If you really want to appreciate the mental prowess of free-jazz players and composers, you should start just one step behind. A half year before Coleman’s free-jazz session let loose the improvisational genius of eight of the best musicians of their time, John Coltrane recorded what is still considered the most sophisticated jazz solo ever—his tour de force through the rapid chord progressions of his composition “Giant Steps.” The film student Daniel Cohen has recently animated the notation for Coltrane’s solo in a YouTube video. You don’t have to be able to read music to grasp the intellectual firepower of Coltrane. After the deceivingly simple main theme, the notes start to race up and down the five lines of the stave in dizzying speeds and patterns. If you also take into consideration that Coltrane used to record unrehearsed music to keep it fresh, you know that he was endowed with a cognitive toolkit way beyond normal.
Now take these four minutes and forty-three seconds, multiply Coltrane’s firepower by eight, stretch it into thirty-seven minutes, and deduct all traditional musical structures, like chord progressions or time. The 1960 session that gave the genre its name in the first place foreshadowed not just the radical freedom the album’s title, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, implied. It was a precursor to a form of communication that has left linear conventions and entered the realm of multiple parallel interactions.
It is admittedly still hard to listen to the album. It is equally taxing to listen to recordings of Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, or Gunter Hampel. It has always been easier to understand the communication processes of this music in a live setting. One thing is a given—it is never anarchy, never was meant to be.
If you’re able to play music and you manage to get yourself invited to a free-jazz session, you’ll experience the incredible moment when all the musicians find what is considered “the pulse.” It is a collective climax of creativity and communication that can leap to the audience and create an electrifying experience. It’s hard to describe but might be comparable to the moment when the catalyst of a surfboard brings together the motor skills of the surfer’s body and the forces of the ocean’s swell, in those few seconds of synergy on top of a wave. It is a fusion of musical elements, though, that defies common musical theory.
Of course, there is a lot of free jazz that merely confirms prejudice. Or as vibraphonist/composer Hampel phrased it: “At one point it was just about being the loudest onstage.” But the musicians mentioned above found new forms and structures, Ornette Coleman’s music theory called Harmolodics being just one of them. In the perceived cacophony of their music, there is a multilayered clarity that can serve as a model for a cognitive toolkit for the twenty-first century. The ability to find cognitive, intellectual, and communication skills that work in parallel contexts rather than linear forms will be crucial. Just as free jazz abandoned harmonic structures to find new forms in polyrhythmic settings, one may have to enable oneself to work beyond proven cognitive patterns.
Collective Intelligence
Matt Ridley
Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
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 1,200-cubic-centimeter 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 the people there are smarter.
Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor—through trade and specialization—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 Southeast 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.
Risk Literacy
Gerd Gigerenzer
Psychologist; director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin; author, Gut Feelings
Literacy is the precondition for an informed citizenship in a participatory democracy. But knowing how to read and write is no longer enough. The breakneck speed of technological innovation has made risk literacy as indispensable in the twenty-first century as reading and writing were in the twentieth. Risk literacy is the ability to deal with uncertainties in an informed way.
Without it, people jeopardize their health and money and can be manipulated into experiencing unwarranted, even damaging, hopes and fears. Yet when considering how to deal with modern threats, policy makers rarely ever invoke the concept of risk literacy in the general public. To reduce the chances of another financial crisis, proposals called for stricter laws, smaller banks, reduced bonuses, lower leverage ratios, less short-termism, and other measures. But one crucial idea was missing: helping the public better understand financial risk. For instance, many of the NINJAs (No Income, No Job, No Assets) who lost everything but the shirts on their backs in the subprime crisis hadn’t realized that their mortgages were variable, not fixed-rate.
Another serious problem that risk literacy can help solve is the exploding cost of health care. Tax hikes or rationed care are often presented as the only viable solutions. Yet by promoting health literacy in patients, better care can be had for less money. For instance, many parents are unaware that a million U.S. children have unnecessary CT scans annually, and that a full-body scan can deliver a thousand times the radiation dose of a mammogram, resulting in an estimated twenty-nine thousand cancers per year.
