Scientific principles for everybody's toolkit

I ran across this very nice article where quite a few prominent scientists and geeks were asked which scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit. Richard Dawkins (a hero of mine) for example highlights the double blind experiment, which indeed is extraordinarily important in weeding out charlatans and hidden and subjective bias. The latter is something very insidious that the experimenter is often not even consciously aware of. It is well worth a read in its entirety.

The Dawkins contribution also reminded me of a fantastic talk at one of the TED conferences by James Randi. It is absolutely superb and I urge everybody to watch it.