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

by John Brockman

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn’t privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn’t the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws—laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit—given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. The rules of inheritance and the nature of biology meant that when your parents had a baby, it was anatomically human and mostly fully functional physiologically, but the unique combination of traits that make you male or female, tall or short, brown-eyed or blue-eyed, were the result of a chance shuffle of genetic attributes during meiosis, a few random mutations, and the luck of the draw in the grand sperm race at fertilization.

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 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.

Imagine that you have two tickets to tonight’s NBA game in your city and that the arena is forty miles away. But it’s begun to snow, and you’ve found out that your team’s star has been injured and won’t be playing. Should you go, or just throw away the money and skip it? To answer that question as an economist would, ask yourself the following question: “Suppose you didn’t have tickets to the game, and a friend called you up and said he had two tickets to tonight’s game which he couldn’t use, and asked if you’d like to have them.” If the answer is “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s snowing and the star isn’t playing,” then the answer is that you shouldn’t go. That answer shows you that the fact that you paid good money for the tickets you have is irrelevant—their cost is sunk and can’t be retrieved by doing something you don’t want to do anyway.