New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (Edge Question Series)

Mostly written by people who ignore science and math. Mostly written by people who can write for hours without citing one quantity or measurement. Social sciences gave us Karl Marx. All b.s.

But I did appreciate the articles having a non-social science basis using double blind studies and design experiments.

Interesting book, it contains many many ideas that can actually be helpful in our everyday life. Most of the essays are written in plain text, but some require a bit more specific knowledge so as to fully understand the subject.
Overall, you'll definitely be satisfied!

While the ideas of gathering lots of people (or experts, as they claimed) to contribute some good ideas to the mankind is good, the book is disorganized, hard to follow and difficult to read.

The same idea of SHA (Shorthand Abstraction) kept coming up again and again, there are more than 5 short articles discussing the same idea that how unique we are...

The thoughts inside this book may be great, but it's indeed a very boring book.

Just got this book today, so perhaps I'm breaking a rule by posting a review before finishing the book. However, I love this book's structure and breadth of topics. If you like TED, you'll love this book since both distill topics to their essence by leading experts and both leave the audience more informed but wanting more. That and the price is a bargain.

First off the structure of this book is great. 397 pages of short essays ranging from one to several pages. The table of contents (all 24 pages of it) at the beginning gives you the essay titles, authors, and a short phrase describing the essay. There's also an index in the back if you prefer more topical browsing. This structure makes this book very accessible since you can pick it up and read as much or as little as you have time for.

Each essay is self-contained and distills topics which are easy to get out into the weeds on. As the book's title suggests, rather than just factual essays, the authors try to show how elements from their field of study can be used to alter your thinking or better understand the world around you. Each essay presents its own kind of mini world view, a single data point describing not not what to think but how to think.

The range of topics is amazing as well. From the back cover, topics include:
* cognitive illusions/delusions
* experimentation
* fear of the unknown
* biases
* negotiation
* culture
* paradigm shifts
* the natural world
* technology
* biology
* uncertainty & randomness
* time
* science
* and lots more

I highly recommend this book.

This is good reading as long as you understand that much of the "science" is based in confirmation bias, especially around the becoming-outdated global warming crises, which the left now refuses to rationally discuss rather than accept criticism that the so-called warming crises is hard to prove. The real fact is that the earth is always warming or cooling and is never static. We have been in a warming trend since the "Little Ice Age."

The scientific concepts not based on this subject make the book work reading, although most of it is familiar territory.

Buzz words are useful because they let you express a complex idea briefly, but it is easy to use them without thinking about what they actually mean. Also, just having heard the name of a term doesn't mean that you understand it.

This would be a good book to keep in your bathroom. Most of the essays are two or three pages, and you would gain more from this book by reading one essay and chewing the cud for a while than you would from reading the book cover to cover in a short time. If a physician or dentist wanted to have something to read in their waiting room more elevating than old magazines, this is exactly the type of book that would work.

The purpose of the essays is described by Dawkins in his contribution: "Not all concepts wielded by professional scientists would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit. We are here not looking for tools with which research scientists might benefit their science. We are looking for tools to help nonscientists understand science better and equip them to make better judgments throughout their lives."

A representative example of the essays is Tooby's "Nexus causality, moral warfare, and misattribution arbitrage". Nexus causality means that events have a collection of causes and that it is usually silly to ask what "the" cause of something is, as much as asking what "the" ingredient of a cake is, but that we instinctively tend to assume that an event has one cause. Moral warfare means instinctively attributing an event to one or more people rather than admitting that something might be too complicated to trace its cause to anyone or anything. Misattribution arbitrage: pre-20th century physicians were paid and present day portfolio managers are paid money and prestige for results that are worse than no treatment or index investing respectively. "If the patient recovers, it was due to my heroic efforts; if not, the underlying disease was too severe."

"If the doors of perception were cleansed," William Blake said, "every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." Editor John Brockman asked 151 people the same question: what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Each replied with short, thoughtful advice ranging from less than a page to four pages. The authors are leading, accomplished or alternative thinkers from a wide range of disciplines, whether academics, business people or independents. Each reply offers a different angle and a different style, be it sincere, provocative, humorous, elegant, leading-edge, back-to-basics, artistic or formally scientific. Some authors are simple and up-beat. Some authors express frustration: "if only people would realize this" and "if only people would check the numbers".

Brockman thanks Steven Pinker for suggesting the question addressed in this book. The book is one of a series from the same editor following the same concept, where each book deals with a unique universal question. They are listed on the last page. Some of these look fascinating, such as "what have you changed your mind about".

So what advice do these great minds give us? The advice is too varied to give representative examples. A summary of the best pieces is appended to the end of this review. One can only strongly recommend a book with so much wisdom. As David Brooks points out in the foreword, the book is utilitarian but offers insights to the intimate world of emotions and spirit. What at times appears coldly scientific is often advice for transcendence, opening and self-actualization. An implicit result of the book, as Brooks writes, is that we observe a frequent desire of the authors to move beyond deductive reasoning and come up with more rigorous modes of holistic or emergent thinking. At the same time we see how subtle and yet uncomplicated things can be, how modest we should be about where we have brought ourselves and yet how daring for the future.

