Sublime

remember the base rates and pay attention to the quality of information.5 If you know that 20% of people like chocolate ice cream and 80% like vanilla, you can easily guess that your new friend prefers vanilla. Even after you are exposed to a series of news stories about a current trend of athletes to partake in cocoa-avocado ice cream, you can

This is the dark side of independent research. Without external validation - “I teach at Stanford” or “I got a grant from NASA”, it’s hard to convince people that you’re any good at what you do. The same goes for your output: you want peers to acknowledge and review your work, or the signoff of a well-respected journal.

“They have hired astronomers; they have hired mathematicians; they have hired physicists; they have even hired theologists. They never even interviewed an economist.”

Ultimately, he says, neuroscience will—and should—dictate human values.

Yes, there are effectively certain truths of science. General Relativity may be overturned by some future physics—albeit not in any way that predicts the Sun will orbit Jupiter; the new theory must steal the successful predictions of the old theory, not contradict them. But evolutionary theory takes place on a higher level of organization than