Ambigamy

Insights for the deeply romantic and deeply skeptical

by Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D.

Infomaniac: Face It, You’re Addicted To, But Can’t Define Information

You use information all the time but can you define what it is? Is it a thing? We measure it in bits and bytes. Is it a container like a hard drive?. Anything can become information but not everything does. What's the deal? Here's your shortest path to a scientific understanding of information and meaning--the meanings of life. Read More

The Two Meanings of Missing Each Other

For my daughter’s birthday I wrote her a song, ending it on a powerful heartfelt line: Time with you is worth missing. My partner said, “Are you sure you mean that?” Read More

Counselor Bias: A Dumb Reason We Think We're Smart

Counselor Bias is the sense that we're more rational than average falsly gained by giving calm "If I were you" advice to people in stress. Read More

Everyone Who's Got Integrity Raise Your Hand!!

Most folks put much more energy into sorting people by moral standards than they put into identifying and refining their sorting standards. Here we survey the kinds of sorting standards people apply and the kind worth having. Read More

Nitrous: My Tri-Annual Transcend-Dental Mental Flossing

Nitrous is a wonder drug. It gets me wondering about the fundamentals of wondering and not wondering, caring and not caring. Read More

Endorphment: Why Some Breakups Are Much Harder Than Others

Endorphment, the endorphin rush of being endorsed--We don't fall in love, we climb in it, feeling endorsed by someone who affirms and elevates our status. We fall when love ends and we're dis-endorsed, or just when we feel dis-endorsed by the better circumstances our ex enters on exiting us. Read More

Single Mid-Life Female Seeks Romantic Solution

A mid-life man notices the epidemic, commiserates, and like any man, makes a lot of unsolicited suggestions. Read More

The Real Reason People Don't Know When to Quit

Why do leaders stay in wars too long, college students borrow thousands for careers they'll never pursue, politicians say ever-nastier things? Is it hubris? Stupidity? No, it's the same reason cod produce over 20 million eggs apiece just to produce one viable descendant. Read More

Psych-Savvy Economics: Robert Franks' Ingenius Path to Liberty and Justice for All

Uber-pragmatic, super psych-savvy and totally readable economist Robert H. Frank takes a brilliant whack at what's wrong, what's right and how to save ourselves from ourselves. Read More

Eat, Pray, Invoice: Keeping Track of Who Owes What

Most acts of kindness aren't random but calculated. Rewards and punishments are blends of feedback on past behavior and feedforward toward future behavior. Read More

Suffering and Insensitivity: Two Inevitables We Must Strive to Eliminate

What if we define suffering and insensitivity as the two possible wrong answers to an alarm call, suffering as heeding a false alarm and insensitivity as not heeding a true alarm? Read More

Eliminate or Illuminate the Middleman: On whether to admit we interpret reality

Can we ever call a spade a spade? Some say yes, and more, that they've found it, a way to eliminate the distorting effects interpretation, the middle man between reality and our perception. Others, like me say there's no getting around the middleman, and therefore we must learn to work with, rather than ignore him. Read More

Nobel Prize Winner Weighs in on “Don’t Worry; Be Happy”

In this year's most talked-about book in psychology, Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman reveals an easily overlooked and misinterpreted secret to happiness. Here it is and how to look at it from its many relevant angles. Read More

The Moral Equivalent to the Eat-Everything Weight Loss Diet

I'm so self-disciplined that I'm on all the diets, which means I can eat anything because no matter what I want there's some diet that says I can. We do the same with morality. To show how principled we are we subscribe to all the moral diets. By selectively applying them we can do whatever we want. Read More

Midwife Crisis: The Competition Between Children and Brainchildren

For 3.6 billion years making children was the name of the game. Now it has stiff competition from another game: Making brainchildren. Competition between the games has us torn. Especially women. Read More

Rather Partial: The Delicate Art of Clinging Right

We know what who and we love by what we would miss if it went away. We love what we have become partial too, meaning incomplete without. Here are some simple ideas for how to manage our loving incompletenesses. Read More

