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. …
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. …
“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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …