Are you selfish?
Seeing others act selflessly makes us feel guilty about our own failures to be as virtuous. It’s far easier to dismiss the apparent selflessness of others than it is to challenge our own very real selfishness.
ReadTag: Science
Do we need props?
Some find our increased reliance on mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything?
ReadShould you keep your options open?
In the physical sciences, a plethora of theories is often a sign of weakness, an admission that we haven’t yet worked out which is right. In ethical and political thinking, however, I suspect there is no such thing as one, all-encompassing true theory. Different models describe different aspects of the world but none captures them all.
ReadSuper excited
I say ‘very’ rather than ‘super’. I think mountains are awesome but simply having the right money for my waiter is not. I don’t think I’m amazing: I don’t even believe I should think that. In sunny Silicon Valley, this moderate British scepticism makes me feel churlish and cynical. It certainly has no place at Googleplex in Mountain View, California, where I found myself recently, among 250 ‘thought leaders’ – researchers, writers, educators, artists, policymakers, investors – gathered for the Sci Foo ‘unconference’…
ReadIs it time to rethink our dietary advice?
It turns out that the more we understand how nutrition works and how complicated it is, the simpler the dietary advice we need to follow. In theory, any number of changes might make your diet healthier, but in practice diet is too complicated for us to be able to micromanage it. Too much is unknown about how the elements of diet interact for us to be able to change the variables to achieve the result we desire.
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