But some are useful In 1976, the statistician George Box published a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association that contained a sentence so concise and so true that it has since become one of the most quoted in the history of the philosophy of science: “All models are wrong, but some are… Read more

Why a thought can be perfectly clear and about nothing at all Here is a sentence anyone can understand: the golden mountain is tall. It is not nonsense, the way a random string of syllables is nonsense. It has a definite meaning, we can picture what would make it true, and we can even say… Read more

How we learned to use the world without understanding it At some point in the last decade, the device most of us are reading these words on became something we cannot explain. Not merely something we could not build (that has been true of most tools for most of human history) but something whose operating… Read more

From individual insight to collective knowledge In the winter of 1676, Isaac Newton wrote a letter to Robert Hooke that contained one of the most quoted sentences in the history of science: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The sentence is usually read as a gesture of… Read more

A thermostat that almost thinks A thermostat on the wall is doing something that, described carefully, sounds a great deal like thinking. It senses the temperature of the room. It holds a target it has been given. And when the two drift apart it acts, clicking the heating on until the gap closes and clicking… Read more