This Will Make You Smarter Read online

Mistakes, errors, false starts—accept them all.

  Tor Nørretranders

  Depth

  It is not what is there but what used to be there that matters.

  Helen Fisher

  Temperament Dimensions

  Temperament is . . . the foundation of who you are.

  Geoffrey Miller

  The Personality/Insanity Continuum

  We are all more or less crazy in many ways.

  Joel Gold

  ARISE

  Sometimes it takes a genius to see that a fifth-grade science experiment is all that is needed to solve a problem.

  Matthew Ritchie

  Systemic Equilibrium

  Living on a single planet, we are all participants in a single physical system that has only one direction—toward systemic equilibrium.

  Linda Stone

  Projective Thinking

  When we cling rigidly to our constructs . . . we can be blinded to what’s right in front of us.

  V.S. Ramachandran

  Anomalies and Paradigms

  One can speak of reigning paradigms—what Kuhn calls normal science and what I cynically refer to as a mutual-admiration club trapped in a cul-de-sac of specialization.

  David Gelernter

  Recursive Structure

  It helps us understand the connections between art and technology, helps us see the aesthetic principles that guide the best engineers and technologists and the ideas of clarity and elegance that underlie every kind of successful design.

  Don Tapscott

  Designing Your Mind

  Want to strengthen your working memory and ability to multitask? Try reverse mentoring—learning with your teenager.

  Andrian Kreye

  Free Jazz

  The 1960 session that gave the genre its name . . . was a precursor to a form of communication that has left linear conventions and entered the realm of multiple parallel interactions.

  Matt Ridley

  Collective Intelligence

  Human achievement is based on collective intelligence—the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves.

  Gerd Gigerenzer

  Risk Literacy

  Unlike basic literacy, risk literacy requires emotional rewiring—rejecting comforting paternalism and illusions of certainty and learning to take responsibility and to live with uncertainty.

  Ross Anderson

  Science Versus Theater

  Modern societies waste billions on protective measures whose real aim is to reassure rather than to reduce risk.

  Keith Devlin

  The Base Rate

  In cases where [an] event is dramatic and scary, like a terrorist attack on an airplane, failure to take account of the base rate can result in wasting massive amounts of effort and money trying to prevent something that is very unlikely.

  Marti Hearst

  Findex

  Although some have written about information overload, data smog, and the like, my view has always been the more information online the better, as long as good search tools are available.

  Susan Fiske

  An Assertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence

  People’s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

  Gregory Paul

  Scientists Should Be Scientists

  Folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and thinking they’re true to the point of obstinacy, even when they have little or no idea of what they’re talking about in the first place.

  James Croak

  Bricoleur

  Currently, encompassing worldviews in philosophy have been shelved, and master art movements of style and conclusion folded alongside them; no more isms are being run up the flagpole, because no one is saluting.

  Mark Henderson

  Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science

  Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of pursuits beyond the laboratory.

  Nick Bostrom

  The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators

  It’s a brilliant demonstration platform for several important concepts—a virtual “philosophy of science laboratory.”

  Robert Sapolsky

  Anecdotalism

  Every good journalist knows its power.

  Tom Standage

  You Can Show That Something Is Definitely Dangerous but Not That It’s Definitely Safe

  A wider understanding of the fact that you can’t prove a negative would, in my view, do a great deal to upgrade the public debate around science and technology.

  Christine Finn

  Absence and Evidence

  Philosophically this is a challenging concept, but at an archaeological site all became clear in the painstaking tasks of digging, brushing, and troweling.

  John McWhorter

  Path Dependence

  One may assume that cats cover their waste out of fastidiousness, when the same creature will happily consume its own vomit and then jump on your lap.

  Scott D. Sampson

  Interbeing

  Each of us is far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that has been flowing for billions of years.

  Dimitar Sasselov

  The Other

  Astronomy and space science are intensifying the search for life on other planets. . . . The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself.

  Brian Eno

  Ecology

  We now increasingly view life as a profoundly complex weblike system with information running in all directions.

  Stephon H. Alexander

  Dualities

  A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives.

  Amanda Gefter

  Dualities

  Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them.

  Anthony Aguirre

  The Paradox

  Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be an opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions.

  Eric Topol

  Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”

  Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web.

  David Rowan

  Personal Data Mining

  We need to [mine] our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information.

  Satyajit Das

  Parallelism in Art and Commerce

  [Damien] Hirst was the artist of choice for conspicuously consuming hedge-fund managers, who were getting very rich.

  Laurence C. Smith

  Innovation

  In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer.

  Kevin Hand

  The Gibbs Landscape

  The systems we have designed and built are inefficient and incomplete in the utilization of energy to do the work of civilization’s ecosystems.

  Vinod Khosla

  Black Swan Technologies

  Who would be crazy enough to have forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones as to latrines?

  Gloria Origgi />
  Kakonomics

  Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them.

  Eric Weinstein

  Kayfabe

  It provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.

  Kai Krause

  Einstein’s Blade in Ockham’s Razor

  And there it was, the dancing interplay between simplex and complex that has fascinated me in so many forms.

  Dave Winer

  Heat-Seeking Missiles

  Your weakness is attractive. Your space is up for grabs.

  Marco Iacoboni

  Entanglement

  Entanglement feels like magic. . . . Yet [it] is a real phenomenon, measurable and reproducible in the lab.

  Timothy Taylor

  Technology Paved the Way for Humanity

  Thinking through things and with things, and manipulating virtual things in our minds, is an essential part of critical self-consciousness.

