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

150 short essays. Some of them worthy of 10 stars, some - only of 1. If you are willing to invest some time and effort in order to search for real jewels, then definitely read this book!The most useful ideas/concepts for me:1) a keener awareness that for the Universe "far more time lies ahead than has elapsed until now." "There is abundant time for posthuman evolution, here on Earth or far beyond, organic or inorganic, to give rise to far more diversity and even greater qualitative changes than those that have led from single-celled organisms to humans." "So humans are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree but a species that emerged early in cosmic history, with special promise for diverse evolution." [Martin Rees]2) "the history of life on Earth doesn't support this evolution toward intelligence [...] Play the movie differently and we wouldn't be here [...]" [Marcelo Gleiser]3) "No matter the domain of life, one's generation's verities so often become the next generation's falsehoods that we might as well have a pessimistic meta-induction from the history of everything. Good scientists understand this. They recognize that they are part of a long process of approximation. They know they are constructing models rather than revealing reality. [...] The idea behind the meta-induction is that all of our theories are fundamentally provisional and quite possibly wrong. If we can add that idea to our cognitive toolkit, we will be able to listen with curiosity and empathy to those whose theories contradict our own. We will be better able to pay attention to counterevidence - those anomalous bits of data that make our picture of the world a little weirder, more mysterious, less clean, less done." [Kathryn Shulz]4) "Cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of THE cause - of an outcome's having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an intersection, or nexus, of factors (including the absence of precluding conditions.) [...] "The complexity and noise permeating any real causal nexus generates a fog of uncertainty. Slight biases in causal attribution or in blameworthiness allow a stable niche for extracting undeserved credit or targeting undeserved blame. If the patient recovers, it was due to my heroic efforts; if not, the underlying disease was too severe. If it weren't for my macroeconomic policy, the economy would be even worse. The abandonment of moral warfare and a wider appreciation of nexus causality and misattribution arbitrage would help us all shed at least some of the destructive delusions that cost humanity so much." [John Tooby]5) Technologies have biases. "Soft technologies, from central currency to psychotherapy, are biased in their construction as much as their implementation. No matter how we spend U.S. dollars, we are nonetheless fortifying banking and the centralization of capital. Put a psychotherapist on his own couch and a patient in the chair and the therapist will begin to exhibit treatable pathologies. It's set up that way, just as Facebook is set up to make us think of ourselves in terms of our "likes". [Douglas Rushkoff.]6) "But without our biases to focus our attention, we would be lost in that endless and limitless expanse. W[...] Biases mediate between our intellect and emotions to help congeal perception into opinion, judgment, category, metaphor, analogy, theory, and ideology, which frame how we see the world. Bias is tentative. Bias adjusts as the facts change. Bias is a provisional Hypothesis. Bias is normal. [...] Truth need continually to be validated against all evidence that challenges it fairly and honestly. [..] Like the words in a multimensional crossworld puzzle, it has to fit together with all the other pieces already in place, The better and more elaborate the fit, the more certain the truth, Science permits no exceptions. It is inexorably revisionary, learning from its mistakes, erasing and rewriting even its most sacred texts, until the puzzle is complete." [Gerald Smallberg]7) The focusing illusion. "Income is an important determinant of people's satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satifaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent." "Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time, because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about things other than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California, we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking a bout a life condition and actually living it is the cause of focusing illusion." "People can be made to believe that school uniforms will significantly improve educational outcomes, or that health care reform will hugely change the quality of life in the United States - either for the better or for the worse." [Daniel Kahneman]8) "[...] When it comes to understanding probability, people basically suck. [...] When a state government requires its citizens to buy car insurance, it does so because it figures, rightly, that people are underestimating the odds of an accident." [Seth Lloyd]9) Shifting Baseline Syndrome. "it forces you to continually ask what is normal. Is this? Was that? And, at least as important, it asks how we "know" that it's normal." [Paul Kedrosky]10) "[...] Not all explanations are created equal; some are objectively better than others. [...] It's inference to the beast explanation that gives science the power to expand our ontology, giving us reasons to believe in things that we can't directly observe, from subatomic particles - or maybe strings - to the dark matter and dark energy of cosmology. It's inference to the best explanation that allows us to know something of what it's like to be other people on the basis of their behavior." [Rebecca Newberger Goldstein].11) "attention is highly selective." "Although there are billions of neurons in our brains firing all the time, we'd never be able to put one foot in front of the other if we were unable to ignore almost all of that hyperabundant parallel processing going on in the background. [...]" [Douglas T.Kenrick]12) "The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung. The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality "out there". Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense? [...] Truman show [...] A good illustration of our unawareness of the limits of our umwelt is that of color-blind people: Until they learn that others can see hues they cannot, the thought of extra colors do not hit their radar screen." [David Eagleman]13) "While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity". In subjective terms, however, there SEEMS to be one - to most of us, most of the time." [Sam Harris]14) "Supervenience explains, for example, why physics is the most fundamental science and why the things that physicists study are the most fundamental things. To many people, this sounds like value judgement, but it's not, or need not be. Physics is fundamental because everything in the universe, from your pancreas to Ottawa, supervenes on physical stuff." [Joshua Greene]15) A cognitive toolkit full of garbage. "Is there a pragmatic way out, other than to radically get rid of mental garbage? Yes, perhaps: Simply not using the key shorthand abstractions explicitly in one's toolkit. Working on consciousness, don't use the SHA "consciousness." If you work on the "self", never refer explicitly to self. Going through one's own garbage, one discovers many misleading SHAs." [Ernst Poppel]

