This year, Edge asks the following question: "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolit?" 151 Elite thinkers answered the question. Here are 27 interesting quotes from that material. Which of these quotes seems most valuable to you and why?
- "We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves"~Rudy Rucker
- "Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable"~Rudy Rucker
- "Truth is a model"~Neil Gershenfeld
- "Making sense of anything means making models that can predict outcomes and accommodate observations"~Neil Gershenfeld
- "Uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful"~Lawrence Krauss
- "Human achievement is based on collective intelligence"~Matt Ridley
- "We can control the spotlight of attention, focusing on those ideas that will help us succeed"~Jonah Lehrer
- "Our own most cherished beliefs might appear patently false to posterity"~Kathryn Shulz
- "Knowledge collapses as often as it accretes"~Kathryn Shulz
- "The concept that people need to add to their toolkit isn't a scientific discovery; it's science itself"~Paul Bloom
- "Even the simplest activities of everyday life involve much more cooperation than you might think."~Roger Highfield
- "I think everyone would do well do overcome that urge to see agents where there are none."~Carl Zimmer
- "Intellectual life is very much about the ability to distinguish between shallow and deep abstractions."~Tor Nørretranders
- "The dichotomy-denying phrase "instinct to learn" deserves a place in the cognitive toolkit of everyone"~W. Tecumseh Fitch
- "Understanding behavior requires that we understand the interaction between inborn processes and individual experience"~W. Tecumseh Fitch
- "One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture"~W. Tecumseh Fitch
- "At every level in the vast and dynamic world of living things lies diversity." ~Joan Chiao
- "If everybody could learn to deal better with the unknown, it would improve the chances for humanity as a whole" ~Seth Lloyd
- "Saying "A causes B" sounds precise, but is actually very vague"~David Dalrymple
- "The power of language to direct thought should never be taken lightly."~Stuart Firestein
- "Too often in science we operate under the principle that "to name it is to tame it""~Stuart Firestein
- "Overcoming this mental weakness, known as confirmation bias, is a lifelong struggle"~Gary Marcus
- "Knowing the limits of our minds can help us to make better reasoners"~Gary Marcus
- "The universe is young; wherever we find microbial life thr will be intelligent life in the future."~J.Graig Venter
- "We live on a microbial planet. We have more than 100 trillion microbes on and in each of us"~J.Graig Venter
- "Humans are not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree, but a species that emerged early in history" ~Martin Rees
- "Far more time lies ahead than has elapsed" ~Martin Rees
Thanks for extracting this interesting collection of quotes from the articles.
ReplyDeleteThe one that has the deepest value from my perspective is the simple idea from Gary Marcus that knowing the limits of our mind helps us be better reasoners. So many of the most interesting of the other quotes are interesting largely because they reveal some of these limits. So for me that idea, while it seems obvious and even trite, is actually central and keeping it in mind is like a master heuristic for reasoning.
Agree! people find it easy to imagine that a dog (for instance) has clear limitations to understand. Yet we find it harder to think that of ourselves even when we are not too different from dogs (or pigs) :)
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