media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention. But this is hardly a reasonable view.  There is considerable distance between, say, the confidence we should place in astronomers’ calculations of eclipses and a small marketing study suggesting that consumers prefer laundry soap in blue boxes

A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved.  Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science?

Second, and even more important, there is our overall assessment of work in a given science in comparison with other sciences.

you need not have a philosophy about meat-eating to understand that we — Americans, that is — need to do less of it. In fact, only if meat were produced at no or little expense to the environment, public health or animal welfare (as, arguably, some of it is), would our decisions about whether to raise and kill animals for food come down to ethics.

The purely pragmatic reasons to eat less meat (and animal products in general) are abundant

18 percent of greenhouse gases were attributable to the raising of animals for food.

Last January, as he prepared to offer the class again, Kelly put the Internet on notice. He posted his syllabus and announced that his new, larger class was likely to create two separate hoaxes. He told members of the public to "consider yourself warned--twice."

One answer lies in the structure of the Internet's various communities. Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed. Facebook, where the Lincoln hoax took flight, has strong communities but decentralizes the exchange of information. Friends are quite likely to share content and to correct mistakes, but those corrections won't reach other users sharing or viewing the same content.

Reddit, by contrast, builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn't a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. When one user voiced doubts, others saw the comment and quickly piled on.

Ignatius taught the Jesuits to end each day doing something called the Examen. You start by acknowledging that God is there with you; then you give thanks for the good parts of your day (mine usually include food); and finally, you run through the events of the day from morning to the moment you sat down to pray, stopping to consider when you felt consolation, the closeness of God, or desolation, when you ignored God or when you felt like God bailed on you. Then you ask for forgiveness for anything shitty you did, and for guidance tomorrow. I realize I’ve spent most of my life saying “thanks” to people in a perfunctory, whatever kind of way. Now when I say it I really mean it, even if it’s to the guy who makes those lattes I love getting in the morning, because I stopped and appreciated his latte-making skills the night before. If you are lucky and prone to belief, the Examen will also help you start really feeling God in your life.

My church hosts a monthly dinner for the homeless. Serious work is involved; volunteers pull multiple shifts shopping, prepping, cooking, serving food, and cleaning. I show up for the first time and am shuttled into the kitchen by a harried young woman with a pen stuck into her ponytail, who asks me if I can lift heavy weights before putting me in front of two bins of potato salad and handing me an ice cream scoop. For three hours, I scoop potato salad onto plates, heft vats of potato salad, and scrape leftover potato salad into the compost cans. I never want to eat potato salad again, but I learn something about the homeless people I’ve been avoiding for years: some are mentally a mess, many—judging from the smell—are drunk off their asses, but on the whole, they are polite, intelligent, and, more than anything else, grateful. As I walk back to my car, I’m stopped several times by many of them who want to thank me, saying how good the food was, how much they enjoyed it. “I didn’t do anything,” I say in return. “You were there,” one of them replies. It’s enough to make me go back the next month, and the month after that. And in between, when I see people I feed on the street, instead of focusing my eyes in the sidewalk and hoping they go away, we have conversations. It’s those conversations that move me from intellectual distance toward a greater sense of gratitude for the work of God.

It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books. Unlike most pop self-help books, these are about life as we know it — the one you can change, but only a little, and with a ton of work. Professor Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic science a decade ago, has synthesized a lifetime’s research in neurobiology, economics and psychology. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” goes to the heart of the matter: How aware are we of the invisible forces of brain chemistry, social cues and temperament that determine how we think and act?

The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.

Mr. Duhigg’s thesis is that we can’t change our habits, we can only acquire new ones. Alcoholics can’t stop drinking through willpower alone: they need to alter behavior — going to A.A. meetings instead of bars, for instance — that triggers the impulse to drink.

why were all his Facebook friends being informed that while perusing the Huffington Post he'd surrendered to primordial yearnings?Because at some point over the past year he had clicked a button without reading the fine print and thus had entered the world of "frictionless sharing." In this world, if you're on a website that permits frictionless sharing (theatlantic.com doesn't), every time you click on a headline, the site can report this behavior to your Facebook friends.

