Quotes from John Brockman

Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn't privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn't the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion.

Why are men so much more prone to becoming suicide terrorists? Why is suicide terrorism so much more prevalent in polygynous cultures that create a greater pool of mateless males?

The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.

Kakonomics (from the Greek, the economics of the worst) describes cases wherein people not only have the standard preference for receiving high-quality goods and delivering low-quality goods (the standard sucker's payoff) but actually prefer to deliver a low-quality product and receive a low-quality one: that is, they connive on a low-low exchange.

Really tapping into our inner vision and inner child might not make us happier or better adjusted, but it might make us appreciate just how smart we really are.

psychologists are too polite with one another's ideas.

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its life span. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.ad

RIDLEY Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist

in part because those countries have switched their foundational ideologies from ones that glorify zero-sum class and national struggle to ones that glorify positive-sum market cooperation.

The graphical desktop guides useful behavior and hides what is true but not useful.

The history of the object is more relevant than the object itself, if we want to pinpoint what is interesting to us.

we all have a number of executive subselves, and the only way we manage to accomplish anything in life is to allow only one subself to take the conscious driver's seat at any given time.

The famous Canadian physician William Osler once wrote, "In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

As a final insult to unity, the laws of quantum mechanics indicate that the universe is continually splitting into multiple histories, or "many worlds," out of which the world we experience is only one. The other worlds contain the events that didn't happen in our world.

When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn.

CAPTURE CHARLES SEIFE Professor of journalism, NYU; former staff writer, Science; author, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.

A patient can have as many diagnoses as [she] damn well pleases.

you're more likely to die while horseback riding (one serious adverse event every 350 or so exposures) than from taking Ecstasy (one serious adverse event every 10,000 or so exposures).

After the visit, George wrote an essay, "Turing's Cathedral," which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google's founders had in store for the world. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of his hosts after his talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI.

Description length is actually a measure of complexity

We live in the shadow of a great lie, and by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have become irrelevant consumers, and a new generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great chain of shopping.