Over at the Genetic Literacy Project, editor Kenrick Vezina offers a particularly level-headed and constructive consideration of the debate over the fitness of the selfish-gene metaphor that my Aeon article “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” raised. Violence of the title aside, [Dobbs’s] point was not that we should go out and gather up all the copies of […]
Continue reading →I find this clip amazing and unsettling. I’ve not read David and Goliath, the book they discuss here. But according to reviews and Gladwell’s own description, it follows the template of his prior books, which mine social science and psychology to create seemingly counterintuitive just-so stories about how people behave and society works. There’s often […]
Continue reading →In a passage highlighted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Stephen Pinker, in an interview in The Observer last week, argues that statistical ignorance is our intellectual culture’s great failure. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the […]
Continue reading →I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into pitching and then beginning work on The Orchid and the Dandelion, I spent a lot of time […]
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