Opinion Forum

Cognitive Biases Are Bad for Business

May 20th, 2013

By Dr. Jim Taylor The conventional wisdom in classical economics is that we humans are “rational actors” who, by our nature, make decisions and behave in ways that maximize advantage and utility and minimize risk and costs. This theory has driven economic policy for generations despite daily anecdotal evidence that we are anything but rational, [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: business, cognitive bias, decision making, ego, information, rational
Categories: Economics, Education, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Is Technology Making Your Children Mindless Instead of Mindful?

January 22nd, 2013

By Dr. Jim Taylor I’m no Zen master and I don’t expect you to teach your children to meditate all day. At the same time, the notion of mindfulness has much broader meaning than as an Eastern philosophy or for practitioners of Buddhism. In fact, it has tremendous significance for your children growing up in [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: children, information, mindfulness, parenting, social media, technology
Categories: Education, Life, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Are Your Children Overloaded with Information?

December 10th, 2012

By Dr. Jim Taylor The Internet, and all of the new computer and communication technology that has sprung from it, have been a boon to the information age, making information available at children’s fingertips instantaneously. The sheer volume of information now accessible online is staggering; there are around 50 billion pages on the Web. Information [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: children, information, internet, overload, parenting, social media, technology
Categories: Education, Life, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Six Reasons Why Politicians Believe They Can Lie (and Not Get Caught)

September 24th, 2012

By Dr. Jim Taylor With the presidential and congressional campaigns in the homestretch, the quadrennial contest for deception, misdirection, fact-bending, half-truths, and downright lies, in other words, the challenge to win the hearts and minds of voters, is in full swing. In writing this post, I’m trying to maintain a neutral stance on which party [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: campaigns, information, internet, liars, lie, narcissism, politicians, truth
Categories: Politics | Comments (1) | Home

The Growing (and Dangerous) Gap Between Information and Wisdom

August 20th, 2012

By Dr. Jim Taylor The Internet is a truly remarkable advancement in our ability to access information. Just about anything we could possibly want to know is now just a few keystrokes away. But, as with most technological innovations, for every benefit to our lives, there is a potential cost as well. With the universe [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: expert, information, insight, internet, knowledge, technology, wisdom
Categories: Education, Life, Science | Comments (1) | Home

The Leaked Cables: Not the End of the World

December 5th, 2010

By Tom Carter Like many others, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading the State Department cables made available through Wikileaks. The military files released earlier were at least potentially damaging, but the State Department cables are a different matter. My impressions are that I haven’t seen much “hot” news in the cables. Nevertheless, [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Assange, classified, damage, information, Manning, punishment, Wikileaks
Categories: Media, News, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Religious Knowledge Survey

October 4th, 2010

By Tom Carter The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a project of the Pew Research Center, recently released a survey on religious knowledge among Americans. The survey results show that many Americans are poorly informed about the basics of different religions, including their own. This won’t surprise anyone who has spent much time [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: information, online quiz, Pew Forum, religion, religious knowledge, survey
Categories: Education, Life, News | Comments (2) | Home

The Medium and the Message

September 27th, 2010

By Tom Carter Why has our political discourse become so uncivil? There are a number of explanations, but the most important is that we simply have too much access to bad information. The information explosion of the past couple of decades has come about in different ways. The most deleterious has been the internet, a [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: extremism, information, internet, left, newspapers, radio, right, sources, TV
Categories: Media, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Smoke or Fire?

June 1st, 2010

By Larry Ennis Sometimes it’s almost scary how things suddenly fall into place. Of course a lot of these magic moments depend on your perspective and may not be all that enlightening to others. One such moment occurred recently when a discussion came about here on Opinion Forum about a piece by Dr. Jim Taylor [...]

Articles written by Larry Ennis
Tags: BP, Gulf of Mexico, information, oil, political contributions, propaganda
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (10) | Home

A Modest Proposal to Promote Domestic Tranquility

May 20th, 2010

By Dan Miller Huff and Puff and down fall the houses of falsehood Here is a truly fascinating article from Huffington Post by Jim Taylor, PhD in psychology and lecturer at the University of San Francisco, a well known bastion of unbiased intellectual thought. Mr.* Taylor complains that the sources of information nowadays are too many, [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: extremists, facts, global warming, health care, information, puppies, truth
Categories: Humor, Life, Politics | Comments (34) | Home