critical thinking
We all employ heuristics to help us deal with the world. But when we make a hasty generalization, we risk making a big error in our thinking.
Our temporal experience of the world is not divided into a series of neat segments, yet that's how we talk about time.
The mediocrity principle is often used to make claims about the abundance of life across the universe, but these claims are likely unfounded.
Why should we rely on scientific conclusions even though they cannot be proven? A new essay offers compelling reasons.
A new study refutes some of the claims recently made about the value of napping.
There's no telling whether machine-learned common sense is five years away, or 50.
Truth might be hard to find, but we can take steps to eliminate common cognitive biases.
Escaping the marshmallow brain trap.
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Being skeptical isn't just about being contrarian. It's about asking the right questions of ourselves and others to gain understanding.
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New research from MIT is unintuitive but could lead to a better system.
A new study looks at why mysterious voices are sometimes taken as spirits and other times as symptoms of mental health issues.
For centuries, universities have advanced humanity toward truth. Professor Jonathan Haidt speaks to why college campuses are suddenly heading in the opposite direction.
Some volunteers performed above chance. They weren't the psychics.
A critical thinking framework developed by psychologists can help teach mental skills necessary for our times.
Derren Brown returns to the stage with his new live, one-man show, Showman. Check it out here.
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Every day, humanity generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Every minute, users are sharing nearly 500,000 tweets, watching more than 4 million YouTube videos, and conducting more than 3.6 million […]
“Trust is so important to how we scale an idea. Without that trust, we don’t take risks. And without risk we don’t build that next big thing,” says Nilofer Merchant, […]
Don't settle for comfortable and familiar thoughts, reach for what you don't know, says Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt.
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All science begins with a leap of intuition, says Richard Dawkins, but we can only ever find objective truths by knowing when to let evidence take over from emotion.
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Your brain stops at the most comforting thought. The truth is somewhere beyond that. Using scientific skepticism as a guide, astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss outlines the questions that critical thinkers ask themselves.
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Can democracy remain vibrant if the public, and especially children, don't have the tools to distinguish sense from nonsense?
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One of the lesser-discussed but potentially most disastrous appointments is in education: Betsy DeVos. Her anti-intellectual agenda would take root in the nation's youngest minds, filtering down through descendant generations.
There is censorship in science, admits Bill Nye – but not nearly as much as there should be.
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The trouble with labeling everything a "fallacy" is that (1) not all poor reasoning is automatically fallacious, and (2) it implies that everybody would agree on everything if we could only think correctly.