Why everyone can be creative

How To Be Creative

The image of the 'creative type' is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague's desk might be the key to your next big idea.

By JONAH LEHRER

Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They're "creative types." We're not.

The myth of the "creative type" is just that--a myth, argues Jonah Lehrer. In an interview with WSJ's Gary Rosen he explains the evidence suggesting everyone has the potential to be the next Milton Glaser or Yo-Yo Ma.

But creativity is not magic, and there's no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.

The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. ("Inspiration" literally means "breathed upon.") Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.

But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use "creativity" as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.

It isn't a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It's a skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.

Does the challenge that we're facing require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it be solved gradually, one piece at a time? The answer often determines whether we should drink a beer to relax or hop ourselves up on Red Bull, whether we take a long shower or stay late at the office.

The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.

Let's start with the hardest problems, those challenges that at first blush seem impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are solved at all) in a moment of insight.

Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn't stick?

On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that we're forced to live with.

But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn't tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the Post-it Note.

Mr. Fry's invention was a classic moment of insight. Though such events seem to spring from nowhere, as if the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun studying how they occur. They do this by giving people "insight" puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the brain:

A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man?

If you solved the question, the solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a priest. Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard creative problem.

Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video—the scientists use a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up—boosts the average success rate by about 20%.

Alcohol also works. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students. The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that goes with a triad of words. Here's a sample problem:

Pine Crab Sauce

In this case, the answer is "apple." (The compound words are pineapple, crab apple and apple sauce.) Drunk students solved nearly 30% more of these word problems than their sober peers.

What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we're probably focused on the wrong answer.

And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.

This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

Of course, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won't solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap.

There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the "rejecting process," noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. "All great artists and thinkers are great workers," he wrote.

This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan "Art is Work" above his office door. Mr. Glaser's most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart.

Mr. Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming design, with "I Love New York" in cursive, set against a plain white background. His proposal was quickly approved. "Everybody liked it," Mr. Glaser says. "And if I were a normal person, I'd stop thinking about the project. But I can't. Something about it just doesn't feel right."

So Mr. Glaser continued to ruminate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi, stuck in midtown traffic. "I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw," he remembers. "And I'm thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go."

The logo that Mr. Glaser imagined in traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design because he refused to stop thinking about it.

But this raises an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we're thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities?

The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

Of course, both moment-of-insight problems and nose-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the answers to the creative problems we're trying to solve somewhere in our heads. They're both just a matter of getting those answers out. Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.

Steve Jobs famously declared that "creativity is just connecting things." Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs's leadership, for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category.

And it isn't just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.

How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out "diverse experiences," collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don't know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.

Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs's wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.

Many of the most innovative companies encourage their employees to develop these sorts of diverse networks, interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas—a sort of grown-up science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.

Such solutions are known as "mental restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.

This principle is at work daily on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website for difficult scientific questions. The structure of the site is simple: Companies post their hardest R&D problems, attaching a monetary reward to each "challenge." The site features problems from hundreds of organization in eight different scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from a multinational food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" to an electronics firm trying to design a solar-powered computer.

The most impressive thing about InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of challenges posted on the site. According to Mr. Lakhani's data, nearly 30% of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being posted online. The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields. Chemists didn't solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to understand the challenge, they weren't so close that their knowledge held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that held back their more expert peers.

It's this ability to attack problems as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that's the key to creativity.

The composer Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was just 15 years old at the time (though he'd already played for J.F.K. at the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece. "Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing," Mr. Adolphe remembers. "I'd never written for the instrument before."

Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. "Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing," Mr. Adolphe says. "And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it."

Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled "Stop!" They looked at Mr. Ma's left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. "You're right," said Mr. Ma, "you really can't play that!" Yet, somehow, he did.

When Mr. Ma plays today, he still strives for that state of the beginner. "One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello," Mr. Ma says. "Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure."

Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

For the first time in human history, it's becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.

—Adapted from "Imagine: How Creativity Works" by Jonah Lehrer, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 19. Copyright © 2012 by Jonah Lehrer.

10 Quick Creativity Hacks

1. Color Me Blue

A 2009 study found that subjects solved twice as many insight puzzles when surrounded by the color blue, since it leads to more relaxed and associative thinking. Red, on other hand, makes people more alert and aware, so it is a better backdrop for solving analytic problems.

2. Get Groggy

According to a study published last month, people at their least alert time of day—think of a night person early in the morning—performed far better on various creative puzzles, sometimes improving their success rate by 50%. Grogginess has creative perks.

#3 Don't Be Afraid to Daydream

3. Daydream Away

Research led by Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that people who daydream more score higher on various tests of creativity.

4. Think Like A Child

When subjects are told to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds, they score significantly higher on tests of divergent thinking, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire.

5. Laugh It Up

When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.

When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.

6. Imagine That You Are Far Away

Research conducted at Indiana University found that people were much better at solving insight puzzles when they were told that the puzzles came from Greece or California, and not from a local lab.

7. Keep It Generic

One way to increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, people think in narrow terms. In contrast, the use of more generic verbs—say, "moving" instead of "driving"—can lead to dramatic increases in the number of problems solved.

According to a new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-footsquare workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.

8. Work Outside the Box

According to new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-foot-square workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.

9. See the World

According to research led by Adam Galinsky, students who have lived abroad were much more likely to solve a classic insight puzzle. Their experience of another culture endowed them with a valuable open-mindedness. This effect also applies to professionals: Fashion-house directors who have lived in many countries produce clothing that their peers rate as far more creative.

10. Move to a Metropolis

Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute have found that moving from a small city to one that is twice as large leads inventors to produce, on average, about 15% more patents.

—Jonah Lehrer

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How to Be CreativeHow To Be Creative.

Does biology make us liars?

