Smarter Than You Think

How tech boosts our cognitive abilities

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How tech boosts our cognitive abilities

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Rocketship.fm

Clive, what's the biggest shift in the tech climate that you've witnessed in your career?

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11yr ago

Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson

Maker

@jeffumbro Hey Jeff! I think, weirdly, the answer is less about technology that our orientation to it. Specifically, it's the shift from thinking of what the internet is for. Sometimes around the middle of the 00s, people started realizing that the Internet wasn't about accessing "information" -- it was about accessing *each other*. The early days of the Internet were all about the idea that we would suddenly have wonderful access to databases of stuff: facts, articles, whatever -- things produced by traditional editorial entities like newspapers. And to a certain extent, that happened! We have enormously more resources at our fingertips these days. But what fewer people predicted, in early days of the Internet, was that the big impact would be in giving us access to other people -- in conversations, discussions, chat, texting, live video, you name it. And despite the many conflicts that emerge when people have new ways to talk to one another, most people tell me this social shift has been enormously beneficial to their everyday lives. If the Internet is a thinking tool, it's because it allows us to think in concert with other people. Clay Shirky put this really nicely some years ago: "We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other."

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11yr ago

NotionMetrics

Hi Clive, thanks for stopping by. What's your favorite cognitive bias?

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11yr ago

Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson

Maker

@brentsum Heh, this is an awesome question. If you mean "which is my favorite cognitive bias to complain about", it's probably what psychologists sometimes call a "frequency illusion". This often occurs when you really really like -- or really really hate -- something, so you start paying closer and closer attention to its occurrence in everyday life ... and you wind up wildly overestimating how common it is. Say one day you suddenly decide that hipsters wearing fedoras are really annoying; and *because* they're so annoying to you, your eye immediately lights -- and lingers -- upon every single person you see wearing one in public. Pretty soon it's like, arg, god: Why is everyone suddenly wearing fedoras? CURSE YOU, HIPSTERS. Of course, it's simply not true that everyone is wearing fedoras. It's just that you're noticing every single one you see, and oversampling it. The frequency illusion crops up a lot in people's complaints about how technology is supposedly changing or deforming everyday life. I pretty frequently hear people complain something like: "I walk into a cafe, and *every single young person* is looking at their phone! No-one is talking to anyone else any more." What's really happening is that a) a subset of people are, indeed, staring at their phones when they're putatively meeting/dining/drinking with a friend, but b) these incidents are actually a lot more rare than social apocalyptics claim (this data isn't precisely on point, but for comparison's sake, a study of the phone-gazing behavior of people in public parks suggests that the actual number of people looking at any given point in time ranges from ... 3% to 10%: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/1... nonetheless, c) the frequency illusion has made it *seem* to the observer that, dammit, *everyone* is on their phones, all the time. Two years ago I started doing a little experiment. When I'm in a restaurant or cafe, at random moments I'll look up and do a quick visual scan of the room, counting how many people are there that are in a social mode -- i.e. with other people -- and of that population, what percentage are actually looking at their phones. It's nearly always a small minority, and frequently it's zero. (The trick is trying to pick as random a moment as possible to do the survey, because frequency illusions occur when you sample the world around you in a specifically nonrandom fashion: i.e. when you notice things only *because* they've annoyed you.)

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11yr ago

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