Spencer Greenberg
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Latest posts
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Why Do Victims Often Not Report Sexual Harassment Or Assault?
This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on October 1, 2026 This is my final essay in a series examining sexual harassment and assault. The first essay can be read here, which also includes more information about the study participants. The second…
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My Social Experiments
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)…
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Why We Need And Lose Institutions
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…
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What Do People Who Have Committed Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault Say About Why They Committed It?
This piece was first written in 2017, and first appeared on my website on July 1, 2026 This is an attempt to find out. This essay is the third in a series examining sexual harassment and assault. The first essay can be read here, which also includes more information about the…
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What’s Between Us and Reality
We often talk as though we are in direct contact with reality – as though our eyes show us the world, and our minds read off the facts. But between whatever reality fundamentally is and the experience you’re having right now, there are a surprising number of layers. At each…
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The Mental Models You Don’t Know About
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…
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Does Meditation Really Demonstrate There Is No You?
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…
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Age Of Gurus
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…
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Will The U.S. Legal System Get You Justice?
I think that people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about the legal system (in the US, at least). For instance, many people think the US legal system is a good way to get justice when someone has committed a crime. In my experience, it’s very hard to get the police to…
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A problem with correlations: rare traits usually have small correlations to other things, just by virtue of being rare
Correlations provide a very useful, quick way to summarize the relationship between two things (as a single number between -1 and 1). For instance, if we find that self-reported anxiety and self-reported depression have a high correlation (which they, in fact, do), then this…