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Opposites don’t attract, but that was never the interesting question
115 of 118 partner traits correlate positively. The gap is in personality — and the twist is that none of it predicts whether a couple will be happy.
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Tech
The Open Office Was Built on a Measurement. Then Nobody Measured...
When researchers finally put sensors on employees before and after a redesign, face-to-face interaction fell by about 70%. The study did not measure productivity — and after six decades of fit-outs, almost nothing has.
Health
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.
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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.
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.
Renting is not throwing money away, but the real argument is stranger
Housing’s celebrated 7% return is almost all rental yield. Real capital gains run about 1% a year — and the variable that decides the answer is whether you actually invest the difference.
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.
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The Meditation Researchers Auditing Their Own Field
Fifteen leading contemplative scientists published a paper warning about the hype around their own discipline. Almost nobody reported it — including the finding that when you finally ask people properly, most report side effects.
Where the three-to-six-month emergency fund rule actually came from
The most repeated number in personal finance was set in 1996 by polling 156 advisers. Six million households of bank data suggest a very different answer.
"Miss the 10 Best Days" Is Half of a Calculation
The statistic every advisor quotes is real. So is the mirror image nobody quotes — and when a researcher ran both at once, the result was not the one the slogan implies.
The people who found the Blue Zones are quietly walking them back
Nicoya’s advantage inverted in forty years. Okinawa fell from 4th to 26th. And the researchers conceding this are the ones who identified the zones in the first place.
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.
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Renting is not throwing money away, but the real argument is...
Housing’s celebrated 7% return is almost all rental yield. Real capital gains run about 1% a year — and the variable that decides the answer is whether you actually invest the difference.
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FICO Has a Page Called "Myth Busting." Almost Nobody Has Read It.
The company that makes the score has published, in writing, that carrying a balance does not help it. Its own survey found 67% of Americans wrong or unsure about what the score can even see.
The Meditation Researchers Auditing Their Own Field
Fifteen leading contemplative scientists published a paper warning about the hype around their own discipline. Almost nobody reported it — including the finding that when you finally ask people properly, most report side effects.
The 50% Divorce Rate Was True for About One Year. You Can Name It.
In 1981 the United States recorded 2,422,000 marriages and 1,213,000 divorces. Divide one by the other and you get 50.1%. It was also the peak year. The statistic has not been updated since.