This Will Make You Smarter Read online

  This Will Make You Smarter

  New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

  Edited by John Brockman

  Foreword by David Brooks

  Contents

  David Brooks: Foreword

  John Brockman: Preface: The Edge Question

  Martin Rees

  “Deep Time” and the Far Future

  Far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up until now.

  Marcelo Gleiser

  We Are Unique

  Modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite.

  P.Z. Myers

  The Mediocrity Principle

  Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.

  Sean Carroll

  The Pointless Universe

  Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being.

  Samuel Arbesman

  The Copernican Principle

  We are not anywhere special.

  J. Craig Venter

  We Are Not Alone in the Universe

  There is a humancentric, Earthcentric view of life that permeates most cultural and societal thinking.

  Stewart Brand

  Microbes Run the World

  This biotech century will be microbe-enhanced and maybe microbe-inspired.

  Richard Dawkins

  The Double-Blind Control Experiment

  Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts, three-quarters believe in angels, a third believe in astrology, three-quarters believe in hell?

  Max Tegmark

  Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle

  Our global scientific community has been nothing short of a spectacular failure when it comes to educating the public.

  Roger Schank

  Experimentation

  Experimentation is something done by everyone all the time.

  Timo Hannay

  The Controlled Experiment

  When required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most nonscientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting.

  Gino Segre

  Gedankenexperiment

  Consciously or unconsciously, we carry out gedankenexperiments of one sort or another in our everyday life.

  Kathryn Schulz

  The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science

  One generation’s verities . . . often become the next generation’s falsehoods.

  Samuel Barondes

  Each of Us Is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind

  This dual view of each of us, as both run-of-the-mill and special, has been so well established by biologists and behavioral scientists that it may now seem self-evident.

  John Tooby

  Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage

  Our self-evidently superior selves and in-groups are error-besotted.

  David G. Myers

  Self-Serving Bias

  Compared with our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better-looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer.

  Gary Marcus

  Cognitive Humility

  Computer memory is much better than human memory because early computer scientists discovered a trick that evolution never did.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Technologies Have Biases

  Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them.

  Gerald Smallberg

  Bias Is the Nose for the Story

  Our brains evolved having to make the right bet with limited information.

  Jonah Lehrer

  Control Your Spotlight

  Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong.

  Daniel Kahneman

  The Focusing Illusion

  The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.

  Carlo Rovelli

  The Uselessness of Certainty

  The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

  Lawrence Krauss

  Uncertainty

  In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability.

  Aubrey de Grey

  A Sense of Proportion About Fear of the Unknown

  Fear of the unknown is not remotely irrational in principle . . . but it can be and generally is overdone.

  Nigel Goldenfeld

  Because

  Complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality.

  Stuart Firestein

  The Name Game

  Even words that, like “gravity,” seem well settled may lend more of an aura to an idea than it deserves.

  Seth Lloyd

  Living Is Fatal

  People are bad at probability on a deep, intuitive level.

  Garrett Lisi

  Uncalculated Risk

  We are afraid of the wrong things, and we are making bad decisions.

  Neil Gershenfeld

  Truth Is a Model

  Building models is . . . a never-ending process of discovery and refinement.

  Jon Kleinberg

  E Pluribus Unum

  The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity.

  Stefano Boeri

  A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality

  Even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension.

  Kevin Kelly

  Failure Liberates Success

  Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Holism

  Holism takes a while to acquire and appreciate. It is a grown-up disposition.

  Robert R. Provine

  TANSTAAFL

  “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.

  Gerald Holton

  Skeptical Empiricism

  In politics and society at large, important decisions are all too often based on deeply held presuppositions.

  Thomas A. Bass

  Open Systems

  Now that the Web has frothed through twenty years of chaotic inventiveness, we have to push back against the forces that would close it down.

  George Church

  Non-Inherent Inheritance

  We are well into an unprecedented new phase of evolution, in which we must generalize beyond our DNA-centric worldview.

  Paul Kedrosky

  Shifting Baseline Syndrome

  We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.

  Martin Seligman

  PERMA

&n
bsp; The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive.

  Steven Pinker

  Positive-Sum Games

  In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself.

  Roger Highfield

  The Snuggle for Existence

  Competition does not tell the whole story of biology.

  Dylan Evans

  The Law of Comparative Advantage

  At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade.

  Jason Zweig

  Structured Serendipity

  Creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation.

  Rudy Rucker

  The World is Unpredictable

  Even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still can’t predict what you’re going to do.

  Charles Seife

  Randomness

  Without an understanding of randomness, we are stuck in a perfectly predictable universe that simply doesn’t exist outside our heads.