Biologists since E. O. Wilson are finding ever more evidence that what we used to call philosophy or culture are simply biological processes. http://www.aldaily.com has a link to an article about biological foundations of self-deception. The whole article (from New Republic) is interesting, but here are the three paragraphs that I liked best.
--ww--

"Can we at least measure the price of our own self-deceit? Trivers offers the interesting suggestion that the strain associated with lying, even unconsciously, takes a toll on the immune system. The reason for this is that immunity is expensive, requiring the burning of energy and consumption of much protein. For the same reason, the immune system has a reservoir that can be drawn upon for other purposes—often, Trivers claims, at the mere “flick of a molecular switch.” A decision has to be made: attack another male for the chance of sex with a female, or invest internally to fight a parasite? Quickly the body apportions its resources, diverting from the immune reservoirs to the fighting mode. No surprise, then, that high testosterone levels are associated with lower immune response, or that disease is associated with lower testosterone levels (the body is shifting investment to the immune system), or that marriage, which lowers testosterone levels in men, is associated with increased lifespan. Monogamy, in other words, can be seen as a disease that improves our health.

"The salient point is that choices involving psychology, of greater or lesser degrees of self-deception, in turn affect our immune systems. Trivers cites studies that show that people who write about their trauma can improve their immune function; indeed, emotional disclosure is associated with consistent immune benefits—this is one of the reasons that going to a shrink might make you feel better. The converse holds as well: HIV-positive patients who deny that they are infected show lower immune function than those who admit it, and tend to suffer from more rapid progression of their disease. Truth seems to be healthy for us. On those grounds alone, Trivers writes, “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be considered an immunological disaster.

...

"Two groups were randomly assigned, and members of the first group were asked to write for five minutes about a situation in which they felt powerful while candy was being distributed among them; at the same time members of the other group were asked to write about a situation of powerlessness and were only allowed to request candy but not to be given any. When all the subjects were asked to snap the fingers of their right hand five times and quickly write the letter E on their forehead, those who had been primed to feel powerless were three times more likely to write the E so that others could read it rather than backward, from their own perspective. Further study showed that the power-primed group was significantly less able to discriminate among human facial expressions associated with fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. It would appear that the ability to apprehend the world correctly, as well as the ability to empathize, is compromised by the feeling of power.

“The ultimate effect of shielding people from the effects of their folly,” Herbert Spencer once observed, “is to fill the world with fools.”
# # #

The Economist on driverless cars

The driverless road ahead

Carmakers are starting to take autonomous vehicles seriously. Other businesses should too

Oct 20th 2012 | from the print edition

THE arrival of the mass-produced car, just over a century ago, caused an explosion of business creation. First came the makers of cars and all the parts that go into them. Then came the garages, filling stations and showrooms. Then all sorts of other car-dependent businesses: car parks, motels, out-of-town shopping centres. Commuting by car allowed suburbs to spread, making fortunes for prescient housebuilders and landowners. Roadbuilding became a far bigger business, whereas blacksmiths, farriers and buggy-whip makers faded away as America’s horse and mule population fell from 26m in 1915 to 3m in 1960.
Now another revolution on wheels is on the horizon: the driverless car. Nobody is sure when it will arrive. Google, which is testing a fleet of autonomous cars, thinks in maybe a decade, others reckon longer. A report from KPMG and the Centre for Automotive Research in Michigan concludes that it will come “sooner than you think”. And, when it does, the self-driving car, like the ordinary kind, could bring profound change.
Just imagine. It could, for a start, save the motor industry from stagnation. Carmakers are fretting at signs that smartphone-obsessed teenagers these days do not rush to get a driving licence and buy their first car, as their parents did. Their fear is that the long love affair with the car is fading. But once they are spared the trouble and expense of taking lessons and passing a test, young adults might rediscover the joys of the open road. Another worry for the motor industry is that car use seems to be peaking in the most congested cities. Yet automated cars would drive nose-to-tail, increasing the capacity of existing roads; and since they would be able to drop off their passengers and drive away, the lack of parking spaces in town might not matter so much.
Cars have always been about status as well as mobility; many people would still want to own a trophy car. These might not clock up much mileage, so carmakers would have to become more like fashion houses, constantly creating new designs to get people to swap their motors long before they have worn out. But cars that are driverless may not need steering wheels, pedals and other manual controls; and, being virtually crashless (most road accidents are due to human error), their bodies could be made much lighter. So makers would be able to turn out new models quicker and at lower cost. Fresh entrants to carmaking could prove nimbler than incumbents at adapting to this new world.
All these trends will affect the car business. But when mass-produced cars appeared, they had an impact on the whole of society. What might be the equivalent social implications of driverless cars? And who might go the same way as the buggy-whip makers? Electronics and software firms will be among the winners: besides providing all the sensors and computing power that self-driving cars will need, they will enjoy strong demand for in-car entertainment systems, since cars’ occupants will no longer need to keep their eyes on the road. Bus companies might run convoys of self-piloting coaches down the motorways, providing competition for intercity railways. Travelling salesmen might prefer to journey from city to city overnight in driverless Winnebagos packed with creature comforts. So, indeed, might some tourists. If so, they will need fewer hotel rooms.
Cabbies, lorry drivers and all others whose job is to steer a vehicle will have to find other work. The taxi and car-rental businesses might merge into one automated pick-up and drop-off service: GM has already shown a prototype of a two-seater, battery-powered pod that would scuttle about town, with passengers summoning it by smartphone. Supermarkets, department stores and shopping centres might provide these free, to attract customers. Driverless cars will be programmed to obey the law, which means, sadly, the demise of the traffic cop and the parking warden. And since automated cars will reduce the need for parking spaces in town, that will mean less revenue for local authorities and car-park operators.
When people are no longer in control of their cars they will not need driver insurance—so goodbye to motor insurers and brokers. Traffic accidents now cause about 2m hospital visits a year in America alone, so autonomous vehicles will mean much less work for emergency rooms and orthopaedic wards. Roads will need fewer signs, signals, guard rails and other features designed for the human driver; their makers will lose business too. When commuters can work, rest or play while the car steers itself, longer commutes will become more bearable, the suburbs will spread even farther and house prices in the sticks will rise. When self-driving cars can ferry children to and from school, more mothers may be freed to re-enter the workforce. The popularity of the country pub, which has been undermined by strict drink-driving laws, may be revived. And so on.
Getting there from here
All this may sound far-fetched. But the self-driving car is already arriving in dribs and drabs. Cars are on sale that cruise on autopilot, slot themselves into awkward parking spaces and brake automatically to avert collisions. Motorists seem ready to pay for such features, encouraging carmakers to keep working on them. The armed forces are also sponsoring research on autonomous vehicles. Some insurers offer discounts to drivers who put a black box in their cars to measure how safely they drive: as cars’ computers get better than humans at avoiding accidents, self-drive mode may become the norm, and manual driving uninsurable.
The first airline to operate a regular international schedule began in 1919, only 16 years after the Wright Brothers showed that people really could fly in heavier-than-air planes. For those businesses that stand to gain and lose from the driverless car, the future may arrive even quicker.
# # #

