In part two of a series on "life reports," David Brooks summarizes the lessons learned, good and bad, by his readers on the other side of 70. There are a number of points to think about, but my favorites are "beware rumination" and "lean toward risk."
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Wayne
If we can be fooled so easily, what's the point of reason?
The New York Times Book Review reviewed Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Sunday. I've mentioned it a couple of times already, but the book, which I just bought for the Kindle, is a warm and deeply informed take on the cleaved and error prone human mind by the Princeton psychologist and Nobel Laureate. The reviewer Jim Holt, however, raises one point that Kahneman doesn't spend much, if any, time discussing. Namely, if our reasoning ability has developed to cope with the world as it is, then the cognitive illusions described by Kahneman are the norm, not a departure from it.
Even if we could rid ourselves of the biases and illusions identified in this book — and Kahneman, citing his own lack of progress in overcoming them, doubts that we can — it is by no means clear that this would make our lives go better. And that raises a fundamental question: What is the point of rationality? We are, after all, Darwinian survivors. Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope efficiently with a complex and dynamic environment. They are thus likely to be adaptive in this environment, even if they can be tripped up in the psychologist’s somewhat artificial experiments. Where do the norms of rationality come from, if they are not an idealization of the way humans actually reason in their ordinary lives? As a species, we can no more be pervasively biased in our judgments than we can be pervasively ungrammatical in our use of language
The following logical puzzle is frequently cited as an example of biased thinking in reviews of the book: If a bat and ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? Think for a moment. The irresistible - and wrong - answer is ten cents. A ten cent ball and a bat that costs $1.10 (one dollar more than the ball) totals $1.20. The correct answer is the ball must cost five cents.
For those of you at IdeaFestival 2011, Daniel Simons did a brilliant job of demonstrating in startling detail how even the obvious visual details are missed when our attention is directed elsewhere. The mind goes astray. It wants to fill in the empty cognitive blanks. It longs for meaning. Our wetware is wildly suggestible and magicians, for one, take advantage of this flaw one misdirected gaze at a time.
Would life go better if we were rid of the mind's shortcomings? Like Holt, I don't think the answer is at all clear. In my view, the shortcomings, when they rise to the level of conscious mistakes, are related to the capacity for suspended belief. Giving up to too soon on the logic comes in mighty handy at the movies or when reading a novel, or expands on the possibilities in games like Minecraft and makes coordinated acts possible in government. The last point is a stretch. But in contrast to make believe, belief-made is that sly waive and a nod to circumstance, the vision that makes transcendent acts possible. In complex and dynamic environments, it's our adaptive and idealized better selves.
Wayne
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Saying that what makes him curious was his early exposure to difference, Baratunde Thurston, digital editor of America's Finest News Source, answers the question put to many IdeaFestival 2011 participants and speakers in the IF Conversations series.
Over the next several months we'll roll out the conversations here, on the blog, as well as in the right sidebar of the web site.
If you've ever been to the IdeaFestival, you know we're big on difference, and for good reason. Difference in social networks has been said to be the key to successful entrepreneurs, according to Jonah Lehrer. Homogenized institutions, like thinking, eventually become stale. Before she became known as the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua argued at IdeaFestival 2008 that a tolerance for diversity had been the key to the success of history's hyper-powers, and offered many examples how some societies had became powerful and wealthy by offering the different and marginalized a way forward. There really isn't a mind to waste.
We believe that the key to innovation is diversity in ideas. Business can learn something from gaming, improvisation and stand-up comedy. Philosophy of mind now informs the development of artificial intelligence and vice versa. Take gravity out of the equation and human cells and genes behave differently. Why that happens in space may eventually lead to therapies for disease on Earth.
The IdeaFestival works very hard to include everyone who wants to participate, and seeks sponsors - thank you! - to make entry affordable. That's good. At this year's festival, some of the most interesting and penetrating questions came from the many high school students who were in attendance. They challenged IBM's Watson and grilled speakers throughout the four days. As someone who has lived a great many places and for the past 20 years has called Kentucky home, the fact that the nerdocalypse happens here thrills me.
There's comedy gold there Baratunde, gold.
Wayne
Well maybe not quite, but we know now that a conscious gratitude confers a host of lasting benefits. Thanks for reading. Thanks for being curious. Thanks for supporting the IdeaFestival throughout the year. We're grateful for you.
See you on Monday.
Wayne
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Describing this video, the World Science Festival says that "Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and author Simon Singh explain how, once one gets past arithmetic and into the big ideas driving mathematics, it can become a highly creative, artistic, and even emotionally charged endeavor."
I freely admit that when it comes to math I was emotionally charged once, just prior to a high school Algebra II final. The fear of failure - I did - has that effect. But loving and appreciating how the great writers can build worlds made right with words, I was intrigued by Robert Krulwich's too-simple and rather unfair comparison between natural and symbolic language. I was intrigued because I knew what was coming next. Not surprisingly, the mathematicians on stage promptly called him on it - poor guy.
Thinking about the descriptive power of natural language - Melville's white whale - Shakespeare's wavering Hamlet - Dickinson's eremitic prose, it's of course immediately obvious that words are more than just symbols with meaning and a one-to-one relationship to an idea or object. As suggested in the video above, the idea that one might subtract six from three introduced a new thought with lasting implications.
I also thought of this passage from The Great Gatsby:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Later in life I've come to have an amateur's appreciation for how mathematicians like du Sautoy must bring a writerly quality to their craft. I wonder what it's like to breathe in topologies that describe the contiguous features of space and time itself, or suggest hidden folds in realities much too small to experience directly. Just like Fitzgerald, mathematicians can also explore infinities and emptiness, and, once mastered, the experience of taking in the complexities commensurate with our capacity to wonder, the experience of making sense of an unfamiliar terrain, of producing an ineluctable result, is a profound and enviable skill that eludes all be a select few. For those few, the exhale must be endlessly satisfying. Oh, so that's it.
Wayne