Scott H Young – Blog

Happiness is a paradoxical goal. We all want to be happy, yet we often fail spectacularly at predicting what will make us happy.
We pursue goals like wealth, fitness, status and mastery only to find that achieving them doesn’t really change our lives very much. In contrast, we often deliberately make ourselves miserable: we worry about things we cannot control, hold grudges against...

I recently had an email exchange with a reader who, in his words, claimed to struggle with a lack of commitment.
He wanted to study machine learning, but he couldn’t get past the first few modules of the course he’s taking. After a few emails back and forth, however, I discovered the reason he “wasn’t able to commit” was simply that his full-time job and family...

Human reason is a puzzling ability. As a species, we’ve invented logic, mathematics, science and philosophy. Yet we suffer from a list of cognitive biases so long that an entire Wikipedia page is devoted to categorizing them.
So which is it: are we excellent at reasoning or incurably irrational?...

When it comes to language learning, grammar gets all the attention. Most theories about second language acquisition focus primarily on how we acquire syntax—the way we put words together to form sentences.
Vocabulary, in contrast, has historically been outside of the spotlight. This is unfortunate. Research has shown that your vocabulary has the greatest effect on comprehension.1 A major difficulty students have in learning a new language is the sheer...