This Will Make You Smarter

Well, it gave me a rather long list of new things to further read on! :)

About 150 short articles, ranging between 1 to 4 pages (perfect for breakfast literature) from big names like V.S. Ramachandran, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, Kevin Kelly, Rudy Rucker, David Eagleman, Sam Harris - each presenting what serves as their answer to the 2012 Edge.org question: “What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?”

In the hitlist of answers:
Advocating for uncertainty. Carlo Rovelli writes “The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge.” Several articles declare it is important to educate the public on probability values, to avoid ridiculous scares that are fuelled by misunderstandings of numbers (see vaccines, airport security scanners, ..). Top of the list are definitely also the issues concerning climate control, and how facts can be misinterpreted. In total there are lots of stabs on the general uneducated state of most Americans. And at societies stubborn preference for mediocrity instead of finding win-win situation through collaboration and compromise.

I especially enjoyed:
- David Eagleman's “The Umwelt” which talks about the limits of our senses and how each organism assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality out there.
- Lee Smolin's “Thinking in Time versus thinking outside of Time” where he advocates for a perspective of truth where the ultimate truth doesn't lie outside our universe but within. In that way objects and ideas only exist once they are invented. Every feature of them is a result of their history and everything about them is negotiable and subject to improvement by the invention of novel ways of doing things.
- Amanda Gefter's “Dualities” which talks about how we should sometimes replace our typically boolean thinking and embrace the scientific concept of dualities instead, that radically different theories can both be true and represent the same underlying reality.

This book had a few conceptual gems in it, but at a low enough density to not make it worthwhile. It's clear that a large number of essayists are writing about topics to signal looking smart, rather than to actually help you in any way. Don't waste your time.