Here's how the Social Reader's recruitment process can work: You're on washingtonpost.com, and you're told that a particular Facebook friend has read a particular story. You decide you'd like to read the story, so you click on the headline. Then you're confronted by a menu that offers only one obvious way to get to read the article--by clicking "Okay, Read Article". And you have to scrutinize the surrounding text pretty carefully to realize that if you choose that option you've just agreed to make your Washington Post reading habits an open book.

The Washington Post says its Social Reader app has around 8 million monthly users. I'm guessing that would be news to at least a million of them

Our society is divided into castes based upon a supposed division between theoretical knowledge and practical skill. The college professor holds forth on television, as the plumber fumes about detached ivory tower intellectuals.

. There is a natural temptation to view these activities as requiring distinct capacities.

If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money

About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts.

Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

Almost any article worth reading these days generates some version of this long tail of commentary. Depending on whether they are moderated, these comments can range from blistering flameouts to smart factual corrections to full-on challenges to the very heart of an article’s argument.

These days, the comments section of any engaging article is almost as necessary a read as the piece itself — if you want to know how insider experts received the article and how those outsiders processed the new

By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers.

Until recently, the overwhelming consensus in psychology was that intelligence was essentially a fixed trait. But in 2008, an article by a group of researchers led by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl challenged this view and renewed many psychologists’ enthusiasm about the possibility that intelligence was trainable — with precisely the kind of tasks that are now popular as games.

it’s important to explain why we’re not sold on the idea.

There have been many attempts to demonstrate large, lasting gains in intelligence through educational interventions, with few successes. When gains in intelligence have been achieved, they have been modest and the result of many years of effort.

You probably don't know as much as you think you do. When put to the test, most people find they can't explain the workings of everyday things they think they understand.

Find an object you use daily (a zipper, a toilet, a stereo speaker) and try to describe the particulars of how it works. You're likely to discover unexpected gaps in your knowledge. In psychology, we call this cognitive barrier the illusion of explanatory depth. It means you think you fully understand something that you actually don't.

We see this every day in buzz words. Though we often use these words, their meanings are usually unclear. They mask gaps in our knowledge, serving as placeholders that gloss concepts we don't fully understand.

Why do teenagers “behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday?” David Dobbs has compiled the available scientific answers to that question masterfully in “Teenage Brains” for the May issue of National Geographic. Teenage brains, he says, are effectively bringing a new operating system online.

“as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.”

This period of development, he writes, is also adaptive: it is perfect for “the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.”

Most urgent questions of public policy turn on empirical imponderables, and so policymakers fall back on ideological predispositions or muddle through. Is there a better way?

The gold standard for empirical research is the randomized field trial (RFT).

The RFT works better than most other types of empirical investigation. Most of us use anecdotes or common sense empiricism to make inferences about the future, but psychological biases interfere with the reliability of these methods

For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.

They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.

At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.

Financial advisers — at least the good ones — are forever telling their clients to be disciplined, to create a diversified portfolio and to avoid tryi

only 22 percent of workers 55 or older have more than $250,000 put away for retirement.

60 percent of workers in that same age bracket have less than $100,000 in a retirement account

The recently retired chief of Israel’s internal security agency said Friday night that he had “no faith” in the ability of the current leadership to handle the Iranian nuclear threat

“I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings,” said Yuval Diskin, who stepped down last May after six years running the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the F.B.I.

“I have observed them from up close,” Mr. Diskin said. “I fear very much that these are not the people I’d want at the wheel.” Echoing Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, Mr. Diskin also said that the government was “misleading the public” about the likely effectiveness of an aerial strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism

At bottom, the invented rituals that proliferate in our culture signify a disenchantment with modernity. If, like millions of Americans, you’re secular and the traditions of a church or temple have no hold on you, or if you’re assimilated and ethnic identity has faded away, then what is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world?

Science might not be enough, which is why so many educated people have turned against it and adopted hostile theories about childhood vaccination. This is the same disenchantment that has produced religious revivalism through much of the world.