Sam McNerney
Science writer
I graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in Philosophy. Now I write about philosophy (mostly epistemology) and psychology (mostly decision making and well-being) at Scientific American and Big Think. My personal blog is SamMcNerney.com. @SamMcNerney.
The Illusion of Conscious Will
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 […]
The Willow-Bark Fallacy [and a challenge to readers]
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 […]
Responding to a Collapse is More Important Than Growth
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 […]
How Countries and People Perceive Time Influences How They Think About Climate Change
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 […]
Excess is Not a Modern Problem
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 […]
Tourists as Inverse Role Models, or the Benefits of Optionality
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. […]
To Benefit From Technology, We Need to Understand Psychology
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 Allure of Essentialism Distorts Business Writing
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 […]
What’s Best For Employees Is Best For Business
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 […]
Modern Art Is Indebted To Descartes
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 […]
Redefining Intelligence: Q&A With Scott Barry Kaufman
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 […]
The Bias Within The Bias
Too often, readers finish popular books on decision making with the false conviction that they will decide better.
To Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Stop Searching
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 […]
Embodied Cognition and Design: A New Approach and Vocabulary
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 […]
Learning From the Illusion of Understanding
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 […]
Decision Making Has Its Semmelweis, Now It Needs a Gawande
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 […]
How Optimism Distorts The Future
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, […]
Why Writing Fluently Is Hard
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 […]
Myself as a Commonwealth: Notes on the Science of Self
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 […]
Mindfulness: Observing Without Questioning
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 […]
Drunk Tank Pink: A Q&A With Adam Alter
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 […]
Virtues of Cognitive Workout: New Research Reveals Neurological Underpinnings of Intelligence
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 […]
Sartre Fallacy Part IV: Philosophizing Without a Ph.D.
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 […]
The Sartre Fallacy Part III: The (Real) Socratic Problem
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 […]
The Sartre Fallacy Part II: Is It Inevitable?
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?
The Sartre Fallacy, or Being Irrational About Reason
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 […]
The Albatross and the Chameleon
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 […]
The Old Prevails Over The New: A Case For Ancient Ideas
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 […]
Getting Attention By Avoiding Attention
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 […]
We Don’t Need No Education
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 […]