What it means 'to think'
Ideas that provoke thought sit outside the contours of noisy and crowded topics, often where many disciplines converge.
“Think with your head” is terrible advice. Because it glosses over what it means ‘to think.’ The process of thinking uses reason to consider facts in order to understand something, make a decision, or solve a problem.
There’s accountability built into it. That’s the part we tend to gloss over.
Knowledge comes before thinking independently.
It has to. And we get that by listening, reading, and discussing topics from different reasoned perspectives. The reason bit makes everyone accountable for the facts... and the lies.
Understanding is a prerequisite for any change to happen.
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Ideas that provoke thought sit outside the contours of noisy and crowded topics, often where many disciplines converge.
I created my own lists to seek inspiration and knowledge. Part dug into the past, with a collection of diverse disciplines and authors, and part discovery of compelling new releases.
The game is not as much what to read, but how you read.
Attention-grabs
1.
I discovered You're Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by journalist Kate Murphy.
Thesis: we don’t know how to listen, don’t even know that we’re not listening, and it’s hurting us. A couple of quotes that resonated:
“While people often say, ‘I can’t talk right now,’ what they really mean is ‘I can’t listen right now.’”
“People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.”
“We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong,” the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.” Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently. You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.”
Rather than a foundational analysis of the problem and a methodology to create the environment for listening, Murphy shares a few tenets: (1) People are unpredictable—everyone we know or meet; (2) What we know is different from what they know; (3) There’s more to the story than first appears.
I’ve often maintained that nobody can read minds... but we can work on it. The incentive: Fewer and fewer people make the time to listen. Hence the default option has become not to have the conversation at all. Because listening is a large part of communication, that’s how we fail to make sense of what’s going on.
Listening involves change, it opens the door to discovery and self-awareness. At best, it helps us unlock what we overlooked.
A character in the Shetland novels series by Ann Cleeves, who manages to create the environment where listening happens. Jimmy Perez is observant, and very still. There’s something to the stillness. We’re used to thinking listening is active. The trick may be reconciling the two.
2.
Sway: Unraveling Unconscious Bias by behavioral scientist Pragya Agarwal, with expertise in cognition, HCI and User-centered Design, focused especially in diversity and inclusion.
Thesis: unintentional bias are hardwired into our subconscious, influence our lives and decisions.
“Oh, it's all right, you’re a girl,” he said with a laugh.
How many times is this an implicit and automatic thought? Agarwal makes extensive use of footnotes and her writing is a bit dense in places. But there are many interesting and strong parts. Some reminded me of the work of Danah Boyd.
The book is split into sections: (1.) ‘Hardwired’ covers basic neuroscience and psychology–how our brains create an image of ourselves, the world, and how the two fit together; (2.) ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ covers the ways in which our brains reinforce biases and prevent us moving past them.
(3.) ‘Sex Type-Cast’ covers what everyone thinks of when they think of bias–prejudice, from racism to sexism to homophobia. It also covers things that people might think of less–fatphobia, ageism, and discrimination based on ‘beauty’ or conventional attractiveness; (4.) ‘Moral Conundrum’ looks to the future and the impact of technology on bias.
They're all familiar themes. But in novel combinations.
3.
Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford.
Thesis: our privacy gives us power. Digital technology wants to take it away by stealing our personal data and influence what companies decide. To reclaim that power and democracy, we must protect our privacy.
Consider:
“When companies collect your data, it doesn’t hurt, you don’t feel the absence, you don’t see it physically. We’re having to learn as we have bad experiences.”
“When somebody says AI is ‘cutting edge’, many times what they are saying is, ‘We haven’t tested it enough to know if it works. It shouldn’t be tested on an entire population without our knowledge, consent or compensation … We’re being treated as guinea pigs.”
Véliz wrote this book for all the people who say they have nothing to hide.
Started as an essay on Aeon, it’s a large ethical question worth pursuing. Because it does matter what information and data companies harvest, scrape, and aggregate on us. There are consequences. Here’s a podcast interview of Véliz on surveillance capitalism, individual self-determination and the fractured shared reality.
I like my appliances to stay dumb while they do their job, thank you very much. I’ve also been using DuckDuckGo as a search engine in all my devices, ad blockers on Firefox browsers, and doing many other small things to favor the companies and products that don’t track and infringe on privacy.
Timnit Gebru was recently forced out of Google for highlighting the risks of large language models. Privacy, power, and influence are interconnected and have become a renewed source of social tension in the name of efficiency (which sounds so innocent.)
“The present generation
enjoys the greatest power in history,
but it appears to have the shortest vision in history.
That combination is lethal."- Brian Eno, long-term thinking
From a wandering mind to another
Limiting the number of things we need to know when in ‘do mode’ helps. But it’s the stimulation we get from the collision of different ideas that pushes us beyond the limitations of what we know.
To me, science and the humanities belong to the same conversation. They complement each other in the timeless questions they ask.
4.
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by physicist Carlo Rovelli is a collection of writings that cover a wide range of scientific and philosophical thoughts. We tend to typecast people to their work, or role. It’s refreshing to find more of the person in the writing here.
He includes an exploration of Dante’s understanding of the shape of the cosmos, which anticipated Einstein’s brilliant intuition of a ‘three sphere’ universe by six centuries. Six centuries!
Another essay is a meditation on the nature of the octopus’ consciousness. Imagine what it would feel like thinking with all your limbs.
5.
A previous book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a short read based on a series of articles he published in Sole 24 Ore. You’ll find philosophical questions blending with theoretical concepts. Our quest is clear: who am I, why am I here?
“Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astound us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate.”
Lesson one is about Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Space is not empty, but composed of particles of some kind. The sun bends space around itself, and the planets circle around the sun because they follow the curve of space (like marbles that roll around a funnel.) This explains the ‘force of gravity’ that prevents the planets from flying off into the galaxy.
Einstein’s major breakthrough was to realize that Newton’s gravitational field is not a field at all but is space-time itself:
“Within this equation there is a teeming universe. And here the magical richness of the theory opens up into a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman, but which have all turned out to be true.”
Special theory of relativity says that the faster you move, the slower time passes. This would be really obvious if you could travel at the speed of light.
Lesson two: Quantum Mechanics laws “do not describe what happens to a physical system but only how one physical system affects another.”
The energy of a field is distributed in ‘quanta,’ or packets of energy, like electrons in an electrical field. But quanta only exist when they're interacting with something else, so they bleep in an out of existence. Quanta move randomly so we can’t know where they’ll manifest themselves.
Lesson three: the Big Bang theory and the architecture of the cosmos talks about many other wonders revealed by Einstein’s theory combined with many of the tools of modern physics such as radio telescopes and particle detectors.
Our sun is one star among billions of stars in the galaxy, there are billions of galaxies. There may even be more than one universe, but we don’t know.
Lesson four, Particles, tells us how the findings of quantum mechanics led to an explosion of understanding of the building blocks of the cosmos in the postwar years. The universe is teeming with quarks and electrons, Higgs bosons and neutrinos. The culmination of all this progress was the Standard Model of particle physics, essentially a kind of periodic table which lists all known particles and their properties.
Unlike general relativity the Standard Model is incomplete. Many of the particles' parameters are poorly understood, and the model itself is incompatible with general relativity. We have much more to discover in fundamental physics.
Lesson five, Quantum Gravity, is about the marriage of general relativity theory where he universe is a continuous curved space, and quantum mechanics, where the universe is composed of particles that bleep in and out of existence. Even though they work well, the two theories contradict each other. Physicists are trying to merge the ideas in a field of study called 'loop quantum gravity.'
One combined theory suggests that space is not continuous but made up of infinitesimally small ‘grains of space’ called loops somewhat connected like a chain link fence. This theory has repercussions incompatible with the reality of time, it needs a lot more of work.
Lesson six is about probability, time, and the heat of Black Holes. The notion of time is elusive and has been the subject of much debate among physicists. Rovelli points out, though, that heat distinguishes the past from the future. As time goes by, heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder (for example, a teaspoon heats up in hot tea.) The science of heat is called thermodynamics.
We don’t know what happens to a gravitational field when it heats up, but a clue might be found in a black hole — a collapsed star with a gravitational field so strong that nothing (not even light) can escape. Black holes are hot — in essence hot spots of space-time. They combine quantum mechanics, general relativity, and thermodynamics. Eventually scientists might be able to use black holes to reveal the true nature of time.
Lesson seven, ourselves, is the ultimate entity that allows us to figure all this out—the human brain. If humans are composed of ephemeral particles, the same stuff as the rest of the universe, where do we get our sense of ourselves, of being conscious and making decisions. Scientists studying the brain are trying to shed light on this.
“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”
One of the most poetic passages in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics deals with the tension between our desire to explain phenomena through storytelling and our thirst for knowledge and learning, which ignites out imagination.
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the Savannah—scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science.
The confusion between these two diverse human activities—inventing stories and following traces in order to find something—is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night’s storytelling.
The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.”
I wish it were true, the bit about kindness. And maybe if we focus on it, we can influence conversations in that direction.
Because humans have been mostly focused on progress,
that’s how we respond to change.
Many parts of history tell us, we’re not very nice when something or someone stands in front of our goal... or we think they are.
Historian Alessandro Barbero starts his biography of Dante with a battle scene. We see the poet, we forget the knight and politician. He was all three, and we have plenty of documents that explain the circumstances that led to his exile.
Reasoning is the best way to learn to think. By trying to explain things to ourselves, we become the source, rather than relying on something external. That’s how we make sense of things, by thinking through them.
Consider that throughout history, ‘to think’ has been a luxury associated with prestige and leisure, a thing of value we may not appreciate when it’s within reach. With dire consequences.