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.
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
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