Fast Brain, Slow Brain

During the past year, I read a book that taught me more about how I think and why I do the things I do than
nearly all of the other books that I have ever read. The bad news is that we are all hard-wired to be
irrational. The good news is that by knowing this, we can try to notice when we are lettting our hard-wiring take over, and then interrupt ourselves and perhaps choose something else that is rational. Nancy reached
many of Kahneman's conclusions intuitively...I was always in awe of her insights...so I know that she would
have recommended "Thinking: Fast and Slow" to you.
I tried to write my own summary of it, but long before I had a version that I liked, I went to Amazon.com
and found these excerpts from various reviews of it.

"Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like "vomit and banana." System 1 and System 2, the fast and slow types of thinking, become characters that illustrate the psychology behind things we think we understand but really don't, such as intuition. Kahneman's transparent and careful treatment of his subject has the potential to change how we think, not just about thinking, but about how we live our lives. Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep--and sometimes frightening--insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more." --JoVon Sotak

“Brilliant . . . It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Daniel Kahneman’s contribution to the understanding of the way we think and choose. He stands among the giants, a weaver of the threads of Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Sigmund Freud. Arguably the most important psychologist in history, Kahneman has reshaped cognitive psychology, the analysis of rationality and reason, the understanding of risk and the study of happiness and well-being . . . A magisterial work, stunning in its ambition, infused with knowledge, laced with wisdom, informed by modesty and deeply humane. If you can read only one book this year, read this one.”— Janice Gross Stein, The Globe and Mail

“A sweeping, compelling tale of just how easily our brains are bamboozled, bringing in both his own research and that of numerous psychologists, economists, and other experts...Kahneman has a remarkable ability to take decades worth of research and distill from it what would be important and interesting for a lay audience...Thinking, Fast and Slow is an immensely important book. Many science books are uneven, with a useful or interesting chapter too often followed by a dull one. Not so here. With rare exceptions, the entire span of this weighty book is fascinating and applicable to day-to-day life. Everyone should read Thinking, Fast and Slow.” —Jesse Singal, Boston Globe

“Absorbingly articulate and infinitely intelligent . . . What's most enjoyable and compelling about Thinking, Fast and Slow is that it's so utterly, refreshingly anti-Gladwellian. There is nothing pop about Kahneman's psychology, no formulaic story arc, no beating you over the head with an artificial, buzzword-encrusted Big Idea. It's just the wisdom that comes from five decades of honest, rigorous scientific work, delivered humbly yet brilliantly, in a way that will forever change the way you think about thinking.”—Maria Popova, The Atlantic

“Profound . . . As Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the universe and Darwin knocked humans off their biological perch, Mr. Kahneman has shown that we are not the paragons of reason we assume ourselves to be.” —The Economist

“[Kahneman’s] disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking . . . We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman’s simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray.” —Jonah Lehrer, The Wall Street Journal

# # #

Why it is so hard to distinguish science from pseudo-science

Fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, a chunk of stuff blew off the planet Jupiter. That chunk soon became an enormous comet, approaching Earth several times around the period of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and Joshua’s siege of Jericho. The ensuing havoc included the momentary stopping and restarting of the Earth’s rotation; the introduction into its crust of organic chemicals (including a portion of the world’s petroleum reserves); the parting of the Red Sea, induced by a massive electrical discharge from the comet to Earth; showers of iron dust and edible carbohydrates falling from the comet’s tail, the first turning the waters red and the second nourishing the Israelites in the desert; and plagues of vermin, either infecting Earth from organisms carried in the comet’s tail or caused by the rapid multiplication of earthly toads and bugs induced by the scorching heat of cometary gases. Eventually, the comet settled down to a quieter life as the planet Venus, which, unlike the other planets, is an ingénue at just 3500 years old. Disturbed by the new girl in the neighbourhood, Mars too began behaving badly, closely encountering Earth several times between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE; triggering massive earthquakes, lava flows, tsunamis and atmospheric fire storms; causing the sudden extinction of many species (including the mammoth); shifting Earth’s spin axis and relocating the North Pole from Baffin Island to its present position; and abruptly changing the length of the terrestrial year from 360 to its present 365¼ days. There were also further shenanigans involving Saturn and Mercury.

