Some ideas are so powerful and useful that once you understand them deeply, you start to see them everywhere. One of those ideas is the normal distribution. Normal distributions, also known as bell curves or Gaussian functions look like this: They have a fat lump in the middle and two “tails” that stretch off in […]

My dad, who taught elementary school for thirty seven years, once had a kid in his class who would always interrupt the class saying, “I know that already!” It was doubly annoying, he told me, because this kid clearly did not know it already. He was near the bottom of the class, and could probably […]

Some ideas are so powerful and useful, that once you understand them deeply you start to see them everywhere. One of those ideas is exponential growth. Exponential growth occurs in many systems, from animal populations to investment accounts. Our brains don’t seem very apt for reasoning exponentially. Instead, we tend to extrapolate things in ways […]

Human beings are social animals, and so it’s by design that we’re obsessed what other people think of us. Being ostracized was a death sentence in premodern times, so it wasn’t an irrational fear. Yet, worrying what people think of you can be a huge obstacle to doing things. We live in a world with […]