This Will Make You Smarter

150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780062109392
• eBook ISBN: 9780062109408
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Business Development

Featuring a foreword by David
Brooks, This
Will Make You Smarter presents brilliant—but accessible—ideas
to expand every mind.

What
scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This
is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world’s most
influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of
psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and
enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about
yourself and the world.
Contributors include:

• Daniel Kahneman on the “focusing
  illusion”
• Jonah Lehrer on controlling
  attention
• Richard Dawkins on
  experimentation
• Aubrey De Grey on conquering our
  fear of the unknown
• Martin Seligman on the
  ingredients of well-being
• Nicholas Carr on managing
  “cognitive load”
• Steven Pinker on win-win
  negotiating
• Daniel Goleman on understanding
  our connection to the natural world
• Matt Ridley on tapping collective
  intelligence
• Lisa Randall on effective theorizing
  
• Brian Eno on “ecological vision”
• J. Craig Venter on the multiple
  possible origins of life  
• Helen Fisher on temperament
• Sam Harris on the flow of thought
  
• Lawrence Krauss on living with
  uncertainty

Index

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

absence and evidence, 281, 282–84

abstractions, shorthand, see SHAs

Adaptation and Natural Selection (Williams), 196

adoptions, 194

Aether, 338–39

Afghanistan, 19

agreeableness, 232–33

Aguirre, Anthony, 301–2

Alexander, Richard, 321

Alexander, Stephon H., xxvii, 296–98

algebra, 6, 24

Alter, Adam, 150–53

altruism, 194, 196–97

aluminum refining, 110

Amazon, 25

Anasazi, 361

Anderson, Alun, 209–10

Anderson, Ross, 262–63

anecdotalism, 278–80

anomalies, 242–45

Anthropocene thinking, 206–8

anthropologists, 361

anthropophilia, 386–88

anyons, 191

apophenia, 394

Arbesman, Samuel, 11–12

archaeology, 282–84, 361

architecture, 246–49

ARISE (Adaptive Regression In the Service of the Ego), 235–36

Aristotle, 9, 28–29, 35

art:

bricolage in, 271–72

parallelism in commerce and, 307–9

recursive structures in, 146–49

Arthur, Brian, 223

Ascent of Man, The, 340

Asimov, Isaac, 324–25

assertions, 267

assumptions, 218–19

atoms, 128

attention, 130, 211

focusing illusion an, 49–50

spotlight of, 46–48

attractiveness, 136, 137

authority and experts, 18, 20, 34

Avery, Oswald, 244

Avicenna, 9

Aztecs, 361

Bacon, Francis, 395

bacteria, 15–16, 89, 97, 166, 290–91, 292–93, 338

transformation of, 243, 244, 245

Baldwin, Mark, 152

Banaji, Mahzarin R., 389–93

banking crisis, 259, 261, 307, 309, 322, 386

Barondes, Samuel, 32

Barton, Robert, 150–51

base rate, 264–65

Bass, Thomas A., 86–87

Bayesian inference, 70

behavior, ignorance of causes of, 349–52

behavioral sciences, 365–66

belief, 336–37

proof, 355–57

Bell, Alexander Graham, 110

bell curve (Gaussian distribution), 199, 200

benchmarks, 186

bias, 18, 43–45

confirmation, 40, 134

self-serving, 37–38, 40

in technologies, 41–42

biochemical cycles, 170–71

bioengineering, 16

biological ecosystems, 312–14

biological teleology, 4

biology, 234, 312

biophilia, 386

Bird, Sheila, 274

birds, 155, 359

chickens, 62–63, 155

herring gulls, 160

songbirds, 154–55

black box, 303

Blackmore, Sue, 215–17

Black Swan, The (Taleb), 315

black-swan technologies, 314–17

Blake, William, 44

blame, 35–36, 106, 386

blindness, 144

Bloch waves, 297

Boccaletti, Giulio, 184–87

body, life-forms in, 13, 290–91, 292

Boeri, Stefano, 78

Bohr, Niels, 28

Bolyai, János, 109

Bon...