If this story makes you feel even the slightest stab of recognition, you’re probably at least fifty years old, because it’s a summary of the key ideas in Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision. Published in New York in 1950, the book is now almost forgotten, but it was one of the greatest cultural sensations of the Cold War era. Before it was printed, it was trailed in magazines, and immediately shot onto the American bestseller lists, where it stayed for months, grabbing the attention and occupying the energies of both enthusiasts and enraged critics. The brouhaha subsided after a few years, but the so-called Velikovsky affair erupted with greater violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the author gathered a gaggle of disciples and lectured charismatically (and at times incomprehensibly) to large and enraptured campus audiences. Velikovsky’s story was chewed over by philosophers and sociologists convinced of its absurdity, some trying to find standards through which one could securely establish the grounds of its obvious wrong-headedness, others edgily exploring the radical possibility that no such standards existed and reflecting on what that meant for so-called demarcation criteria between science and other forms of knowledge.
Worlds in Collision was Velikovsky’s blockbuster – I haven’t found exact sales figures, though there is an estimate from the late 1970s that millions of copies had been sold, with translations into many major languages – but there were follow-up volumes through the 1970s, fleshing out the basic astronomical-historical picture and offering ingeniously reflexive accounts of the developing controversies over his theories. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Velikovsky’s books must have been in most American college dorm rooms. Other countries were not nearly as besotted, but neither were they immune: in 1972, both the BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced respectful documentaries on the man and his views. Velikovskianism had gained so much traction in America that in 1974 there was a huge set-piece debate over his views at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His scientific opponents reckoned he was ‘quite out of his tree’, while some of his acolytes – and these included an assortment of scientists with appropriate credentials – were of the opinion that Velikovsky was ‘perhaps the greatest brain that our race has produced’.
Velikovsky appeared in American culture pretty much as a man from Mars: he was almost unknown to the intellectual communities whose expertise his book most directly engaged. Born in Vitebsk (now in Belarus) in 1895 to well-off Jewish parents, Velikovsky studied a wide range of subjects at Montpellier and Edinburgh before taking his medical degree in Moscow in 1921. Emigrating to Berlin, then to Vienna and Palestine, he learned psychoanalysis under Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Stekel and practised as a psychiatrist before escaping the Nazis in 1939 and living first on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and later in Princeton. From that point on, he never had an academic appointment or regular salaried employment, apparently supporting himself with money inherited from his father, a bit of practice as a shrink and, later, book royalties and fees for speaking engagements. When you look up Velikovsky online, he’s most often described as a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Despite the celebrity of his astronomical-historical stories, and despite the fact that he almost entirely gave up the couch when he became a celebrity, that’s quite right.
Between the wars, Velikovsky turned himself into one of those then common Central European scholars of enormous intellectual range, always seeking the Big Unifying Idea. His interest in planetary astronomy was a late development: it was psychoanalysis and Jewish history that were the keys to the story in Worlds in Collision. A Zionist, though not notably religious, Velikovsky was infuriated by Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism (1937), which claimed that Moses wasn’t actually Jewish but a runaway Egyptian priest from Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic sun religion, later murdered by the Israelites, who ended up fabricating a syncretic deity from an Egyptian sun god and a Midianite volcano god called Jehovah. Subsequently, the idea of a Messiah was concocted as an expression of guilt for father-murder, a sense of guilt which has been handed down to the Jews as a common psychological inheritance. The historical account Judaism offered of itself was therefore, according to Freud, a form of dream-work, a collective repressed memory needing skilled decoding by modern interpreters. To Velikovsky, all this was yet another manifestation of Freud’s Jewish self-hatred. How dare he impugn the Old Testament story about who the Jews were and how they came to be Chosen? But Freud’s methods in Moses and Monotheism nevertheless signalled a productive new way of interpreting human history, one in which psychoanalytic techniques could effectively expose the true meaning of the world’s dream-myths.
At the same time, Velikovsky was convinced that the Old Testament, decoded in this way, was an overwhelmingly reliable historical account, that the Jewish records could be used as a standard to calibrate archives of dream-myths – from the Egyptian and Greek to the Chinese and Choctaw – and that, once this radical reinterpretation of world religions was achieved, we would have an accurate account of the physical events that had occurred in historical times and were encrypted in the dream-myths.
Although Worlds in Collision was a pastiche of comparative mythology and planetary astronomy, its major purpose was a radical reconstruction of history. Velikovsky had worked through the annals of myth and ancient history, which substantially supported each other and told the same historical stories; the Jewish story and its chronologies could be used reliably to gauge all the others. The apparent datings of events did differ, but a wholesale recalibration of ancient chronology was both possible and necessary. The ancient historians had got their dates badly wrong, and so too had the astronomers, biologists and geologists, who now needed to understand that spectacular cosmic catastrophes had happened and that historical methods of interpreting ancient texts could be used to establish radically unorthodox scientific stories. Properly understood, Jewish history not only laid bare the inaccuracy of scientific accounts, it securely established the reality of natural events and processes which scientists assumed could not possibly have happened.
It was American scientists who went ballistic over Velikovsky, not historians, and one purpose of Michael Gordin’s probing and intelligent The Pseudoscience Wars is to ask why they responded to Velikovsky as they did. Putting that sort of question is a sign of changed times. Passions have cooled; circumstances have altered. Almost all previous books about Velikovsky and the affair have been for or against, celebratory or accusatory, justifying the way the scientific community handled the business or criticising them for handling it badly. There’s no evidence that Gordin considers Velikovsky’s theories anything but nutty, yet affirming and identifying their nuttiness is a non-barking dog here. Gordin is a disengaged and dispassionate historian of science – much of his work has been about Russian science and the science and politics of nuclear weapons in the postwar period – and the questions he poses about Velikovsky are meant to illuminate the condition of American science in ‘the postwar public sphere’ and to figure out what has been meant by the notion of ‘pseudoscience’. The Velikovsky affair was at once a long-running episode of surpassing strangeness and, Gordin says, ‘ground zero’ in a series of Cold War era ‘pseudoscience wars’. Understanding the pathological is here meant to encourage a new perspective on the normal.
Scientists in the years after World War Two were upset by Velikovsky because, Gordin argues, they felt insecure, uncertain of the new authority and influence they had apparently gained by building the bomb and winning the war. Enormous amounts of government money had been dumped on them and government agencies designed to ensure the support of even basic research had been established, with unprecedented arrangements allowing the recipients of government largesse to determine its distribution. Yet there were reasons to be fearful, and in Cold War American culture there was more than enough fear to go around. Some forms of fear specially afflicted scientists. First, there was concern that political support might translate into political control. There were the Marxists – not all that many, of course, in America – who had actively worked for the organised planning and direction of scientific research, and there was the cautionary tale of genetics in the Soviet Union, especially after 1948, when Stalin had decreed, against the canons of ‘Western bourgeois’ Mendelian genetics, that the ideas of the charlatan Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko about the inheritance of acquired characteristics should count as dogma. Lysenkoism seemed to show how vulnerable orthodox science might be to the fantasies and ideologies of those who weren’t scientists at all or whose scientific credentials had been burnished by the political powers. And there were the McCarthyite witch-hunts, some of which targeted distinguished scientists. How much autonomy did American scientists actually have? How vulnerable was that autonomy to the dictates of politicians and to the delusions of popular culture? No one could be sure. In 1964, Richard Hofstadter brilliantly described the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics: your opponents weren’t simply wrong, they were conspiring against you, mobilising dark forces to suppress free and rational thought. The joining up of psychiatry and history was in the air, like the UN’s Black Helicopters over the US – or perhaps in the cultural water, like fluoride dumped in reservoirs by alien agents.
Velikovskianism belonged to the intellectual genre known as catastrophism, the notion that sudden and massive changes, not just gradual ones, have occurred in the natural world and that the more or less uniform natural processes now observable do not constitute all the modes of change that have historically shaped the world. Darwin was a notable uniformitarian, and Velikovsky opposed Darwinism for that reason, but there is nothing inherently unscientific about catastrophism, nor did Velikovsky’s catastrophism invoke divine intervention. It was bizarre, but it was offered as a scientific (not a religious) theory about natural objects, natural events and natural powers. At a theoretical level, the objections orthodox scientists had about Velikovskianism mostly had to do with celestial mechanisms: his assertions about the insufficiency of gravitation and inertial motion to account for planetary behaviour and related claims about the significance of electromagnetic forces. The problem at a factual level was that these spectacular catastrophes were supposed to have happened quite recently, while orthodox science recognised no evidence that they had.
The greatest ingenuity of Velikovsky’s thought lay in its merging of naturalistic catastrophism and psychoanalytic theory. This allowed him to account at once for the annals of comparative myth and religion and for scientists’ resistance to his scheme, and that is the reason Worlds in Collision was offered, in Gordin’s phrase, as ‘a dream journal for humanity’. The key was what Velikovsky called ‘collective amnesia’. The catastrophes let loose on Earth by the Venus comet had so scarred the human mind that memories of them had either been erased or, more consequentially, encoded in allegory. Just as with Oedipal father-killing and mother-mating, amnesia and suppressed memory were coping mechanisms, and so a proper interpretation of ancient myth would decode the allegorical forms into which traumatic memories had been cast. At the same time, what was the violence of scientists’ opposition to Velikovsky’s ideas but a persistence of that same tendency to deny the catastrophic truth of what had happened to the human race, how very close it had come to obliteration? The fact that the scientists were leagued against him was precisely what Velikovsky’s theories predicted. It was further evidence that he was right. What the scientists needed, indeed what the culture as a whole needed, was therapy, a cure for collective amnesia.
Here are the reasons for the enormous appeal of Velikovsky’s theories to Cold War America, and, specifically, to the young, the angry and the anxious. Lecturing to campus audiences, Velikovsky told the students what they already knew: the world was not an orderly or a safe place; Armageddon had happened and could happen again:

