This Will Make You Smarter: Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

Edited by John Brockman, “This Will Make You Smarter: Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking” Harper Paperback, 2012, 397 pp.

This book is published through efforts of  Edge.org.  Edge defines its goal: “To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”  Each year a question is posed to the world’s leading scientific minds and their input requested.  This current book has 151 submitted articles; some are only one page, the longest is 4 pages.  The question posed was “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?”  The term “scientific” in this book is understood in a broad sense—as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be human behavior, corporate behavior, the fate of the planet, or the future of the universe.  It is a search for cognitive tools to better understand the world.  Most of the essays in the book are about metacognition.  They consist of thinking about how we think.

My Notes:

Pg. xxvii:  Twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.

Pg 8:  The universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but everything does follow rules—grasping those rules should be the goal of science.

Pg. 20:  The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia; yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views, characterizing them as ‘strong.’  The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed ‘distrust of experts’ as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread.  Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions. 

Pg. 24:  If schools taught basic cognitive concepts, such as experimentation in the context of everyday experience, instead of concentrating on algebra as a way of teaching people how to reason, then people would be much more effective at thinking about politics, child raising, personal relationships, business, and every other aspect of their daily lives.

Pg. 30:  Good scientists understand that they are part of a long process of approximation (for instance: Newton and then Einstein on gravity).  They know they are constructing models rather than revealing reality.  They are comfortable working under conditions of uncertainty.

Pg. 52:  A better understanding of the meaning of ‘probability’—and especially realizing that we don’t need (and never possess) ‘scientifically proved’ facts but only a sufficiently high degree of probability in order to make decisions—would improve everybody’s conceptual toolkit.

Pg. 107:  Random events behave predictably in aggregate even if they’re not predictable individually.

Pg. 157:  Democracy is a bottom-up emergent political system specifically designed to displace top-down kingdoms, theocracies, and dictatorships.  Economic and political systems are the result of human action, not human design.  (Language, for example, is a bottom-up design).

Pg. 166:  We are already transitioning from a humanoid that is shaped by and shapes its environment into a Homo evolutis, a species that directly and deliberately designs and shapes its own evolution and that of other species.

Pg. 232:  To understand insanity, we have to understand personality.  There’s a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well described by five main dimensions of variation.  These Big Five personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.  The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of one another, genetically heritable, stable across the life course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species, such as chimpanzees.  They predict a wide range of behaviors in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.

Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits.  Over-conscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other ‘impulse control’ disorders.  Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders.  Low extroversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders.  Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder.  High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia.  Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level but also at the genetic level. 

Pg. 252:  Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, there were five exabytes of data collected (an Exabyte equals 1 quintillion bytes).  Today five exabytes of data gets collected every two days!

Pg. 259:  The breakneck speed of technological innovation has made risk literacy as indispensable in the twenty-first century as reading and writing were in the twentieth.  Risk literacy is the ability to deal with uncertainties in an informed way. 

Pg. 270:  The atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had pretty much nothing to do with ending WWII with Japan.  It was the Soviet attack on Japan that forced Hirohito to surrender to save his war-criminal’s neck and keep Japan from being split into occupation zones. 

Pg. 326:  Albert Einstein disagreed with Ockham’s razor approach to problem solving, his counter offering was “Things should be made as simple as possible—but not simpler.”

Pg. 333:  The very idea of a ‘cognitive toolkit’ is one of the most important items in our cognitive toolkit.  It is far more than just a metaphor, for the relationship between actual physical tools and the way we think is profound and of immense antiquity.

Ideas such as evolution and a deep prehistory for humanity are as factually well established as the idea of a round Earth.  But the idea that the first chipped stone tool predates, by at least half a million years, the expansion of mind that is so characteristic of humans should also be knowable by all. 

The idea that technology came before humanity and, evolutionarily, pave the way for it, is the scientific concept that should be part of everybody’s cognitive toolkit.

Pg. 378:  Statistically significant difference is a concept that is essential to science and has become common parlance among educated adults.  These three words convey a basic understanding of the scientific process, random events, and the laws of probability.  It is a shorthand abstraction for a sequence of events that includes an experiment (or other research design), the specification of a null and alternative hypothesis, (numerical) data collection, statistical analysis, and the probability of an unlikely outcome.  That’s a lot of science conveyed in a few words.  

Addenda:

While we often imagine bell curves everywhere, in fact the phenomena of the world are often best described by the Pareto Principle. Things are often skewed radically toward the top of any distribution. Twenty percent of the employees in any company do most of the work, and the top 20 percent within that 20 percent do most of that group's work.