Author: Yuval Noah Harari | Source: Big Think (August 11, 2025) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. […] Our emotional lives [are] the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. – Maria Popova
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We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves. – Maria Popova
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The main difficulty that faces … [ Read more ]
Authors: John Macmurray, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.
The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.
The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation (March 2, 2023) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Logic is the bedrock of pretty much all human knowledge. As such, philosophers have killed many trees over the centuries, analyzing and determining the principles that define logic and reason. Their ambition has been to determine what we can know to be true and what we cannot know to be true.
What most people don’t realize is that logical fallacies—that is, errors in judgment and reasoning—are … [ Read more ]
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Thought | Inquiry
Three primary reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories:
Author: Joe Forrest | Source: Instrument of Mercy (May 7, 2020) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.
Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:
For the most part we do not first
Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge
The great triumphs of modern science, from splitting the atom to unraveling the human genome, increasingly raise a troubling question: Is the pursuit of knowledge always a good thing? A long tradition in Western thought – largely ignored even by today’s critics of science – says it is not.
Author: Mark Lilla | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Summer2001) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology, Philosophy
How the emergence of IQ tests contracted rather than expanding our understanding of intelligence and what we can do to transcend their perilous cultural legacy is what practicing physician, research scientist, and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee explores throughout The Gene: An Intimate History — a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self.
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A crucial agent in … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Popova, Siddhartha Mukherjee | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (November 30, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
My question … was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?” Differently expressed,
Authors: Leo Tolstoy, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (June 3, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Meaning, Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior, Religion
The secret to happiness in almost any relationship is knowing what not to say.
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The pool of knowledge is limited; it’s the pool of ignorance, speculation and misunderstanding that is infinite.
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But one thing that happens when we acquire too much “knowledge” is that, like Othello, we sometimes fail to distinguish it from what can never be known, which may not be untrue. Another is that we’re … [ Read more ]
Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The New York Times (December 31, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Wisdom
The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise. A leading researcher on the psychology of human wrongness sets us straight.
Author: David Dunning | Source: Pacific Standard (October 27, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
[The] trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the Internet. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. … [ Read more ]
Author: Hossein Derakhshan | Source: WIRED (October 19, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Communication, Culture, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology