Thought of the Day from Albert Einstein
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
As a behavioral scientist, I have long been interested in self-deception. But I’ve never thought about it this way before, as pictured in a tremendous drawing by Jonathan Bartlett: (Click here to view comments)
In recent posts, I’ve presented several interesting pictures of how arbitrary thresholds influence behavior. I showed how airplane pilots speed up flights to make on-time arrivals, but don’t speed up late flights that won’t make it on time. I’ve shown that the price of used cars changes when the mileage on the odometer passes arbitrary round…
“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.” —John Durham Peters (Click here to view comments)
I have been thinking a lot about C Everett Koop lately, ever since his death on February 25 at the ripe old age of 96 and more recently with the announcement that our current Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, is planning to step down from that post. In particular, I have been pondering what made Koop…
Ever been talking to someone when they all of a sudden said: “To be perfectly honest . . .” I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that phrase reassuring. In fact, it kind of makes me wonder how honest you were being with me before you said that!
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…