Teasing apart luck from skill in our decisions is difficult. While most outcomes involve a combination of both, our improvement requires identifying what we should have done differently and what was out of our control.…
Category: <span>This or That?</span>
You have to pay attention to your goals if you ever want to achieve them. But while you pay for this attention with your time, there is something else you sacrifice when you decide to…
Coloured words can cause us some problems
Confronted with risks and gambles, people often make irrational decisions. This is no surprise—but what makes many of these errors in rationality so interesting is that we make them systematically. We are, to steal Dan Ariely’s…
On June 29, your personal astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sent out this tweet: Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence — Neil…
“Little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree.” —Friedrich Nietzsche…
We are not the logical, rational, thought-filled creatures we like to pretend we are. We are prone to misdirection, to being led up the garden path, to being taken for a ride. Molly Crockett, a…
Simplicity is now something we expect from design. Everything should be clear, obvious, intuitive—in other words, we should not have to think very hard. For the most part, this is a good thing. We don’t want…
Warning: This post may disappoint you. Take a look around the world today and you’ll see an abundance of optimism. Life is great, things will only get better, we’re all going to succeed. And we…
In every moment of every day, we’re making predictions. Those predictions are mostly unconscious–we expect to see our bed when we walk into the room, we expect to get running water when we turn the…