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Smarter Than You Think
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Knowing when to shift between public and private thinking—when to blast an idea online, when to let it slow bake—is a crucial new skill: cognitive diversity. When I get blocked while typing away at a project on my computer, I grab a pencil and paper, so I can use a tactile, swoopy, this-connects-to-that style of writing to unclog my brain. Once an
... See moreClive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
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.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
It turns out that the type of people in the group and the way they interact spell the difference between success and failure.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia, bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
His answer was the memex, a high-tech desk. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he wrote. Seated at their memex, users could peruse thousands of bo
... See moreClive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
Evernote much?
In other words, if we know a digital tool is going to remember a fact, we’re slightly less likely to remember it ourselves.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
I think this means that if you use a trusted system to offload the work of remembering, you need to build paths of rediscovery. In apps such as Evernote, this is achieved through the implementation of tagging schemas and auto-organizational functions such as time, place and contents search.
As Farhad Manjoo documented in his book True Enough, it isn’t just about opinions—like-minded groups reinforce each other’s lousy, half-true, or even patently wrong facts. This is called selective exposure: we seek out and pay close attention to facts that suit what we believe, ignoring the ones that don’t.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
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.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
I love when Popular Highlights in Kindle draws attention to passages I would have glossed over.
Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.