Better has an ambitious mission: to research, develop, and share the best ways people can improve their lives and the world. There are countless ways to potentially improve life; over millennia, humanity has tried everything from protective magic to ward off evil spirits to caloric restriction to extend lifespan. Unfortunately, the majority of these ways don’t work. Of the ones that do, only a small fraction are the absolute best ways to try. There has never been a dedicated effort to identify the absolute best ways to improve life—until now, with Better.

Given the enormous breadth and depth of information that exists about life, and the challenge of separating what’s best from what works and what works from what doesn’t, Better has begun developing a research framework that will allow us—and humanity in general—to find the best ways to live life as speedily as possible.

We are calling our initial framework the EPITOME framework. It has five steps:

The EPITOME framework relies on many mental models and heuristics (some opinionated, some not) for how the world works, how to do research, and how to reason. We’ve documented these models and heuristics in five steps, in rough order of when they are used in EPITOME.

Better exists because we believe that there are many things that are imperfect in the world, and many of these imperfections are entirely optional and inflicted by individuals and society upon themselves. Individuals and society do this because they are either less than perfectly moral, or less than perfectly rational and strategic. Our research method will focus on the latter problem; we believe that with better knowledge and reasoning, we can make things better.

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book Inadequate Equilibria, which is available for free online, covers why we do not live in an “adequate civilization,” and instead in one where imperfections on an individual and societal level exist at a vast scale and produce unimaginable levels of harm. In Chapter 1, on an individual level, Eliezer describes how he treated his wife’s depression with a simple strategy that, tragically, could likely improve the lives of millions of other depressed people but is completely ignored by everyone. On a societal level, he describes how the Bank of Japan, a reputable institution, needlessly inflicted trillions of dollars of damage on its own economy, and how such a thing is even possible. Understanding humanity’s civilizational inadequacy is critical in understanding why Better even exists; ideally, there would not be imperfections so large we can find easy ways to greatly improve the lives of millions of people, but sadly we can.

The Open Philanthropy Project’s article on Reasoning Transparency covers why the vast majority of writing (and information) does not easily and clearly make their reasoning easy to replicate. This is unfortunate because it forces us to either trust something, or spend large amounts of time trying to recreate an information source’s reasoning. We will use this understanding of reasoning transparency to gauge higher quality content from lower quality content, as well as shape Better’s internal and public writing and information.

In addition to believing that better knowledge and reasoning can improve the world, a perspective supported by Inadequate Equilibria, here at Better, we also adopt a stance of epistemic humility. Epistemic humility involves recognizing that our own knowledge and reasoning are limited, and that there is a possibility that other views are correct. We aim to almost never hold a belief of view with “100%” confidence. Given the number of people and beliefs on the planet, statistically, it is nearly impossible for people to be correct with all of the things they believe are correct, including Better. It is also almost certain that future generations will view many of our current beliefs in a completely different light, as evidenced from our views on the beliefs of past generations. Regarding confidence estimates, as documented in the book Superforecasting, people are generally very poor at accurately predicting things and accurately conveying their own level of confidence. We want to use the recommendations in Superforecasting to learn how to better convey our own levels of confidence in our recommendations and the supporting arguments, evidence, and predictions in those recommendations.

First principles reasoning is an important way to improve how we reason, as captured by Wait But Why in their article on how Elon Musk has been so successful. Farnam Street also has an article advocating for it and explaining how to do it. This is important in Better’s research. For example, we can use first principles reasoning to understand how common and less common ways to live life work and what effects they have on us. We can then use this understanding to determine which way is likely to be best, and why. As another example, first principles reasoning can help us understand how the world and life works, and then think of novel ways to improve it.

Cognitive biases are the many ways our brain does not think in rational ways. The Decision Lab has an excellent list of common biases. Biases can range from consistently underestimating how hard things will be (which is why projects always seem to be going over time and over budget) to using whether something easily comes to mind to estimate things (for example, overestimating the risk of planes due to media coverage of plane crashes, and underestimating the risk of cars). Here at Better, we want to follow practices that minimize bias. With Better Research, we want to be cautious of confirmation bias, which can cause us to only search for evidence that confirms our existing views.

Information sources are of utmost importance when doing research. High-quality information sources employ good reasoning and evidence, and will allow us to quickly arrive at the right conclusions. Lower-quality information sources can cause us to miss out on key information and strategies, and as a result produce suboptimal recommendations.

We categorize information sources from the highest level to the lowest level.

Types of Source

Clearly, websites, academic studies, and expert interviews are very different from one another. All have their pros and cons. We will generally use multiple types of sources, in particular, websites, academic research, books, and people in our network. We will most commonly use online research due to its ease of access, speed, and breadth. Unfortunately there is a lot of low-quality content on the internet, and we will need to use various strategies to overcome this problem. The following categories will use websites as examples of classification.

General-Purpose Information Sources

General-purpose information sources can be used in isolation or with several related sources to find information on a vast array of topics. The highest-level general information source for the web would be a top-level domain, like .edu, which can only be used by accredited institutes of higher education for the most part.

This category also includes common websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, which we commonly use at Better (we can use websites in many ways, and not necessarily for evidence; for example, Wikipedia can be a good gauge of the neutral/consensus view on a topic).

Individual websites and small collections of websites in a certain area also fall under this classification. For example, we will sometimes search thoughtful publications such as Aeon, Nautilus, and BBC Future to get well-researched, thoughtful takes on issues, and websites that have book summaries to information that may only be in books.

Broad Information Sources

We use broad information sources to reliably get information about a specific area of knowledge. For example, the Cochrane Collaboration is a great way to understand the consensus academic view on medical issues, and Consumer Reports is a great way to get information on the best products in a particular area.

Better is particularly interested in organized information sources for a specific area, which we call a database. An example of a database would be Greater Good in Action, an organized resource on positive psychology.

Specific Information Sources

Specific information sources contain information about a very specific topic. This is generally a standalone article or webpage. Here, the reliability of the publisher matters, but so does the actual content in the source itself.

Depending on the source, we may be interested in:

Each factor can be scored on a numeric scale, for example 1–5, and combined together to create a holistic score for the source.

When evaluating academic research, LessWrong has a great article introducing the why and how of literature reviews.

Tools

We recommend learning about and using advanced Google search techniques. This series of articles covers some common techniques we use, including site limited searches (air quality site:bbc.com/future) and exact searches (”delegative” “DAO”).

It is very helpful to store your research progress in a knowledge management tool to synthesize information and for future reference. This could be done with a research-specific tool, like Zotero, or in a general-purpose tool, like Notion (which we use at Better).

It is important to understand the exact research question and scope of the research in order to avoid hours of wasted time searching for irrelevant information. It can help to create a research plan before doing the research, as well as break the broad research question down into parts.

Rapid Learning

When researching a new/unfamiliar space, it’s important to get a sense of the entire landscape in an efficient manner. If this isn’t done, it could be possible to miss entire areas of knowledge that could be pivotal in affecting research outcomes. This process also helps with understanding and prioritizing the specific items that need to be researched, as well as identifying quality sources of information.

There are several strategies that can help with rapid learning:

Knowledge Gaps

Knowledge gaps are missing areas/bits of information that can greatly affect research outcomes. For example, Better often searches for the best products and services to meet certain needs. If we are unable to find some that actually exist, we may provide the wrong recommendation, or even mistakenly conclude that no relevant options exist. This can have significant consequences on our public recommendations and internal decisions.

In order to avoid this, you can utilize several strategies to find relevant information:

Utilizing trusted sources, quick results for high-qual info

Evaluate new sources - curation guidelines, source credibility in Tracy Truthfinding, writing quality

Levels of evidence

Strategically using sources; biased, secondary vs. primary, etc (saving time)

Fermi estimates

Gather confirming and disconfirming evidence as needed after looking at argument, go back up the research process (scope needed info, breadth/depth as needed, incorporate new information into reasoning)

Create reasoning aids (argument maps)

At first, we will publish our recommendations in our initial recommendation template. This template adapts to whichever phase of EPITOME a potential recommendation is in.

E: Only title required, put in appropriate category, flag with hyphen, internal

P: Fill in initial ABCD, perform initial fermi

IT: Investigate if it works

O: Optimize if needed (may not require a check if publishing in existing space)

ME: Fill in template, document specific impacts on various aspects of society, internal review, then external review and publish

Conversion Table, document what’s best there

Overall Score: Use conversion table for final result

Audience: US population percentage

Benefits (Net): Use conversion table for net benefits