I believe that the answer to modern crises is not simply more laws, more bureaucracy, or more money, but, first and foremost, more citizens who are risk-literate. This can be achieved by cultivating statistical thinking.
Simply stated, statistical thinking is the ability to understand and critically evaluate uncertainties and risks. Yet 76 percent of U.S. adults and 54 percent of Germans do not know how to express a 1 in 1,000 chance as a percentage (0.1 percent). Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty—geometry, trigonometry—and little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty. If taught at all, it
is mostly in the form of coin and dice problems that tend to bore young students to death. But statistical thinking could be taught as the art of real-world problem solving—i.e., the risks of drinking, AIDS, pregnancy, skateboarding, and other dangerous things. Out of all mathematical disciplines, statistical thinking connects most directly to a teenager’s world.
At the university level, law and medical students are rarely taught statistical thinking, even though they are pursuing professions whose very nature it is to deal with matters of uncertainty. U.S. judges and lawyers have been confused by DNA statistics; their British colleagues have drawn incorrect conclusions about the probability of recurring sudden infant death. Many doctors worldwide misunderstand the likelihood that a patient has cancer after a positive screening test, or can’t critically evaluate new evidence presented in medical journals. Experts without risk-literacy skills are part of the problem rather than the solution.
Unlike basic literacy, risk literacy requires emotional rewiring—rejecting comforting paternalism and illusions of certainty and learning to take responsibility and to live with uncertainty. Daring to know. But there is still a long way to go. Studies indicate that most patients want to believe in their doctor’s omniscience and don’t dare to ask for supporting evidence, yet nevertheless feel well-informed after consultations. Similarly, even after the banking crisis, many customers still blindly trust their financial advisors, jeopardizing their fortunes in a consultation that takes less time than they’d spend watching a football game. Many people cling to the belief that others can predict the future and pay fortune-tellers for illusory certainty. Every fall, renowned financial institutions forecast next year’s Dow and dollar exchange rate, even though their track record is hardly better than chance. We pay $200 billion yearly to a forecasting industry that delivers mostly erroneous future predictions.
Educators and politicians alike should realize that risk literacy is a vital topic for the twenty-first century. Rather than being nudged into doing what experts believe is right, people should be encouraged and equipped to make informed decisions for themselves. Risk literacy should be taught beginning in elementary school. Let’s dare to know—risks and responsibilities are chances to be taken, not avoided.
Science Versus Theater
Ross Anderson
Professor of security engineering, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory; researcher in the economics and psychology of information security
Modern societies waste billions on protective measures whose real aim is to reassure rather than to reduce risk. Those of us who work in security engineering refer to this as “security theater,” and there are examples all around us. We’re searched going into buildings that no terrorist would attack. Social-network operators create the pretense of a small intimate group of “friends,” in order to inveigle users into disclosing personal information that can be sold to advertisers. The users get not privacy but privacy theater. Environmental policy is a third example: Cutting carbon emissions would cost lots of money and votes, so governments go for gesture policies that are highly visible though their effect is negligible. Specialists know that most of the actions that governments claim will protect the security of the planet are just theater.
Theater thrives on uncertainty. Wherever risks are hard to measure or their consequences hard to predict, appearance can be easier to manage than reality. Reducing uncertainty and exposing gaps between appearance and reality are among the main missions of science.
Our traditional approach was the painstaking accumulation of knowledge that enables people to understand risks, options, and consequences. But theater is a deliberate construct rather than an accidental side effect of ignorance, so perhaps we need to become more sophisticated about theatrical mechanisms too. Science communicators need to become adept at disrupting the show, illuminating the dark corners of the stage, and making the masks visible for what they are.
The Base Rate
Keith Devlin
Executive director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford University; author, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern
The recent controversy about the potential dangers to health of the back-scatter radiation devices being introduced at the nation’s airports and the intrusive patdowns offered as the only alternative by the TSA might well have been avoided, had citizens been aware of, and understood, the probabilistic notion of base rate.
