Smarter Than You Think

The trick is to encourage people to join in but also to think for themselves.

The “extended mind” theory of cognition argues that the reason humans are so intellectually dominant is that we’ve always outsourced bits of cognition, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied realms. Printed books amplified our memory. Inexpensive paper and reliable pens made it possible to externalize our thoughts quickly. Stu

While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had found interesting—and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I’d only lightly skimmed myself.

To be really smart, though, an online group needs to obey one final rule—and a rather counterintuitive one. The members can’t have too much contact with one another. To work best, the members of a collective group ought to be able to think and work independently.

The lifelogs remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science,”

Without a way to find or make sense of the material, a lifelog’s greatest strength—its byzantine, brain-busting level of detail—becomes, paradoxically, its greatest flaw. Sure, go ahead and archive your every waking moment, but how do you parse it? Review it? Inspect it? Nobody has another life in which to relive their previous one.

In “Funes, the Memorious,”

He discovered that because PowerPoint slides are low resolution and designed to be projected on a wall and read at a distance, the tool encourages people to be overly reductive. As a point of comparison, he looked at the gold standard of everyday charts—the data-rich ones you’d see in newspapers like The New York Times. Tufte found that the average

“I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”

Games evoke modes of thinking that can be enormously valuable in education. They teach you that complex things are interesting because of their complexity. The trick is to learn how to use them in the right way.