CEO. Tiny-upstart, on the other hand, is just two twenty-five year olds with an idea, no funding, no users and no business experience. If mega-corp and tiny-upstart are in the same line of business, then by any reasonable stretch of the imagination tiny-upstart will lose the fight. So how is it that tiny startups seem to keep crushing huge companies? Consider the top 5 most trafficked websites in the U.S...