Annoyance

> Q: What's the most important leg of a three-legged stool? A: The one that isn't there. - traditional joke-riddle A specific neurological lesion can sometimes damage or impair specific neurological functions without touching others. In the condition famously known as "Ondine's Curse", for example, automatic control of breathing is...

Which weighs more: a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold? Close consideration of this riddle - and the conditions under which people tend to get it wrong - is helpful in understanding the limits of human rationality. It is a specific example which leads us to general principles...

The classical understanding of categories centers on necessary and sufficient properties. If a thing has X, Y, and Z, we say that it belongs to class A; if it lacks them, we say that it does not. This is the model of how humans construct and recognize categories that philosophers...

Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is a mixed bag for rationalists. Written as a series of essays organized into three sections entitled Fallibility, Mystery, and Uncertainty, the book as a whole is of questionable value, but the sections need to be considered individually for their...

The formal concept of the fallacious argument was born as the twin of logic itself. When the ancient Greeks first began to systematically examine the natural arguments people made as they sought to demonstrate the truth of propositions, they noted that certain types of arguments were vulnerable to counterexamples while...

> People are always telling you that "we have always done thus", and then you find that their "always" means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips compared to the ways and habits of the body,...

I said that my next post would discuss why IQ tests don't measure frontal executive functions, but I've found something tangential yet extremely topical which I think should be discussed first. A reader sent me a link to this Opinion column written by New York Times writer Nicholas D. Kristof:...