Whenever a statistician wants to predict the likelihood of some event based on the available evidence, there are two main sources of information that have to be taken into account: (1) the evidence itself, for which a reliability figure has to be calculated; and (2) the likelihood of the event calculated purely in terms of relative incidence. The second figure here is the base rate. Since it is just a number, obtained by the seemingly dull process of counting, it frequently gets overlooked when there is new information, particularly if that new information is obtained by “experts” using expensive equipment. In cases where the event is dramatic and scary, like a terrorist attack on an airplane, failure to take account of the base rate can result in wasting massive amounts of effort and money trying to prevent something that is very unlikely.
For example, suppose that you undergo a medical test for a relatively rare cancer. The cancer has an incidence of 1 percent among the general population. (That is the base rate.) Extensive trials have shown that the reliability of the test is 79 percent. More precisely, although the test does not fail to detect the cancer when it is present, it gives a positive result in 21 percent of the cases where no cancer is present—what is known as a false positive. When you are tested, the test produces a positive diagnosis. The question is: What is the probability that you have the cancer?
If you’re like most people, you’ll assume that if the test has a reliability rate of nearly 80 percent, and you test positive, then the likelihood that you do indeed have the cancer is about 80 percent (i.e., the probability is approximately 0.8). Are you right?
The answer is no. You have focused on the test and its reliability and overlooked the base rate. Given the scenario just described, the likelihood that you have the cancer is a mere 4.6 percent (i.e., 0.046). That’s right—there is a less than 5 percent chance that you have the cancer. Still a worrying possibility, of course. But hardly the scary 80 percent you thought at first.
In the case of the back-scatter radiation devices at the airports, the base rate for dying in a terrorist attack is lower than many other things we do every day without hesitation. In fact, according to some reports, it is about the same as the likelihood of getting cancer as a result of going through the device.
Findex
Marti Hearst
Computer scientist, University of California–Berkeley, School of Information; author, Search User Interfaces
Findex (n): The degree to which a desired piece of information can be found online.
We are the first humans in history to be able to form just about any question in our minds and know that very likely the answer can be before us in minutes, if not seconds. This omnipresent information abundance is a cognitive toolkit entirely in itself. The actuality of this continues to astonish me.
Although some have written about information overload, data smog, and the like, my view has always been the more information online the better, as long as good search tools are available. Sometimes this information is found by directed search using a Web search engine, sometimes by serendipity by following links, and sometimes by asking hundreds of people in your social network or hundreds of thousands of people on a question-answering Web site such as Answers.com, Quora, or Yahoo Answers.
I do not actually know of a real findability index, but tools in the field of information retrieval could be applied to develop one. One of the unsolved problems in the field is how to help the searcher to determine if the information simply is not available.
An Ass
ertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence
Susan Fiske
Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University; author, Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us
The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People’s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.
Scientists Should Be Scientists
Gregory Paul
Independent researcher; author, Dinosaurs of the Air: The Evolution and Loss of Flight in Dinosaurs and Birds
The archenemy of scientific thinking is conversation, as in typical human conversational discourse, much of which is BS. I have become rather fed up with talking to people. Seriously, it is something of a problem. Fact is, folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and thinking they’re true to the point of obstinacy, even when they have little or no idea of what they’re talking about in the first place. We all do it. It’s part of how the sloppy mind-generating piece of meat between our ears is prone to work. Humans may be the most rational beings on the planet these days—but that’s not saying much, considering that the next most rational are chimpanzees.
Take creationism. Along with the global-climate issue and parental fear of vaccination, the fact that a big chunk of the American body politic denies evolutionary and paleontological science and actually thinks a god created humans in near historical times is causing scientists to wonder just what is wrong with the thinking of so many people. Mass creationism has been used as a classic example of mass antiscientific thinking by others responding to this question. But I am not going to focus so much on the usual problem of why creationism is popular but more on what many who promote science over creationism think they know about those who deny the reality of Darwin’s theory.
This Will Make You Smarter Page 24
