Some of the intellectually deepest ideas from this blog (res mensan)

A portion of the 4,200 posts on this blog are cerebral. For example, the ones I picked for this collection touch on deep and deeply significant ideas.

Perhaps the most intellectually significant idea dealt with by this blog is neuroscience (See my post of June 22, 2008: neuroscience with 32 references.).

Three other topics for deep thinkers have to do with knowledge: the fallacy of induction; post-modernist beliefs, and no best practices (Sept. 22, 2008: post-modernism and law department management; Aug. 22, 2006: fallacy of induction; and Feb.14, 2009: best practices with 24 references and one metapost.).

Another three major ideas involve the basis for managers’ actions: values, causality, and unintended consequences (See my post of May 31, 2006: all management decisions express values; Dec. 12, 2006: instrumental variables and causality; and Jan. 25, 2008: causality with 10 references.). As for unintended consequences (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: trade offs when actions are taken; Aug. 1, 2006: second-order consequences; Dec. 17, 2006: all practices have pros and cons; and July 10, 2007: well-intentioned actions boomerang.).

My final two candidates for pipe-smoking and pondering rest on mathematics: Bayesian statistics and power laws (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006: Bayesian analysis and law departments; June 16, 2007: deeper look at Bayesian analysis; Dec. 26, 2005: one form of statistics; Sept. 9, 2008 #1: standard deviation and Bayesian statistics; and April 5, 2009: Bayesian belief networks; and Jan. 25, 2009: attributized Bayesian analysis.). As to power-law distributions (See my post of Feb. 24, 2009: power laws and their appearance in law departments; Feb. 24, 2009: primacy of intangibles; Nov. 13, 2005: fractals, bell curves and power laws; July 25, 2005: bell curves compared to power laws; and May 27, 2007: Zipf’s law.).