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...

 People With High Cognition Want More

First, it seems to me (based on anecdotal evidence and personal observations) that people who are already endowed with above-average cognitive capacities are at least as eager, and, from what I can tell, actually more eager, to obtain further improvements in these capacities than are people who are less talented in these regards. For instance, someone who is musically gifted is likely to spend more time and effort trying to further develop her musical capacities than is somebody who lacks a m...

 PETWHAC

PETWHAC stands for Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental. Population may seem an odd word, but it is the correct statistical term. I won't keep using capital letters because they stand so unattractively on the page. Somebody's watch stopping within ten seconds of the psychic's incantation obviously belongs within the petwhac, but so do many other events. Strictly speaking, the grandfather clock's stopping should not be included. The mystic did not claim that he could stop...

 Humanity is Not the Purpose of the Universe, It is Humani...

Another phrase which occurs frequently in the propaganda of Christian fundamentalists is "scientific humanism." Scientific humanism is supposed to be a philosophy standing in opposition to Christian faith. Fundamentalists like to pretend that we have only two alternatives, either scientific humanism or their version of Christianity. But scientific humanism has as many different meanings as scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, a scientific humanist is somebody who believes in science and ...

 Certainty in Alchemy

"We have a phenomenon very like that in industry," Galiagante said when she was done. "It's called green thumb syndrome. It sometimes occurs when a new plant establishes a complicated but known procedure for the first time. Your people set it up perfectly but nothing happens. The oxides won't reduce, the catalysts won't… cattle. Punishing the technicians accomplishes nothing. The reaction simply refuses to run. Eventually management will fly in somebody who's worked on the procedure before ...

 Wubizixing

At one time, Chinese had a serious "keyboard problem", but it's been largely solved by keyboards like Wubizixing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubizixing [wikipedia.org] ) and Wubihua. At the simple end, Wubihua assigns 5 keys to the most fundamental strokes used to write Chinese: horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling/dot, and hooked/complex. You press the keys corresponding to at least the first 4 strokes, then press the key corresponding to the last, and it presents you with a ...

 Scientists Must Always Stand at the Drawing Board

Do I believe in UFOs or extraterrestrial visitors? Where shall I begin? There's a fascinating frailty of the human mind that psychologists know all about, called "argument from ignorance." This is how it goes. Remember what the "U" stands for in "UFO"? You see lights flashing in the sky. You've never seen anything like this before and don't understand what it is. You say, "It's a UFO!" The "U" stands for "unidentified." But then you say, "I don't know what it is; it must be aliens from ou...

 Einstein Saw No Point in Exploring Non-Beautiful Theories

What I remember most clearly was that when I put down a suggestion that seemed to me cogent and reasonable, Einstein did not in the least contest this, but he only said, 'Oh, how ugly.' As soon as an equation seemed to him to be ugly, he really rather lost interest in it and could not understand why somebody else was willing to spend much time on it. He was quite convinced that beauty was a guiding principle in the search for important results in theoretical physics.

 The Unimaginative Naming of an Ancestor

Raymond Dart, then, gave the name Australopithecus to the Taung Child, the type specimen of the genus, and we have been stuck with this depressingly unimaginative name for our ancestor ever since. It simply means 'southern ape'. Nothing to do with Australia, which just means 'southern country'. You'd think Dart might have thought of a more imaginative name for such an important genus. He might even have guessed that other members of the genus would later be discovered north of the equator. S...

 L Peter Deutsch on Why Programing is so Hard

One of the things that I've been thinking about off and on over the last five-plus years is, "Why is programming so hard?" You have the algorithmic side of programming and that's i close enough to mathematics that you can use mathematics as the basic model, if you will, for what goes on in it. You can use mathematical methods and mathematical ways of thinking.That doesn't make it easy, but nobody thinks mathematics is easy. So there's a pretty good match between the material you're working ...