Jay Matthews

This is why science, as a mode of inquiry, is fundamentally antithetical to all monolithic intellectual systems. In a beautiful essay, Feynman (1999) talks about the hard-won "freedom to doubt." It was born of a long and brutal struggle, and is essential to a functioning democracy. Intellectuals have a solemn duty to doubt, and to teach doubt.... See more

" We cannot make sense of these events, nor are we meant to process so much loss and be expected to simply keep our heads down and keep moving, show up to work, show up for others – and yet that is exactly what we are asked to do, what we have to do.. . And remember we don’t have time to mourn, that this happens so often it isn’t even a question,... See more

Adam Grant and Samir Nurmohamed Grant shows how Brad bird united his team by rallying against a common enemy. The enemy in this case was the outside expectation that they would fail. Samir Nurmohamed expands on this with Adam: In a study with job seekers who had faced discrimination in their careers, Samir randomly assigned some of them to tell a... See more

Sixteen Reasons Other Than Prediction to Build Models But, more to the point, I can quickly think of 16 reasons other than prediction (at least in this bald sense) to build a model. In the space afforded, I cannot discuss all of these, and some have been treated en passant above. But, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, such... See more

On relationships with others in the field: “It’s a very important medium-term project to bring China into the international scientific community in a worthy way,” he says. “There’s a tremendous hunger for research and knowledge in science there. I wish it weren’t so politically fraught.”

I think we need to, in this time, we need to reckon with the fact that in each and every single one of our bodies holds living memory of our ancestors coming into agreements with plants and animals, and those agreements are those, um, covenants that our ancestors, you know, wove themselves into with plants is that they said, "we'll give up a little... See more

The problem here, Fromm emphasizes, is not whether or not the beliefs are correct—the problem is whether or not the beliefs are a result of one’s own thinking. It is certainly possible that someone, through their original reasoning, can arrive at the same beliefs as the person I described above. The difference is that they came to these beliefs... See more