By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we ...

If you try to enumerate all of the things that you know with absolute, 100% certainty, you will find that the list is very small. You know that “something” exists. If you have mental experiences, then you know that “you” exist (though coming up with a reasonable definition for what “you” means can be remarkably tricky). If your mental experiences are varied, then you know that whatever exi...

For those who are interested in finding someone to date, a little probabilistic thinking can help a lot. To see how, let's take a moment to analyze the situation. Every time that you meet a new person, there is some chance that you will end up in a romantic relationship. If we want to assign a probability to this happening in any particular case, that probability will depend on the information ...

When we try to predict how long a task will take, we are in danger of falling prey to the planning fallacy. This is the natural human tendency to underestimate how long your own projects will take and the costs involved. To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, ...

Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like "nonplused", "loquacious" and "limerance" spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don't consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books o...

Should I wait in line to get this free mug? Should I walk to dinner rather than taking a taxi? Should I drive an extra fifteen minutes to go to the cheaper grocery store? Should I keep reading reviews for another twenty minutes to make sure I've really found the best hot water bottle that $10 can buy? These questions can be quite difficult to answer without a framework for valuing our time, especi...

If you hire a law firm, as an individual or the owner of a small business, there is a pretty good chance they will bill you by the hour. So if the work performed takes 100 hours rather than 50, you will pay them twice as much. From the law firm’s perspective, this is reasonable, because each one of their work hours is about as valuable to them as every other one (holding the specific employees on ...

Thinking very carefully about problems can be an extremely powerful way to answer questions or make predictions. But there are some problems for which our non-conscious processing systems produce superior results. Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of thi...

We often talk about ideas by using phrases like "I believe X." But what do we mean when we say that we "believe" in an idea? Do we mean that we have 100% confidence that the idea is true? Let's hope not. Even statements that we all would say we very strongly believe, like "tomorrow the sun will rise", and "I am not a robot" we should not assign 100% probability to. While we can be very, very, v...