For me the book has no substantial drawbacks. One quibble is that the concept offers the authors a platform for self-display. This is unavoidable and is rarely distracting. In answering the cognitive tool-kit question, many authors go for a general, multipurpose meta-tool, some go for a more specific but useful tool, and fortunately only a few come up with something hopelessly specific to their own field and attitude. I liked the fact that several authors call for better statistical skills; I wished that one piece would have been devoted to the problem that most "clinical studies" cited in the media or elsewhere are based on an insufficient sample and are therefore meaningless. No piece mentions of the increasing resistance of microbes to antibiotics and why we should be aware of this.

I found more than half of the 151 contributions to be great ideas that I hope to remember and apply. I also enjoyed the one line summary about who the author is, often referring to a book from that author. Some are tantalizing. Brockman groups pieces as well as possible according to theme. A substantial number of the pieces, perhaps a quarter or a third, refer to or directly address the singular peril we face by causing the extinction of our own ecological niche, as D. Goleman put it, especially climate change but also other anthropocene problems. It is encouraging to see that intelligent people point this out when considering that which is essentially advisable for every human. Some or all of the contributions are on edge.org.

This concludes my review. The following are summaries of some authors' advice on what we should keep in mind when we cognize.
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Applied Science: R. Dawkins: we should confront superstition, subjectivity and untruths with double-blind, randomized, controlled experiments. This sorts things out quickly. T. Hannay: controlled experimentation would improve decision making in business and government policy. Governments spend fortunes but without systematic learning. M. Henderson: People often think of science as a body of knowledge and technologies that is to be confined to certain disciplines such as the study of nature, but we would benefit from applying scientific methods and the scientific way of thinking to much of life. We would govern ourselves better by applying randomized controlled trials to education, criminal justice and government projects. A. Gefter: In our extremely polarized cultural and political climate, we should use dualism in physics, such as light's wave-particle duality, as a brilliant example of pluralism and the subtlety of truth.

K. Kelley: We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that doesn't work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but to be cultivated in order to exploit negative results. We can all learn by deliberately pressing our investigations or accomplishments to the point that they fail. S. Fiske: A scientific assertion is often an empirical question settled by rigorously collected, peer-reviewed evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data and the plural of opinion is not fact. R. Sapolsky: We derive cognitive satisfaction from anecdotes (e.g., we like stories, we like to recognize individual cases) but we learn more from unappealing, unintuitive patterns of statistics and variations.

C. Rovelli: Lack of absolute certainty is precisely what makes scientific conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain, because the good scientist will be ready to adapt to new evidence or arguments. L. Krauss: Lack of understanding of quantitative certainty and reliability results in poor public policy. Einstein said, "If we knew what we are doing, it wouldn't be called research." N. Gershenfeld: The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek to find truth. They don't - they make and test models. Making sense of anything means making models that can predict outcomes and accommodate observations. [Carl Sagan: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.] A. Aguirre: Because of our flawed understanding, nature and life appear to have paradoxes. The discovery of a paradox is an opportunity to challenge our assumptions and refine our models. It shows that our models are insufficient. B. Knutson: When asked how one should deal with different teachings from different teachers, the Buddha said "When you know for yourselves ... these things, when performed and undertaken, are conducive to well-being and happiness, then live and act accordingly." Applied empiricism.

Change: K. Schulz: scientific theories have always been replaced by improved ones, so better scientific ideas will replace our current models. Believing in the stability of scientific "truths" is misplaced. J. O'Donnell: We tend to forget it, but Heraclitus is still right today: You can't step in the same river twice. Everything changes inevitably. Accept that and go with the flow.

Applied math: T. Sejnowski: get a feeling for thinking in orders of magnitude and logarithmic scales (such as decibels or the Richter scale) to understand everything more broadly and deeply. G. Boccaletti: Most of the Universe - be it physical systems, economics or business - is non-linear. To understand such systems, focus on what parameters matter most for a problem and how those parameters relate to each other in by magnitude or scale (i.e., their non-linearity). This "scale analysis" allows powerful induction, the reason why we apply non-linear math. This should be obvious but people don't do it, even when numerically literate. This was how a scientist G. I. Taylor inferred the power of the atom bomb based on few parameters such as radius and timing, even though it was a military secret. C. Shirky: We tend to expect Gaussian distribution (bell curves) too much, forgetting that Pareto distribution is often the better model to understand nature and especially human behaviour. S. Kosslyn: Applying a constraint-satisfaction model to problem solving improves reasoning and decision making. K. Devlin: People often misunderstand the relationship between the basic probability (base rate) and the failure rate of tests. This is the base rate fallacy.

Focus and problem solving: A. Anderson: We have evolved to focus on immediate threats, so we ignore or habituate to threats that come slowly and steadily, even if they threaten humanity with extinction. J. Rosen: Wicked problems - such as climate change and health care costs - are those that are hard to describe, where there is no consensus on how to describe them, whose description may change with time, or that are both a problem and the symptom of other problems. Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible and collaborative. Such people never invest too much in their ideas because they know they will have to alter them. J. Lehrer: Self-control, when we benefit from delayed gratification, is not about moral character but about strategic focusing of attention. Successful people put on mental blinkers and learn to focus when confronted with much information. J. Zweig: sudden bursts of insight come when the brain abruptly shifts its focus outside familiar environments. In order to pick up new ideas and combine old ones, he recommends reading a new scientific paper in a different field each week, one ostensibly unrelated to our day job, and each time read in a different place. E. Pöppel: Using Short-Hand Abstractions (SHAs) of concepts can limit our understanding and creativity. The meaning of an SHA can be vague because people misuse it.

Bias: G. Smallberg, who aptly provided the quote from Blake at the start of this book review, points out that bias is an intuitive skill for survival. Our brains evolved to work quickly with limited information. Bias can be countered by science but cannot be eliminated. We can use bias critically for deduction and induction. Darwin didn't collect his data randomly to formulate the theory of evolution. "Bias is the nose for the story." D. Myers, G. Marcus: we should be mindful of self-serving bias and confirmation bias. A. Clark: We imagine that we perceive by using sensory information to build a model of the world, but we really perceive by using experience to predict our sensory states and then adapt to mismatches. D. Rushkoff: technology bias makes us see the world through our tools, such as guns, cars, tablets, or social networks. C. Seife: we have evolved to be pattern-finders so our instincts are biased against perceiving randomness. J. Tooby: we prefer to assign causation to one factor when it should be assigned to an intersection of factors - and so we punish a single culprit unfairly.

Memory: N. Carr: working memory is the short-term store of information where we hold the contents of our consciousness at any given moment. We can hold about seven ideas simultaneously. Cognitive load is the amount of information entering our consciousness at any instant. When it is too high, we remember less and our ability to think critically and conceptually weakens. Information overload is not just a metaphor, it's a physical state. When you are engaged in an important or complex task, or when you want to savour an experience, it's best to turn the information faucet down to a trickle. D. Tapscott: The well-known study of London cab drivers shows that we can change the structure of our hippocampus. We truly use or lose our brains. We can design our brains to meet functional objectives by practicing earnestly, such as to improve our absorption of information (e.g., speed reading), concentration (e.g., daily reading), speed (e.g., rehearsing difficult music), creativity, communication or collaboration.

The Unconscious: T. Kenrick: We believe that there is a single "me" inside our heads, but research suggests this is an illusion. We may have several selves, as is indicated by selective attention, lateral inhibition, state-dependent memory and cognitive dissociation. Thinking of the mind as composed of several functionally independent adaptive selves helps us to understand apparent inconsistencies in human behaviour. S. Harris: Our thought flows are multiple and constant. We struggle to focus on what is real. Instead all we constantly speak to ourselves in hope and fear about what just happened, could have happened, and might happen. Multiple religions offer techniques to achieve temporary awareness, proving that the basis of these techniques is fundamentally psychological and that their sectarian claims have no basis. A. Gopnik: Freud's concept of the unconscious, made popular by themes of sex and violence in evolutionary psychology, is deeply established in people's imagination: an irrational unconscious barely held in check by our rational conscious. "Freud has been largely discredited scientifically" and we underestimate the rationality our unconscious. In some ways we can compare it to a Turing machine quietly processing for us. It enables vision. It is wired to deal with probabilities. It allows babies and young children to learn quickly before consciously understanding. We are smarter than only our conscious self. W. Tecumseh Fitch: Our capacity to learn sounds and languages is instinctive (an inborn cognitive process), but learning each word is not.

F. Cushman: We are shockingly unaware of the causes of our behaviour. We mostly combine deliberate thinking with automatic action. We confabulate: we guess at the plausible explanations of our behaviour and then regard the guesses as introspective certainties. People named Denise or Dennis are more likely to become dentists. People make harsher moral judgments in foul smelling rooms. People holding a warm coffee are more open to strangers. Judges are harsher before lunch. Women are less likely to call their fathers during the fertile phase of their cycle, reflecting a means of incest avoidance. People tend toward political conservatism during flu epidemics. People tend to cheat only as much as they can without realizing it. A. Alter: People tend to be more creative when exposed to the Apple logo. Self-identified Christians tend to be more honest when exposed to an image of the crucifix, even if they do not remember seeing it.

Learning: R. Nisbett: Even for concepts that are simple to understand, we have a strong tendency to be good at learning, adopting and applying some concepts but to forget or do not apply others. To improve student thinking, teachers should know which concepts are learned quickly and which tend to be forgotten. Simply explaining concepts without giving weight to learnability leads to poor results.

Personality: G. Miller: Personalities have dimensions of variability: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. The psychiatry industry draws an arbitrary line where there is in fact no clear line between normal and abnormal variation in human personality. By our own definition of insanity as deviation from the norm, we are all insane; some are simply more extreme than society accepts or feels comfortable with. We must recognize the substantial fallibility of our intuitions in psychiatry in order to identify real mental illnesses and to be more modest about our own mental health. H. Fisher: Personality is composed of temperament traits (biological) and character traits (learned). 40 to 60 percent of observed variance in personality is due to temperament traits. [This seems to contradict Existentialist beliefs about how free people really are.] They are heritable and linked to neurotransmitter systems associated with dopamine (e.g., enthusiasm), serotonin (e.g., sociability), testosterone (e.g., aggressiveness) and estrogen (e.g., empathy).

Perception: D. Eagleman: We see only ten trillionths of the electro-magnetic spectrum. We smell a tiny fraction of what other species smell. Our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of reality. Our knowledge of what goes unperceived should keep us humble. B. Smith: We have two senses of smell. Orthonasal olfaction is produced by inhaling and used to perceive the environment. Retronasal olfaction is produced by exhaling and used to detect the quality of what we just ate. It is the largest part of what we call taste. Thanks to its smell, vanilla makes us believe something is sweet, but pure vanilla is not sweet at all.

M. Shermer: Because individual agents (humans, organic molecules, prokaryotic cells) have freedom or some freedom, the systems that they are part of (cells, economies, democracies, societies) tend to evolve ("emerge") towards a "bottom-up" organization, i.e. they are self-organizing. Our brains instinctively look for "top-down" designs. Thinking bottom-up is counter-intuitive. That is why believe that life was designed top-town, that economies and governments are run top down, that all events have distinct individual causes. B. Eno: Traditionally we tend to seek hierarchical patters (pyramids). We thought the Earth was the centre of the universe. We perceived Great Men with Great Ideas. Today we think more ecologically, i.e., in terms of fertile circumstances wherein uncountable minds contribute to a river of innovation. We continue to admire the most conspicuous minds, but know that they are as much an effect as a cause.

Games of life: S. Pinker: Trading of surpluses is a positive-sum game making all parties richer. Competition for biological mates is a zero-sum game. Divorcing spouses can agree to split their wealth or go to lawyers and lose their wealth (negative-sum game). G. Origgi: we pretend to aim for high quality in our daily dealings but sometimes agree implicitly to reciprocal mediocrity. What we offer and demand (work/pay) is often both of lower quality than what we pretend. E. Weinstein: "Kayfabe" is the name given to the systematic deception followed by professional wrestlers, where individual matches are agreed and choreographed in advance. We should learn to recognize Kayfabe systems elsewhere, such as in secret price agreements among competitors, in the consensus of narratives and topics among news media and scientific peer-reviewing (you publish me and I'll publish you). Such systems typically involve (a) avoiding the risk of one player being excluded from the game and (b) seeking mutually beneficial stability. As in wrestling, the audience is sometimes aware of and accepts the deception.

Homo Sapiens: J. Enriquez: We are homo evolutis, a species that directly and deliberately designs and shapes its own evolution and that of others. Using the genetic code will allow some companies to become very successful. E. Salcedo-Albaran: We are homo sensus sapiens. Sensus because our innermost reptilian brain controls movement, reproduction and preservation of the species. We call these instinct or feelings. Sapien because the more evolved parts of the brain allow thinking and creativity.
Life on Earth: M. Gleiser: Although pre-Copernican religious sentiments of humanities centrality in the universe were misplaced, science shows how unique we and our planet are. Taken all together, the earth's atmosphere, axial tilt, ozone layer, magnetic field, plate tectonics, and orbital position provide a statistically rare environment. The genesis and evolution of life towards self-aware intelligence capable of advanced technologies is all the more statistically rare. "We matter because we are rare and we know it." Even if there were to be some intelligence somewhere, "it will be so remote that for all practical purposes we are alone." There can be no meaningful collaboration. (I would add that it is pointless to talk about travelling to another solar system when the closest star is four light years away. Even travelling to Mars would be fatally carcinogenic. And yet these ideas are rehashed yearly by all popular media reporting on science.) C. Zimmer: Evolution results from an unintended, failed replication of genes, which means that the evolution of wings did not start so that birds could fly but by chance. In the same way, humans did not evolve thanks to an agent but by chance. P.Z. Myers and Sean Carroll emphasize that we are not divinely special. In no way does being rare imply metaphysics - we exist as a consequence of universal laws of nature. Our existence is not the product of directed, intentional fate. The ultimate answer to the question "Why?" is because of the state of the universe and the laws of nature. In this sense, the universe is pointless. This does not mean that life is devoid of purpose and meaning, as Carroll writes. It only means that all purpose and meaning come from what we create and not from what we discover in cosmology. D. Dennett: to understand life on earth, look for the cycles: seasonal, hydraulic, chemical, geological, evolutionary. S. Brand: life on earth is profoundly determined by microbes.

