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This Will Make You Smarter
150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
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- 448 pages
- English
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- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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About This Book
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
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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