The intellectual’s special temptation In the late 1930s, George Orwell noticed something that troubled him more than most of the political catastrophes he was living through. Sophisticated, educated, well-read people, people who could identify propaganda in the newspapers of countries they disliked, were systematically unable to identify it in the publications of movements they sympathized… Read more

Chaos, randomness, and the limits of prediction On the morning of October 15, 1987, Michael Fish, a senior meteorologist at the BBC, broadcast the following reassurance to the British public: “Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t… Read more

But some are useful In 1976, the statistician George Box published a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association that contained a sentence so concise and so true that it has since become one of the most quoted in the history of the philosophy of science: “All models are wrong, but some are… Read more

Why a thought can be perfectly clear and about nothing at all Here is a sentence anyone can understand: the golden mountain is tall. It is not nonsense, the way a random string of syllables is nonsense. It has a definite meaning, we can picture what would make it true, and we can even say… Read more

How we learned to use the world without understanding it At some point in the last decade, the device most of us are reading these words on became something we cannot explain. Not merely something we could not build (that has been true of most tools for most of human history) but something whose operating… Read more