Robert A Burton
Neurologist and Author,
Robert A Burton is a neurologist, author and the former associate director of the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center at Mount Zion. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and Nautilus, among others. His latest book is A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves (2013).
Written by Robert A Burton
essay
Cognition and intelligence
Our world outsmarts us
Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed?
Robert A Burton
essay
Neuroscience
The theory of mind myth
Even experts can’t predict violence or suicide. Surely we’re kidding ourselves that we can see inside the minds of others
Robert A Burton
idea
Demography and migration
Like the chemical process of osmosis, migration is unstoppable
Robert A Burton
Our world outsmarts us
Robert A BurtonThanks for the wide range of fascinating comments. As usual, it is more fun and enlightening to read the comments than it is to write the essay.
A few casual observations:
* On professional jargon: readers are absolutely on point as to the downside of experts mystifying simplicity through complex language. In part, I chose this example because of this semantically confusing phrase– false positive rate. The phrase can be used either to denote the percentage of people in a given population who test positive but do not have the disease, or as as a statistical comment upon the accuracy of the test (the lower the false positive rate, the higher the presumed reliability of the res...