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<DIV><FONT size=2>From: <EM>The New York Times</EM></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>
<DIV class=timestamp>March 28, 2011</DIV>
<DIV class=kicker></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0">Tools for
Thinking</NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE>
<H6 class=byline>By <A class=meta-per title="More Articles by David Brooks"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html?inline=nyt-per">DAVID
BROOKS</A></H6></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody><NYT_CORRECTION_TOP></NYT_CORRECTION_TOP>
<P>A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What
scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? </P>
<P>The good folks at <A href="http://edge.org/" target=_>Edge.org</A> <A
title=" " href="http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_index.html#greenej">organized a
symposium</A>, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a
linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path
dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or
inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the
past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”
</P>
<P>For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the
manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have
typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty
keyboard. </P>
<P>Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories,
McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade
writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from using
the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s, language became
less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is regarded as an
eccentric. </P>
<P>Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung
Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that
worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This
effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is
viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq. </P>
<P>Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion,
which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you
are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of
income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people
think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be
reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the
myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among
people who have the same education are huge.” </P>
<P>Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has a
brilliant entry on Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a
dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a
different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The
relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be
displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties
(dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels). </P>
<P>Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship
between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are taking
over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new discoveries about
the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind supervene the
mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive
sciences even as they supervene them. </P>
<P>If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the
Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior
that is better explained by context. </P>
<P>I’d also nominate the distinction between emotion and arousal. There’s a
general assumption that emotional people are always flying off the handle.
That’s not true. We would also say that Emily Dickinson was emotionally astute.
As far as I know, she did not go around screaming all the time. It would be
useful if we could distinguish between the emotionality of Dickinson and the
arousal of the talk-show jock. </P>
<P>Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of
emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point. </P>
<P>We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their
constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent
systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of
interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the
parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.
</P>
<P>Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of
interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in
it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization,
rising health care costs and a bad marriage. </P>
<P>Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be
studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still
try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease
out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently. </P>
<P>We’d certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium,
which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once. 
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<DIV><FONT size=2>___________________________________________</FONT></DIV><FONT
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