Incompetence: R. Anderson: When forced to act on problems, governments or companies prefer dramatic ineffective gestures to expensive or risky solutions. This behaviour depends on voters being scientifically illiterate or uncritical. G. Paul: The experts for evaluating social problems are sociologists, not scientists. Unfortunately, the pet theories of sociologically clueless scientists often distort or dominate "national conversations", such as why creationism is so popular in America.

Cultural continuity: D. Sperber: Our toolkit should include Richard Dawkin's idea of a meme, a unit of cultural transmission capable of replicating itself and undergoing Darwinian selection. Cultures have "items"--like ideas, norms, tales, recipes, dances, rituals, tools, and practices--that are produced again and again. Each retransmission of a cultural item is influenced by the bias of the individuals sending and receiving. Sperber suggests that cultural items that stay stable over time do so not because of exact replication that avoids cumulative change, but because variants tend to cancel each other out.

We can't change some old luggage: J. McWhorter: We try to explain phenomena rationally with contemporary reasons but many phenomena, such as the qwerty keyboard layout, can only be explained for reasons that no longer apply. Once a path has been taken (e.g., qwerty), it is often impossible to change. Many ascribe the simplicity of English compared to other languages to the "Anglo-Saxon spirit of efficiency", but old English lost its complexity because Vikings could not master it. People believe cats cover their faeces out of fastidiousness but this is an instinct to avoid predators. People ascribe the simplification of modern written English to television, email and texting, but we moved from pompous phraseology to terse, spontaneous, spoken-style of writing in the sixties as part of counter-culture. It's too late to change. Anyone attempting to write grandiloquently today is perceived as absurd and denied exposure or influence. Religious traditionalists despise the vulgarity of demotic writing but exclusive, hieratic communication will never come back.

This book belongs firmly in the surrounding knowledge category, which I suspect to most readers of investingbythebooks is a category we turn to after all of the "real" book titles have been exhausted. Expanding one's horizons is important I believe. In the words of Charlie Munger "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - at how much I read..."

This Will Make You Smarter with its catchy title, is a pantheon of interesting insights and ideas that will satisfy even the most intellectually curious amongst us. The book does what it says on the tin. It is both a formidable compilation to have on the shelf and a good read. I like to pick it up from time to time to absorb some random insight from the world of biology, physics or neuroscience.

The editor (there are 151 authors) is John Brockman. Brockman is a literary agent and an impresario and he created the website called Edge.org. If you take away just one thing from this review, let it be a visit to this website. Edge.org was launched in 1996 as a modern day version of the Bloomsbury Group, or "The Reality Club," an informal gathering of intellectuals to share ideas and theories. In the words of the novelist Ian McEwan, Edge.org is "open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful ... an unadorned pleasure in curiosity..." Each year Edge publishes a book by posing a thought provoking question. The contents of these books contain the answers to the question from its erudite members. Through the years I have purchased and read most of these books. My favorite is the 2012 edition of the Edge question.

In 2012 the question was "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" or to paraphrase: if you, Mr(s) prominent scientist can offer your average person with one insight, one rule of thumb from the world of theoretical science that you think they ought to know, what would it be? The answers are far and varied but most are rooted in a branch of science. The essays range from a single paragraph in length to 4 pages and cover a total of 151 topics by as many authors. The members of Edge that have written for the book read as a who's who in science across multiple disciplines. They include Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Daniel Dennett as well as practitioners such as Paul Kedrosky and Vinod Khosla. There are too many entries to list, but I have some favorites. Kahneman writes about the Focusing Illusion i.e. "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it". Ridley, the author of the Rational Optimist writes about Collective Intelligence highlighting the fact that human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon driven by the forces of specialization and trade. James O'Donnek's essay is entitled "Everything is in Motion" and quotes Heraclitus "You can't step in the same river twice".

As a collection of essays the book lacks some structure. The entries appear in no particular order. There's no ranking by status of the author for instance nor are there specific sections or chapters. Having read it a few times now, I noticed there is a grouping in that entries that cover a specific topic or theme such as randomness, "emergence" or the limits of human cognition, tend to go together. The lack of structure is also appealing; you can randomly flick through it and read an entry without having to read what came before to understand it.

To the investor, intellectual curiosity and knowledge building are a necessity. This book if anything, highlights how little we know, and that the smartest people tend to be the ones often least convinced of their knowledge.

