We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feeli...
Twenty-four centuries ago, a Greek man stood at the sea’s edge watching ships disappear in the distance. Aristotle must have passed much time there, quietly observing many vessels, for eventually he w...
To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate resu...
That’s why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set—the set of people who don’t give up.
One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled crackpot, and the other visionary.
On June 18, 1964, about 11:30 a.m. Mrs. Juanita Brooks, who had been shopping, was walking home along an alley in the San Pedro area of the city of Los Angeles. She was pulling behind her a wicker bas...
Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child’s third-grade report card...
It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. —Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, 1993
In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called theory of mind, or ToM, this ability gives humans a remarkable power to...
In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associat...
CARL JUNG BELIEVED that to learn about the human experience, it was important to study dreams and mythology. History is the story of events that played out in civilization, but dreams and myths are ex...
A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself
Your own species ends up with a name like that when you get to choose it
While your unconscious mind is working feverishly to do all those things, you can relax in bed, recognizing, seemingly without effort, the lighting fixture on the ceiling—or the words in this book.
My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.
I wouldn’t have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.
A bishop should not be condemned except with seventy-two witnesses… a cardinal priest should not be condemned except with forty-four witnesses, a cardinal deacon of the city of Rome without thirty-six...