This Will Make You Smarter

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.