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Suppose that human beings had absolutely no idea how they performed arithmetic. Imagine that human beings had evolved, rather than having learned, the ability to count sheep and add sheep.

Maybe your friends are all wearing Bayes' Theorem T-shirts, and you're feeling left out. Maybe you're a girl looking for a boyfriend, but the boy you're interested in refuses to date anyone who "isn't Bayesian". What matters is that Bayes more...

The problem is that fundamentally we suck at symbolic reasoning, quite contrary to many people's assumptions. We simulate the process of logical thought by modeling perceptual patterns that generally coincide with it. The reason all those AI systems failed is more...

the human mind does not automatically detect when a cause has an unconstraining arrow to its effect. Worse, thanks to hindsight bias, it may feel like the cause constrains the effect, when it was merely fitted to the effect. Interestingly, more...

Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand - the ones that seem real to us, the ones we can retrofit into our models of the world. If you understand neurology more...

A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion - that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings. Yet strangely enough, I can't find any theorem of probability theory which more...

When I grew up I read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, and discovered a gem called 'the wave equation'. I thought about that equation, on and off for three days, until I saw to my satisfaction it was dumbfoundingly simple. more...

Whenever someone exhorts you to "think outside the box", they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where "outside the box" is located. Isn't it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...

"Rationalization." What a curious term. I would call it a wrong word. You cannot "rationalize" what is not already rational. It is as if "lying" were called "truthization".