Scientific Principlesbeginner
Stress
Stress is the feeling of having too many demands and expectations that exceed our ability to cope. It can arise from time pressure or from high expectations and self-criticism.
medicine · business↗
ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Scientific Principles
Borrow powerful explanations from the natural world.
Scientific Principlesbeginner
Supply and Demand
Supply and demand help explain how prices and quantities respond to shortages, changing preferences, and new production. Prices can also influence who receives a scarce good and whether producers invest in more capacity.
business · economics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Support Theory
Support theory is a framework for understanding probability judgments that emphasizes description-dependence and the balance of evidence. It applies to decision making, calibration, and phenomena like the above-average effect.
probability · psychology↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Systematic Review
A systematic review uses an explicit question, search strategy and appraisal process to find and synthesize relevant research. These methods aim to reduce selection bias and make the work reproducible. A review may include meta-analysis when combining quantitative results is appropriate.
management · science↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis as Research Summaries
In Banasiewicz’s 3E framework, systematic reviews use explicit search, selection, and appraisal procedures to summarize research on a defined question. A review may include a meta-analysis, which statistically combines comparable results. Both can help decision makers assess a body of evidence, but neither removes weaknesses in the underlying studies.
education · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Talent and Luck
Success is a combination of talent and luck; extreme performances often involve luck, leading to regression toward the mean in subsequent events.
sports · statistics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Taming Intuitive Predictions
Intuitive forecasts can be too extreme when they treat an imperfect signal as a reliable guide. Base rates and the strength of the evidence can help determine how far to adjust a forecast toward the mean.
economics · statistics↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
Territorial Behavior
Territorial behavior is the active defense of an area, often to maintain access to food, space, or mating opportunities. Its benefits must be considered alongside the time, energy, and risk involved in defense.
psychology · biology↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
Testosterone on My Mind and in My Brain
Simon Baron-Cohen presents research on how prenatal testosterone levels influence brain development, behavior, and cognitive traits such as empathy and systemizing, and explores their potential link to autism.
medicine · neuroscience↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Birthday Paradox
The Birthday Paradox demonstrates that in a group of just 23 people, the probability of any two sharing a birthday is about 50%, counterintuitive to individual expectations.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Certainty of Logic
Basic logic uses quantifiers like 'for all' and 'there exists' to make precise statements about scope and truth, overcoming the ambiguity of everyday language.
logic · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Challenge of Multiple Causes
Communication can fail through interacting causes. High stakes may increase a speaker’s motivation to be clear while also creating pressure that leaves less attention for monitoring ambiguous wording.
communication · psychology↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Chemical Bond
A chemical bond is an attraction between atoms, ions, or molecules that enables the formation of chemical compounds, resulting from electrostatic forces in ionic bonds or electron sharing in covalent bonds.
science · chemistry↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Chemical Reaction
A chemical reaction is a thermodynamic process where reactants transform into products through the breaking and forming of chemical bonds, often involving energy changes. It produces new substances with different molecular structures, unlike physical changes that only alter state or form.
science · chemistry↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Dependence on Theory for Rare Events
When an event is rare relative to the available record, observations provide limited guidance about its frequency. Estimating its probability then depends more heavily on assumptions about outcomes beyond the observed data.
probability · philosophy_of_science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The End of the World
Harrison distinguishes hazards such as asteroid impacts and nuclear war from unsupported predictions of an imminent apocalypse. He argues for examining the evidence behind each claim and preparing for credible threats without treating a confident prediction as proof.
science · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
The Error Equation
For repeated numerical judgments of the same true value, mean squared error equals squared bias plus noise variance: MSE = bias² + noise². Bias is the average error; noise is the spread of judgments. When their initial magnitudes are equal, halving either reduces MSE equally. The equation makes the cost of inconsistency visible alongside systematic error.
decision_science · law↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Gendarme's Hat
Rates based on small samples fluctuate more than rates based on large samples. Small groups can therefore appear near both ends of a ranking even when their underlying performance is no different. Larger samples reduce this sampling variation, but do not remove bias or guarantee a correct interpretation.
sociology · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Green Troll in a Red Dress
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, a principle popularized by Carl Sagan. It guides us to require more rigorous proof for assertions that are highly improbable or outside normal experience.
education · science↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Increase in the Decrease (Gaussian Distribution)
The probability of a deviation from the mean in a Gaussian distribution declines exponentially, with the odds decreasing dramatically with each additional unit of deviation. This accelerating decline allows statisticians to effectively ignore extreme outliers.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Intermediate Value Theorem
The Intermediate Value Theorem says that a continuous real-valued function taking values 0 and a at the ends of an interval must take every value between them. Cheng uses this as an analogy for offering a closely spaced range of options when people’s preferences are unknown.
sociology · science↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Invention of the Scatterplot
A scatterplot displays paired measurements as points on two axes. Galton’s 19th-century studies of family heights illustrate its use for examining relationships between variables.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning)
Fractal distributions (power laws) exhibit scalability where the ratio of exceedances above two thresholds is given by the ratio of the thresholds to the power of the negative exponent, allowing estimation of rare events from known data.
economics · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Mandelbrotian
The Mandelbrotian distribution describes a scalable, non-Gaussian distribution where extreme events, such as great wealth, are more likely than under a normal distribution, used to model phenomena like wealth in Europe.
economics · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Platonicity of Triangles
The concept explains that credit for an idea often goes to the person who connects disparate observations into a coherent framework, not the original discoverer, as illustrated by Mandelbrot's synthesis of fractal geometry.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Problem of Induction
The problem of induction questions the logical justification of inferring general laws from specific observations, highlighting the uncertainty inherent in empirical science and everyday reasoning.
science · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Quincunx and the Binomial Distribution
The quincunx (or Galton board) illustrates how in a series of random binary events, most outcomes cluster around the mean, while extreme outcomes become exponentially rarer. The board models the binomial distribution: large deviations are highly improbable in symmetric randomness.
science · psychology↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Real Butterfly Effect: Sensitivity to Initial Conditions
The butterfly effect describes sensitivity to initial conditions: nearby starting states in a chaotic system can develop very different trajectories. It limits prediction from imperfect measurements, but does not mean every small event has equal influence or that causes cannot be studied.
philosophy · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Sandpile Effect
The sandpile effect illustrates nonlinearity, where a small incremental input (a grain of sand) can trigger a disproportionate, catastrophic collapse, analogous to 'the straw that broke the camel's back'.
philosophy · science↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Scientific Method According to Feynman
A mindset and method for learning and understanding: make a guess about reality, compare it to observation, and let results guide you. It emphasises curiosity, playfulness, and willingness to be wrong.
education · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Secret Thirst for Chance
Taleb argues that some randomness makes life more engaging and can provide useful variation in activity. His examples contrast spontaneous challenges with rigid routines, extending his broader argument for retaining variability rather than eliminating it.
science · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
The Six-Cornered Snowflake
Kepler asked why snowflakes commonly have sixfold symmetry and proposed that their shape arose from the arrangement of smaller units.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Three Body Problem
Taleb uses Poincaré’s work on the three-body problem to explain a limit of forecasting: in a system sensitive to initial conditions, small measurement errors can grow until a precise long-term prediction is no longer useful.
philosophy · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
The Understanding/Acceptance Principle and Spearman’s Positive Manifold
The understanding/acceptance principle uses correlations with cognitive ability to examine disputed standards for reasoning tasks. Its proponents argue that positive correlations support the scoring model, while absent or negative correlations give reason to reconsider the model or the task’s interpretation. The correlation alone does not settle which answer is normatively correct.
cognitive psychology · psychometrics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Classical Geometry
Conic sections—ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas—are simple curves that recur across nature, science, and even literature because mathematical simplicity forces them into diverse roles.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
Theory-Laden vs Data-Laden Knowledge Creation
Banasiewicz distinguishes theory-guided hypothesis testing from exploratory analysis that seeks patterns without a predetermined explanatory theory. He favors using established knowledge to guide and check new findings. Both approaches depend on data quality, and exploratory findings need further testing before they support confident decisions.
science · statistics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics describes energy transfer, entropy and thermal equilibrium. Its account of the energy needed to sustain processes can also suggest metaphors for maintenance, though social order and motivation are not physical entropy or heat.
business · economics↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
Think Like a Scientist
Thinking like a scientist involves maintaining a healthy level of curiosity and doubt, not drawing conclusions without good evidence, and being willing to change your mind. It is an effective antidote to bad thinking and irrational claims.
science · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Truth Values
Classical two-valued logic assigns 0 to false statements and 1 to true statements. Cheng explains how this simplifies reasoning, then distinguishes partial truth, unresolved factual questions, and paradoxes that cannot be assigned a classical truth value consistently.
logic · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
Types of Probability Events
Mutually exclusive events cannot occur together in the outcome being considered. Dependent events have probabilities that change when information about another event is taken into account. These are different relationships, not an exhaustive division of events.
science · mathematics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Uncorrelated Doesn't Mean Unrelated
Two variables can be uncorrelated (zero linear correlation) but still strongly related through a nonlinear relationship. Correlation only detects linear associations, not all forms of dependence.
science · political science↗
Scientific Principlesadvanced
Undecidability of Probability Estimation from Samples
Taleb describes a proposed result about estimating probabilities from samples without prior restrictions on the admissible distributions. The passage raises the problem of model assumptions but does not supply the proof or its precise conditions.
science · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Universal and Existential Quantifiers: The Logic of 'All' and 'Some'
Universal statements like 'All men are sexist pigs' require refutation by finding a single counterexample (existential statement). A joke about three logicians illustrates how individuals can deduce the truth of a universal claim through sequential self-reporting.
logic · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Vacuous Truth
A statement like 'All elephants in the room have two heads' is true because there are no elephants; this is vacuous truth, where a universal claim is satisfied when the category it refers to is empty.
logic · philosophy↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Validity and Reliability
Validity concerns whether evidence supports interpreting a measure as intended. Reliability concerns how consistently it measures under comparable conditions. A measure can be consistent while failing to capture the concept you care about.
sociology · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Veblen Goods and Giffen Goods
Veblen goods can become more desirable at higher prices because price signals status. Giffen goods are inferior staples for which a price rise reduces purchasing power enough to increase the quantity bought, outweighing the substitution effect.
economics · sociology↗
Scientific Principlesbeginner
Velocity
Velocity is a vector quantity that measures the rate of change of an object's position, combining speed and direction to determine how quickly and in what direction something is moving.
physics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Wald–Wolfowitz Run Test
The Wald–Wolfowitz runs test examines whether a binary sequence has more alternation or clustering than expected under a randomness model.
sports · statistics↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
When Does Speciation Occur?
Dennett uses hypothetical isolated human populations to ask when speciation can be said to occur. Reproductive isolation may develop gradually, and a separation’s eventual significance can depend on whether the populations reunite or continue to diverge.
evolution · science↗
Scientific Principlesintermediate
Why Don’t Statisticians Detect Rare Events?
Under suitable sampling assumptions, estimation error often shrinks with the square root of sample size. Taleb emphasizes a different practical difficulty: a long record without a rare event may reveal little about its risk, while a single observation establishes that it can occur.
philosophy · economics↗