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

by John Brockman

My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis, but Galileo simply asked us to consider a large and a small stone tied together by a very light string. If Aristotle was right, the large stone should speed up the smaller one, and the smaller one retard the larger one, if they fall at different rates. However, if you let the string length approach zero, you have a single object with a mass equal to the sum of their masses, and hence it should fall at a higher rate than either. This is nonsensical. The conclusion is that all objects fall in a vacuum at the same rate.

if “the pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science” is cumbersome to say and difficult to remember, it is also a great idea. In fact, as the “meta” part suggests, it’s the kind of idea that puts all other ideas into perspective. Here’s the gist: Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today’s theories will eventually prove incorrect as well.

The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t—they make and test models. Kepler, packing Platonic solids to explain the observed motion of planets, made pretty good predictions, which were improved by his laws of planetary motion, which were improved by Newton’s laws of motion, which were improved by Einstein’s general relativity. Kepler didn’t become wrong because of Newton’s being right, just as Newton didn’t then become wrong because of Einstein’s being right; these successive models differed in their assumptions, accuracy, and applicability, not in their truth.

Open standards allow knowledgeable outsiders access to the design of computer systems, to improve, interact with, or otherwise extend them. These standards are public, transparent, widely accessible, and royalty-free for developers and users. Open standards have driven innovation on the Web and allowed it to flourish as both a creative and commercial space. Unfortunately, the ideal of an open Web is not embraced by companies that prefer walled gardens, silos, proprietary systems, apps, tiered levels of access, and other metered methods for turning citizens into consumers. Their happy-face Web contains tracking systems useful for making money, but these systems are also appreciated by the police states of the world, for they, too, have a vested interest in surveillance and closed systems. Now that the Web has frothed through twenty years of chaotic inventiveness, we have to push back against the forces that would close it down. A similar push should be applied to other systems veering toward closure. “Citoyens, citoyennes, arm yourselves with the concept of openness.”

The First Law of Randomness: There is such a thing as randomness.

The Second Law of Randomness: Some events are impossible to predict.

The Third Law of Randomness: Random events behave predictably in aggregate even if they’re not predictable individually.

The famous Canadian physician William Osler once wrote, “In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.” When we examine discoveries in science and mathematics, in hindsight we often find that if one scientist did not make a particular discovery, some other individual would have done so within a few months or years of the discovery. Most scientists, as Newton said, stood on the shoulders of giants to see the world just a bit farther along the horizon. Often, several people create essentially the same device or discover the same scientific law at about the same time, but for various reasons, including sheer luck, history sometimes remembers only one of them.

Feeling distracted? The simple discipline of reading a few full articles per day rather than just the headlines and summaries could strengthen attention.

There’s a lot to remember these days. Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, there were five exabytes of data collected (an exabyte equals 1 quintillion bytes). Today five exabytes of data gets collected every two days! Soon there will be five exabytes every few minutes. Humans have a finite memory capacity. Can you develop criteria for which will be inboard and which outboard?

As a journalist, I have lost count of the number of times people have demanded that a particular technology be “proved to do no harm.” This is, of course, impossible, in just the same way that proving that there are no black swans is impossible. You can look for a black swan (harm) in various ways, but if you fail to find one, that doesn’t mean none exist: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All you can do is look again for harm in a different way. If you still fail to find it after looking in all the ways you can possibly think of, the question is still open: “lack of evidence of harm” means both “safe as far as we can tell” and “we still can’t be sure if it’s safe or not.” Scientists are often accused of logic-chopping when they point this out. But it would be immensely helpful to public discourse if there were a wider understanding that you can show that something is definitely dangerous, but you cannot show that it is definitely safe.

IN MY VIEW, there are threats to peace that we should worry about, but the real risk factors—the ones that actually caused catastrophic wars, such as the World Wars, wars of religion, and the major civil wars—don’t press the buttons of our lurid imaginations: Narcissistic leaders. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction is a state. When a state is taken over by a leader with the classic triad of narcissistic symptoms—grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy—the result can be imperial adventures with enormous human costs. Groupism. The ideal of human rights—that the ultimate moral good is the flourishing of individual people, while groups are social constructions designed to further that good—is surprisingly recent and unnatural. People, at least in public, are apt to argue that the ultimate moral good is the glory of the group—the tribe, religion, nation, class, or race—and that individuals are expendable, like the cells of a body. Perfect justice. Every group has suffered depredations and humiliations in its past. When groupism combines with the thirst for revenge, a group may feel justified in exacting damage on some other group, inflamed by a moralistic certitude that makes compromise tantamount to treason. Utopian ideologies. If you have a religious or political vision of a world that will be infinitely good forever, any amount of violence is justified to bring about that world, and anyone standing in its way is infinitely evil and deserving of unlimited p...