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman"This Will Make You Smarter" is a thought-provoking book of scientific essays brought to you by The Edge that provides readers with better tools to think about the world. The Edge is an organization that presents original ideas by today's leading thinkers from a wide spectrum of scientific fields. The 2011 Edge question is, "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" This worthwhile 448-page book contains 151 short essays that address the question. The quality of these essays range from the obvious to the truly profound.For my sake, I created a spreadsheet of all the essays and graded them from zero to five stars based on quality. Five star essays are those that provide a great description of the author's favorite scientific concept. On the other hand, those receiving a one or even a zero represent essays that were not worthy of this book. Of course, this is just one reviewer's personal opinion. I basically reprised the same formula I used to review, "This Explains Everything".Positives:1. This series by "The Edge" always deliver a high-quality product.2. A great premise, "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?"3. A great range of scientific topics: biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics.4. There were a number of outstanding essays deserving of five stars for me. I will list my favorites as positives in this review. In order of appearance, the first by P.Z. Myers' "The Mediocrity Principle". It discusses the importance of having basic math skills and accepting the notion that we aren't special. Sounds harsh on the surface but P.Z. won me over with his persuasive argument.5. Sean Carroll's "Pointless Universe". His contention is that the universe is not advancing toward a goal but is caught up in an unbreakable pattern.6. Max Tegmarr's "Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle". The need to educate the public on science. Hit on all the pertinent points with mastery.7. Kathryn Schulz's "The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science". Makes the compelling case that there are no absolutes in science. Understanding that science is about constructing models rather than revealing reality.8. Jonah Lehrer's "Control Your Spotlight." Learning how to control short list of thoughts in working memory.9. Kevin Kelly's "Failure Liberates Success." Failures in science can lead to success.10. Steven Pinker's "Positive-Sum Games." A great explanation on the value of understanding positive-sum games.11. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's "Inference to the Best Explanation." One of the best essays of the book. Explains what is behind the power of science.12. Donald Hoffman's "Our Sensory Desktop." The importance of refining our attitude toward our own perceptions.13. Michael Shermer's "Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down." Great explanation on emerging properties.14. Terrence Sejnowski's "Powers of 10." How to think about things in the world over a wide range of magnitudes and time scales.15. Guilio Boccaletti's "Scale Analysis." Understanding this concept can help us on many complex problems.16. Sam Harris's "We are Lost in Thought." The distorted views of the self.17. Sue Blackmore's "Correlation is not a Cause." The need to spread this concept to the public.18. Lee Smolin's "Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time." Important and very little discussed topic, it's about time.19. Geoffrey Miller's "The Personality/Insanity Continuum." Very interesting topic.20. Mathew Ritchie's "Systematic Equilibrium." The second of thermodynamics applied.21. Mark Henderson's "Science Methods Aren't Just for Science." Solid defense of science.22. Scott D. Sampson's "Interbeing." Another one of my favorites.23. Satyajit Das's "Parallelism in Art and Commerce." A unique contribution.24. Vinod Khosla's "Black Swan Technologies." Low probability events with extreme impact.25. Fiery Cushman's "Understanding Confabulation." Understanding our own behavior.Negatives:1. Some essays were not worthy of this book. It's not my intent to denigrate any of these great minds so I'm not going to mention them by name. Thankfully just a few received zero or one stars.2. Some of my favorite authors let me down while others flourished.3. It requires an investment of time.In summary, I enjoy these kinds of books. The Edge does a wonderful job of selecting a thought-provoking question and an even better job of bringing in intellectuals from a wide range of fields to answer it. The search for knowledge is a fun and satisfying pursuit. Pick up this book and enjoy the ride.Further suggestions: " This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works " by John Brockman, " A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing " by Lawrence Krauss, " The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution " by Richard Dawkins, " The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements " by Sam Kean, " The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human " by V.S. Ramachandran, " The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies " by Michael Shermer, " How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed " by Ray Kurzwell, " The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature " by Steven Pinker, " Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies " by Jared Diamond, " Why Evolution Is True " by Jerry A. Coyne, and "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior" by Leonard Mlodinow.

A good book, yet marred by the fact that it has c. 150 authors. Through small essays and pieces, averaging one page, several intelectuals and, mostly, people of science issue a piece in order to answer the question, what will improve your thinking. The title (and aim) of the book is a bit over the top - reading this book will make no one smater, going much deeply in some of the authors and their works of the book will.It is interesting, with some fascinating pieces, but the different styles, article lenghts and fields of labour of the authors makes for a difficult and perhaps tedious read at some points.Good, worthy and quite interesting in many parts. Too unbalanced to be what it intends.

Composed of very short articles. Very interesting

Definitely a great summary of important scientific, sociological and philosophical knowledge, condensed into very short summaries. Highly recommended as an accessible book that you can just dip into.

V poor qualityBook unclean and fungus on multiple pagesPlan to return

An enjoyable read!