If you’re not right, then you’re wrong. Right? Isaac Asimov considered this in his essay ‘The Relativity of Wrong,’ which appeared in his book by the same name and the Skeptial Inquirer in 1989. The essay is a response to a letter received from an English Lit major who argued…

Where’s your place in the future of work? — Automation anxiety isn’t new. In response to Luddites breaking and destroying the technologies they feared would take their jobs, the British parliament passed the ‘Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act’ in 1812, which made such destruction punishable by death. Long before that, Aristotle considered how if all our tools could…

People are quick to make certain judgements. Our minds have evolved to excel at drawing conclusions from minimal data and thinking quickly using heuristics and mental models. But some judgements are more reliable than others. …

Born in France in 1623, Blaise Pascal’s intellectual prowess was evident early. He was writing about projective geometry and laying the groundwork for probability theory in his teens, and by his early twenties had built a calculating machine (the Pascaline) to help his father do his taxes. When he hit…

Technology is all around us. It is at once so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, and in other areas so remarkable as to grab the world’s attention. From ceramic cups to nuclear weapons; from the springs in your mattress to immersive virtual worlds; from paper and pencils to intelligent…

It’s always nice to have a good idea, but good ideas aren’t always easy to find. They’re often seen as something mystical, not reducible to a simple process but something that we wait and hope will burst up from the back of our mind. This might be true to an…

Thinking takes time and effort, meaning we can’t apply it to everything we do, otherwise it would take us too long to get anywhere. For this reason we rely a great deal on intuition. It helps us navigate familiar roads, put our socks and shoes on, and get breakfast together…

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. Trouble is, when we try to identify what we did right or wrong, and what…