The belief that we are living in an orderly universe, that nothing happened to this Earth and the other planets since the beginning, that nothing will happen till the end, is a wishful thinking that fills the textbooks … And so it is only wishful thinking that we are living in a safe, never perturbed, solar system and a safe, never perturbed past.

Alfred Kazin, writing in the New Yorker, understood that this was part of Velikovsky’s appeal, and tellingly linked the great pseudoscientist with the Doomsday warnings of orthodox atomic scientists: Velikovsky’s work ‘plays right into the small talk about universal destruction that is all around us now’, he said, ‘and it emphasises the growing tendency in this country to believe that the physicists’ irresponsible scare warnings must be sound.’
The counterculture emerging in 1960s and 1970s America was born from fear and bred to hope. It feared nuclear catastrophe; it was disposed to think that the military-industrial-academic complex had scant regard for preventing catastrophe or even that it was conspiring to bring it about. (In 1962, the war-gamer Herman Kahn suggested that we should begin to ‘think the unthinkable’ and work out how to fight and win a nuclear war, and in 1964 Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove made Kahn’s vision box-office.) The counterculture expressed whatever optimism it had about the future in a characteristically American psychotherapeutic idiom. So did Velikovsky. Humankind could save itself if it confronted its irrationality and the collective amnesia that was responsible for all forms of racist, social and military violence: ‘Nothing is more important for the human race than to know our past and to face it.’ Velikovsky offered both diagnosis and treatment. And if his theories were not, in themselves, religious, they so clearly pointed to political and moral consequences that one disciple cited his Velikovskianism to the draft board as a way of getting out of the Vietnam War: pacifism flowed from planetary astronomy. (The reluctant soldier happily failed his physical, not his metaphysical.)
When Velikovsky’s bizarre story about planetary hi-jinks was so energetically puffed up in 1950, the American scientific establishment was presented with a choice, a choice endemically faced by orthodoxy confronted by intellectual challenges from alien sources: do you ignore the heterodox? Do you invite it to sit down with you and have a calm and rational debate? Do you crush it? There were scientific voices counselling Olympian disdain but they were in general overruled. Still, pretending to take no notice of Velikovsky might have been the plan had Worlds in Collision not been published by Macmillan, a leading producer of scientific textbooks, and packaged not as an offering to, say, comparative mythology or as popular entertainment, but as a contribution to science. Elite scientists, notably at Harvard, reckoned that they might be able to control what Macmillan published when it was represented as science. A letter-writing campaign was organised to get Macmillan to withdraw from its agreement to publish the book; credible threats were made to boycott Macmillan textbooks; hostile reviews were arranged; questions were raised about whether the book had been peer-reviewed (it had); and, when Worlds in Collision was published anyway, further (successful) pressure was exerted to make Macmillan wash its hands of the thing and shift copyright to another publisher. The editor who had handled the book was let go, and a scientist who provided a blurb and planned a New York planetarium show based on Velikovsky’s theories – admittedly not the sharpest knife in the scientific drawer – was forced out of his museum position and never had a scientific job again.
From an uncharitable point of view, this looked like a conspiracy, a conspiracy contrived by dark forces bent on the suppression of free thought and different perspectives – and the Velikovskians took just that view. An establishment conspiracy centred on Harvard had sought to control scientific thought; the conspirators had closed minds and wanted to close others’ minds; they refused to engage with Velikovsky’s ideas at the level of evidence, to show exactly where he was wrong. When Velikovsky made specific predictions of what further observation and experiment would show, his enemies declined to undertake those observations and experiments. This was the way the Commies behaved, Velikovsky’s allies suggested. Analogies were drawn from the history of science seen as the history of martyrs to dogma. Velikovsky figured himself as Galileo and his opponents as Galileo’s critics, who wouldn’t even look through the telescope to see the moons of Jupiter with their own eyes. ‘Perhaps in the entire history of science,’ Velikovsky said, ‘there was not a case of a similar violent reaction on the part of the scientific world towards a published work.’ Newsweek wrote about the spectacle of scientific ‘Professors as Suppressors’ and the Saturday Evening Post made sport of the establishment reaction as ‘one of the signal events of this year’s “silly season”’. Some scientists who were utterly convinced that Velikovsky’s views were loopy had qualms about how the scientific community had treated him. Einstein, in whose Princeton house Velikovsky was a frequent visitor, was one of them. Interviewed just before his death by the Harvard historian of science I.B. Cohen, Einstein said that Worlds in Collision ‘really isn’t a bad book. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.’ Yet he thought, as Cohen put it, that ‘bringing pressure to bear on a publisher to suppress a book was an evil thing to do.’
The Velikovsky affair made clear that there were radically differing conceptions of the political and intellectual constitution of a legitimate scientific community, of what it was to make and evaluate scientific knowledge. One appealing notion was that science is and ought to be a democracy, willing to consider all factual and theoretical claims, regardless of who makes them and of how they stand with respect to canons of existing belief. Challenges to orthodoxy ought to be welcomed: after all, hadn’t science been born historically through such challenges and hadn’t it progressed by means of the continual creative destruction of dogma? This, of course, was Velikovsky’s view, and it was not an easy matter for scientists in the liberal West to deny the legitimacy of that picture of scientific life. (Wasn’t this the lesson that ought to be learned from the experience of science in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia?) Yet living according to such ideals was impossible – nothing could be accomplished if every apparently crazy idea were to be given careful consideration – and in 1962 Thomas Kuhn’s immensely influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions commended a general picture of science in which ‘dogma’ (daringly given that name) had an essential role in science and in which ‘normal science’ rightly proceeded not through its permeability to all sorts of ideas but through a socially enforced ‘narrowing of perception’. Scientists judged new ideas to be beyond the pale not because they didn’t conform to abstract ideas about scientific values or formal notions of scientific method, but because such claims, given what scientists securely knew about the world, were implausible. Planets just didn’t behave the way Velikovsky said they did; his celestial mechanics required electromagnetic forces which just didn’t exist; the tails of comets were just not the sorts of body that could dump oil and manna on Middle Eastern deserts. A Harvard astronomer blandly noted that ‘if Dr Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy.’
