“Judge the value of what you have by what you had to gi...

The principle of an opportunity cost does not at first glance seem hard to understand. If you spend half an hour noodling around on Twitter, when you would otherwise have been reading a book, the lost book-reading time is the opportunity cost of the tweeting. If you decide to buy a fancy belt for £100 instead of a cheaper one for £20, the opportunity cost is the £80 shirt you could otherwise have bought. Everything has a cost: whatever you were going to do instead, but couldn’t. [...] ...

 The Spotlight, Starlight, and Daylight of Attention

irst, the “spotlight” of attention is how cognitive scientists tend to talk about perceptual attention. The things that are task-salient in my environment. How I select and interact with those, basically. Second, the “starlight.” If the spotlight is about doing things, the starlight is who I want to be, not just what I want to do. It’s like those goals that are valuable for their own sake, not because they’re instrumental toward some other goal. Also, over time, how we keep movin...

 Innovate, Don't Digitize

The value of technology for transforming learning is lost if it is only used to digitize traditional materials (e.g. scanning worksheets makes them digital, but doesn't improve the learning experience). Instead, think about innovative approaches that allow students to engage with content differently. What does technology make possible that could not be done before?

 If You Do Get a Degree, Double-Major in Something Useful

Well, the value of graduate school really depends on what you are studying and what you expect to get out of graduate school. I encourage young people to engage in the act of dynamic thinking. That means don't just apply the rules that worked in your field 20 years ago. Journalism is a great example. The media has changed dramatically. I run a media company. I'm in media all the time, and the biggest mistake a journalism major can make is to allow 1985 thinking to dictate how they pursue thei...

 Confirmation Bias

Numerous studies have demonstrated that people generally give an excessive amount of value to confirmatory information, that is, to positive or supportive data. The "most likely reason for the excessive influence of confirmatory information is that it is easier to deal with cognitively" (Gilovich 1993). It is much easier to see how a piece of data supports a position than it is to see how it might count against the position. Consider a typical ESP experiment or a seemingly clairvoyant dream: ...

 Science as a Religion

"On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war. I played them one against the other. I helped each in turn. I offered them science, trade, education, scientific medicine. I made Terminus of more value to them as a flourishing world than as a military prize. It worked for thirty years." "Yes, but you were forced to surround these scientific gifts with the most outrageous mummery. You've made half religion, half balderdash out of it. You've erected a hier...

 The Truth Religion

The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civil...

 Meaningful, Transferable, and Purposeful Understanding

...meaningful, transferable, and purposeful understanding: • Meaningful: The understanding is relevant to the students’ lives and needs. Students connect with the learning. • Transferable: The understanding fosters creative problem-solving and application. Students can apply their understanding to unique and out-of context situations. • Purposeful: The understanding is focused. Students know that the understanding has value and a function.

 Appreciate the Beauty of Wrong Ideas

Pinker tiresomely rehearses the familiar triumphalism of science over religion: “the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures ... are factually mistaken.” So they are, there on the page; but most of the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures have evolved in their factual understandings by means of intellectually responsible exegesis that takes the progress of science into account; and most of...

 Literate Societies Place Less Value on the Elderly

...older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience. ...