Category: Practical Wisdom
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Physical activity types, variety, and mortality
“Physical activity types, variety, and mortality: results from two prospective cohort studies” ” –> Walking is a great activity, especially when combined 😉 “ During 2 431 318 person years of follow-up, 38 847 deaths were recorded, with 9901 from cardiovascular disease, 10 719 from cancer, and 3159 from respiratory disease. Total physical activity and most individual physical activities,…
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Was I fooled or wasn’t I?
“What Is the Name of This Book?-The Riddle of Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles, by Raymond M. Smullyan” My introduction to logic was at the age of six. It happened this way: On April 1, 1925, I was sick in bed with grippe, or f lu, or something. In the morning my brother Emile (ten…
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Intuitive insight: Fast associative processes drive sound creative thinking
“Intuitive insight: Fast associative processes drive sound creative thinking” Convergent thinking, the ability to find a single optimal solution to a well-defined problem, is considered a core component of creativity, and is often assumed to rely on controlled, deliberative processes. We tested this assumption using the Compound Remote Associates (CRA) test, where participants have to…
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The ‘made-up mind’.
“The ‘made-up mind’. Deriving new hypotheses on delusions from general psychological models of belief maintenance” Highlights Contemporary definitions of delusions highlight their resistance to conflicting evidence as the core feature, but there has been little progress in understanding why even explicit confrontation with contradicting evidence seldom leads to belief revision. This review aims to generate…
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Nature on the balance sheet …
“Putting nature on the balance sheet: how to account for the ecological costs of our actions” Economists should consider forests and wetlands as well as factories and farms. A book review of “On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us“, Partha Dasgupta (2025) On Natural Capital recaps the roaring economic advances of the past 75…
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Decisions: Studying and Supporting
“Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices“ A lively, authoritative insider’s account of how we make decisions and how decision-making research has developed over the last half century. Decisions describes the evolution of decision science (also called behavioral decision research and related to behavioral economics) through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions,…
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Critical Thinking for Medicine—Moving Beyond Illness Scripts
“Critical Thinking for 21st-CenturyMedicine—Moving Beyond Illness Scripts” Clinical Reasoning for 21st-Century Medicine: Optimal clinical reasoning will involve an appropriate balance betweenillness scripts and pathophysiological reasoning. In our view, medical education has historically overemphasized the former—to which learners are predisposed even without explicit teaching— and underemphasized the latter. The risks of this historical approach will become…
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Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy
I found this nice discours on an interesting topic, related with individual challlenges, AI and related tools appearing in this relation. Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy by Steven Reidbord Reducing the problem to a merely external one leads to therapy that resembles political advocacy; therapy that prizes agreement (“validation”) over all else; therapy that absolves the patient…
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The power of mathematical models for better policy decisions
“Harnessing the power of mathematical models for better policy decisions” sets out four practical recommendations to help policymakers across a wide range of policy areas effectively capitalise on, and sidestep pitfalls of, using mathematical models for decision-making. Decision-makers are often keen to “follow the science” in highly-charged contexts such as climate policy, pandemic response, economic…
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Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated — and nearly everything in-between — our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—The Myth of…
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As For Protocols
Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to critically examine protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As…
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Why probability probably doesn’t exist
(but it is useful to act like it does) David Spiegelhalter All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is. In our everyday world, probability probably does not exist — but it is often useful to act as if it does.— David…
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Explanation in Biology
The most recent publication from the series “Philisophy of Biology” is “Explanation in Biology“, available for free download at the site. The book introduces and elaborates scientific explanations in biology and the life sciences. Explanations are viewed as a “primary” objective of science – theyoffer deep understanding and knowledge of the world, as opposed to…
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