By 1964, some of Velikovsky’s scientific critics were drawing a different lesson from the affair: the nuclear chemist Harold Urey was concerned ‘about the lack of control in scientific publication … Today anyone can publish anything,’ and it was impossible to tell the signal of truth from the noise of imposters. We must return to the past, Urey urged, when there was a proper intellectual class system and a proper system of quality control: ‘Science has always been aristocratic.’ In a society insisting on its democratic character, that was not a wildly popular position, though doubtless it had appealed to the scientists who tried to prevent the original publication of Velikovsky’s book and who sought to block his later efforts to publish in mainstream scientific journals.
Then there was the tactic of labelling Velikovskianism ‘pseudoscience’. One of the strengths of Gordin’s book is its careful historical unpicking of what scientists had in mind, and what they were doing, when they called something pseudoscientific. Pseudoscience isn’t bad science – incompetent, shallow, containing egregious errors of fact or reasoning. (In those senses, there’s a lot of bad science around which is almost never identified as pseudoscience.) Rather, what postwar scientists meant when they called Velikovskianism pseudoscience (along with contemporary parapsychology, resurgent eugenics, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy theory, creationism and the fantastical world ice theory) was that these were bodies of thought that pretended to be scientific, dressing themselves up in the costumes of science, but which were not the thing they pretended to be. Pseudoscientific thought might indeed contain errors of fact and theory, but the orthodox regarded it as fundamentally misconceived.
There were attempts to spell out in exactly what ways Velikovsky had transgressed the rules of scientific method, and, while some critics satisfied themselves that they had identified those errors, there was little if any agreement about what this transgressed method was. For example, Velikovsky did make a series of specific predictions (about the temperature and chemical composition of Venus and about Jupiter as a radio source) which would have permitted his system to be empirically tested, and some of these predictions were eventually advertised as confirmed (even in major scientific journals), but it proved notoriously difficult to disentangle those specific observations – whether supposedly confirming or refuting – from a complex network of claims and assumptions. This ‘network’ character of confirmation and disconfirmation is now generally recognised as endemic to science. Einstein spoke with his usual wisdom when asked how scientists might tell by inspection whether unorthodox ideas were brilliant or barmy. He replied, with Velikovsky clearly in mind: ‘There is no objective test.’ The term ‘pseudoscientist’ is a bit like ‘heretic’. To be a pseudoscientist is to be accused; you don’t describe yourself as a pseudoscientist. (Velikovsky, indeed, was exquisitely cautious about joining a salon des refusés, disinclined to associate his cause with that of the parapsychologists and members of the other pseudoscientific tribes who identified themselves as martyrs to orthodoxy.) So there was a lot of pseudoscience about in the Cold War decades, but the category – not the content – was manufactured by orthodox scientists concerned about maintaining the boundaries of legitimacy but unable to find a stable and coherent way of defining what the category consisted of, other than its violation of valued structures of plausibility.
If pseudosciences are not scientific, neither are they anti-scientific. They flatter science by elaborate rituals of imitation, rejecting many of the facts, theories and presumptions of orthodoxy while embracing what are celebrated as the essential characteristics of science. That is at once a basis for the wide cultural appeal of pseudoscience and an extreme difficulty for those wanting to show what’s wrong with it. Velikovsky advertised his work as, so to speak, more royalist than the king. Did authentic science have masses of references and citations? There they were in Worlds in Collision. Was science meant to aim at the greatest possible explanatory scope, trawling as many disciplines as necessary in search of unified understanding? What in orthodoxy could rival Velikovsky’s integrative vision? Authentic science made specific predictions of what further observation and experiment would show. Velikovsky did too. Was science ideally open to all claimants, subjecting itself to all factual criticisms and entertaining the possibility of radically new theoretical interpretations? Who behaved more scientifically – Velikovsky or the Harvard ‘suppressors’?
Gordin sides with those – like Einstein and a number of modern sociologists and philosophers – who doubt that universal and context-independent criteria can be found reliably to distinguish the scientific from the pseudoscientific. But here is a suggestion about how one might do something, however imperfectly, however vulnerable to counter-instances and however apparently paradoxical, to get a practical grip on the difference between the genuine article and the fake. Whenever the accusation of pseudoscience is made, or wherever it is anticipated, its targets commonly respond by making elaborate displays of how scientific they really are. Pushing the weird and the implausible, they bang on about scientific method, about intellectual openness and egalitarianism, about the vital importance of seriously inspecting all counter-instances and anomalies, about the value of continual scepticism, about the necessity of replicating absolutely every claim, about the lurking subjectivity of everybody else. Call this hyperscience, a claim to scientific status that conflates the PR of science with its rather more messy, complicated and less than ideal everyday realities and that takes the PR far more seriously than do its stuck-in-the-mud orthodox opponents. Beware of hyperscience. It can be a sign that something isn’t kosher. A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

