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What, really, would Maria Montessori have made of this scene? The 30 or so children here were not down at the shore poking their fingers in the sand or running them along mossy stones or digging for hermit crabs. instead they were all inside, alone or in groups of two or three, their faces a few inches from a screen, their hands doing things Montessori surely did not imagine. A couple of 3-year-old girls were leaning against a pair of French doors, reading an interactive story called Ten Giggly Gorillas and fighting over which ape to tickle next. A boy in a nearby corner had turned his fingertip into a red marker to draw an ugly picture of his older brother. On an old oak table at the front of the room, a giant stuffed Angry Bird beckoned the children to come and test out tablets loaded with dozens of new apps. Some of the chairs had pillows strapped to them, since an 18-month-old might not otherwise be able to reach the table, though she’d know how to swipe once she did.

I have just returned wIth a team of scIentIsts from sIx weeks at sea conductIng research In the Great PacIfIc Garbage Patch — one of fIve major garbage patches drIftIng In the oceans north and south of the equator at the latItude of our great terrestrIal deserts. Although It was my 10th voyage to the area, I was utterly shocked to see the enormous Increase In the quantIty of plastIc waste sInce my last trIp In 2009. PlastIcs of every descrIptIon, from toothbrushes to tIres to unIdentIfIable fragments too numerous to count floated past our marIne research vessel AlguIta for hundreds of mIles wIthout end. We even came upon a floatIng Island bolstered by dozens of plastIc buoys used In oyster aquaculture that had solId areas you could walk on.

I thInk most phIlosophers of scIence would say that all scIentIfIc generalIzatIons are probabIlIstIc rather than logIcally certaIn, more so for the socIal scIences because the systems you are studyIng are more complex than, say, molecules, and because there are fewer opportunItIes to Intervene experImentally and to control every varIable. But the exIs­tence of the socIal scIences, IncludIng psychology, to the extent that they have dIscovered anythIng, shows that, despIte the uncontrollabIlIty of human behavIor, you can make some progress: you can do your best to control the nuIsance varIables that are not lIterally In your control; you can have analogues In a laboratory that sImulate what you’re Interested In and Impose an experImental manIpulatIon. You can be clever about squeezIng the last drop of causal InformatIon out of a correlatIonal data set, and you can use convergIng evI­dence, the qualItatIve narratIves of tradItIonal hIstory In combInatIon wIth quantItatIve data sets and regressIon analyses that try to fInd patterns In them. But I also go to tradItIonal hIstorIcal narratIves, partly as a sanIty check. If you’re just manIpulatIng numbers, you never know whether you’ve wan­dered Into some preposterous conclusIon by takIng numbers too serIously that couldn’t possIbly reflect realIty. Also, It’s the narratIve hIstory that provIdes hypotheses that can then be tested. Very often a hIstorIan comes up wIth some plausIble causal story, and that gIves the socIal scIentIsts somethIng to do In squeezIng a story out of the numbers.

There’s no Rosetta Stone for scientific translation. it’s quite simple really. The first step is getting rid of the technical language.

This sounds like a straightforward instruction, but many enormously intelligent people fail to follow it. The trick they fail to master is to train their brains to think in two ways. One, like a scientist; and two, like someone with no scientific training whatsoever.

And whenever I see or hear journalIsts or polItIcIans dIscussIng a partIcularly Important socIal scIence – economIcs – I just don’t see them makIng the same efforts of jargon removal and technIcal translatIon. Whether It’s dIscussIon of debt, or the argument for austerIty, It’s hard to fInd good economIcs communIcatIon, where the language Is rInsed free of jargon.

Not even he believes that the various flaws that bedevil decision-making can be successfully corrected. The most damaging of these is overconfidence: the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite. it is the bias he says he would most like to eliminate if he had a magic wand. But it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things”.

Credit illustration by Nicole Rifkin Early on March 16, 1968, a company of soldiers in the United States Army’s Americal Division were dropped in by helicopter for an assault against a hamlet known as My Lai 4, in the bitterly contested province of Quang Ngai, on the northeastern coast of South Vietnam.