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Critical thinking helps us frame everyday problems, teaches us to ask the correct questions, and points us towards intelligent solutions.

Critical thinking is a continuing practice that involves an open mind and methods for synthesizing and evaluating the quality of knowledge and evidence, as well as an understanding of human errors.

Step 1. What We Believe Depends on How We Feel

One of his new Slapfish restaurants, serving sustainable seafood, was hit this year with dozens of bad reviews that complained about its prices (too high) and portions (too small).

“You can get buried by bad reviews,” said Mr. Gruel, whose fast-casual restaurants serve food like fish tacos and lobster burgers. “So it’s a race to stop the bleeding.”

“Star ratings persist forever,”

peer review. The process has been blamed for everything from slowing down the communication of new discoveries to introducing woeful biases to the literature

peer review does not elevate the quality of published science and that many published research findings are later shown to be false. In response, a growing number of scientists are working to impose a new vision of the scientific process through post-publication review,

organized post-publication peer review system could help “clarify experiments, suggest avenues for follow-up work and even catch errors.” If used by a critical mass of scientists, he added, “it could strengthen the scientific process.”  

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

I liked Uber, and the driver said, by way of being helpful, I believe, “You have a 4.5 rating. If it drops to 4.0, no driver will pick you up.”

At this time I had taken only six rides in an Uber. I had no idea I was being reviewed as a passenger. A perfect score is 5.0. What could I have done to get demoted .5?

We are all being rated these days. Doctors, professors, cleaners, restaurants, the purse repair store I looked up on Yelp this morning. The app Lulu lets women rate the men they date. In Boston, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center launched a pilot program that lets patients go online to read their therapists’ notes

as a social network it’s a) made up of humans who are b) trying to stand out from the crowd like a goth at the homecoming pep rally.

Here’s a list of some of the many annoying things people do

Like-whoring by writing tweets instead of reviews. Like-whoring is the basic problem with every social network depraved enough to have a “like” function, of course. The most obvious like-whoring behavior on Letterboxd is the shoehorned-in one-liner review. On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate

David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class

the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships.

he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform

We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.

I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want

Whether you are healthy, moribund or traversing the stages of decrepitude in between, every morsel of medical advice you receive is pure conjecture — educated guesswork perhaps, but guesswork nonetheless. Your health care provider and your favorite columnist are both mere croupiers, enablers for your health gambling habit.

Staying well is all about probability and risk. So is the interpretation of medical tests, and so are all treatments for all illnesses, dire and trivial alike. Health has nothing in common with the laws of physics and everything in common with lottery cards, mutual funds and tomorrow’s weather forecast.

Are you impressed with studies showing that people who take Vitamin X or perform Exercise Y live longer? Remember, correlation does not imply causation. Do you obsess over studies claiming to show that various dietary patterns cause cancer? In fact, Mr. Wheelan points out, this kind of research examines not so much how diet affects the likelihood of cancer as how getting cancer affects people’s memory of what they used to eat.

two differences between workplace performance reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies, managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality criticism, such as comments that the woman was “abrasive,” “judgmental” or “strident.” Only 2 percent of men’s critical reviews included negative personality comments.

The study speaks to the impossible tightrope women must walk to do their jobs competently and to make tough decisions while simultaneously coming across as nice to everyone, all the time

If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she’s going to be criticized — with comments not just about her work but also about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that allows her to persevere in the face of it.

The now-discredited study got headlines because it offered hope. It seemed to prove that our sense of empathy, our basic humanity, could overcome prejudice and bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences. It was heartwarming, and it was utter bunkum. The good news is that this particular case of scientific fraud isn't going to do much damage to anyone but the people who concocted and published the study. The bad news is that the alleged deception is a symptom of a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment.

When it was published in Science magazine last December, the research attracted academic as well as media attention; it seemed to provide solid evidence that increasing contact between minority and majority groups could reduce prejudice.

But in May, other researchers tried to reproduce the study using the same methods, and failed. Upon closer examination, they uncovered a number of devastating "irregularities" - statistical quirks and troubling patterns - that strongly implied that the whole LaCour/Green study was based upon made-up data.

conomic models often give people credit for being what may seem at a glance an unexceptional thing: fully rational beings pursuing our own self-interest. But as psychologists, such as 2002 Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, and behavioral economists, such as 2017 laureate Richard H. Thaler, have pointed out, an assortment of biases, heuristics, and other factors often move us to behave in ways that seem distinctly irrational. Can social science’s understanding of how humans think and act be used to predict how markets will behave?

Although the responses tended to affirm the predictive power of behavioral economics, members of both panels reiterated that fully rational models still have an important place in economics. Pol Antras of Harvard, who agreed with the statement, added, “Still, models with fully rational agents provide a perfectly good approximation for explaining many market outcomes!”

Colorado health officials will resume their review of a program allowing ketamine to be administered outside of hospital settings,

The 23-year-old Black man died in August 2019 after paramedics administered the powerful anesthetic during a confrontation with police.

"This more clearly defined scope will allow us to do a review that examines the health outcomes of ketamine administration by EMS providers in the field, broadly,

The artist who deploys irony tests the sophistication of his audience and divides it into two parts, those in the know and those who live in a fool’s paradise. Irony creates a privileged vantage point from which you can frame and stand aloof from a world you are too savvy to take at face value. Irony is the essence of the critical attitude, of the observer’s cool gaze; every reviewer who is not just a bourgeois cheerleader (and no reviewer will admit to being that) is an ironist.

“Les Misérables” defeats irony by not allowing the distance it requires. If you’re looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can’t frame what you are literally inside of.

Endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite are what “Les Misérables” offers in its refusal to afford the distance that enables irony.

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are — or than others consider us to be — can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others.

One intriguing theme running through “The Folly of Fools” is that self-­deception can affect our susceptibility to disease, for ill or good.

When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.

lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.

corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations.

Airbnb’s real innovation — a platform of “trust” — where everyone could not only see everyone else’s identity but also rate them as good, bad or indifferent hosts or guests. This meant everyone using the system would pretty quickly develop a relevant “reputation” visible to everyone else in the system.

“I think we’re going to move back to a place where the world is a village again — a place where a lot of people know each other and trust each other ... and where everyone has a reputation that everyone else knows,” said Chesky, 32. “On Airbnb, everyone has an identity.”

“There used to be a romanticism about ownership, because it meant you were free, you were empowered,” Chesky answered. “I think now, for the younger generation, ownership is viewed as a burden. Young people will only want to own what they want responsibility for. And a lot of people my age don’t want responsibility for a car and a house and to have a lot of stuff everywhere.