Month: March 2021
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Closing the Gap: Financial Hardship and Poor Mental Health in Higher education
A talk given for the Open University’s Special Interest Group on Inclusivity You’ll learn a lot if you ask someone why a problem is important. The first thing you’ll learn if you ask the question to many different people is that it often feels like they’re answering completely different questions. Understanding why that happens is…
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“I don’t know”: Intellectual Humility and power imbalance when Dunning Kruger meets the Prisoner’s Dilemma
I am drawn to clickbait articles about self-improvement. Especially ones about being smart (their appeal is a suitable reminder to myself that I’m not, in case my head swells too much). This morning I was reading one such. It had all the classics of a genre which tends to be populated by smart-ish people trying…
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One Thing Relentlessly: Why Humans Always Fail
There’s a line in Citizen Kane, “It’s no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money” that captures something fundamental about being human. Any goal is very much easier to achieve it’s your only goal…But being human almost always means having more than one goal.…
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Art, Extreme Sports and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
Many of us have heard of the sunk cost fallacy. Many of those of us who have heard of it know that it describes something bad. So why do so many of us still talk as though we either haven’t heard of it, or don’t realise it’s bad (hint: the answer is, itself, an example…