This Idea Is Brilliant

1. Science is a Method, Not a Subject

The scientific method is simply that body of practices best suited for obtaining reliable knowledge.

Beyond the Lab. Science isn't confined to test tubes and microscopes; it's a way of thinking and acquiring knowledge. It's about using reliable methods to understand the world, whether it's the behavior of molecules or the patterns of history.

• Science is not just physics, chemistry, and biology.
• It includes psychology, economics, history, and political science.
• The scientific method varies across fields, but the goal is always reliable knowledge.

Scientia as a Meme. The essence of science is "scientia," meaning "knowledge" in Latin. Spreading scientific understanding is crucial for progress, even if some people prefer to remain in ignorance. Science is a tool for understanding anything, from human nature to the origins of life.

Reliable Knowledge. The scientific method is not a rigid set of rules but a flexible approach tailored to each field. It's about using the best practices to obtain reliable knowledge, whether through controlled experiments or observation-based studies. Science is not just about what we know, but how we know it.

2. Longevity is a Measure of Intelligence

The longevity factor is a measure of intelligence—the ability to predict potential problems and solve them in advance.

Civilization's Lifespan. The longevity of a technological civilization is a crucial factor in the Drake equation, which estimates the number of communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. It's not just about how intelligent we are, but how long we can survive.

• Existential threats include climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, and asteroid collisions.
• Solutions require both local and space-based efforts.
• Long-term survival depends on spreading out into space.

Galactic Thinking. We need to think beyond our planet and consider the galactic scale. Colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to more distant destinations, such as Proxima b. We must master interstellar travel and develop beyond our organic origins.

Riding the Expansion. Even galactic civilizations face existential threats, such as death bubbles. The accelerating expansion of the universe may offer an escape route, by splitting into daughter civilizations and putting as much distance between them as possible. Our responsibility is to keep going for as long as the laws of physics allow.

3. Our Minds are Full of Illusions

Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth. We often overestimate our understanding of how things work. This "illusion of explanatory depth" (IOED) is pervasive, from everyday objects to complex scientific concepts.

• People rate their understanding higher before attempting to explain something.
• After trying to explain, their self-reported understanding drops significantly.
• The IOED extends to political issues, where it can fuel extremism.

Humility and Moderation. The IOED can be a powerful tool for promoting humility and reducing political polarization. When people are forced to confront their lack of understanding, they become more moderate in their views.

• The most ignorant are often the most overconfident.
• Expertise leads to a recognition of complexity and calibrated confidence.
• Recognizing our modest understanding is a first step to bridging divides.

Superficial Consumption. We consume information widely but not deeply, often relying on headlines and soundbites. This superficial consumption contributes to the IOED and makes us more susceptible to misinformation. We need to promote deeper engagement with knowledge.

4. The Past is Encoded in Our Genes

If only we could read the genome in the appropriate way, it would be a kind of negative imprint of ancient worlds, a description of the ancestral environments of the species: The Genetic Book of the Dead.

The Genetic Book of the Dead. Our genomes contain a record of our ancestors' environments. By reading the genome in the appropriate way, we can reconstruct the past.

• Webbed feet indicate an aquatic way of life.
• Camouflage reveals environments where ancestors evaded predation.
• Cellular chemistry and genes hold hidden clues.

Reading the Genome. We can use statistical techniques to find common features in animals living in similar environments. By comparing the genomes of aquatic, desert, arboreal, and subterranean mammals, we can identify genes that are associated with specific environments.

Revealing History. The genome can also reveal other aspects of history, such as demography. Coalescence analysis can show population bottlenecks and migration events. The genome is a palimpsest of water, land, and other environments, waiting to be deciphered.

5. Evolution is a Tinkerer, Not an Engineer

Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it new functions or combining several systems to produce a more elaborate one.

The Tinkerer's Approach. Natural selection is not an engineer designing the perfect organism but a tinkerer working with available materials. This means that evolution often takes the easiest, most accessible route, not necessarily the most optimal one.

• Penguins use wings for swimming because they lack tails.
• Pandas have a modified wrist bone for a "thumb" because they lack a true opposable digit.
• Giraffes have long vertebrae because mammals are constrained to have seven cervical vertebrae.

Imperfect Adaptations. We shouldn't expect perfection from natural selection. It just gets the job done, taking the easiest route. Humans are not perfection personified, just natural selection's way of turning a quadrupedal ape into a big-brained biped.

Contingency of Evolution. Had we not come along, some other species might have evolved hyperintelligence. But having come from different starting blocks, that species probably wouldn't have looked much like us. Evolution is contingent on the materials at hand.

6. Information Spreads Like a Virus

The spread of information is not just a human affair, it’s as old as the universe.

Viral Information. Information spreads rapidly, like a virus. This is true not only for digital memes but also for physical systems. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy tends to increase, which is nothing more nor less than the natural tendency of bits of information to reproduce and spread.

The Virial Theorem. In systems governed by gravitation, information tends to spread at an accelerating rate. The virial theorem implies that when gravitating systems lose energy and information, they heat up. This is why stars grow hotter as they lose energy.

The Meme Race. Information that reproduces itself twice in a second wins out over information that reproduces only once in a second. This leads to a race to the bottom, where subtlety and nuance are lost. Truth is a constraint that can slow down the spread of information. Fake news can propagate more rapidly than real news because it is unconstrained by reality.

7. Order Arises from Disorder

The second law of thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.

The Second Law. The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy never decreases. Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, and less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes.

• Usable energy is dissipated as heat flows from warmer to cooler bodies.
• Orderly states are a tiny sliver of all possible states.
• Any perturbation will nudge a system toward disorder.

