What’s So Significant About Significance?
One of my favorite studies of all time took the 50 most common ingredients from a cookbook and searched the literature for a connection to cancer: 72% had a study linking them to increased or …
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The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 1)
(Purchase a copy of the entire 3-part series in one sexy PDF for $3.99) *** Recently, we discussed some of the net advantages of our faulty, but incredibly useful, memory system. Thanks to …
Mental Model: Bias from Envy and Jealousy
“It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.” — Warren Buffett *** It is a fact of life that we are not equal. Not biologically, not culturally. Some inequities come from flawed …
Daniel Pink on Incentives and the Two Types of Motivation
There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Both are very different and lead to disparate outcomes. Here’s how to make the most of motivation, both for yourself and others. *** …
Alex Bellos: Every Number Tells a Story
“We depend on numbers to make sense of the world, and have done so ever since we started to count.” — Alex Bellos *** The earliest symbols used for numbers go back to about 5000 years ago …
Don’t Let Your (Technology) Tools Use You
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it …
Mental Models: Getting the World to Do the Work for You
People are working harder and harder to clean up otherwise avoidable messes they created by making poor initial decisions. There are many reasons we’re making poor decisions and failing to learn …
Henry Ford and the Actual Value of Education
“The object of education is not to fill a man’s mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.” — Henry Ford *** In his memoir My Life and Work, written in …
Daniel Dennett: Tools for Critical Thinking
Philosopher Daniel Dennett shows us how to train your brain to think better in his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Critical Thinking. Dennett, a pioneering thinker in cognitive and …
Is Our Faulty Memory Really So Bad?
[This introduction is the first of a four-part series on memory. Also see Chatper One, Two, and Three on the challenges of memory.] The Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has some brilliant insights …
Hares, Tortoises, and the Trouble with Genius
“Geniuses are dangerous.” — James March How many organizations would deny that they want more creativity, more genius, and more divergent thinking among their constituents? The great …
Fun with Logical Fallacies
We came across a cool book recently called Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies, by a social psychologist named Bo Bennett. We were a bit skeptical at first …
Our Genes and Our Behavior
“But now we are starting to show genetic influence on individual differences using DNA. DNA is a game changer; it’s a lot harder to argue with DNA than it is with a twin study or an …
J.K. Rowling On People’s Intolerance of Alternative Viewpoints
At the PEN America Literary Gala & Free Expression Awards, J.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, received the 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. Embedded in her acceptance speech is …
A Few Useful Mental Tools from Richard Feynman
We’ve covered the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) many times here before. He was a genius. A true genius. But there have been many geniuses — physics has been fortunate to …
Richard Feynman on Teaching Math to Kids and the Lessons of Knowledge
Legendary scientist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was famous for his penetrating insight and clarity of thought. Famous for not only the work he did to garner a Nobel Prize, but also for the lucidity of …