Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, e...
Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Modeling himself after Newton, Quételet desired to create a new social physics describing the laws of human behavior. In Quételet’s analogy, just as an object, if undisturbed, continues in its state o...
Let all the disciples of Aristotle…, he would write, recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics.6
Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.
Kant said, there is Das Ding an sich, a thing as it is, and there is Das Ding für uns, a thing as we know it. For
In fact, when some wedding guest inevitably complains about the seating arrangements, you might point out how long it would have taken you to consider every possibility: assuming you spent one second...
In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn’t invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an hour mi...
I saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.
HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.
George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11
Em vez de convencer as pessoas, os dados apenas polarizaram o grupo. Assim, até mesmo padrões aleatórios podem ser interpretados como evidências convincentes quando se relacionam a noções preconcebida...
Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triump...
Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn’t associate with weirdos.
As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories...
Albert Einstein wrote, One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its con...
A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.
We are highly invested in feeling different from one another—and superior—no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You
There remains the big picture, the question of how much randomness contributes to where we are in life and how well we can predict where we are
There are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test the...