They included too few subjects, they were not randomized, they did not properly compare the orders with alternatives, and judges were not even asked to record how they would otherwise have sentenced offenders. The culture of public service

Indeed, researchers at the vanguard of public health contend that neither social stressors nor individual vulnerabilities are enough to produce most mental illnesses.

Conventional wisdom would recommend incremental improvements to maximize the potential of the existing infrastructure. The fundamental flaw in conventional wisdom is the failure to acknowledge the possibility of a black swan.

Humans, and essentially all the animals you know and love, typically harness a couple thousand kilojoules per mole by burning food with oxygen.

They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after it’s solved than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough.

Microbes have figured out all sorts of ways to harness Gibbs free energy by combining various gases, liquids, and rocks.

We need to think more about mining our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information.

There are multiple stakeholders, who don’t define the problem the same way. If the number of uninsured goes down but costs go up, is that progress? We don’t even know.

Societies that adopt innovative, predictive, and adaptive models designed around a significant, ongoing redistribution of global resources will be most likely to survive in the future.