Successful Prediction
Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “int...
WHERETO Mnemonic for Lessons
Learning Activities:
What learning experiences and instruction will enable students to achieve the desired results? How will the design
W = Help the students know Where the unit is going and What is expected? Help the teacher know Where the students are coming from (prior knowledge, interests)?
H = Hook all students and Hold their interest?
E = Equip students, help them Experience the key ideas and Explore the issues?
R = Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understandings...Acronym for key elements to hit in any teaching activity.
The Three Principal Means of Investigation
We have three principal means: observation of nature, reflection, and experiment. Observation gathers the facts, reflection combines them, experiment verifies the result of the combination. It is essential that the observation of nature be assiduous, that reflection be profound, and that experimentation be exact. Rarely does one see these abilities in combination. And so, creative geniuses are not common. Each is a virtue, and strength in all three is rare.
The Value of the Elderly
A challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing. Some abilities, of course, decrease with age. Those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina, ambition, and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation, such as figuring out the structure of DNA, best left to scientists under the age of 30. Conversely, valuable attributes that increase with age include experience, understanding of people and human relationship...Their experience makes them better-skilled for certain professions, such as managing, and teaching.
Handling Self Doubt
I think the more you know, the more you realize just how much you don't know. So paradoxically, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you might tend to fixate on the growing collection of unlearned peripheral concepts that you become conscious of along the way.
That can manifest itself as feelings of fraudulence when people are calling you a "guru" or "expert" while you're internally overwhelmed by the ever-expanding volumes of things you're learning that you don't know.
However, ...When dealing with self-doubt about one's abilities, remember that what you don't know is a treasure map that less-skilled people don't have.
Dunning–Kruger effect
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The
authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these
domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make
unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4
studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of hum...People who are unskilled in domains grossly overestimate their abilities compared to those who are skilled.
The Hierarchical World of Mathematics and Theoretical Phy...
The world of mathematics and theoretical physics is hierarchical. That was my first exposure to it. There's a limit beyond which one cannot progress. The differences between the limiting abilities of those on successively higher steps of the pyramid are enormous. I have not seen described anywhere the shock a talented man experiences when he finds, late in his academic life, that there are others enormously more talented than he. I have personally seen more tears shed by grown men and women o...The difference in talent between individuals is enormous, and shocking to those who discover others are vastly more talented than they.
Study Nature for Truth, Not Usefulness
It must be for truth's sake, and not for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that the scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to the useful arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other tools than his; and therefore I say that the man of science who follows his studies into their practical application is false to his calling. The practical man stands ever ready to take up the work where the scientific man leaves it, and adapt it to the material wants and uses of ...Practical people will take the truth and make something productive of it.
Naturalism Improves Perception
Nature study also heightens our perceptive
abilities: we see, hear and smell more, and more
keenly, because of them. In the cities, our senses tend
to atrophy. The relentless commercial badgering of
signs, and the general dullness and ugliness of city
landscapes, push the urban walker into the safe
cocoon of his mind and further out of his senses.
Simply spending time out in pastoral or wild
landscapes counteracts this tendency. Spend a day in
the woods and you will begin to hear a bit more a...Being attentive to nature heightens our senses because of the enjoyment we get from listening, seeing, smelling, and feeling it.
The Law Strives for an Impossible Standard of Accuracy
When we are asked to swear in courts of law that we will tell
'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth', we
are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers.
Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an
approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the
Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony. To
swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
to the limit of our abilities is a fair request. Without th...When it asks us to swear to tell the whole truth.