Zeno Vendler chose, perhaps understandably, chose to write an article about understanding something. That article is: “Understanding Misunderstanding,” Zeno Vendler, Language, Mind, and Art, 1994, pp. 9-21. The publisher’s web site says, about it: Keywords: Black Hole, Moral Virtue, Wishful Thinking, Plain View, Indirect Question These keywords were added by machine and not by the […]
Doron Zeilberger cast a wary glance at the social gathering habits of his fellow mathematicians. He wrote a little, gleeful diatribe about it: Opinion 104: The Shocking State of Contemporary “Mathematics”, and the Meta-Shocking Fact that Very Few People Are Shocked I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, […]
An essay (in The Elusive Self blog) about a demonstration of how little anyone really understands how the brain works: False functional inference: what does it mean to understand the brain? A few days ago Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording [pictured here] (J&K) posted a thought-provoking paper on bioRxiv entitled “Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?” […]
Treefrogs often find themselves faced with the Cocktail Party Problem. Those who study the Cocktail Party Problem have their own complicated mess to make sense of: They try to understand how someone amidst a yacketing group can understand one particular conversation even though many other conversations are equally audible. This study sees treefrogs as possibly being […]
The power of psychology can come from appreciating that psychologists truly understand only a tiny part of what makes people tick*. That’s the message of a nice essay by psychologist Vaughn Bell. His essay is part of a special BPS Research Digest special series called “Psychology to the Rescue“, in which the editor “asked a […]
Do economists fully understand how the economy works? Yes they do. Do other people understand how the economy works? No, they don’t. This is according to a transcript of a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee ( held in the offices of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C., […]