Kids do the darnedest things. For instance, one time late at night, when I was 9 or 10, I opened the drawer in the kitchen, took out the biggest knife, […]
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Surrounding yourself with, and adhering closely to, those who share your opinions leads to difficulty in coherently analyzing today’s political problems. A new study says this is true regardless of your network’s perceived levels of political sophistication.
For a couple of days, I was inclined to buy the theory that Obama won the election because his campaign was so “metric driven.” Metric driven in this case seems […]
Bob Costas’ Sunday Night “perspective,” his celebrated half-time denouncement of American gun culture, wasn’t just dissonant hectoring. It wasn’t just a burlesque of Murrow or Cosell (USA Today‘s forced, but […]
I’ve written some overarching thoughts about last week’s presidential election, but I wanted to dwell on one of its more fascinating aspects: the extent to which the Republican party was […]
If you devote the patience necessary to finish this short post, you will end up a better decision maker. But then, as you will discover in the paragraphs below, […]
I write here about the Risk Perception Gap, when we worry too much about smaller risks and not enough about bigger ones. More than just an interesting example of […]
Optimism Bias – “Things will work out okay” or “things will work out better for me than the next guy” or, simply, “It won’t happen to ME!” – is one the mental games we play in order to do the things we want to do even when those choices come with costs or danger.
Of the 303 million people living in the United States, half or so are registered to vote. It’s rather impressive to think that a good proportion of the 150 million […]
A short essay argues that most institutions should immediately institute moratoriums on hiring new faculty and building new facilities, and that universities need to focus on clarifying their value proposition in a world of ‘commodity [higher] education.’
There is a hole in higher education and it might not be where you expect. This hole in the system is causing substantial problems for our country, including for taxpayers […]
In an interview late last month, Republican senator Marco Rubio, who’s widely viewed to be laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential run, announced that he doesn’t know how old […]
[Editor’s Note: Please welcome guest blogger Andrew Tripp, author of Considered Exclamations and president and co-founder of the DePaul Alliance for Free Thought, a Secular Student Alliance and Center for […]
Sometimes the urge for instant gratification makes perfect sense.
In an article on the Gospel Coalition website, a Christian writer named Trevin Wax asserts that anti-choice politicians are held to a higher standard than pro-choice ones. He lists ten […]
Last month, I posed a list of questions to people who identify as pro-life. In the long comment thread which ensued, there were a fair number of people who stepped […]
DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner […]
If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]
Cognitive science exists in a golden era. The amount of resources pouring into research that examines human nature is unmatched by any other time in history.
A couple years ago, the government of New York City created a program on resilience to climate change and sea level rise. Many of the steps that program laid out […]
Dear Lover or Mistress: Let’s face it. No one’s making chicken soup for your cheating soul. You’re not well-liked. If you’re a public figure and you get caught, pundits will […]
Focusing on what the materials have to teach us is a staple of design thinking, and a powerful mindset for anyone seeking to create anything with structural integrity.
I’ve written in the past about the Secret, more properly called the Law of Attraction, the perenially popular New Age idea which says that merely thinking about something draws it […]
What’s the Big Idea? When it comes to making choices about benefits, keep it simple, says Bruce Finley, Senior Partner and the Director of Global Workplace Communication at Mercer — and calculate, […]
Although Zbigniew Brzezinski “talks in paragraphs, virtually without pause,” according to a recent profile of him in the Financial Times, those paragraphs don’t meander; he gets to the point—fast. When […]
The past few years have been tough on economics and economists. In a searing indictment written one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Paul Krugman concluded that the central […]
As you’ve no doubt already heard, American embassies throughout the Middle East have been attacked by violent mobs in the last few days, ostensibly due to outrage over a YouTube […]
Today, I had the dubious pleasure of discovering that one of the research associates working at the MIT AgeLab has 1392 unread messages in his primary email inbox. 1392! As in, […]
When I heard the news of Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications on Monday — indiscretions that led to an apology and his resignation from the New Yorker on Tuesday — my jaw fell. Like […]
What’s the Big Idea? Why do we so often form opinions about things that fly in the face of the evidence? We do this all the time — whether it […]