I am not a fan of the self-help, personal improvement, motivational genre. To be specific, it’s the I can [teach you/help you/motivate you] to be [happy/rich/successful] if you buy my [book/blog/course] merry-go-round I don’t care for. I don’t care if authors have academic, research, finance, religious or sales backgrounds, they’re mostly shysters[…] Read On
Sitting on the outdoor patio of our favorite local breakfast place the other day my wife and I were getting a kick out of watching this little boy who run around nonstop, banging into things, spewing gibberish and looking like he was having a blast. After a few seconds I[…] Read On
When I studied physics in college and engineering in grad school, I kept wondering when we were going to stop trying to use grossly oversimplified one and two-dimensional models to explain complex phenomenon in the real three-dimensional world. The thing is, we never did. I’m sure that sort of modeling[…] Read On
When you try to boil down complex concepts to the kind of motivational missives that the Twitterverse eats up, the sound-bites you come up with may sound compelling, but they’re usually misleading or just plain wrong. The problem is, people are bombarded with that sort of oversimplified bullshit 24×7. Case[…] Read On
Everyone tells me our education system is broken. Curious, I typed, “education system is …” into Google. The top suggestion to complete the search phrase was “broken.” The next four were “flawed,” “failing,” “bad” and “messed up.” Just as I suspected. I’m a big believer in Occam’s razor: all things[…] Read On
We used to use research studies to draw scientific conclusions. Now we use data to draw erroneous conclusions and sell books. Sometimes the BS-busters are the biggest BSers. Yesterday I watched a video of a guy explaining why American millionaires have an average college GPA of 2.9. Something about college[…] Read On
The court of public opinion is no place to meter out justice. That’s why we have a criminal justice system with the blindfolded lady and the scales. Without it you’re left with groupthink and confirmation bias which ultimately deteriorates to mob rule. Who would have thought that an enlightened society[…] Read On