This is a review by investingbythebooks.com

I chose to read this book attracted by the proposed methodology. The editor poses a question: "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" And then all kind of scholars offer a response in the form of short articles. I was very enthusiastic when I began reading but then I realized the book was much longer than I thought (over 400 pages including notes and an index -useless in electronic edition by the way). Nevertheless I continued reading looking forward to seeing the answers that would be given to such an interesting question.

The book has at least two essential characteristics.
(1) It is an interdisciplinary book: This is reflected in the different essays of the book. Some are structurally complex whereas others are so short and spontaneous that they touch the border of poetry. This is good for the reader can always be expectant of what will come next. Yet it may also seem frustrating at times since it may disrupt the flow of the book and some articles are really low quality in comparison to others.
(2) This is a scientific book: writers made their essays from the perspective of a scientist and even those short reflexive articles affirm so. This obviously mean that there is a plethora of new words to learn and it is advisable for the reader to have a dictionary at hand. Moreover, it is not seldom that authors make up their own words and turn the terms into the center of their reflection. As a studious person with a scientific inclination this characteristic compelled to me and I found most of the essays amusing.

Nevertheless, my great objection to the book is the attitude of the writers. All throughout the book there is this feeling of using science as something to boast about. As a matter of fact many of the articles get annoying when some of the writers refer to anything out of their scientific world as less important and even something they can make fun of. Sarcasm is abundant and direct or indirect attacks to religious beliefs are found all throughout the book, with just a few exceptions. Though this proud attitude speaks more of the contributors as persons than of their disciplines, it made me consider to drop the book several times. It is paradoxical how people as smart as the writers in this book can fall victim of simplistic stereotypes labeling everyone outside of their intellectual sphere as less than them. This disdain is not only for religious people but also for people in the humanities and occasionally for those who belong to a different branch of science.

Lastly, I feel that it would be more productive to read this book along one whole year (maybe a couple essays per day) rather than as your main reading. That would offer more time for reflection and process of the ideas presented and minimize the reader's ability to perceive the negative things I perceived by reading it at once.

In conclusion, the title of the book makes an offer that should warn the reader of the embedded presupposition. The book offers to make you smarter because most of the writers consider that they are smarter than you and they are not slow to brag about it. In spite of this, many of the ideas are really thought-provoking and for a reader who is able to take what is good and ignore the rest this may be an enriching reading.

Bought & read this, and the more recent, "This Explains Everything", each for about 10 bucks. Both were interesting, and well worth the price although, in my view, each could have used editing that "axed" about half of the entries, leaving what was left no doubt 5 star. I even bought em after reading them on loan from the library, to let my family and friends read them....

I take it from their reviews that some of the whiners who rated 1 or 2 stars expect quite a lot, for next to nothing( 10 bucks to read and think about what you've read for hours is too much??), or really just aren't bright enough to "get" what contributors are offering.....

For everybody else, go splurge! Both were well worth the price; less than you'd pay to see a crappy movie. Didn't make me that much smarter, and for sure didn't explain everything; but then again didn't really think a ten buck paperback could.....a good read was enough.

As other reviewers have noted, this book contains about 150 essays written by thinkers from various academic specializations, as well some outside of academia. Each thinker is asked to write a bite-size essay which describes one idea which is presumably profound enough to provide some real insight into how the world works. Some of the ideas are old, some are arguably new, and many are echoes of old ideas clothed in modern garb.

The overall result is, in my opinion, beyond satisfying. The quality of the essays is typically quite high, the book is thoroughly intellectually stimulating, and, as promised, the book delivers plenty of useful insights (whether they'll make you 'smarter' can be debated, since many of our flaws are shown to be deeply hardwired). I will likely be reading this book again, maybe even trying to prepare a summary of the best insights.

The one shortcoming of the book, as noted by another reviewer, is that suggestions for further reading would have been very helpful, but are missing. Nevertheless, this is a great book!

Interesting overall. Some excellent dissertations with a variety of viewpoints. It is not an easy read, however. Some esoteric to the point of exasperation in understanding. Others, straightforward and comprehensible. Perhaps I needed a book, "This Will Make You Smart" before "This Will Make You SmartER". John Brockman's "Edge Questions" (the basis of the book is the question, "What can everyone put in their cognitive toolbox") does cause one to reflect. Worth a look. With 150 contributions, one could always take what they like from it and leave the rest.

The title of this book caught my attention, and after leafing through a few pages I decided to take it home. Well. I AM smarter than when I first laid hands on this book's covers, but the book doesn't score a perfect rating for me.

The book's strengths are its scope and quality of thought. The literature discusses a multitude of subjects, ranging from the concepts of self-serving bias, to the uselessness of certainty, to the rational unconscious, to a multitude of other ideas. A compilation of thoughts ranging from psychology and neuroscience to biology and physics, the contributors enlighten the mind with ideas that are curious and thought provoking. Most of these ideas to me are new.

