This Will Make You Smarter

William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older. Perhaps life is lived on a logarithmic time scale, compressed toward the end.

reactive use of intelligence narrows our vision. In contrast, projective thinking is expansive, “open-ended,” and speculative, requiring the thinker to create the context, concepts, and the objectives.

Supervenience is a shorthand abstraction, native to Anglo-American philosophy, that provides a general framework for thinking about how everything relates to everything else.

But increasingly published negative results (which include experiments that succeed in showing no effects) are becoming another essential tool in the scientific method.

McClintock, Prusiner, and Marshall offered projective thinking, suspending their disbelief regarding scientific views accepted at the time.

Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them.

They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after it’s solved than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough.

The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits.

For that, we must look for and invest in quantum jumps in technology with low probability of success; we must create black-swan technologies. We must enable the multiplication of resources