Apparently horses in races are almost always (98%) whipped.* The main reason is to make them go faster. Congratulations to the scientists from the University of Sydney who won a prize for discovering that “whipping does not increase horses’ chances of finishing in the top three and that they actually run faster when they are not [...]
Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category
The Danger of Truthiness
Posted in Observation, Statistics, Thinking, Truthiness on September 11, 2011 | 4 Comments »
365 years of progress in thinking about the possibility of artificial intelligence
Posted in AI, Intelligence, Thinking on January 5, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Rene Descartes, 1637: For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs—for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what [...]
How are critical thinking skills acquired? Five perspectives
Posted in Argument Mapping, Critical Thinking, Education, Expertise, Reasoning, Teaching, Thinking on October 20, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The five main theories about how critical thinking skills are acquired are Formal Training, Theoretical Instruction, Situated Cognition, Practice, and Evolutionary Psychology. The most credible theory is Practice.
If there were giants…
Posted in Cognition, Language, Thinking on June 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Daddy, is this true? If there were giants, then a football to them would be the same size as a pea to us. That was, word for word, a completely out-of-the blue utterance by our 6 year old daughter, Lillian. Her “if…then” construct is what is known as a counter-factual conditional – If [something that [...]
My bookshelves
Posted in Thinking on May 19, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Last night I re-sorted all my work-related books, with approximately one shelf for each of the following categories: Argumentation theory, informal logic, and critical thinking Psychology of judgement and decision making Popular (“trade”) books on mind and rationality Software development, including UI and interaction design and usability Visual thinking, information design and architecture Training, elearning [...]
Dangers of Datacentrism
Posted in Business, Critical Thinking, Datacentrism, Decision Making, Research, Thinking on May 7, 2009 | 3 Comments »
A common decision making trap is thinking more data = better decision – and so, to make a better decision, you should go out and get more data. Let’s call this the datacentric fallacy. Of course there are times when you don’t have enough information, when having more information (of the right kind) would [...]
Simple but not easy
Posted in Argument Mapping, Decision mapping, Hypothesis mapping, Mapping, Thinking on May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“As I have said many times, it is simple, but not easy.” – Warren Buffett. Buffett is of course talking about investment, but the same seems to me to be true of mapping (whether of the decision, argument or hypothesis variants). The principles are simple enough. What for example could be simpler to state and [...]
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Can this be true?- Oh wait that's a "t"Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles.
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