Why Moral Absolutists are Really Moral Relativists

Moral absolutists say "There is a moral absolute and it's mine. Mine is the only true moral standard so shut up." or they say "Let me persuade you that you should need no persuading." Either way, they're moral relativists in moral absolutists clothing. Read More

Your Rights; Your Right Nows

What is a right, really? Are any inalienable? Are any God-given? The liberal author agrees with conservative budget hawks answers to these questions. Read More

One Last Question: Tips for Asking Enough; Not Too Much

Too much information or not enough? We talk as though we're authorities who know where to objectively draw the line on curiosity, but rarely about how to draw that line. Here's an attempt to say how. Read More

The Trouble With Team Players

There is an "I" in "Team." We can be selfish on behalf of our group, saying to outsiders "I deserve more than you but if you think that means I'm selfish you're wrong, because I think my fellow teammates deserve more than you too." Team Player and elitist are two sides of the same coin. Read More

Youmeus Curiosity: How to Save a Relationship If It's Worth Saving

Here are some very simple yet new tools for working it out with your partner, and other people too. Read More

A Greedy Egomaniac's Problem With Today's Robber Barons

My friends say the problem with today’s robber barons is that they’re greedy egomaniacs, but I don’t think that nails it. What after all is egomania? It’s some extreme on a continuum I ride too. Read More

Making Love: All of the Positions

A woman I know nearly throws up when anyone calls sex “making love.” You wouldn’t guess it to see her or hear her talk. She’s classy and refined, and a true romantic, too. Still, she much prefers calling sex sex or any of its other rougher names. Read More

Science Is an Art, the Art of "Ought Management"

Science is misunderstood as dispassionate fact-finding. It's really the art of managing our passions so we can serve them better. Read More

Rather Partial: The Delicate Art of Clinging Right

We speak more accurately than we realize when we say that we're partial to someone or something. Love, addiction, attachment, commitment, co-dependence, community, parisitism, leaning on a crutch, all have in common the basic dynamics. You lose an inclination or ability to do something for yourself thereby becoming a part of a large whole. Read More

Declaration of Co-dependency: Face it, We're Addicted Through Love

Set aside positive and negative connotations, the dynamical behavior underlying love and addiction are the same. In both cases we lose an ability to do something for ourselves and become dependent on someone or something else. The right question is simply who and what to love and be addicted to? Read More

Fighting Fire With Fire: Psychology Lessons From Newt

The debate exchange between Newt Gingrich and John King highlights the psychopath's gift for climbing into power and how, to beat it, we need to be able to join it as necessary. Read More

Clueless? Lying? Loyal? Explaining Why He Disagrees With You

An explanation of the three possibilities we consider when trying to figure out why someone believes what we consider to be nonsense, and why it matters to us so much to figure out which applies. Read More

Rub-o-nomics: What Lovers Know About Politics and Economics

“Look, it’s simple,” she said. “There’s rubbing and not rubbing; there’s whether it feels good or doesn’t, and whether it is good or isn’t. That’s all.” “Now Mitch and I, we’ve been together 25 years. Lovers? Yeah, you could call us that. And you know we’ve seen it all. We were so young. At first all we cared about was whether it felt good. Read More

Both Kinds of Wonder

Wonder as satisfied awe, and as unsatisfied curiosity: May you experience both this holiday season. Read More

Jeremy Sherman is an evolutionary epistemologist studying the natural history and practical realities of decision making.

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About Ambigamy

Ambigamy is a word I coined originally for romance but now extend to all of life. Ambigamists live with the tension between romance and cynicism, holding on and letting go, investment and divestment, an approach that is poignantly sweet and sour not blandly middlegroundish. By abandoning hope for some easy both/and solution, or formula for always being in the middle ground (e.g. tough love), ambigamists corner themselves with the challenge of figuring out where to be to be tenacious vs. relaxed, yang vs. yin, etc.