Smarter Than You Think

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

It turns out that the type of people in the group and the way they interact spell the difference between success and failure.

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

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.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,

Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

When tools and institutions emerged to track Americans’ personal data—like the Social Security number or credit bureaus—we passed laws to limit who could see our info and how long it was retained. Artificial forgetting can work if we want it to.

In “Funes, the Memorious,”

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.

There are terrible parts of my life I’d rather not have documented (a divorce, the sudden death of my best friend at age forty); or at least, when I recall them, I might prefer my inaccurate but self-serving human memories.