As the new semester here has started (we start late because we fit in a semester in January) I have been frantically getting everything settled with my three classes. For one of them, I am trying something new, so I thought I would share it with you and ask for any thoughts or feedback. It…
I don’t often write about gender and science, but I have been thinking and reading about it lately. If you were hoping for my typical aloof lecturing, or overblown (yet intellectual) ranting, just wait a few days (or you could revisit what I think of David Brooks and Larry Summers). At a wonderful dinner out…
I squirmed a lot reading Larry Summers’ recent piece in the New York Times on where he thinks and hopes higher education will go in the future. Here’s a point by point analysis: He begins by undermining his own credibility: A paradox of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much…
I had a few thoughts about the big teacher quality and VAM study that came out today that I wanted to share before they float away. My thoughts are less about the methods of the study itself and more about how it moves so quickly from the econometrics to the policy, and how the journalist…
This chapter deals with an enduring theme in my own thoughts, and a tension between the practice of science and the limits of the human mind. Those pieces of evidence which we naturally find convincing do not do real work in science. To understand why, it is important to understand both what makes some types…
Ok, let me begin by saying how much I love the New York Review of Books. You should totally subscribe to it. It is generally great content, and they make a lot of it free online to free loaders like you (haven’t subscribed yet?). Tons of thought provoking stuff. Second, Freeman Dyson is a super…
The subtitle of this chapter is “But Doctor, what does it really mean?” What does gravity really mean? Not just measurements of how fast things fall, but what is gravity, really? Stanovich points out that often the lay public wants science to answer these kinds of questions, which he calls ultimate questions, or essentialist questions,…
In the spirit of this liveblog of teaching Stanovich’s book, I thought I would share a quick anecdote of class discussion around the issues of Chapter 2 on Falsifiability and Scientific Theories. We were discussing how science answers testable questions, and how theories make falsifiable predictions, and I gave one well-worn example: “All swans are…
In the second chapter, Stanovich delves deeper into his third characteristic of science: Scientists deal with solvable problems. To define “solvable problems” in this context, we must start with two critical concepts: first, what are the defining characteristics of a scientific theory, and second, what does it mean to be falsifiable? Scientific theories must always…
The first chapter begins with where we all hate to begin, but we must: The Freud problem. Despite having loosed his grip on the world of psychological science many decades ago, Freud’s hold on the collective imagination and definition of psychology persists. Stanovich points out that fewer than 10% of members of the American Psychological…
