When we cling rigidly to our constructs, as McClintock’s peers did, we can be blinded to what’s right in front of us.

There are multiple stakeholders, who don’t define the problem the same way. If the number of uninsured goes down but costs go up, is that progress? We don’t even know.

the laboratory already intuit that most ideas don’t pan out, and those that do sometimes result from chance or charitable interpretations. Conversely, they also recognize that replicability means they’re really onto something.

Supervenience is a shorthand abstraction, native to Anglo-American philosophy, that provides a general framework for thinking about how everything relates to everything else.

That is, life’s diversity does not exist because it is necessary for living things. Birds

Your mouth alone contains more than seven hundred distinct kinds of bacteria.

we can use design principles and discipline to shape our minds. This is different from acquiring knowledge. It’s about designing how each of us thinks, remembers, and communicates—appropriately and effectively for the digital age.

In our post-privacy world of pervasive social-media sharing, GPS tracking, cellphone-tower triangulation, wireless sensor monitoring, browser-cookie targeting, face-recognition detecting, consumer-intention profiling, and endless other means by which our

Conventional wisdom would recommend incremental improvements to maximize the potential of the existing infrastructure. The fundamental flaw in conventional wisdom is the failure to acknowledge the possibility of a black swan.