Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize

Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups  of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…

Telling Truths with Numbers

For all of us who work in colleges and universities, we might be doing fine with our students but we have a long way to go when it comes to educating the public. Data is at the very foundation of informed decision-making. Numbers do not lie. But when happens when people do not have data? Their guesses…

Stories and Histories: Journeys and Meaning

When I taught history, I sought conversations with students at the end of the semester about the course. What mattered to them? What would they remember, if anything, in the semester or years to come? Learning outcomes assessment evaluations and summary grades are valuable, but there’s nothing like an open-ended conversation with a student. It is often…

Making Sense of Signals in the Noise

Quick! Your favorite 18th century English philosopher is . . . David Hume? Edmund Burke? Adam Smith or Bishop Berkeley? Don’t worry if one one comes to mind – Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, has a provocative suggestion: Thomas Bayes. Silver is a terrific statistician and…