  Clifford Pickover

  The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine

  We are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are part of a discovery kaleidoscope and are mirrored in numerous individuals at once.

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

  Inference to the Best Explanation

  Not all explanations are created equal.

  Emanuel Derman

  Pragmamorphism

  Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism.

  Nicholas Carr

  Cognitive Load

  When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit.

  Hans Ulrich Obrist

  To Curate

  In our phase of globalization . . . there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture.

  Richard Nisbett

  “Graceful” SHAs

  An assumption of educators for centuries has been that formal logic improves thinking skills. . . . But this belief may be mistaken.

  Rob Kurzban

  Externalities

  The notion of externalities forces us to think about unintended (positive and negative) effects of actions, an issue that looms larger as the world gets smaller.

  James O’Donnell

  Everything Is in Motion

  Remembering that everything is in motion—feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion—is always hard for us.

  Douglas T. Kenrick

  Subselves and the Modular Mind

  The only way we manage to accomplish anything in life is to allow only one subself to take the conscious driver’s seat at any given time.

  Andy Clark

  Predictive Coding

  The brain exploits prediction and anticipation in making sense of incoming signals and using them to guide perception, thought, and action.

  Donald Hoffman

  Our Sensory Desktop

  Our sensory experiences . . . can be thought of as sensory desktops that have evolved to guide adaptive behavior, not report objective truths.

  Barry C. Smith

  The Senses and the Multisensory

  We now know that the senses do not operate in isolation but combine, both at early and late stages of processing, to produce our rich perceptual experiences of our surroundings.

  David Eagleman

  The Umwelt

  Our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.

  Alison Gopnik

  The Rational Unconscious

  The idea of the rational unconscious has . . . transformed our scientific understanding of creatures whose rationality has traditionally been denied, such as young children and animals.

  Adam Alter

  We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life

  Our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness.

  W. Tecumseh Fitch

  An Instinct to Learn

  The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn.”

  Michael Shermer

  Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down

  Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down.

  Irene Pepperberg

  Fixed-Action Patterns

  The concept of a fixed-action pattern, despite its simplicity, may prove valuable as a metaphorical means to study and change human behavior.

  Terrence Sejnowski

  Powers of 10

  Thinking in powers of 10 is such a basic skill that it ought to be taught along with integers in elementary school.

  Juan Enriquez

  Life Code

  As we begin to rewrite existing life, strange things evolve.

  Stephen M. Kosslyn

  Constraint Satisfaction

  When moving into a new house, my wife and I had to decide how to arrange the furniture in the bedroom.

  Daniel C. Dennett

  Cycles

  The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice.

  Jennifer Jacquet

  Keystone Consumers

  A relative few can . . . ruin a resource for the rest of us.

  Jaron Lanier

  Cumulative Error

  Our brains have unrealistic expectations of information transformation.

  Dan Sperber

  Cultural Attractors

  In spite of variations, an Irish stew is an Irish stew, Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood, and a samba is a samba.

  Giulio Boccaletti

  Scale Analysis

  It is through scale analysis that we can often make sense of complex nonlinear phenomena in terms of simpler models.

  Frank Wilczek

  Hidden Layers

  Hidden layers embody in a concrete physical form the fashionable but rather vague and abstract idea of emergence.

  Lisa Randall

  “Science”

  The theory that works might not be the ultimate truth, but it’s as close an approximation to the truth as you need.

  Marcel Kinsbourne

  The Expanding In-Group

  The in-group-vs.-out-group double standard . . . could in theory be eliminated if everyone alive were considered to be in everyone else’s in-group.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Contingent Superorganisms

  It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability.

  Clay Shirky

  The Pareto Principle

  We are still failing to predict it, even though it is everywhere.

  William Calvin

  Find That Frame

  What has been cropped out of the frame can lead the unwary to an incorrect inference.

  Jay Rosen

  Wicked Problems

  In the United States, rising health care costs are a classic case of a wicked problem. No “right” way to view it.

  Daniel Goleman

  Anthropocene Thinking

  Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left
the Holocene epoch and entered . . . the Anthropocene, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life.

  Alun Anderson

  Homo dilatus

  Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto, but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.

  Sam Harris

  We Are Lost in Thought

  Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox.

  Thomas Metzinger

  The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model

  A transparent self-model necessarily creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood—of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole.

  Sue Blackmore

  Correlation Is Not a Cause

  Understanding that a correlation is not a cause could raise levels of debate over some of today’s most pressing scientific issues.

  David Darymple

  Information Flow

  Saying “A causes B” sounds precise but is actually very vague.

  Lee Smolin

  Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time

  Thinking outside of time often implies the existence of an imagined realm, outside the universe, where the truth lies.

  Richard Foreman

  Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy