The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results

by Andrew McAfee

We saw in chapter 3 that evolution crowdsourced the knowledge about making fire from the individual to the group. Something very similar has happened with ideas: evolution has crowdsourced evaluating them to the group, not to the individual who originated them. Our minds are deeply justificatory with their own ideas, and just as deeply argumentative with others’. This is the viewpoint laid out by cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, who offer an ultimate perspective on how reasoning works in us Homo ultrasocialis. In this perspective, individuals’ ideas get evaluated by group-level discussion and debate. Bad ideas get rejected, and sound ones accepted. A lot of us walk around with the stereotype that (other) people will believe almost anything, but the evidence says otherwise. Most of the time we’re actually quite good at the back-and-forth of probing somebody else’s argument and evaluating its quality.9 In fact, Mercier and a team of colleagues found that we become better at ignoring our press secretaries and evaluating our own ideas if they’re repackaged and fed back to us as coming from someone else.