The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a...
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in...
The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we’ve achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is natur...
The researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people o...
Thomas Edison is often said to have advised, To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.
We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.
What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the qu...
Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there...
Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein p...
Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.
Moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the...
Recent years psychologists have found that the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is at least as important a factor in success as talent.
Theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.
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...
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
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
While a jar of ground cinnamon may contain four hundred insect fragments.
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
HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels.
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