Fairness is an F-word

There is an opinion piece in the Chronicle Review about fairness. The author suggests that modern-day Americans think the opposite of fairness is selfishness, whereas it ought to be favoritism. The whole article is at http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Favoritism/135610/. Here are some core paragraphs. I put one key sentence in bold.
--ww--

Children and parents were taught something very different about envy in the 19th century. Parents taught their children to accommodate negative feelings like envy using stoic resolve. When the educational philosopher Felix Adler analyzed the biblical Cain and Abel parable, in his 1892 The Moral Instruction of Children, he exhorted young people to master and suppress their feelings of envy, or else they would end up like murderous Cain (recall that envy led Cain to kill his brother after God preferentially favored Abel's animal sacrifice). Envy was to be treated with self-discipline. There will always be people better off than you, and the sooner you accept and conquer your envy, the better off you'll be.
The social historian Susan J. Matt argues that all this changed in the 20th century, and by the 1930s a whole new childhood education regarding envy was in full swing. Social workers "praised parents who bought extra gifts for their children. If a son or daughter needed a hat, adults should buy it, but they should also purchase hats for their other offspring, whether or not they needed them. This would prevent children from envying one another."
The phenomenon of sibling rivalry made its way into the textbooks as a potentially damaging pattern of envy—one that is best addressed by giving all the kids an equal fair share of everything. Subduing or restraining one's feelings of deprivation and envy was considered old school, and new parents (living in a more prosperous nation) sought to stave off those feelings in their children by giving them more stuff.
This trend—of assuaging feelings of deprivation by distributing equal goods to children—grew even stronger in the baby-boomer era and beyond. It has also dovetailed nicely with the rise of an American consumer culture that defines the good life in part by material acquisition. "In a consumer society," Ivan Illich says, "there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Today's culture tries to spare kids the pains of sibling and peer rivalry, but does so by teaching them to channel their envy into the language and expectation of fairness—and a reallocation of goods that promises to redress their emotional wounds.
If our high-minded notions of retributive justice have roots in the lower emotions of revenge, then why should we be surprised if fairness has roots in envy? I have no illusions and feel entirely comfortable with the idea that fairness has origins in baser emotions like envy. But most egalitarians will find this repugnant, and damaging to their saintly and selfless version of fairness.
The merit-based critique of fairness is well known. Plato spends much of The Republic railing against democracy on the grounds that know-nothing dolts should never have equal political voice with experts (aristoi). Elitism is a dirty word in our culture, but not for the ancients.
American hostility to elitism is especially manifest during election seasons, when politicians work hard to downplay their own intelligence and intellectual accomplishments so they might seem less threatening (less eggheadish) to the public. I am in agreement with many of the merit-based critiques of egalitarian fairness. I don't want my political leaders to be "regular guys." I want them to be elite in knowledge and wisdom. I want them to be exceptional.
Our contemporary hunger for equality can border on the comical. When my son came home from school with a fancy ribbon, I was filled with pride to discover that he had won a footrace. While I was heaping praise on him, he interrupted to correct me. "No, it wasn't just me," he explained. "We all won the race!" He impatiently educated me. He wasn't first or second or third—he couldn't even remember what place he took. Everyone who ran the race was told that they had won and were all given the same ribbon. "Well, you can't all win a race," I explained to him, ever-supportive father that I am. "That doesn't even make sense." He simply held up his purple ribbon and raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, "You are thus refuted."
I don't want my son and every other kid in his class to be told they'd "won" the footrace at school just because we think their self-esteem can't handle the truth. Equal rewards for unequal achievements foster the dogma of fairness, but they don't improve my son or the other students.
The contrast of our fairness system with merit-based Chinese preschool is astounding. Imagine your 4-year-old preschooler getting up the nerve to stand in front of her class to tell a story. It's a sweet rite of passage that many children enjoy around the world, and it builds self-esteem and confidence. Now imagine that when your preschooler is finished spinning her yarn, the other children tell her that her story was way too boring. One kid points out that he couldn't understand it, another kid says her voice was much too quiet, another says she paused too many times, and another tells her that her story had a terrible ending. In most schools around the world, this scenario would produce a traumatic and tearful episode, but not so in China, where collective criticism is par for the course—even in preschool.
At Daguan Elementary School, in Kunming, China, this daily gantlet is called the "Story Teller King." American teachers who saw this exercise were horrified by it. But it is indicative of Chinese merit-based culture.
# # #

