Sam McNerney

The following is a guest post by Mark Molloy “Sir we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.” (Samuel Johnson as quoted by J. Boswell in The Life […]

In the history of discovery, most discoverers struggled to recognize their discovery. The value of Gregor Mendel’s famous pea experiments were only recognized decades after his death. Without the theory […]

Many successful networks (biological or non-biological) experience breakpoints—instances in which more growth is impossible. Consider the story of 29 reindeer on St. Matthew Island, a narrow piece of land located […]

One of the many paradoxes of time is that it doesn’t flow by smoothly. Although we agree that time is objective—we don’t set our clocks arbitrarily after all—it feels as […]

Consider the story of the wealthy New York banker and the Greek fisherman. While vacationing in Greece, the banker meets a Greek fisherman and asks him how long it takes […]

The benefits of tourism in New York City (or any city) are not only financial. Tourists are anti-beacons: wherever they flock, residents like me immediately know where not to go. […]

A paradox of selling technology in the 21st century is that it’s often more difficult to convince users that they need the latest gadget, even if that gadget is more […]

The premise of many business books is to boldly go where no business book has ever gone before, to gather more data, to interview more executives, to read more articles […]

In the early 1850s, Daniel McCallum, the General Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad, had a problem. At the time, the New York and Erie Railway was the […]

Writers and historians enjoy making the case for one or another thinker as the starting point for an epoch. Did Galileo launch the scientific revolution? Or was it Copernicus? Or […]

Scott Barry Kaufman (@sbkaufman) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU, co-founder of The Creativity Post, Scientific American blogger, and a friend. He is also the author of Ungifted: Intelligence […]

Too often, readers finish popular books on decision making with the false conviction that they will decide better. 

In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait by a tree in the moonlight for the arrival of someone they both claim to know but […]

When the iPhone 5 went on sale users complained that it was too light. This was an odd objection. We prefer light products to heavy ones, especially devices we carry […]

The feeling of certainty might be our default setting. We spend most of our mental life confirming our opinions, even when those opinions involve complex issues. We believe we understand […]

What’s the difference between a physician and a surgeon?  If you were sick in the Middle Ages you had three options: the church, the local healer, and the physician. A […]

Humans are an optimistic bunch. We overestimate desirable traits (humor), skills (driving) and our future states (well-being and health). Worse, we believe that we are immune to these better-than-average errors, […]

The human mind likes simplicity. It’s a complicated world, so we filter it into one cohesive and easy-to-digest worldview. This perspective is a rather unscientific one, however. When we observe […]

We imagine our view of the world like a painting from the Realism movement – rife with detail and comprehensible – but the contents of our conscious mind are more […]

The story of discovery goes something like this: the inventor investigates what he knows (the properties of stapholycocci) and uncovers something else (penicillin), which changes the world. The scientific method […]

Today Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel and Behavegoes on sale. The author is NYU Assistant Professor of Marketing Adam Alter. I came […]

This was originally published on the Scientific American guest blog on February 5th How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that […]

Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and […]

This brings me to an ancient Greek, the master himself, Socrates of Athens. In a segment of Gorgias that foresees decades of modern psychological research, the erudite interlocutor observes that […]

If we know that we are bad at predicting and can account for the underlying psychology then why do we continue to make bad predictions?

Consider the story of my first encounter with Sartre. I read Being and Nothingness in college. The professor, a Nietzsche aficionado, explained Sartre’s adage that existence precedes essence. After two […]

I’ve never seen an albatross but I’m told the regal bird can glide for hundreds of miles without flapping his wings. On land, however, the large wings drag like “drifting […]

Henry Molaison, known for most of his life as H.M., was a medical oddity. Surgery to cure severe epilepsy in the 1950s led to the removal of his hippocampus, which […]

Recall Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), America’s “archprude” and upholder of Victorian morality. Comstock devoted his life to denouncing art he deemed “obscene, lewd or indecent.” In response to a New York […]

One salient feature of the United States in the 21st century is a belief that our school system – from pre-kindergarten to higher education – is failing us. There are […]