This Will Make You Smarter

by John Brockman

  A few years back, an anticreationist documentary came out titled A Flock of Dodos. Nicely done in many regards, the documentary scored some points against the antievolution crowd, but when it came to trying to explain why many Americans are repelled by evolution, it was way off base. The reason it was so wrong is that the creator of the film, Randy Olson, went to the wrong people to find out where the problem lies. A highlight of the picture featured a bunch of poker-playing Harvard evolutionary scientists gathered around a table to converse and opine on why the yahoos don’t like the results of their research. This was a very bad mistake, for the simple reason that evolutionary scientists are truly knowledgeable only about their area of expertise, evolutionary science.

  If you really want to know why regular folks think the way they do, then you go to the experts on that subject, sociologists. Because A Flock of Dodos never does that, its viewers never find out why creationism thrives in the age of science and what needs to be done to tame the pseudoscientific beast.

  This is not an inconsequential problem. In the last decade, big strides have been made in understanding the psychosociology of popular creationism. Basically, it flourishes only in seriously dysfunctional societies, and the one sure way to suppress the errant belief is to run countries well enough so that the religion that creationism depends upon withers to minority status, dragging creationism down with it.

  In other words, better societies result in mass acceptance of evolution. Yet getting the word out is proving disturbingly difficult. So the chatty pet theories about why creationism is a problem and what to do about it continue to dominate the national conversation and pro-creationist opinion remains rock steady (although the numbers of those who favor evolution without a god is rising along with the general increase of nonbelievers).

  It’s not just evolution. A classic example of conversational thinking by a scientist causing trouble was Linus Pauling’s obsession with vitamin C. Many ordinary citizens are skeptical of scientists in general. When researchers offer up poorly sustained opinions on matters outside their firm knowledge base, it does not help the general situation.

  So what can be done? In principle, the solution is simple enough. Scientists should be scientists. We should know better than to cough up committed but dubious opinion on subjects outside our expertise. This does not mean that scientists must limit their observations solely to their official field of research. Say a scientist is also a self-taught authority on baseball. By all means, ardently discuss that subject, the way Stephen Jay Gould used to.

  I have long had an intense interest in the myths of World War II and can offer an excellent discourse on why the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had pretty much nothing to do with ending the war, in case you’re interested. (It was the Soviet attack on Japan that forced Hirohito to surrender to save his war-criminal’s neck and keep Japan from being split into occupation zones.) But if they’re asked about something they don’t know a lot about, they should either decline to opine or qualify their observations by stating that the opinion is tentative and nonexpert.

  In practical terms, the problem is, of course, that scientists are human beings like everyone else. So I’m not holding my breath waiting for us to achieve a level of factual discourse that will spread enlightenment to the masses. It’s too bad, but very human. I have tried to cut down on throwing out idle commentary without qualifying its questionable reality, while being ardent about my statements only when I know I can back them up. Methinks I am fairly successful in this endeavor, and it does seem to keep me out of trouble.

  Bricoleur

  James Croak

  Artist

  French for “handyman” or “do-it-yourselfer,” this word has migrated into art and philosophy recently, and savants would do well tossing it into their cognitive toolbox. A bricoleur is a talented tinkerer, the sort who can build anything out of anything: whack off a left-over drain pipe, fasten a loop of tin roofing, dab on some paint, and presto, a mailbox. If one peers closely, all the parts are still there—still a piece of roofing, a piece of pipe—but now the assembly exceeds the sum of the parts and is useful in a different way. In letters, a bricoleur is viewed as an intellectual MacGyver, tacking bits of his heritage to subcultures about him for a new meaning-producing pastiche.

  Bricolage is not a new thing, but it has become a new way of understanding old things: epistemology, the Counter-Enlightenment, the endless parade of “isms” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marxism, Modernism, Socialism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism—the list is endless and often exclusive, each insisting that the other cannot be. The exegesis of these grand theories by deconstruction—substituting trace for presence—and similar activities during the past century shows these worldviews not as discoveries but as assemblies by creative bricoleurs working in the background, stapling together meaning-producing scenarios from textual bric-a-brac lying about.

  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. Pluralism and modest descriptions of the world have become the activity of fine arts and letters, personalization and private worlds the Zeitgeist. The common prediction was that the loss of grand narrative would result in a descent into end-of-history purposelessness; instead, everywhere, the bricoleurs are busy manufacturing meaning-eliciting metaphor.

  Motion Graphics, Bio-Art, Information Art, Net Art, Systems Art, Glitch Art, Hacktivism, Robotic Art, Relational Esthetics, and others—all current art movements tossed up by contemporary bricoleurs in an endless salad. Revisit nineteenth-century Hudson River landscape painting? Why not. Neo-Rodin, Post–New Media? A Mormon dabbling with the Frankfurt School? Next month. With the quest for universal validity suspended, there is a pronounced freedom to assemble lives filled with meaning from the nearby and at-hand. One just needs a bricoleur.

  Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science

  Mark Henderson

  Science editor, The Times; author, 50 Genetics Ideas You Really Need to Know

  Most people tend to think of science in one of two ways. It is a body of knowledge and understanding about the world: gravity, photosynthesis, evolution. Or it is the technology that has emerged from the fruits of that knowledge: vaccines, computers, cars. Science is both of these things, yet as Carl Sagan so memorably explained in The Demon-Haunted World, it is something else besides. It is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an imperfect one) for discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are.

  Science is provisional, always open to revision in light of new evidence. It is antiauthoritarian: Anybody can contribute, and anybody can be wrong. It seeks actively to test its propositions. And it is comfortable with uncertainty. These qualities give the scientific method unparalleled strength as a way of finding things out. Its power, however, is too often confined to an intellectual ghetto—those disciplines that have historically been considered “scientific.”

  Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of pursuits beyond the laboratory. Yet it remains missing in action from far too much of public life. Politicians and civil servants too seldom appreciate how tools drawn from both the natural and social sciences can be used to design more effective policies, and even to win votes.

  In education and criminal justice, for example, interventions are regularly undertaken without being subjected to proper evaluation. Both fields can be perfectly amenable to one of science’s most potent techniques—the randomized controlled trial—yet these are seldom required before new initiatives are put into place. Pilots are often derisory in nature, failing even to collect useful evidence that could be used to evaluate a policy’s success.

  Sheila Bird, of the Medical Research Council, for instance, has criticized the UK’s introduction of a new community sentence c
alled the Drug Treatment and Testing Order, following pilots designed so poorly as to be worthless. They included too few subjects, they were not randomized, they did not properly compare the orders with alternatives, and judges were not even asked to record how they would otherwise have sentenced offenders.

  The culture of public service could also learn from the self-critical culture of science. As Jonathan Shepherd, of the University of Cardiff, has pointed out, policing, social care, and education lack the cadre of practitioner-academics that has served medicine so well. There are those who do, and there are those who research; too rarely are they the same people. Police officers, teachers, and social workers are simply not encouraged to examine their own methods in the same way as doctors, engineers, and bench scientists. How many police stations run the equivalent of a journal club?

  The scientific method and the approach to critical thinking it promotes are too useful to be kept back for “science” alone. If science can help us to understand the first microseconds of creation and the structure of the ribosome, it can surely improve understanding of how best to tackle the pressing social questions of our time.

  The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators

  Nick Bostrom

  Director of the Future of Humanity Institute; professor, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

  The Game of Life is a cellular automaton invented by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. Many will already be acquainted with Conway’s invention. For those who aren’t, the best way to familiarize yourself with it is to experiment with one of the many free implementations found on the Internet (or better yet, if you have at least rudimentary programming skills, make one yourself).

  Basically, there is a grid, and each cell of the grid can be in either of two states: dead or alive. You start by seeding the grid with some initial distribution of live cells. Then you let the system evolve according to three simple rules.

  Why is this interesting? Certainly, the Game of Life is not biologically realistic. It doesn’t do anything useful. It isn’t even really a game, in the ordinary sense of the word. But it’s a brilliant demonstration platform for several important concepts—a virtual “philosophy of science laboratory.” (The philosopher Daniel Dennett has expressed the view that it should be incumbent on every philosophy student to be acquainted with it.) It gives us a microcosm simple enough that we can easily understand how things are happening, yet with sufficient generative power to produce interesting phenomena.

  By playing with the Game of Life for an hour, you can develop an intuitive understanding of the following concepts and ideas:

  • Emergent complexity—How complex patterns can arise from very simple rules.

  • Basic dynamics concepts—Such as the distinction between laws of nature and initial conditions.

  • Levels of explanation—You quickly notice patterns (such as “gliders,” which are a specific kind of pattern that crawls across the screen) arising that can be efficiently described in higher-level terms but are cumbersome to describe in the language of the basic physics (i.e., in terms of individual pixels being alive or dead) upon which the patterns supervene.

  • Supervenience—This leads one to think about the relation between different sciences in the real world. Does chemistry, likewise, supervene on physics? Biology on chemistry? The mind on the brain?

  • Concept formation, and carving nature at its joints—How and why we recognize certain types of patterns and give them names. For instance, in the Game of Life, you can distinguish “still lives,” small patterns that are stable and unchanging; “oscillators,” patterns that perpetually cycle through a fixed sequence of states; “spaceships,” patterns that move across the grid (such as gliders); “guns,” stationary patterns that send out an incessant stream of spaceships; and “puffer trains,” patterns that move across the grid leaving debris behind. As you begin to form these and other concepts, the chaos on the screen gradually becomes more comprehensible. Developing concepts that carve nature at its joints is the first crucial step toward understanding, not only in the Game of Life but in science and in ordinary life as well.

