December 2011
4 posts
2011 Roundup
It’s that time of year again: for a few weeks, writers everywhere can get away summarizing what they’ve already said rather than writing anything new. As a reader, I appreciate it, because I don’t obsessively follow every magazine, every blog, so it’s likely I’ll have missed something in the roundups. Like last year, here is a collection of some of the more...
The Big Five Personality Traits →
Unfortunately, I feel the need to issue an all-out bullshit alert. The popular Myers-Briggs personality test is bullshit. The Big Five, however, are not, but we’ll get to that.
You’d think that a psychological test that is popular everywhere except in psychology would raise some eyebrows, but no matter. Normally rational, scientifically-minded people seem to fall as hard for this as...
Quantum Computing Promises New Insights →
Scott Aaronson writes in the New York Times:
In everyday life, it would be silly to speak of a “minus 30 percent chance of rain tomorrow,” much less a “square root of minus 1 percent chance.” However, quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which are closely related to probabilities but can also be negative (in fact, they are complex numbers). Crucially, if an event (say, a...
November 2011
9 posts
Feeling Pain and Being in Pain →
So memory isn’t so simple. You know what else turns out to be unexpectedly complex? Pain. Pain is unpleasant. When something hurts, we don’t like it. Right? Now, there exist cases of congenital analgesia, or hereditary inability to feel pain. And most of us have experienced the effects of local anesthetics, so it’s not entirely out there to imagine that someone could experience...