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The 37% Rule derives from optimal stopping’s most famous puzzle, which has come to be known as the “secretary problem.” Its setup is much like the apartment hunter’s dilemma that we considered earlier. Imagine you’re interviewing a set of applicants for a position as a secretary, and your goal is to maximize the…
Your brain, in other words, may not consent to be trained. But t will improve a few of these key skills if you let it enjoy a few hours of the first-person shooter BioShock. Recent research, the 2012 re noted, has revealed action games' positive effects, not just on attentional control and emotional regulation, but…
What Prensky and Gee had realized early on was that game designers had lowered the cost of failure so players would take risks. They'd figured out that well-designed problem solving that gives players a second chance and a way to share their successes is almost irresistibly attractive. In just a few years, game…
Such is the power of wargames: They create a virtual world players can experience, learn from, and integrate into their tactical and strategic decision making. Let's repeat what we said at the outset. If you had the opportunity to probe the future, make strategic choices, and view the consequences of those choices in…
The analogy is mathematically precise, and fascinating. In rough terms, it says that the process of natural selection resembles the process of Bayesian inference. A population of organisms can be thought of as having various 'hypotheses' about how to survive—each hypothesis corresponding to a different allele…
Here are some examples of the principles that teachers can use to expand concepts presented in formal course material. These principles don't have to be taught in the context of any particular class. It's an empirical question. This is a comment that ought to terminate many more conversations than it does. For many of…
In communication theory, information is the reduction of prior uncertainty. Organisms are 'uncertain' because they are composed of conditional adaptations that adopt different states under different conditions. These mechanisms can be described in terms of the decision rules that they embody—'if A, then B', or 'If you…
People’s freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized. Evaluate risk according to available science, not popular perception, and allow for common reasoning biases. Give…
Measurement has too often been the leitmotif of many investigations rather than the experimental examination of hypotheses. Mounds of data are collected, which are statistically decorous and methodologically unimpeachable, but conclusions are often trivial and rarely useful in decision making. This results from an…