The miracle and the mess In 1948, a mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories named Claude Shannon published a paper that changed, in a single stroke, what it was possible to think about communication. Shannon was not interested in the meaning of messages: he was explicit about this from the first pages of his paper, which… Read more

How language makes thought possible, and what it makes impossible In the 1970s, a team of researchers at Stanford University studied a group of deaf children in Nicaragua who had been brought together for the first time in a newly established school for the deaf. The children had no shared language: each had developed their… Read more

Practical strategies for seeing how much we don’t know Ask people what diabetes is, and most give a fuller answer than they get credit for. They know it means blood sugar that stays too high. They know that, left unchecked, it does slow damage to the body, to the eyes, the nerves, the kidneys. They… Read more

Three levels of understanding and why most of us live at the first When Richard Feynman was a boy, his father took him for walks in the woods outside New York City and pointed out the birds. Other fathers named the birds. Feynman’s father did something different. He would say: “See that bird? It’s a… Read more

Why the strength of a conviction is not evidence of its truth Think about the last time you genuinely changed your mind about something important. Not refined your position, not updated a minor detail, but actually reversed a significant belief: concluded that what you had been confident about was wrong and adopted the opposing view…. Read more