The book is also not a random, jumbled jungle of article contributions, but rather is well-organized with similar concepts sliding together smoothly. I also appreciate the range of vocabulary and numerous writing styles I encountered from the dozens of authors.

The weakness of the book is it left me frustrated when I wanted to know more about a particular topic. The book contains few references or suggestions for further reading, and each article feels painfully short and not very developed. It is as if my appetite has been whetted but now I am denied the main course. Yes, it is a simple task to find out more on the internet, but at least some guidance would have been nice.

Overall, I don't regret getting this book, and I have enjoyed letting my mind think freely on its own at the conclusion of each article - some ideas I did find to be quite ingenious and exciting. I strongly recommend this book if you are one who enjoys thinking and/or seeking, and I don't recommend it if you are looking for something that offers in-depth analysis on current scientific speculations.

This book presents many interesting points of view about science and how certain ideas from science can be helpful and useful. That having been indicated, and the fact that the book was, on the whole enjoyable to read, even if I was familiar with many of the ideas presented (since it was also the authors' viewpoints that were appealing), the book is less well-organized than I, personally, would have liked. Although each short contribution was obviously arranged in some order, some further editorial grouping would have been appreciated, since there are very many short essays that constitute this book.

Will this book make you smarter ? That is a function of how you define the term. Smart for me is someone who not only talks the talk but also is able to use his knowledge to perform tasks that are challenging for the average person. From that point of view, this book made me more aware of the way our neurology is set up and how it causes us to do x or y. However I am certain that myself along with a lot of other people will most certainly not use the concepts presented in the book to suddenly change our approach to the way we live our lifes.

That being said, the collection of essays and the ideas they cover are very interesting. Since each essay is maximum of 3-4 pages, you are getting inundated with different concepts in record time. The contributors are top notch academics and/ or high achievers who are on the cutting edge of what they do. A book like this should be read by everyone who wants to get a sense of what academia is saying about the power or weakness in our toolkit.

An encyclopedia of great ides by a conglomerate of great minds.
Literally a universal, cosmological, and grand concept of the Apex of human erudition thus far.
The "Edge" represents a canvas where novel and avant-gardiste ideas are painted with lovely brush strokes, colours and minds.
This book is a READER written by over 150 great minds about great issues for a HANDFUL of $.
Where in the world can you get that kind of a deal.... Lest we forget it IS edited, therefore excluding the internet.
Do yourself a favour... Just OWN it, as well as most collections by J. Brockman.

I rarely write book reviews, but this book deserves it. Just great ideas, in short pithy chunks, that help refine your concept toolkit. Leave this book wherever you have small snippets of time to ingest one or two concepts by flipping through the pages at random: your breakfast table, the bathroom, kindle while you wait for an elevator . . . it's the perfect antidote to cluttering your brain with newspaper trivia or flipping through emails. Science!

Abhor the title, but adore the book. Scientific methods of thought that we can apply to our daily lives.
It won't make you happier, and I won't even go so far as to say it will change the way you think. I don't think it's supposed to.

BUT, the collection of leading intellects of today waxing poetic about a wide range of cognitive subjects was what drew me, and it doesn't disappoint. I would have liked the chapters to have been a little longer - and thus, a little more detailed - but the variety and mix is what makes this book worthwhile. From philosophy and psychology, and even physics and biology, the text reads like a self help book for your thought processes.

Chicken Noodle Soup for the...noodle? Art of War...for the mind? Considerably less saccharine than the former, but enjoyable and easy to read, and not as grand or poetic as the latter, but more conclusive and focused. A good balance of both evident by the chosen authors in their respective fields.

Great read; fascinating and thoughtful. Recommended.

GREAT gift idea. Short, insightful chapters by a wide variety of brilliant and articulate thinkers from a wide variety of backgrounds. Want some help discovering ways to illuminate some of your own blindspots (or others')? This book is a fun and fascinating read.

Dishonest title and dishonest marketing. It's a hodgepodge, of some articles about scientific concepts and quite a few pushing leftist or liberal ideas. The author simply invited his buddies to contribute articles without editing or logical selection. Plenty of factual errors and general idiocy, too; many of the articles are unscientific, merely bashing those who hold differing opinions. One of the most startling articles suggests that GMO foods are safe. The only "evidence" presented is the mud-slinging at scientists and others who question GMO safety. The writer also lies outright in claiming that GMO modifications are equivalent to the grafting and other plant-breeding methods traditionally employed.

Could have been a great book if the concept was lived up to. But as it is, a waste of money.

*****
"This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky..., Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere." --David Brooks: Book Foreword
*

John Brockman, literary agent, author, and host of 'The Edge of human knowledge website', keeps inviting scholars outside their intellectual disciplines, arranges symposiums and debates, encouraging online conversations, in order to bring a think tank together with popular intellect in a 'third culture' network, enhancing their talent and involvement. Many would agree that at least half his clients are truly remarkable thinkers, reports the Guardian, but there is room for disagreement about which half. Brockman, better named by a friend as a 'cultural impresario', presents 150 plus short essays, driving us onto the Cutting Edge, after 'Future Science', his last essays on intellectual research that aroused great interest in his readers.

