This is a bit of a follow up on my previous post about my experiments with General Psychology, but mostly about my thoughts about student evaluations in higher ed (using this class as an example). With every class, I try to take a breath a little short of halfway through and ask students how the…
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…
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,…
