Home > Work > This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
1 " Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way. "
― John Brockman , This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
2 " By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion. "
3 " If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research. "
4 " After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called “time span of discretion,” or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake. "
5 " Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong. Willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow, we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away. "
6 " Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. "
7 " Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery. "
8 " In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs. "
9 " it is difficult to discern where “you” end and the remainder of the world begins. "
10 " Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity. "
11 " Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It "
12 " Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. "
13 " Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results. "
14 " What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science. "
15 " Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world. "
16 " Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong. "
17 " In biology especially, we have labels for everything—molecules, anatomical parts, physiological functions, organisms, ideas, hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. "
18 " We all start from radical ignorance in a world that is endlessly strange, vast, complex, intricate, and surprising. Deliverance from ignorance lies in good concepts—inference fountains that geyser out insights that organize and increase the scope of our understanding. "
19 " Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the risk of being bitten and killed by a spider is less than the risk that being afraid of spiders will kill you because of the increased stress. "
20 " The idea that we can systematically understand certain aspects of the world and make predictions based on what we’ve learned, while appreciating and categorizing the extent and limitations of what we know, plays a big role in how we think. "
