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This Will Make You Smarter

This Will Make You Smarter

John Brockman
2012
T3 415 pages · about 6h 55m to read Open Librarygoodreads

Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting

Summary

Brockman runs Edge, which each year posed a question to scientists, technologists and thinkers and published the answers. This volume collects responses to the 2011 question: what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? There are roughly 150 short contributions, most one to three pages, from contributors including Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Clay Shirky, Sean Carroll and many others.

The concepts offered include the focusing illusion, the difference between experiment and correlation, the Copernican principle, cumulative error, base rates, scale analysis, the placebo effect, cognitive load, path dependence, positive-sum games, the availability heuristic, kakonomics, the uselessness of certainty, and dozens more. Each contributor states a concept and explains why using it would improve thinking.

The format makes it a reference to browse rather than read through, and quality varies substantially: some entries are sharp and immediately usable, others are the contributor's hobby horse restated. There is no editorial synthesis and no argument connecting the entries.

For investors and operators the value is as a source of named concepts for things they already half-perceive, which makes those things easier to notice and discuss. The book is from 2011, so several psychology entries rest on findings that subsequently failed to replicate, and the entries on technology and the internet are dated. Read it selectively.

Key takeaways 7

  1. Nothing in life is as important as it seems while you are thinking about it, which Kahneman calls the focusing illusion and which distorts every prediction of future satisfaction.
  2. Controlled experiment and correlation answer different questions, and most published claims about cause rest on the latter presented as the former.
  3. Base rates should anchor any estimate about an individual case, because the specific details that feel informative usually are not.
  4. Errors compound through a chain of estimates, so a calculation with several uncertain inputs is far less reliable than any individual input.
  5. Certainty is a psychological state rather than an epistemic one, and its intensity carries no information about whether a belief is true.
  6. Most human interactions are positive-sum, and treating them as zero-sum is the single most common reasoning error in economics and politics.
  7. Naming a concept makes the corresponding pattern easier to notice, which is the mechanism by which a vocabulary improves thinking.

Who should read it

Readers who want a browsable collection of named thinking concepts from working scientists, selected rather than read in full.

Who recommended it 2 · 2 direct

Morgan HouseldirectSource
Patrick CollisondirectSource

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Topics

SciencePhilosophyPhilosophy of science and mindHistory and philosophy of science