Fighting Entropy. The second law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder is a major source of human folly.

Misfortune and Poverty. The second law implies that misfortune may be no one's fault. Poverty is the default state of humankind. What needs to be explained is wealth. We should focus on solving problems rather than blaming others.

8. The Universe is a System of Algorithms

In the 21st century, we’re making progress understanding the nature of complexity in computer science and biology based on the mathematics of algorithms.

Algorithms Everywhere. Algorithms are step-by-step recipes that we follow to achieve a goal. They're not just for computers; they're also at the heart of biological processes, from the growth of trees to the development of brains.

• Fractals grow out of simple recursive algorithms.
• Brains are constructed by algorithms embedded in DNA.
• Learning and memory are governed by algorithms that change the strengths of synapses.

The Universe of Algorithms. The universe is full of algorithms that generate complexity. Even simple cellular automata can produce complex behaviors. The remarkable complexity we find in nature could have evolved by sampling the simplest space of chemical interactions between molecules.

Automated Discovery. We can use automated search to find algorithms that solve interesting problems. Each deep-learning network is a point in the space of all possible algorithms and was found by automated search. The 21st century has just begun, and there may be whole galaxies of useful algorithms that humans have not yet discovered.

9. We are Governed by Chance and Bias

“Like all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.”

The Babylonian Lottery. The slow encroachment of programmatic chance, or algorithms, is like the lottery in Babylon. Algorithms are increasingly complex, specialized, and opaque. We ignore their impact for as long as possible.

• Algorithms have evolved from deterministic to probabilistic.
• Few can understand today's algorithms from first principles.
• We ignore the impact of algorithms because it conflicts with our mythologies of meritocracy.

Biases and Filters. We are subject to various biases, including optimism bias, skepticism bias, and confirmation bias. These biases affect how we interpret information and make decisions.

• Optimism bias derives from a strong like or hope.
• Skepticism bias derives from dislike or fear.
• Confirmation bias is the cherry-picking of confirmatory facts.

The Power of Story. To avoid the fate of the Babylonians, we need to replace enumeration with description. Stories are guides to decision-making along the way. A story teaches us to make new mistakes rather than recursively repeating the old.

10. The Future is Shaped by Our Choices

The second benefit is the expansion of our toolset for solving associated dilemmas.

Intertemporal Choice. Many of our decisions involve trade-offs between immediate and future rewards. We tend to excessively discount the value of future rewards, making it difficult to part with money that could offer pleasure in the moment.

• Intertemporal choices are not limited to financial ones.
• They also involve cooperation, honesty, loyalty, and perseverance.
• Self-control evolved to help us manage social capital, not just economic capital.

Future Self-Continuity. The extent to which we imagine our future self to be similar to our present self predicts our willingness to consider the interests of the future self. Future self-continuity can be measured and manipulated.

• People with greater future self-continuity are more willing to wait for future rewards.
• They also show less delinquent behavior and act more ethically.
• Interventions can enhance future self-continuity.

Moral Emotions. Moral emotions, such as gratitude, compassion, and guilt, lead people to value the future. They enhance our character and help us to share, persevere, be patient, and be diligent. We should continue exploring the mind's inclination toward selfish, short-term temptations and its many mechanisms to overcome them.

11. The World is a Network of Interconnections

The notion of a “climate system” is the powerful idea that the temperature we feel when we walk outside our door every day of the year, the wind blowing in our face while we take a walk, the clouds we see in the sky, the waves we watch rippling on the ocean’s surface as we stroll on the beach are all part of the same coherent, interconnected planetary system governed by a small number of deterministic physical laws.

The Climate System. The climate system is a coherent, interconnected planetary system governed by physical laws. It includes temperature, wind, clouds, and ocean waves.

• The climate system transports heat from the equator to the poles.
• It can generate its own resonant modes, such as El Niño and La Niña.
• It can also generate chaotic dynamics.

The Noösphere. The Noösphere, or "the sphere of mind," is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. It's the collective human mind as a new geological force.

• Humans have domesticated information, just as early farmers domesticated the land.
• Collective learning has made us a planet-changing species.
• The Noösphere became the primary driver of change on Earth in the mid-20th century.

The Gaia Hypothesis. The planet Earth is a self-regulated living being. The planet, in all its parts, remains in suitable condition for life thanks to the behavior and action of living organisms.

• Earth regulates its own atmosphere.
• Life avoids decaying to thermodynamical equilibrium by feeding on negative entropy.
• Humans are unwittingly no more than Gaia's disease.

12. Reality is Relative and Emergent

Thought, passion, love . . . this internal world we experience, including all the meaning and purpose in our lives, arises naturally from the interactions of elementary particles.

Emergence. Our internal world arises naturally from the interactions of elementary particles. The magic of life comes from emergence, the unimaginably large numbers of interactions that make this magic possible.

• Emergent qualities arise from vast numbers of interacting entities.
• Analysis is practically useless for understanding complex systems.
• We can more effectively understand an entity using principles deduced from experiments at its own level.

Strata of the World. The emergent strata of the world are roughly recapitulated by the hierarchy of our major scientific subjects. At each higher level, new behavior and properties appear that aren't obvious from the interactions of the constituent entities in the level below but do arise from them.

• Atomic physics emerges from particle physics.
• Chemistry emerges from atomic physics.
• Biology emerges from biochemistry.
• And so on.

No Supernatural Influence. Natural emergence is all it takes to create all the magic of life from building blocks of simple inanimate matter. We should never forget that we and everything in our inner and outer world are emergent structures arising in many strata from a comprehensible physical foundation.

Last updated: January 18, 2025