There’s an article on rationality in Newsweek, with an emphasis on evo-psych explanations for irrationality. Especially: we evolved our reasoning skills not just to get at the truth, but also to win debates, and overconfidence is good for the latter.
There’s nothing there that’s new to readers of this blog, and the analysis is superficial (plus the writer makes an annoying but illustrative error while explaining why human intuition is poor at logic puzzles). But Newsweek is a large-circulation (second to Time) newsweekly in the U.S., so this is a pretty broad audience.
Perhaps this has been mentioned before, since it’s been online for almost a week, but my parents’ print copy was just delivered today, and that’s what I read.
There’s an article on rationality in Newsweek, with an emphasis on evo-psych explanations for irrationality. Especially: we evolved our reasoning skills not just to get at the truth, but also to win debates, and overconfidence is good for the latter.
There’s nothing there that’s new to readers of this blog, and the analysis is superficial (plus the writer makes an annoying but illustrative error while explaining why human intuition is poor at logic puzzles). But Newsweek is a large-circulation (second to Time) newsweekly in the U.S., so this is a pretty broad audience.
Perhaps this has been mentioned before, since it’s been online for almost a week, but my parents’ print copy was just delivered today, and that’s what I read.