  Paul Saffo

  Time Span of Discretion

  We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with.

  Tania Lombrozo

  Defeasibility

  Between blind faith and radical skepticism is a vast but sparsely populated space where defeasibility finds its home.

  Richard Thaler

  Aether

  Aether variables are extremely common in my own field of economics.

  Mark Pagel

  Knowledge as a Hypothesis

  There will always be some element of doubt about anything we come to “know” from our observations of the world.

  Evgeny Morozov

  The Einstellung Effect

  Familiar solutions may not be optimal.

  Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

  Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons

  We are the tension of the sensus and the sapiens.

  Fiery Cushman

  Understanding Confabulation

  Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized and even goal-driven.

  David M. Buss

  Sexual Selection

  Research on human mating strategies has exploded over the past decade, as the profound implications of sexual selection become more deeply understood.

  Bart Kosko

  QED Moments

  We can really only prove tautologies.

  Richard Saul Wurman

  Objects of Understanding and Communication

  I want help flying through my waking dreams connecting the threads of these epiphanies.

  Carl Zimmer

  Life as a Side Effect

  Everyone would do well to overcome that urge to see agents where there are none.

  Gregory Cochran

  The Veeck Effect

  It occurs whenever someone adjusts the standards of evidence in order to favor a preferred outcome.

  Joshua Greene

  Supervenience!

  A TOE won’t tell you anything interesting about Macbeth or the Boxer Rebellion.

  Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner

  The Culture Cycle

  Just as there is no such thing as a culture without agents, there are no agents without culture.

  Victoria Stodden

  Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions

  Our intuition regularly seems to break down with scale.

  Brian Knutson

  Replicability

  Replication should be celebrated rather than denigrated.

  Xeni Jardin

  Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation

  Facts are more fluid than in the days of our grandfathers.

  Diane F. Halpern

  A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process

  “Statistically significant difference” is a core concept in research and statistics, but . . . it is not an intuitive idea.

  Beatrice Golomb

  The Dece(i)bo Effect

  Key presumptions regarding placebos and placebo effects are more typically wrong than not.

  Andrew Revkin

  Anthropophilia

  More fully considering our nature . . . could help identify certain kinds of challenges that we know we’ll tend to get wrong.

  Mahzarin R. Banaji

  A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory

  Signal-detection theory . . . provides a mathematically rigorous framework for understanding the nature of decision processes.

  David Pizarro

  Everyday Apophenia

  The pattern-detection responsible for so much of our species’ success can just as easily betray us.

  Ernst Pöppel

  A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage

  Because we are a victim of our biological past, and as a consequence a victim of ourselves, we end up with shabby SHAs, having left behind reality.

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Books by John Brockman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Footnotes

  Foreword

  David Brooks

  Columnist, New York Times; author, The Social Animal

  Every era has its intellectual hotspots. We think of the Bloomsbury Group in London during the early twentieth century. We think of the New York intellectuals who wrote for little magazines like Partisan Review in the 1950s. The most influential thinkers in our own era live at the nexus of the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and information technology. This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere.

  Many of the leaders of this network are in this book. They are lucky enough to be at the head of fast-advancing fields. But they are also lucky enough to have one another. The literary agent and all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman gathers members of this network for summits. He arranges symposia and encourages online conversations. Through Edge.org, he has multiplied the talents of everybody involved. Crucially, he has taken scholars out of their intellectual disciplines, encouraging them to interact with people in different fields, to talk with business executives, to talk with the general public.

  The disciplinary structure in the universities is an important foundation. It enforces methodological rigor. But it doesn’t really correlate with reality (why do we have one field, psychology, concerning the inner life and another field, sociology, concerning the outer life, when the distinction between the two is porous and maybe insignificant?). If there’s going to be a vibrant intellectual life, somebody has to drag researchers out of their ghettos, and Brockman has done that, through Edge.

  The book you hold in your hand accomplishes two things, one implicit, one explicit. Implicitly it gives you an excellent glimpse of what some of the world’s leading thinkers are obsessed with at the moment. You can see their optimism (or anxiety) about how technology is changing culture and interaction. You’ll observe a frequent desire to move beyond deductive reasoning and come up with more rigorous modes of holistic or emergent thinking.

  You’ll also get a sense of the emotional temper of the group. People in this culture love neat puzzles and cool questio
ns. Benoit Mandelbrot asked his famous question “How long is the coast of Britain?” long before this symposium was written, but it perfectly captures the sort of puzzle people in this crowd love. The question seems simple. Just look it up in the encyclopedia. But as Mandelbrot observed, the length of the coast of Britain depends on what you use to measure it. If you draw lines on a map to approximate the coastline, you get one length, but if you try to measure the real bumps in every inlet and bay, the curves of each pebble and grain of sand, you get a much different length.

  That question is intellectually complexifying but also clarifying. It gets beneath the way we see, and over the past generation the people in this book have taken us beneath our own conscious thinking and shown us the deeper patterns and realms of life. I think they’ve been influenced by the ethos of Silicon Valley. They seem to love heroic attempts at innovation and don’t believe there is much disgrace in an adventurous failure. They are enthusiastic. Most important, they are not coldly deterministic. Under their influence, the cognitive and other sciences have learned from novels and the humanities. In this book, Joshua Greene has a brilliant entry in which he tries to define the relationship between the sciences and the humanities, between brain imaging and Macbeth. He shows that they are complementary and interconnected magisteria. In this way the rift between the two cultures is being partially healed.

  The explicit purpose of this book is to give us better tools to think about the world. Though written by researchers, it is eminently practical for life day to day.