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This article originally appeared in the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. The courtroom is hushed. A teenage boy has been slain, riddled with bullets during a drive-by shooting, and there, on the witness stand, is his crying mother. She's understandably weeping ...
When I talk about rationality I mean really two things. One is so-called epistemological rationality, which is caring about truth, caring about being right and following that processes called truth seeking process meaning that you just don’t—you are not curious and engaged in discussions, not just ...
The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid. And that is the job of science, to try to educate us about the nature of what we are, our very nature, how we’re built, how we work, understand that and in doing that it seems to me is fulfilling and of great value and ...
Some people enjoy being angry and some people really hate it and that is a known difference. It is a know dimension of individual differences. For some people anger is a positive emotion. For others it’s negative. I happen to be an extreme case with for me anger goes into depression very quickly ...
This image shows the orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2 which will be making a flyby on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC). If the 1.7 mile space rock were to make impact, we would almost certainly be doomed. The good news is that the asteroid, which was discovered 15 years ago ...
One of the things that we have found in the study of networks is that whenever people are free to choose anything they want they usually choose what their friends have chosen and people tend to copy each other. This sort of fundamental mimicry or this mimicry that we humans evince is extremely ...
One of the greatest obstacles to finding your life’s task quite honestly can be your parents. We all love our parents – at least most of us do. And they mean the best. But often they’re the ones that screw us up most in the sense that they want to consciously or unconsciously direct you in a path ...
You might find, as most of us do, that when you're arguing with someone you start to feel frustrated with them or combative with them or irritated by them and that can make it especially hard to rationally consider what they're saying. So one trick that I've found particularly useful is to ...
A long tradition of thinking tells us that due to man's animal nature we need to have order imposed from above, in the form of religion. Without religion, we could not live together, and that is why all human societies believe in the supernatural and have developed one religion or another. This ...
In Drunk Tank Pink I talk about the effect of symbols on various outcomes. And some of the symbols I talk about I call super symbols. And they’re super symbols because they have even greater meaning than maybe some other symbols do. And I think maybe the greatest super symbol in our culture and ...
If you want to stop smoking here’s the best advice that I could give you. The first thing I would say is, smoking is actually not physically addictive for very long after you stop smoking. So we know from studies that about 100 hours after your last cigarette, all of the nicotine is out of your ...
“I believe the children are our future.” Never has a more brazen tautology graced the opening line of a Top 40 song. But when Whitney Houston popularized these words in her 1986 hit, she gave voice to an orientation that seems to be in retreat today. For Douglas Rushkoff, author of a new ...
In terms of sustainability and what we eat and what its footprint is on the environment and the consequences of eating one thing versus another, obviously it makes a lot of sense to be eating insects. They’re incredibly plentiful. They’ve got a very short turnover rate. You could be eating ...
The issue of risk is absolutely central to being a creative person. Whether it’s being a write or an entrepreneur or an artist risk is something you have to think about a lot and deal with a lot. Trying to create a life that is fulfilling and meaningful and satisfying to you is much harder than ...
When you look at the United States at the moment and you think about our future one of the things that you might ask is what are we good at? We used to be good at creating jobs, but we’re not so good at creating jobs. We used to be good at building bridges or highways or infrastructure. We’re ...