Spencer Greenberg

For many years, I’ve thrown social experiments as part of a group I founded, called Ergo. Our rule: we can never repeat the same event format. Once we’ve used one, it’s dead, forcing each event to be experimental. Here are a few of our bizarre/entertaining past events: 1) Novelty party: each attendee brings something interesting […]

It’s sometimes easy to forget that institutions often arise as solutions to problems. For example: • Journalism uncovers and spreads information that matters to people that would otherwise be hard for them to know. • Education teaches people what they’ll need to know that they won’t easily learn on their own. • Science increases our […]

I was disheartened to discover how many people either never learned the basic mental models or learned garbled versions of them. As a public service, here’s a concise refresher. Which of these did you not already know? • Badhart’s Law: if a large organization doesn’t measure anything, it’s unlikely to achieve anything • The Zareto […]

An issue I have with some claims about “nondual” meditation: some meditators say that they achieve a state of non-duality where they see through the “illusion of the self” and then claim something like “there is no self”. To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have […]

We seem to be living in an age of gurus. They’re all over the place, building large followings in domains like politics, self-improvement, spirituality, religion, activism, philosophy and even (occasionally) science. Gurus may not be more numerous now than in the past, but they seem to now more easily garner audiences of hundreds of thousands […]