S1-306 – The widening gap
How we learned to use the world without understanding it At some point in the last… Read more
S1-305 – How ideas travel
From individual insight to collective knowledge In the winter of 1676, Isaac Newton wrote a letter… Read more
S1-103 – When a mechanism becomes a model
A thermostat that almost thinks A thermostat on the wall is doing something that, described carefully,… Read more
S1-304 – Mathematics: The language that doesn’t lie
What it cannot say In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner published an essay with a title… Read more
S1-303 – What a word must do
Categories, definitions, and the preconditions for communication There is a word that has appeared in political… Read more
S1-213 – Mapping the unknown
Practical strategies for seeing how much we don’t know Ask people what diabetes is, and most… Read more
S1-212 – Knowing the name vs. knowing the thing
Three levels of understanding and why most of us live at the first When Richard Feynman… Read more
S1-210 – The catalogue of cognitive fallacies
How the mind systematically misleads itself In the spring of 1972, the psychologist Amos Tversky invited… Read more
S1-209 – Knowledge vs. belief
The most important distinction we are probably not making In ordinary conversation, the words “know” and… Read more
S1-208 – Talking across the gap
How to communicate with someone whose framework differs from one’s own at the level of what… Read more