Contents
Marcelo Gleiser
Modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite.
P.Z. Myers
Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.
Sean Carroll
Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being.
J. Craig Venter
We Are Not Alone in the Universe
There is a humancentric, Earthcentric view of life that permeates most cultural and societal thinking.
Stewart Brand
This biotech century will be microbe-enhanced and maybe microbe-inspired.
Richard Dawkins
The Double-Blind Control Experiment
Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts, three-quarters believe in angels, a third believe in astrology, three-quarters believe in hell?
Max Tegmark
Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle
Our global scientific community has been nothing short of a spectacular failure when it comes to educating the public.
Timo Hannay
When required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most nonscientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting.
Gino Segre
Consciously or unconsciously, we carry out gedankenexperiments of one sort or another in our everyday life.
Kathryn Schulz
The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science
One generation’s verities . . . often become the next generation’s falsehoods.
Samuel Barondes
Each of Us Is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind
This dual view of each of us, as both run-of-the-mill and special, has been so well established by biologists and behavioral scientists that it may now seem self-evident.
John Tooby
Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage
Our self-evidently superior selves and in-groups are error-besotted.
David G. Myers
Compared with our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better-looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer.
Gary Marcus
Computer memory is much better than human memory because early computer scientists discovered a trick that evolution never did.
Douglas Rushkoff
Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them.
Gerald Smallberg
Bias Is the Nose for the Story
Our brains evolved having to make the right bet with limited information.
Jonah Lehrer
Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong.
Daniel Kahneman
The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.
Carlo Rovelli
The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
Lawrence Krauss
In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability.
Aubrey de Grey
A Sense of Proportion About Fear of the Unknown
Fear of the unknown is not remotely irrational in principle . . . but it can be and generally is overdone.
Nigel Goldenfeld
Complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality.
Stuart Firestein
Even words that, like “gravity,” seem well settled may lend more of an aura to an idea than it deserves.
Neil Gershenfeld
Building models is . . . a never-ending process of discovery and refinement.
Jon Kleinberg
The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity.
Stefano Boeri
A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality
Even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension.
Kevin Kelly
Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated.
Nicholas A. Christakis
Holism takes a while to acquire and appreciate. It is a grown-up disposition.
Robert R. Provine
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.
Gerald Holton
In politics and society at large, important decisions are all too often based on deeply held presuppositions.
Thomas A. Bass
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.
George Church
We are well into an unprecedented new phase of evolution, in which we must generalize beyond our DNA-centric worldview.
Paul Kedrosky
We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.
Martin Seligman
The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive.
Steven Pinker
In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself.
Dylan Evans
The Law of Comparative Advantage
At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade.
Jason Zweig
Creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation.
Rudy Rucker
Even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still can’t predict what you’re going to do.
Charles Seife
Without an understanding of randomness, we are stuck in a perfectly predictable universe that simply doesn’t exist outside our heads.
Clifford Pickover
The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine
We are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are part of a discovery kaleidoscope and are mirrored in numerous individuals at once.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Inference to the Best Explanation
Not all explanations are created equal.
Emanuel Derman
Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism.
Nicholas Carr
When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
In our phase of globalization . . . there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture.
Richard Nisbett
An assumption of educators for centuries has been that formal logic improves thinking skills. . . . But this belief may be mistaken.
Rob Kurzban
The notion of externalities forces us to think about unintended (positive and negative) effects of actions, an issue that looms larger as the world gets smaller.
James O’Donnell
Remembering that everything is in motion—feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion—is always hard for us.
Douglas T. Kenrick
Subselves and the Modular Mind
The only way we manage to accomplish anything in life is to allow only one subself to take the conscious driver’s seat at any given time.
Andy Clark
The brain exploits prediction and anticipation in making sense of incoming signals and using them to guide perception, thought, and action.
Donald Hoffman
Our sensory experiences . . . can be thought of as sensory desktops that have evolved to guide adaptive behavior, not report objective truths.
Barry C. Smith
The Senses and the Multisensory
We now know that the senses do not operate in isolation but combine, both at early and late stages of processing, to produce our rich perceptual experiences of our surroundings.
