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• [article] Purple doesn't exist — 18 Apr 2024
  We see short light waves as blue, medium as green, and long as red. When the brain senses short (blue) and long (red) but not medium (green), it ‘makes up’ a colour to fill in the blank.
• [article] Overengineering 'calm down' — 21 Mar 2024
  Pop-psych theories on stress often use complex jargon to describe fundamentally simple concepts. They act less to inform, and more to reassure us, fascinate us, and absolve us of responsibility.
• [article] The Value of Brain Waves — 19 Feb 2024
  Brain waves are subject to the same pop-psych fluff as everything else brain related. There’s no harm in it, but looking a little more carefully actually makes them a useful tool for understanding behaviour.
• [article] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
  Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
• [article] The Trouble With Objectivity — 21 Dec 2023
  The obsession over objectivity is a confusion of two things. There’s rationality, the desire to be less biased. Then there’s truth which is going to be necessarily biased toward whatever aspect of the world we’re trying to understand. In both cases objectivity is irrelevant.
• [article] Eerie coincidences aren't that eerie — 12 Nov 2023
  Your phone probably isn’t eavesdropping for ads. Your brain’s job is to highlight unexpected hits while ignoring the misses. Eerie coincidences are probably just you not noticing all the times something weird could have happened but didn’t.
• [article] Problems with p-values — 24 Oct 2023
  P-values are no gold standard. The way we use them today means p-values have a probability distribution. Just one could be an outlier, and the way publishing works, probably is. It’s the reason for so many ‘too good to be true’ findings—they are.
• [article] Panpsychism isn't that fun — 22 Sep 2023
  Panpsychists reckon they’ve one-upped materialists and non-materialists in explaining how consciousness might have come to be by telling us that everything is conscious. Then they just leave us hanging.
• [marginalium] Economist preferences by cognitive skill and personality — 12 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] A literary guide to the subject of death — 11 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] CBT might just be the ‘gold standard’ for white people — 10 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] A short list of heuristics or principles for doing good creative research work — 9 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] A Wikipedia page on science in 2023 — 8 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] Book review of the Educated Mind — 7 Sep 2023
• [marginalium] What’s making kids not alright — 6 Sep 2023