  At a more advanced level, we discover that the Game of Life is Turing complete. That is, it’s possible to build a pattern that acts like a Universal Turing Machine (a computer that can simulate any other computer). Thus, any computable function could be implemented in the Game of Life—including perhaps a function that describes a universe like the one we inhabit. It’s also possible to build a universal constructor in the Game of Life, a pattern that can build many types of complex objects, including copies of itself. Nonetheless, the structures that evolve into a Game of Life are different from those we find in the real world: Game of Life structures tend to be fragile, in the sense that changing a single cell will often cause them to dissolve. It is interesting to try to figure out exactly what it is about the rules of the Game of Life and the laws of physics that govern our own universe that accounts for these differences.

  Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the strategy of Looking for Generators. We confront many problems. We can try to solve them one by one. But alternatively, we can try to create a generator that produces solutions to multiple problems.

  Consider, for example, the challenge of advancing scientific understanding. We might make progress by directly tackling some random scientific problem. But perhaps we can make more progress by Looking for Generators and focusing our efforts on certain subsets of scientific problems—namely, those whose solutions would do most to facilitate the discovery of many other solutions. In this approach, we would pay most attention to innovations in methodology that can be widely applied; and to the development of scientific instruments that can enable many new experiments; and to improvements in institutional processes, such as peer review, that can help us make decisions about whom to hire, fund, or promote—decisions more closely reflecting true merit.

  In the same vein, we would be extremely interested in developing effective biomedical cognitive enhancers and other ways of improving the human thinker—the brain being, after all, the generator par excellence.

  Anecdotalism

  Robert Sapolsky

  Neuroscientist, Stanford University; author, Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals

  Various concepts come to mind for inclusion in that cognitive toolkit. “Emergence.” Or, related to that, “The failure of reductionism”: Mistrust the idea that if you want to understand a complex phenomenon, the only tool of science to use is to break it into its component parts, study them individually in isolation, and then glue the itty-bitty pieces back together. This doesn’t often work, and increasingly it doesn’t work for the most interesting and important phenomena out there. To wit: You have a watch that doesn’t run correctly; often, you can fix it by breaking it down to its component parts and finding the gear that has had a tooth break (actually, I haven’t a clue if there is any clock on Earth that still works this way). But if you have a cloud that doesn’t rain, you don’t break it down to its component parts. Ditto for a person whose mind doesn’t work right. Or for going about understanding the problems of a society or ecosystem.

  Related to that are terms like “synergy” and “interdisciplinary,” but heaven save us from having to hear more about either of those words. There are now whole areas of science where you can’t get a faculty position unless you work one of those words into the title of your job talk and have it tattooed on the small of your back.

  Another useful scientific concept is “genetic vulnerability.” One hopes this will find its way into everyone’s cognitive toolkit, because its evil cousins “genetic inevitability” and “genetic dete
rminism” are already deeply entrenched there, and with long long legacies of bad consequences. Everyone should be taught about work like that of Avshalom Caspi and colleagues, who looked at genetic polymorphisms related to various neurotransmitter systems associated with psychiatric disorders and antisocial behaviors. “Aha,” far too many people will say, drawing on that nearly useless, misshapen tool of genetic determinism. “Have one of those polymorphisms and you’re hosed by inevitability.” And instead, what those studies beautifully demonstrate is how these polymorphisms carry essentially zero increased risk of those disorders, unless you grow up in particularly malign environments. Genetic determinism, my tuchus.

  But the scientific concept I’ve chosen is one that’s useful simply because it isn’t a scientific concept: “anecdotalism.” Every good journalist knows its power—start an article with statistics about foreclosure rates, or feature a family victimized by some bank? No-brainer. Display maps showing the magnitudes of refugees flowing out of Darfur or the face of one starving orphan in a camp? Obvious choice. Galvanize the readership.

  But anecdotalism is potentially a domain of distortion as well. Absorb the lessons of science and cut saturated fats from your diet, or cite your friend’s spouse’s uncle who eats nothing but pork rinds and is still pumping iron at age 110? Depend on one of the foundations of the twentieth century’s extension of life span and vaccinate your child, or obsess over a National Enquirer–esque horror story of one vaccination disaster and don’t immunize? I shudder at the current potential for another case of anecdotalism: I write four days after the Arizona shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and nineteen other people by Jared Loughner. As of this writing, experts such as the esteemed psychiatrist Fuller Torrey are guessing that Loughner is a paranoid schizophrenic. And if this is true, this anecdotalism will give new legs to the tragic misconception that the mentally ill are more dangerous than the rest of us.