David Eagleman
Our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.
Alison Gopnik
The idea of the rational unconscious has . . . transformed our scientific understanding of creatures whose rationality has traditionally been denied, such as young children and animals.
Adam Alter
We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life
Our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness.
W. Tecumseh Fitch
The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn.”
Michael Shermer
Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down.
Irene Pepperberg
The concept of a fixed-action pattern, despite its simplicity, may prove valuable as a metaphorical means to study and change human behavior.
Terrence Sejnowski
Thinking in powers of 10 is such a basic skill that it ought to be taught along with integers in elementary school.
Stephen M. Kosslyn
When moving into a new house, my wife and I had to decide how to arrange the furniture in the bedroom.
Daniel C. Dennett
The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice.
Jaron Lanier
Our brains have unrealistic expectations of information transformation.
Dan Sperber
In spite of variations, an Irish stew is an Irish stew, Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood, and a samba is a samba.
Giulio Boccaletti
It is through scale analysis that we can often make sense of complex nonlinear phenomena in terms of simpler models.
Frank Wilczek
Hidden layers embody in a concrete physical form the fashionable but rather vague and abstract idea of emergence.
Lisa Randall
The theory that works might not be the ultimate truth, but it’s as close an approximation to the truth as you need.
Marcel Kinsbourne
The in-group-vs.-out-group double standard . . . could in theory be eliminated if everyone alive were considered to be in everyone else’s in-group.
Jonathan Haidt
It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability.
William Calvin
What has been cropped out of the frame can lead the unwary to an incorrect inference.
Jay Rosen
In the United States, rising health care costs are a classic case of a wicked problem. No “right” way to view it.
Daniel Goleman
Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left the Holocene epoch and entered . . . the Anthropocene, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life.
Alun Anderson
Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto, but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.
Sam Harris
Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox.
Thomas Metzinger
The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model
A transparent self-model necessarily creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood—of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole.
Sue Blackmore
Understanding that a correlation is not a cause could raise levels of debate over some of today’s most pressing scientific issues.
Lee Smolin
Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time
Thinking outside of time often implies the existence of an imagined realm, outside the universe, where the truth lies.
Richard Foreman
Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy
Mistakes, errors, false starts—accept them all.
Joel Gold
Sometimes it takes a genius to see that a fifth-grade science experiment is all that is needed to solve a problem.
Matthew Ritchie
Living on a single planet, we are all participants in a single physical system that has only one direction—toward systemic equilibrium.
Linda Stone
When we cling rigidly to our constructs . . . we can be blinded to what’s right in front of us.
V.S. Ramachandran
One can speak of reigning paradigms—what Kuhn calls normal science and what I cynically refer to as a mutual-admiration club trapped in a cul-de-sac of specialization.
David Gelernter
It helps us understand the connections between art and technology, helps us see the aesthetic principles that guide the best engineers and technologists and the ideas of clarity and elegance that underlie every kind of successful design.
Don Tapscott
Want to strengthen your working memory and ability to multitask? Try reverse mentoring—learning with your teenager.
Andrian Kreye
The 1960 session that gave the genre its name . . . was a precursor to a form of communication that has left linear conventions and entered the realm of multiple parallel interactions.
Matt Ridley
Human achievement is based on collective intelligence—the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves.
Gerd Gigerenzer
Unlike basic literacy, risk literacy requires emotional rewiring—rejecting comforting paternalism and illusions of certainty and learning to take responsibility and to live with uncertainty.
Ross Anderson
Modern societies waste billions on protective measures whose real aim is to reassure rather than to reduce risk.
Keith Devlin
In cases where [an] event is dramatic and scary, like a terrorist attack on an airplane, failure to take account of the base rate can result in wasting massive amounts of effort and money trying to prevent something that is very unlikely.
Marti Hearst
Although some have written about information overload, data smog, and the like, my view has always been the more information online the better, as long as good search tools are available.
Susan Fiske
An Assertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence
People’s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.
Gregory Paul
Scientists Should Be Scientists
Folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and thinking they’re true to the point of obstinacy, even when they have little or no idea of what they’re talking about in the first place.