Matternet

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's matternet.

From this week's Economist:

THE spread of mobile phones in developing countries in the past decade has delivered enormous social and economic benefits. By providing a substitute for travel, phones can make up for bad roads and poor transport infrastructure, helping traders find better prices and boosting entrepreneurship. But although information can be delivered by phone—and, in a growing number of countries, money transferred as well—there are some things that must be delivered physically. For small items that are needed urgently, such as medicines, why not use drone helicopters to deliver them, bypassing the need for roads altogether?
That, at least, was the idea cooked up last year at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley summer school where eager entrepreneurs gather in the hope of solving humanity’s grandest challenges with new technologies. The plan is to build a network of autonomously controlled, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to carry small packages of a standardised size. Rather than having a drone carry each package directly from sender to recipient, which could involve a long journey beyond the drone’s flying range, the idea is to build a network of base stations, each no more than 10km (6 miles) from the next, with drones carrying packages between them.
After arrival at a station, a drone would swap its depleted battery pack for a fully charged one before proceeding to the next station. The routing of drones and the allocation of specific packages to specific drones would all be handled automatically, and deliveries would thus be possible over a wide area using a series of hops. It is, in short, a physical implementation of the “packet switching” model that directs data across the internet, which is why its creators call their scheme the “matternet”.
Over the matternet, so the vision goes, hospitals could send urgent medicines to remote clinics more quickly than they could via roads, and blood samples could be sent and returned within hours. A farmer could place an order for a new tractor part by text message and pay for it via mobile money-transfer. A supplier many miles away would then take the part to the local matternet station for airborne dispatch via drone.
Mind over matter
Andreas Raptopoulos, the entrepreneur who led the academic team, reckons that the scheme would be competitive with building all-weather roads. A case study of the Maseru district of Lesotho put the cost of a network of 50 base-stations and 150 drones at $900,000, compared with $1m for a 2km, one-lane road. The advantage of roads, however, is that they can carry heavy goods and people, whereas matternet drones would be limited to payloads of 2kg in a standard 10-litre container. But the scheme is potentially lifesaving in remote areas, and might also have commercial potential to deliver small packages in the rich world.
Since the original proposal, however, an ideological disagreement has emerged over how best to implement this drone-powered internet for objects. Two separate groups are now taking rather different approaches. The first, led by Mr Raptopoulos, has formed a company, called Matternet, to develop the drone and base-station hardware, and the software that will co-ordinate them. The company then hopes to sell the technology to government health departments and non-profit groups. Just as mobile phones have spurred development in poor countries, Mr Raptopoulos hopes drone delivery will do something similar.
The second group is called Aria (“autonomous roadless intelligent array”). It believes the matternet should be free, open and based on standardised protocols, just like the internet. It is developing these protocols and building prototypes that adhere to them, and inviting others to follow suit. Aria is not promoting any particular use of the technology, and will not necessarily build or run networks itself. “We understand there will be hundreds of applications, but we are not interested in running such applications,” says Arturo Pelayo, Aria’s co-founder. “We won’t aim for understanding every single geographical and cultural context where the system might be used.”
Both groups have recently started testing their first prototypes. Matternet ran a series of successful field tests of its prototype UAVs in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in September, and met local groups to sell the idea. Meanwhile, Aria also spent the summer testing, and showcased its ideas, such as the use of retrofitted shipping containers for base stations, at the Burning Man festival held in the Nevada desert in August. Flying drones in high winds without crashing into anyone presented quite a challenge.
For the delivery of drugs in developing countries, a rider on a motorbike may be a much simpler and more rugged solution. Maintaining a network of drones—a complex, immature technology—is unlikely to be easy, particularly in the remote areas that Matternet intends to target. It may be that congested city centres in rich countries will prove a more promising market.
And whether in the rich or poor world, any widespread deployment of delivery-drone fleets is bound to raise concerns about safety and regulation. It is undoubtedly a clever idea. But moving packets of data around inside the predictable environment of a computer network is one thing; moving objects around in the real world is, you might say, a very different matter.
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