Brockman proves that you need not be an inspired writer to inspire other thinkers into reforming our outdated concepts and crippled speculation. Featured in his new collection, a marathon of 151 thinkers, allowed to express their human, social, or scientific experiences in a precis essay in a tight space within 397 pages, that average 2.6 pages per thinker! The writers in this book lead some of the forefront fields; in these pages they are just inviting you to an appetizer of what they are thinking, working on, or dreaming to accomplish. Several of these very short essays just highlight how we see the world in an imperfect surroundings, rendering our knowledge is incomplete, because the stock of our own individual reason is small.

Futurist Kevin Kelly admonishing against the fear of failure states, "The chief innovation that science brought to the state of defeat is a way to manage mishaps. Blunders are kept small, manageable, constant, and trackable." Martin Seligman, patron of positive psychology, writes about the five pillars of well-being; Positive Emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships,..., Meaning and Purpose, while Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, meditates on our tendency to miscalculate the magnitude of impact in some circumstances, which he calls 'focusing illusion'. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli reminds us uncertainty and meekness are a vital for personal and intellectual growth, "The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt." Just a small sampler!

This fascinating and stimulating collection, by no means makes you smarter, although it increases your analog cognitive power, stretches your imagination and keeps you in the company of the intellectual, humble elites. Maria Popova in her beautiful review of the book says, "my favorite, for obvious reasons, comes from curator extraordinaire Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "To curate, in this sense, is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations."

Cutting Edge, targets the same celestial goal led by unconfined craving; an avid adventure into knowledge, marked by keen interest and enthusiasm. His new anthology, 'New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking', is such a provocative survey of the ever expanding frontier of knowledge, in a charged capsule format. Brockman's resilient 'catenaccio myth' of Fabian maneuvers, to dismantle the ancient taboo, dissolving classic boundaries of study domains, across great frontiers of knowledge, while avoiding front assaults in favor of wearing down the outmoded classical flanks of Academia. His ascent regain the composure of Dean Summers recent attempt to champion the means of acquiring knowledge, initiated by him in advancing Harvard's Cutting Edge interdisciplinary education mission.

All of the Annual Questions of 'Edge' have produced volumes rich in ideas and insights. Bringing together many of the most innovative thinkers in a wide variety of largely scientific fields the symposia have proven first- rate sources of knowledge and creative thinking. This one is no exception. Perhaps the unifying idea of this particular collection is the idea of scientific investigation and research as central means of knowing and understanding the world. Howard Gardner in his contribution in a way suggests this when he cites the idea of Karl Popper on the importance of a hypothesis' being refutable if it is to import true scientific knowledge. The toolkit of examples provided in this work is a truly a rich one, with there being a large focus on ideas from Information Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Cognitive Brain Studies.As with the other Annual Questions reading through this work provides a good picture of the kind of thinking and research being done today in a wide variety of scientific areas.

Everything about this book worked for me. The concept of having the world's greatest thinkers share their thoughts on what to add to the cognitive toolkit. The more-or-less two pages allocated to each. The varied insights. The depth of the thinking. The quality of the writing.

I read this pen in hand and it has so many underlinings, notations, questions and dog ears from the re-readings that it's in tatters. I return to it often if I am stuck or need to add to the creative or cognitive pot, it just gets me thinking and rethinking, including myself.

I have just ordered his latest Thinking and copies of the earlier books in this series. I can't wait for them to arrive.

I've now read several of Brockman's anthologies and I seem to be detecting a downward slope of quality or inspiration, or maybe it's just that I'm tiring of this genre of 'Smart Thinker's' half baked ideas as a panacea for all the world woes inflicted upon the damp masses by 'Normalcy'.
( ? )

Amazing. Good to find so much under the cover of a singe book.
Definitely worth spending your time.
I'm astonished by the (thankfully) few negative reviews on the book. I think they were expecting a miracle perhaps ?
Follows the Pareto principle - page 198 - albeit for for negative reviews

There is NOTHING more boring than listening to professors tell you how dumb you are and how smart they are. I hope we can keep these radicals confined in cages somewhere. They have no real-world experience and thus provide no real-world solutions. They think they are better than the average person and they sit around writing stupid stuff like this and then bow and pat each other on the backs... we all know supposedly "real smart people" who don't know how to change a tire. This book is loaded with them.

I really struggled reading it and finally gave up because they kept repeating ground already covered. (I'm smart, you're dumb) Good luck with that.

My mind was blown essay after essay. It's incredible, the genius of the writers that contributed to this amazing book.
Now I sleep with the book in my arms and wake up at random times, and read a random essay just to provide jet fuel for my dreams.
A must read for knowledge junkies!