The Ostrich Effect
First things first: despite any cartoons you might’ve seen, ostriches don’t try to hide from danger by burying their heads in the sand....
Beautiful Minds
Hollywood doesn’t have the best track record portraying mental illness. From the harmless, almost charmingly quirky weirdos of Benny and...
The Twain Brain, or, Why Smart People do Stupid Things
StartFragment “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” So said Mark Twain, printer, steamboat...
Six Strategies for Avoiding the Truth
Are you lying to yourself every day? Depends: are you a "Bayesian Updater?" Hopefully you are. The term is named after Reverend Thomas...
The Lowdown on Luck
“Good luck!” It’s a common expression in our lexicon. Obviously, on a gut level we have some sense of the importance of luck—that is,...
Aristotle's Three Musketeers, or, A Swiftly Tipping Stool
What might the Greek philosopher and Jack-of-all-trades Aristotle think of the latest findings in neuroscience? How would his notion of...
The D'Oh Effect, the Heath Brothers, and the Secrets to Good Decision-Making
Buyer's remorse is a terrible thing. It occurs when you have the realization that you've bought the wrong thing and now you can't return...
The Reality Gap and the Power of Self-Myth
You are not you. By that, I mean that the idea of Self -- the single arbitrator of decisions and sole captain of your wants and desires...
What Makes Meetings So Terrible? The Asch Conformity Paradigm, For One Thing.
There is a special dialect unique to the corporate world. If you work at a big company, your brain might at this moment be reflexively...
Measuring the Unmeasureable
"Metric" is a kind of sexed up word for measurement, popular among the corporate crowd. The interesting thing about "metric" is that it...