This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
- 12h 8m 3s
- John Brockman
- Recorded Books, Inc.
- 2013
What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.
This Will Make You Smarter features Daniel Kahneman on the “focusing illusion”; Jonah Lehrer on controlling attention; Richard Dawkins on experimentation; Aubrey De Grey on conquering our fear of the unknown; Martin Seligman on the ingredients of well-being; Nicholas Carr on managing “cognitive load”; Steven Pinker on win-win negotiating; Daniel C. Dennett on benefiting from cycles; Jaron Lanier on resisting delusion; Frank Wilczek on the brain's hidden layers; Clay Shirky on the “80/20 rule”; Daniel Goleman on understanding our connection to the natural world; V. S. Ramachandran on paradigm shifts; Matt Ridley on tapping collective intelligence; John McWhorter on path dependence; Lisa Randall on effective theorizing; Brian Eno on “ecological vision”; Richard Thaler on rooting out false concepts; J. Craig Venter on the multiple possible origins of life; Helen Fisher on temperament; Sam Harris on the flow of thought; and Lawrence Krauss on living with uncertainty.
In this Audiobook
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“Deep Time” and the Far Future
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We are Unique
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The Mediocrity Principle
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The Pointless Universe
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The Copernican Principle
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We are Not Alone in the Universe
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Microbes Run the World
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The Double-Blind Control Experiment
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Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle
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Experimentation
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The Controlled Experiment
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Gedankenexperiment
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The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science
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Each of Us is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind
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Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage
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Self-Serving Bias
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Cognitive Humility
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Technologies Have Biases
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Bias is the Nose for the Story
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Control Your Spotlight
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The Focusing Illusion
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The Uselessness of Certainty
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Uncertainty
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A Sense of Proportion about Fear of the Unknown
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Because
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The Name Game
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Living is Fatal
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Uncalculated Risk
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Truth is a Model
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E Pluribus Unum
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A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality
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Failure Liberates Success
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Holism
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TANSTAAFL
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Skeptical Empiricism
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Open Systems
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Non-Inherent Inheritance
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Shifting Baseline Syndrome
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PERMA
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Positive-Sum Games
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The Snuggle for Existence
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The Law of Comparative Advantage
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Structured Serendipity
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The World is Unpredictable
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Randomness
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The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine
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Inference to the Best Explanation
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Pragmamorphism
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Cognitive Load
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To Curate
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“Graceful” SHAs
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Externalities
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Everything is in Motion
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Subselves and the Modular Mind
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Predictive Coding
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Our Sensory Desktop
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The Senses and the Multisensory
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The Umwelt
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The Rational Unconscious
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We are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life
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An Instinct to Learn
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Think Bottom up, Not Top down
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Fixed-Action Patterns
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Powers of 10
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Life Code
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Constraint Satisfaction
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Cycles
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Keystone Consumers
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Cumulative Error
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Cultural Attractors
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Scale Analysis
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Hidden Layers
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“Science”
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The Expanding In-Group
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Contingent Superorganisms
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The Pareto Principle
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Find That Frame
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Wicked Problems
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Anthropocene Thinking
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Homo Dilatus
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We are Lost in Thought
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The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model
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Correlation is Not a Cause
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Information Flow
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Thinking in Time versus Thinking outside of Time
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Negative Capability is a Profound Therapy
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Depth
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Temperament Dimensions
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The Personality/Insanity Continuum
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ARISE
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Sysstemic Equilibrium
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Projective Thinking
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Anomalies and Paradigms
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Recursive Structure
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Designing Your Mind
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Free Jazz
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Collective Intelligence
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Risk Literacy
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Science versus Theater
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The Base Rate
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Findex
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An Assertion is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence
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Scientists Should Be Scientists
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Bricoleur
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Science's Methods aren't Just for Science
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The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators
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Anecdotalism
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You Can Show That Something is Definitely Dangerous but Not That it's Definitely Safe
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Absence and Evidence
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Path Dependence
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Interbeing
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The Other
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Ecology
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Dualites
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Dualities
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The Paradox
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Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”
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Personal Data Mining
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Parallelism in Art and Commerce
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Innovation
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The Gibbs Landscape
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Black Swan Technologies
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Kakonomics
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Kayfabe
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Einstein's Blade in Ockham's Razor
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Heat-Seeking Missiles
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Entanglement
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Technology Paved the Way for Humanity
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Time Span of Discretion
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Defeasibility
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Aether
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Knowledge as a Hypothesis
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The Einstellung Effect
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Homo Sensus Spiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons
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Understanding Confabulation
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Sexual Selection
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QED Moments
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Objects of Understanding and Communication
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Life as a Side Effect
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The Veeck Effect
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Supervenience!
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The Culture Cycle
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Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions
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Replicability
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Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation
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A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process
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The Dece(i)bo Effect
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Anthropophilia
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A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory
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Everyday Apophenia
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A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage