Category Archives: Human Nature

Avoid committees of 8?

Are committees of 8 spectacularly bad at making decisions?

January 20, 2009 – 5:26 am | By Brian Fitzgerald | Posted in Human Nature | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Three questions about time and history

I. Is the arc of history bending toward peace? In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point …

September 13, 2007 – 3:46 am | By Brian Fitzgerald | Posted in Environmental Issues, Human Nature, Peace | Comments (0)

Hockey Helmets and Climate Change

Photo by Kenneth Malcolm Tucked among the pile of New Yorkers that were sprawled out at my doorstep when I got back from vacation was this tiny parable from David Surowiecki, who writes a fascinating weekly article on economics (he’s also the author of the Wisdom of Crowds): Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named …

August 1, 2007 – 5:15 am | By Brian Fitzgerald | Posted in Environmental Issues, Human Nature | Comments (2)