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
S1-302 – Communication as model transfer
The miracle and the mess In 1948, a mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories named Claude Shannon… Read more
S1-301 – Without words, no world
How language makes thought possible, and what it makes impossible In the 1970s, a team of… 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
S1-211 – Merit beliefs and crony beliefs
Why the strength of a conviction is not evidence of its truth Think about the last… Read more