Table of contents

• Contents
• David Brooks: Foreword
• John Brockman: Preface
• “Deep Time” and the Far Future
• We Are Unique
• The Mediocrity Principle
• The Pointless Universe
• The Copernican Principle
• We Are Not Alone in the Universe
• Microbes Run the World
• The Double-Blind Control Experiment
• Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle
• Experimentation
• The Controlled Experiment
• Gedankenexperiment
• The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science
• Each of Us Is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind
• Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage
• Self-Serving Bias
• Cognitive Humility
• Technologies Have Biases
• Bias Is the Nose for the Story
• Control Your Spotlight
• The Focusing Illusion
• The Uselessness of Certainty
• Uncertainty
• A Sense of Proportion About Fear of the Unknown
• Because
• The Name Game
• Living Is Fatal
• Uncalculated Risk
• Truth Is a Model
• E Pluribus Unum
• A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality
• Failure Liberates Success
• Holism
• TANSTAAFL
• Skeptical Empiricism
• Open Systems
• Non-Inherent Inheritance
• Shifting Baseline Syndrome
• PERMA
• Positive-Sum Games
• The Snuggle for Existence
• The Law of Comparative Advantage
• Structured Serendipity
• The World is Unpredictable
• Randomness
• The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine
• Inference to the Best Explanation
• Pragmamorphism
• Cognitive Load
• To Curate
• “Graceful” SHAs
• Externalities
• Everything Is in Motion
• Subselves and the Modular Mind
• Predictive Coding
• Our Sensory Desktop
• The Senses and the Multisensory
• The Umwelt
• The Rational Unconscious
• We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life
• An Instinct to Learn
• Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down
• Fixed-Action Patterns
• Powers of 10
• Life Code
• Constraint Satisfaction
• Cycles
• Keystone Consumers
• Cumulative Error
• Cultural Attractors
• Scale Analysis
• Hidden Layers
• “Science”
• The Expanding In-Group
• Contingent Superorganisms
• The Pareto Principle
• Find That Frame
• Wicked Problems
• Anthropocene Thinking
• Homo dilatus
• We Are Lost in Thought
• The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model
• Correlation Is Not a Cause
• Information Flow
• Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time
• Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy
• Depth
• Temperament Dimensions
• The Personality/Insanity Continuum
• ARISE
• Systemic Equilibrium
• Projective Thinking
• Anomalies and Paradigms
• Recursive Structure
• Designing Your Mind
• Free Jazz
• Collective Intelligence
• Risk Literacy
• Science Versus Theater
• The Base Rate
• Findex
• An Assertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence
• Scientists Should Be Scientists
• Bricoleur
• Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science
• The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators
• Anecdotalism
• You Can Show That Something Is Definitely Dangerous but Not That It’s Definitely Safe
• Absence and Evidence
• Path Dependence
• Interbeing
• The Other
• Ecology
• Dualities
• Dualities
• The Paradox
• Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”
• Personal Data Mining
• Parallelism in Art and Commerce
• Innovation
• The Gibbs Landscape
• Black Swan Technologies
• Kakonomics
• Kayfabe
• Einstein’s Blade in Ockham’s Razor
• Heat-Seeking Missiles
• Entanglement
• Technology Paved the Way for Humanity
• Time Span of Discretion
• Defeasibility
• Aether
• Knowledge as a Hypothesis
• The Einstellung Effect
• Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons
• Understanding Confabulation
• Sexual Selection
• QED Moments
• Objects of Understanding and Communication
• Life as a Side Effect
• The Veeck Effect
• Supervenience!
• The Culture Cycle
• Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions
• Replicability
• Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation
• A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process
• The Dece(i)bo Effect
• Anthropophilia
• A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory
• Everyday Apophenia
• A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage
• Excerpt from What Should We Be Worried About?
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Books by John Brockman
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher
• Footnotes