By now, the failure of FiveThirtyEight to accurately predict the British elections has been widely dissected. British political scientist and historian Patrick Porter has been tweeting up a storm about it, noting FiveThirtyEight headman Nate Silver and others tried to impose his…
In comparative cognition and child development, having a theory of mind means understanding that others have minds. Among other things, theory of mind entails understanding that seeing leads to knowing and that others’ knowledge may be different from one’s own, which confers the ability to practice…
Economic iconoclast Bill Easterly says this about a new article on behavioral economics and its potential role in public policy.
Behavioral econ @R_Thaler says we are too dumb to fix our own mistakes but smart…
An interesting, if revealing story about an IT mishap:
With a few taps on a computer keyboard, a student’s entire school history from kindergarten to high school graduation was supposed to show up on the screen. That…
Third, and perhaps most important of all, Weaver wrote an article in 1947 that pioneered the notion that science had crossed a watershed sometime after 1900, away from problems of “simplicity” and into the arena of what he called “disorganized complexity.” The harbinger of the new approach was…
On Empathy
Even though our abilities to mentalize and to empathize are mostly used in concert when we try to understand other people’s intentions, beliefs, desires, and feelings, preliminary evidence from studies of populations of patients with marked social deficits, like those with autism or psychopathy (see Box 27.1)…
The more we learn about nonhuman intelligence, however, the more we find that abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are not. Many of the abilities listed earlier have been found to varying degrees in the great apes. For example, it was thought until the 1960s that humans alone…
I just started reading this book. Already hooked.
Because Jevons was grappling with issues of logic, simulation, and calculation, it is all too easy to paint him in retrospect as a budding cyborg; but now we can begin to entertain the notion that he was no such creature. The…