Progress-focused

In his 1996 book The Demon Haunted World , Carl Sagan wrote the chapter The Fine Art of Baloney Detection . A recently published book by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, Calling Bullshit. The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World , can be seen as an extension and update of that chapter. The book is about bullshit, or nonsense claims. Bullshit is as old as humanity and even older. Many other animal species also employ all kinds of deception. Some animals sound the alarm to suggest that a predator is coming to lure other animals away from food in order to get to it themselves. But besides humans, there are only a few animal species that deliberately mislead. This is because deliberately misleading others requires a fairly complex brain.

by Jamie Hale In the context of everyday language, statistics (numbers, quantitative representations) are used to represent basketball players’ free throw average, death rates, life spans and so on. In science, statistics are tools used in describing, organizing, summarizing and analyzing data. Learning about stats will help you think in terms of probabilities, and allow you to gain a better understanding of research data.

Since the beginning of the 1980's psychologist have done much research into happiness. Often instead of the term happiness terms like subjective well-being are used. I remember that I once read somewhere that Ed Diener, pioneer in the field, had chosen this name because it sounded more scientific that the term happiness. Positive psychology, which emerged around the year 2000, has emphasized the importance of happiness a lot and of finding out which factors foster it. Since then many books and articles have been publishes about happiness and its determinants. In those publications factors where often mentioned like: (1) expressing gratitude, (2) cultivating optimism, (3) building and maintaining relationships, (5) searching flow experiences, (6) practicing religious and spiritual activities, and (7) practicing meditation (this list is not exhaustive).