To move up: What is this an example or instance of? To move down: What is an example or instance of this?

One reason humans will always transcend machines in their ability to synthesize is that they can empathize and comprehend the implications for humans in ways algorithms never can. Seeing the whole is essential to understand what is possible and the paths that lead there.

Our understanding of the world is based on how we bring together the fragments of the world we perceive to create meaning.

We should adopt as a core precept the adage of influential social scientist Gregory Bateson: “Knowledge comes from but a single perspective; wisdom comes from multiple perspectives.”

If you are seeking to improve your thinking, prioritize content that has withstood the test of time over continuously scanning for the latest updates.

Herbert Simon coined the neologism “satisfice” to describe decisions that sufficed to satisfy a threshold of acceptability.

Information serves us if it helps us to understand the world better, make better decisions, and live more fulfilled lives, even in the smallest way. Information does not serve us well if it misleads us, reinforces our biases, makes us unhappy, or simply wastes our time and attention by being irrelevant to our intentions.

Mark Beeman, whom you will meet again later in this book, explain that “we continuously build mental models of the world around us—our boxes—to help predict what will happen next. Any deviation from these expectations causes a group of neurons to shout in synchrony to signal that something is different, unexpected, or just wrong. And those

Rather than sources, we should think about “portals,” the doorways through which we discover information, each with distinctive characteristics in how they filter and aggregate inputs.