Medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their pr...
Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.
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...
Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.
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.
If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives, you’d probably get a pretty strange look;
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...
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 his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace´s atoms, impossible to...
It all began when the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn’t kill him, died of gangrene.
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
Newton was not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.
On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are.
Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I
Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Robert Frost wrote in 1914, Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.
Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing w...
That brings us back to the default mode. When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth, Andreasen says. Your association cortices are always running in the bac...
Showing 101 to 120 of 177 results