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Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
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What ‘just go for a walk’ leaves out
The evidence on exercise and depression is weaker than the headlines and more interesting than the sceptics allow. It points at structure and supervision, not walks.
Health
Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
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The sleep chart everyone copies has a footnote nobody reads
The age-by-age sleep chart is a compromise document, and the panels that wrote it said so. What the primary sources actually show about how much sleep you need.
No health authority has ever recommended 10,000 steps
Every official physical activity guideline is written in minutes, not steps. A 1965 pedometer brand name filled the gap — and it is aimed at exactly the wrong people.
Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
The 21-day habit rule came from a plastic surgeon’s book preface
Maxwell Maltz was describing how long patients took to get used to a new face. When researchers finally measured habit formation, the range ran from 18 days to 254.
Sport news
The 90% divorce prediction that was never a prediction
The famous accuracy figures are real, and they measure something other than prediction. What happens when a divorce model is finally tested on data it has not already seen.
The 21-day habit rule came from a plastic surgeon’s book preface
Maxwell Maltz was describing how long patients took to get used to a new face. When researchers finally measured habit formation, the range ran from 18 days to 254.
The eight-glasses rule is a sentence someone deleted
The 1945 document blamed for the rule said most of your water comes from food and that thirst is an adequate guide. Both sentences were cut. Here is what the evidence actually shows.
The four-day week trials mostly didn’t test a four-day week
The pilots cut about four hours a week, not eight. Iceland never ran one. And the best-instrumented trial found healthier workers, unchanged revenue, and a significantly faster pace of work.
No health authority has ever recommended 10,000 steps
Every official physical activity guideline is written in minutes, not steps. A 1965 pedometer brand name filled the gap — and it is aimed at exactly the wrong people.
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What ‘just go for a walk’ leaves out
The evidence on exercise and depression is weaker than the headlines and more interesting than the sceptics allow. It points at structure and supervision, not walks.
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Your Myers-Briggs type is four coin flips in a trench coat
The MBTI measures four real traits with decent reliability, then discards most of what it measured by drawing a line through the middle of a bell curve.
The 21-day habit rule came from a plastic surgeon’s book preface
Maxwell Maltz was describing how long patients took to get used to a new face. When researchers finally measured habit formation, the range ran from 18 days to 254.
Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day
The randomised trials point gently the other way. But the real story is the audit that found only 17% of citations to a key trial described its results accurately.