Ayn Rand on Why Philosophy Matters
Nearly four decades after her death, many of Ayn Rand’s works remain controversial and divide people into two camps: love them or hate them. Her lesser known book on philosophy provides broad, …
Critical Thinking
Poker, Speeding Tickets, and Expected Value: Making Decisions in an Uncertain World
You can train your brain to think like CEOs, professional poker players, investors, and others who make tricky decisions in an uncertain world by weighing probabilities. All decisions involve …
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 …
Daniel Dennett’s Most Useful Critical Thinking Tools
We recently discussed some wonderful mental tools from the great Richard Feynman. Let’s get some more good ones from another giant, Daniel Dennett. Dennett is one of the great thinkers in the …
Atul Gawande and the Mistrust of Science
Continuing on with Commencement Season, Atul Gawande gave an address to the students of Cal Tech last Friday, delivering a message to future scientists, but one that applies equally to all of us as …
Eager to Be Wrong
“You know what Kipling said? Treat those two impostors just the same — success and failure. Of course, there’s going to be some failure in making the correct decisions. Nobody bats a thousand. I …
Peter Thiel on the End of Hubris and the Lessons from the Internet Bubble of the Late 90s
The best interview question — what important truth do very few people agree with you on?— is tough to answer. Just think about it for a second. In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that it …
Ray Dalio: Open-Mindedness And The Power of Not Knowing
Ray Dalio, founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates (and guest on The Knowledge Project), offers a prime example of what a learning organization looks like in the best book I’ve ever read …
Eight Things I Learned from Peter Thiel’s Zero To One
Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir. He also made the first outside investment in Facebook and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn. …
11 Rules for Critical Thinking
A fantastic list of 11 rules from some of history’s greatest minds. These are Prospero’s Precepts and they are found in AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question: All beliefs …
What Is Critical Thinking?
Based on our dysfunctional national dialogue, Hamilton College Professor Paul Gary Wyckoff articulates the critical thinking skills he wants his students to learn. 1. The ability to think empirically, …
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking That We Know
“Critical thinking has to include assessing one’s own thinking.” — Daniel Kahneman *** In this extraordinary talk at the National Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman …