John Brockman - This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

This Will Make You Smarter

New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

Edited by John Brockman

Foreword by David Brooks

Contents

Martin Rees

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

Marcelo Gleiser

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

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

Sean Carroll

Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we cant help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being.

Samuel Arbesman

We are not anywhere special.

J. Craig Venter

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

Stewart Brand

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

Richard Dawkins

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

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

Roger Schank

Experimentation is something done by everyone all the time.

Timo Hannay

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

Gino Segre

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

Kathryn Schulz

One generations verities... often become the next generations falsehoods.

Samuel Barondes

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

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

David G. Myers

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

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

Douglas Rushkoff

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

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

Jonah Lehrer

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

Daniel Kahneman

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

Lawrence Krauss

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

Aubrey de Grey

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

Nigel Goldenfeld

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

Stuart Firestein

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

Seth Lloyd

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

Garrett Lisi

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

Neil Gershenfeld

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

Jon Kleinberg

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

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

Kevin Kelly

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

Nicholas A. Christakis

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

Robert R. Provine

There aint no such thing as a free lunch [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.

Gerald Holton

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

Thomas A. Bass

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

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

Paul Kedrosky

We dont have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.

Martin Seligman

The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, andideallyexhaustive.

Steven Pinker

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

Competition does not tell the whole story of biology.

Dylan Evans

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

Jason Zweig

Creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation.

Rudy Rucker

Even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still cant predict what youre going to do.

Charles Seife

Without an understanding of randomness, we are stuck in a perfectly predictable universe that simply doesnt exist outside our heads.

Clifford Pickover

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

Not all explanations are created equal.

Emanuel Derman

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

Nicholas Carr

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

Hans Ulrich Obrist

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

Richard Nisbett

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

Rob Kurzban

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 ODonnell

Remembering that everything is in motionfeverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motionis always hard for us.

Douglas T. Kenrick

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

Andy Clark

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