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Analytical Thinking
Could anyone still meet the Theoretical Minimum?
There are two conceptions of free will: "straight" and "mixed."
In a world where we assume people tell the truth, liars prosper. To stop them from exploiting others, here are three rules to catch a liar.
The role of the Devil’s advocate was to argue against the beatification of mystics. Contrary to popular belief, they did not wear Prada.
Since at least 600 BC, people have been mesmerized by the concept of the infinite.
Detective fiction reveals how a particular society or time period looks at crime and criminal justice.
Crystallization is an entirely random process, so scientists have developed clever ways to investigate it at a molecular level.
"A cheap loan is beyond all new destiny." Does that mean anything to you?
People believe that slow and deliberative thinking is inherently superior to fast and intuitive thinking. The truth is more complicated.
John Templeton Foundation
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?
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.
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?
Many of his criticisms ring true today.
Scientific pluralism is the notion that some questions must be approached from many angles. How can we integrate these scientific models?
Learning styles are supposed to help learners take ownership of their education, but research doesn’t back up this well-intentioned myth.
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.” […]