This Will Make You Smarter

Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself: “otherness” not among DNA-encoded species but among life-forms using different molecules to encode traits.

This involves, first, understanding powers of ten; second, visualizing data over a wide range of magnitudes on graphs using logarithmic scales; and third, appreciating the meaning of magnitude scales, such as the decibel (dB) scale for the loudness of sounds and the Richter scale for the strength of earthquakes.

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.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multidimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole”—a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW.

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

But increasingly published negative results (which include experiments that succeed in showing no effects) are becoming another essential tool in the scientific method.

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.

Instead, eyes, wings, and the rest of life’s wonder have come about as a side effect of life itself. Living