James Croak
Currently, encompassing worldviews in philosophy have been shelved, and master art movements of style and conclusion folded alongside them; no more isms are being run up the flagpole, because no one is saluting.
Mark Henderson
Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science
Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of pursuits beyond the laboratory.
Nick Bostrom
The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators
It’s a brilliant demonstration platform for several important concepts—a virtual “philosophy of science laboratory.”
Tom Standage
You Can Show That Something Is Definitely Dangerous but Not That It’s Definitely Safe
A wider understanding of the fact that you can’t prove a negative would, in my view, do a great deal to upgrade the public debate around science and technology.
Christine Finn
Philosophically this is a challenging concept, but at an archaeological site all became clear in the painstaking tasks of digging, brushing, and troweling.
John McWhorter
One may assume that cats cover their waste out of fastidiousness, when the same creature will happily consume its own vomit and then jump on your lap.
Scott D. Sampson
Each of us is far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that has been flowing for billions of years.
Dimitar Sasselov
Astronomy and space science are intensifying the search for life on other planets. . . . The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself.
Brian Eno
We now increasingly view life as a profoundly complex weblike system with information running in all directions.
Stephon H. Alexander
A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives.
Amanda Gefter
Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them.
Anthony Aguirre
Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be an opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions.
Eric Topol
Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”
Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web.
David Rowan
We need to [mine] our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information.
Satyajit Das
Parallelism in Art and Commerce
[Damien] Hirst was the artist of choice for conspicuously consuming hedge-fund managers, who were getting very rich.
Laurence C. Smith
In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer.
Kevin Hand
The systems we have designed and built are inefficient and incomplete in the utilization of energy to do the work of civilization’s ecosystems.
Vinod Khosla
Who would be crazy enough to have forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones as to latrines?
Gloria Origgi
Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them.
Eric Weinstein
It provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.
Kai Krause
Einstein’s Blade in Ockham’s Razor
And there it was, the dancing interplay between simplex and complex that has fascinated me in so many forms.
Marco Iacoboni
Entanglement feels like magic. . . . Yet [it] is a real phenomenon, measurable and reproducible in the lab.
Timothy Taylor
Technology Paved the Way for Humanity
Thinking through things and with things, and manipulating virtual things in our minds, is an essential part of critical self-consciousness.
Tania Lombrozo
Between blind faith and radical skepticism is a vast but sparsely populated space where defeasibility finds its home.
Mark Pagel
There will always be some element of doubt about anything we come to “know” from our observations of the world.
Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán
Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons
We are the tension of the sensus and the sapiens.
Fiery Cushman
Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized and even goal-driven.
David M. Buss
Research on human mating strategies has exploded over the past decade, as the profound implications of sexual selection become more deeply understood.
Richard Saul Wurman
Objects of Understanding and Communication
I want help flying through my waking dreams connecting the threads of these epiphanies.
Carl Zimmer
Everyone would do well to overcome that urge to see agents where there are none.
Gregory Cochran
It occurs whenever someone adjusts the standards of evidence in order to favor a preferred outcome.
Joshua Greene
A TOE won’t tell you anything interesting about Macbeth or the Boxer Rebellion.
Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner
Just as there is no such thing as a culture without agents, there are no agents without culture.
Victoria Stodden
Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions
Our intuition regularly seems to break down with scale.
Xeni Jardin
Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation
Facts are more fluid than in the days of our grandfathers.
Diane F. Halpern
A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process
“Statistically significant difference” is a core concept in research and statistics, but . . . it is not an intuitive idea.
Beatrice Golomb
Key presumptions regarding placebos and placebo effects are more typically wrong than not.
Andrew Revkin
More fully considering our nature . . . could help identify certain kinds of challenges that we know we’ll tend to get wrong.
Mahzarin R. Banaji
A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory
Signal-detection theory . . . provides a mathematically rigorous framework for understanding the nature of decision processes.
David Pizarro
The pattern-detection responsible for so much of our species’ success can just as easily betray us.
Ernst Pöppel
A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage
Because we are a victim of our biological past, and as a consequence a victim of ourselves, we end up with shabby SHAs, having left behind reality.