Analytical Thinking

Analytical Thinking

financial bullshit
"A cheap loan is beyond all new destiny." Does that mean anything to you?
Close-up of a pencil and charcoal drawing showing a detailed human eye on the left side, with textured shading and geometric shapes in the background—capturing the beauty found where science fails to explain human perception.
5mins
Why are we here? What is everything made of? This theoretical physicist says science isn’t the right way to answer these questions.
John Templeton Foundation
thinking fast slow
People believe that slow and deliberative thinking is inherently superior to fast and intuitive thinking. The truth is more complicated.
John Templeton Foundation
chess insanity
Chess was once blamed for triggering mental health problems, including suicide and even murder. Today, the same is said of video games.
We imagine and debate the inner lives of literary characters, knowing there can be no truth about their real motives or beliefs. Could our own inner lives also be works of fiction?
reductionism
We cannot deduce laws about a higher level of complexity by starting with a lower level of complexity. Here, reductionism meets a brick wall.
It took a series of ingenious experiments in the 20th century to uncover some of our biggest cognitive biases.
socratic problem
Socrates lived during a time when people did not strive to separate fact from fiction. So how much of what we know about Socrates is true?
Illustration of a human brain, drawn with black ink lines on a solid orange background, symbolizing intellectual life.
5mins
According to Zena Hitz, the idea of the intellectual has become distorted. She believes “the real thing is something more extraordinary but also more available to us.”
John Templeton Foundation
Bronze sculpture of a seated man resting his chin on one hand, appearing deep in thought and embodying genius traits, against a plain background.
2mins
James Gleick, the author of biographies of Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman, discusses what they and other geniuses have in common.
John Templeton Foundation
scientific pluralism
Scientific pluralism is the notion that some questions must be approached from many angles. How can we integrate these scientific models?
Two second graders learn by different approaches. One draws a picture, the other writes a paragraph.
Learning styles are supposed to help learners take ownership of their education, but research doesn’t back up this well-intentioned myth.
philosophy
Even some philosophers don’t think highly of philosophy, but we need it now more than ever.
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]
At ground zero, Trinitite, the green, glassy substance found in the area, is still radioactive and must not be picked up. The Trinity Site was where the first atomic bomb […]
In the quantum world of the unstable, even identical particles don’t have identical masses. In the microscopic world of the quantum particle, there are certain rules that are wholly unfamiliar […]
It may be the only way to save the USA — and the world — from alternative facts. “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” –Ernest Rutherford There […]
An awful op-ed about how science is no different than other disciplines misses some fundamental facts. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” […]