Smarter Than You Think

In essence, a new form of chess intelligence was emerging. You could rank the teams like this: (1) a chess grand master was good; (2) a chess grand master playing with a laptop was better. But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance. “Hu

When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.

I also suspect that as more forms of media become digital, they’ll become sites for public thinking—particularly digital books. Books have always propelled smart conversations; the historic, face-to-face book club has migrated rapidly online, joining the sprawling comments at sites like Goodreads. But the pages of e-books are themselves likely to b

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.

Failed networks kill ideas.

Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about.

Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work.

“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.”

“If you’re finding information that supports your conversation, that’s making it richer; it’s multiplexing, not multitasking,”