Scientific Concepts We All Ought To Know
John Brockman’s online scientific roundtable Edge.org does something fantastic every year: It asks all of its contributors (hundreds of them) to answer one meaningful question. …
Steven Pinker
John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?
“Straw Dogs is an attack on the unthinking beliefs of thinking people.” — John Gray *** We like to think that the tide of history is an inexorable march from barbarity to civilization, …
Using Multidisciplinary Thinking to Approach Problems in a Complex World
Complex outcomes in human systems are a tough nut to crack when it comes to deciding what’s really true. Any phenomena we might try to explain will have a host of competing theories, many of …
Spring 2016 Reading List — More Curated Recommendations For a Curious Mind
We hear a lot from people who want to read more. That’s a great sentiment. But it won’t actually happen until you decide what you’re going to do less of. We all get 24 hours a day …
Can We Reason Our Way to a Better Morality?
In a 2012 TED talk, NYU professor Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, sat down with her husband Harvard professor Steven Pinker for an interesting (and polarizing) conversation: Does …
Towards a Greater Synthesis: Steven Pinker on How to Apply Science to the Humanities
The fundamental idea behind Farnam Street is to learn to think across disciplines and synthesize, using ideas in combination to solve problems in novel ways. An easy example would be to take …
Steven Pinker on Why Your Professional Writing Sucks (And What to Do)
When we know a lot about a topic, it can be difficult to write about it in a way that makes sense to the layperson. In order to write better about your professional specialty, you need to avoid using …
Steven Pinker: What a Broad Education Should Entail
Harvard’s biologist/psychologist Steven Pinker is one of my favorites, even though I’m just starting to get into his work. What makes him great is not just his rational mind, but his …
A Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman
Edge.org asked the likes of Christopher Chabris, Nicholas Epley, Jason Zweig, William Poundstone, Cass Sunstein, Phil Rosenzweig, Richard Thaler & Sendhil Mullainathan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, …
The False Allure of Group Selection.
From Steven Pinker’s edge.org article The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker argues that the more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it …
“stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face”
From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: In his groundbreaking book How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we might one day face, along …
Smart People Are Reading These Books
Ok, so you’ve seen the nine books Bill Gates is reading this summer. Gates has some pretty smart friends and they were kind enough to share what they were reading this summer too. ****** Vinod …