Making good decisions is not easy, and making the best possible (“optimal”) decisions is even harder. Instead, humans often use shortcuts and rules of thumb. From firm managers and policymakers to ...

After giving a lecture at a large tech company, I got into a cab bound for the airport along with one of the attendees. As I searched for my seatbelt in the bottomless crevice of the back seat, I ...

Teenagers get dissed for being irrational and making bad decisions, which can lead to very bad things, like drunken driving, risky sex and drug use. But what if the problem is really that teens are ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who just don’t seem all that sharp. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence ...

In book 3 of On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry is traditionally taken to argue that animals are rational and that it is, therefore, unjust to kill them for food. Since the vast majority of ...

Irrational numbers are numbers that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. This is opposed to rational numbers, like 2, 7, one-fifth and -13/9, which can be, and are, expressed as the ...

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence ...