The Edge's Annual Question is a great compilation of brief
effusions from science groupies like me. This year the question
was
What scientific concept would improve everybody's
cognitive toolkit?
My answer was this:
Brilliant people, be they anthropologists,
psychologists or economists, assume that brilliance is the key to
human achievement. They vote for the cleverest people to run
governments, they ask the cleverest experts to devise plans for the
economy, they credit the cleverest scientists with discoveries, and
they speculate on how human intelligence evolved in the first
place.
They are all barking up the wrong tree. The
key to human achievement is not individual intelligence at all. The
reason human beings dominate the planet is not because they have
big brains: Neanderthals had big brains but were just another kind
of predatory ape. Evolving a 1200-cc brain and a lot of fancy
software like language was necessary but not sufficient for
civilization. The reason some economies work better than others is
certainly not because they have cleverer people in charge, and the
reason some places make great discoveries is not because they have
smarter people.
Human achievement is entirely a networking
phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division
of labor - through trade and specialisation - that human society
stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying
capacity, technological virtuosity and knowledge base of the
species. We can see this in all sorts of phenomena: the correlation
between technology and connected population size in Pacific
islands; the collapse of technology in people who became isolated,
like native Tasmanians; the success of trading city states in
Greece, Italy, Holland and south-east Asia; the creative
consequences of trade.
Human achievement is based on collective
intelligence - the nodes in the human neural network are people
themselves. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then
sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become
capable of doing things they do not even understand. As
the economist Leonard Read observed in his essay "I, Pencil' (which
I'd like everybody to read), no single person knows how to make
even a pencil - the knowledge is distributed in society among many
thousands of graphite miners, lumberjacks, designers and factory
workers.
That's why, as Friedrich Hayek observed,
central planning never worked: the cleverest person is no match for
the collective brain at working out how to distribute consumer
goods. The idea of bottom-up collective intelligence, which Adam
Smith understood and Charles Darwin echoed, and which Hayek
expounded in his remarkable essay "The use of knowledge in
society", is one idea I wish everybody had in their cognitive
toolkit.
Some of the other answers were great, including this from Sue Blackmore, of which this is an
extract (and which should be compulsory reading for climate
scientists):
The phrase "correlation is not a cause"
(CINAC) may be familiar to every scientist but has not found its
way into everyday language, even though critical thinking and
scientific understanding would improve if more people had this
simple reminder in their mental toolkit.
One reason for this lack is that CINAC can be
surprisingly difficult to grasp. I learned just how difficult when
teaching experimental design to nurses, physiotherapists and other
assorted groups. They usually understood my favourite example:
imagine you are watching at a railway station. More and more people
arrive until the platform is crowded, and then - hey presto - along
comes a train. Did the people cause the train to arrive (A causes
B)? Did the train cause the people to arrive (B causes A)? No, they
both depended on a railway timetable (C caused both A and B).
I soon discovered that this understanding
tended to slip away again and again, until I began a new regime,
and started every lecture with an invented example to get them
thinking.
"Right", I might say "Suppose it's been
discovered (I don't mean it's true) that children who eat more
tomato ketchup do worse in their exams. Why could this be?" They
would argue that it wasn't true (I'd explain the point of thought
experiments again). "But there'd be health warnings on ketchup if
it's poisonous" (Just pretend it's true for now please) and then
they'd start using their imaginations.
"There's something in the ketchup that slows
down nerves", "Eating ketchup makes you watch more telly instead of
doing your homework", "Eating more ketchup means eating more chips
and that makes you fat and lazy". Yes, yes, probably wrong but
great examples of A causes B - go on. And so to "Stupid people have
different taste buds and don't like ketchup", "Maybe if you don't
pass your exams your Mum gives you ketchup". And finally " "Poorer
people eat more junk food and do less well at school".
