This Idea Is Brilliant Quotes

“Population thinking is itself a population of mental and public things. Philosophers’ discussions of what population thinking really is are members of this population. So is the text you just read, and so is your reading of it.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“If a system is to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“The obscure scientific term explaining why we see most other people as unintelligent or crazy is naïve realism. Its origins trace back to at least the 1880s, when philosophers used the term to suggest that we should take our perceptions of the world at face value. In its modern incarnation, it has almost the opposite meaning. Stanford social psychologist Lee Ross uses the term to indicate that although most people do take their perceptions of the world at face value, this is a profound error that regularly causes virtually unresolvable conflicts between people.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“In truth, much of human social life—our morality, our relationships—revolves around challenges posed by intertemporal choice.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“If I offered to give you $20 today or $100 in a year, which would you choose?”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“In the long term, Mars must be a stepping-stone to more distant destinations, because two adjacent planets could be simultaneously affected by the universe’s more violent events, such as a nearby supernova.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“Stephen Hawking has estimated: “Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years. By that time we should have spread out into space, . . .”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“Science, then, is the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers

“The essence of science, however, is best conveyed by its Latin etymology: scientia, meaning “knowledge.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know – An MIT Technology Review Best Book from Physicists, ... and Philosophers