More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We matter because we are rare and we know it.
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.
Theologians sometimes invoke “sustaining the world” as a function of God. But we know better; the world doesn’t need to be sustained, it can simply be.
lack of training in how to think critically and how to discount personal opinion, prejudice, and anecdote in favor of evidence.
Many are too swamped with obligations and distractions to seek it. Many seek information only from sources that confirm their preconceptions.
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.
Being mindful of self-serving bias beckons us not to false modesty but to a humility that affirms our genuine talents and virtues and likewise those of others.
the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control.
In fact, however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful.
Seth Lloyd Quantum mechanical engineer, MIT; author, Programming the Universe
If everybody could learn to deal better with the unknown, this would improve not only their individual cognitive toolkit (to be placed in a slot right next to the ability to operate a remote control, perhaps) but the chances for humanity as a whole.
A well-developed scientific method for dealing with the unknown has existed for many years—the mathematical theory of probability.
I can’t say I’m optimistic about the odds that people will learn to understand the science of odds. When it comes to understanding probability, people basically suck.
Driving a car, however, is one of those common but dangerous processes where human beings habitually underestimate the odds of something bad happening. Accordingly, some are disinclined to obtain car insurance (perhaps not surprising, when the considerable majority of people rate themselves as better-than-average drivers).
Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the risk of being bitten and killed by a spider is less than the risk that being afraid of spiders will kill
...more
We might get over our excessive fear of spiders and develop a healthy aversion to doughnuts, cigarettes, television, and stressful full-time employment.
The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t—they make and test models.
Holism is colloquially summarized as “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Robert R. Provine Psychologist and neuroscientist, University of Maryland; author, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
Randomness
Randomness is so difficult to grasp because it works against our pattern-finding instincts.
I would argue that only once we understand three dicta—three laws of randomness—can we break out of our primitive insistence on predictability and appreciate the universe for what it is, rather than what we want it to be.
Anthropomorphism means attributing the characteristics of human beings to inanimate things or animals. I have invented the word “pragmamorphism” as a shorthand abstraction for the attribution of the properties of inanimate things to human beings. One of the meanings of the Greek word pragma is “a material object.”
Richard Nisbett Social psychologist; codirector, Culture and Cognition Program, University of Michigan; author, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count
we are brilliant and stupid at the same time, capable of inventing wonders and still capable of forgetting what we’ve done and blundering stupidly on.
The Senses and the Multisensory Barry
We accept our umwelt and stop there.
it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.
W. Tecumseh Fitch Evolutionary biologist; professor of cognitive biology, University of Vienna; author, The Evolution of Language
The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn.”
This in turn means that in such systems most people (or whatever is being measured) are below average, a pattern encapsulated in the old economics joke: “Bill Gates walks into a bar and makes everybody a millionaire, on average.”
But since we are biologically and socially programmed to avoid discussing entropy (death), we reflexively avoid the subject of systemic changes to our way of life, both as a society and individuals. We think it’s a bummer. Instead of examining the real problems, we consume apocalyptic fantasies as “entertainment” and deride our leaders for their impotence. We really need to fix this.
2003, there were five exabytes of data collected (an exabyte equals 1 quintillion bytes). Today five exabytes of data gets collected every two days!
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet,
Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor—through trade and specialization—that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity, and knowledge base of the species.
As the economist Leonard Read observed in his essay “I, Pencil” (which I’d like everybody to read), no single person knows how to make even a pencil—the knowledge is distributed in society among many thousands of graphite miners, lumberjacks, designers, and factory workers.
Simply stated, statistical thinking is the ability to understand and critically evaluate uncertainties and risks. Yet 76 percent of U.S. adults and 54 percent of Germans do not know how to express a 1 in 1,000 chance as a percentage (0.1 percent). Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty—geometry, trigonometry—and little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty.
The archenemy of scientific thinking is conversation, as in typical human conversational discourse, much of which is BS.
better societies result in mass acceptance of evolution.
Most people tend to think of science in one of two ways. It is a body of knowledge and understanding about the world: gravity, photosynthesis, evolution. Or it is the technology that has emerged from the fruits of that knowledge: vaccines, computers, cars. Science is both of these things, yet as Carl Sagan so memorably explained in The Demon-Haunted World, it is something else besides. It is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an imperfect one) for discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are.
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton invented by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Many will already be acquainted with Conway’s invention. For those who aren’t, the best way to familiarize yourself with it is to experiment with one of the many free implementations found on the Internet (or better yet, if you have at least rudimentary programming skills, make one yourself).
Anecdotalism
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
arrangement that put “A”
With duality, there’s a third option. Perhaps my argument is right and yours is wrong; perhaps your argument is right and mine is wrong; or, just maybe, our opposing arguments are dual to one another. That’s not to say that we ought to descend into some kind of relativism, or that there are no singular truths. It is to say, though, that truth is far more subtle than we once believed, and that it shows up in many guises. It is up to us to recognize it in all its varied forms.
Olber’s paradox.
In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines a black swan as an event of low probability, extreme impact, and only retrospective predictability.
Many argue that since we already have some alternative energy technology, we should quickly deploy it. They fail to see the potential of black-swan technology possibilities;
Half a century ago, while advising a UK Metals company, Elliott Jaques had a deep and controversial insight. He noticed that workers at different levels of the company had very different time horizons. Line workers focused on tasks that could be completed in a single shift, whereas managers devoted their energies to tasks requiring six months or more to complete. Meanwhile, their CEO was pursuing goals realizable only over the span of several years.
The Einstellung effect is more pervasive than its name suggests. We constantly experience it when trying to solve a problem by pursuing solutions that have worked for us in the past, instead of evaluating and addressing the new problem on its own terms. Thus, whereas we may eventually solve the problem, we may be wasting an opportunity to do so in a more rapid, effective, and resourceful manner.
