Sublime

“Deferring to experts is rational,” Mercier and Sperber write. “If we didn’t, we would be clueless about a wide variety of important issues about which we have no personal experience and no competent reflection. Once we defer to some experts, it makes sense to put relatively little weight on challenging arguments from third parties.”

our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.

Most mornings when she is in her lab, Doudna schedules a steady stream of her researchers to come present their most recent results. Her questions tend to be Socratic: Have you thought about adding RNA? Can we image that in living cells? “She has a knack for asking the right critical big questions when you’re developing your project,” says Jinek.

That means adopting “a mindset of falsification,” always striving to “disprove” your hypothesis, and seeing “if it stands up to the assault.” One of Shubin Stein’s favorite questions is, “Why might I be wrong?”

You need to know how important evidence really is, he said. Ask how they would react to someone who saw the same information and reached a different conclusion. Do you use the same standards for counterevidence? How did you conclude this was the best explanation of your observation? The point here is to move away from the claim itself and help them

They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. “Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike’s experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum,” writes the historian of education Diane