Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ clarify the mind even more. Bloggers frequently tell me that they’ll get an idea for a blog post and sit down at the keyboard in a state of excitement, ready to pour their words forth. But pretty soon they think about the fact that someone’s going to read this as soon as it’s posted. And suddenly all the weak points in their argument, their clichés and lazy, autofill thinking, become painfully obvious. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo—an upstart search engine devoted to protecting its users’ privacy—writes about search-engine politics, and he once described the process neatly:

      Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions.¹¹ This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post—I’m sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced. When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.

      “Hand waving” is a lovely bit of geek coinage. It stands for the moment when you try to show off to someone else a cool new gadget or piece of software you created, which suddenly won’t work. Maybe you weren’t careful enough in your wiring; maybe you didn’t calibrate some sensor correctly. Either way, your invention sits there broken and useless, and the audience stands there staring. In a panic, you try to describe how the gadget works, and you start waving your hands to illustrate it: hand waving. But nobody’s ever convinced. Hand waving means you’ve failed. At MIT’s Media Lab, the students are required to show off their new projects on Demo Day, with an audience of interested spectators and corporate sponsors. For years the unofficial credo was “demo or die”: if your project didn’t work as intended, you died (much as stand-up comedians “die” on stage when their act bombs). I’ve attended a few of these events and watched as some poor student’s telepresence robot freezes up and crashes … and the student’s desperate, white-faced hand waving begins.

      When you walk around meditating on an idea quietly to yourself, you do a lot of hand waving. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, as Weinberg points out, the hand waving has to end. One evening last spring he rented the movie Moneyball, watching it with his wife after his two toddlers were in bed. He’s a programmer, so the movie—about how a renegade baseball general manager picked powerful players by carefully analyzing their statistics—inspired five or six ideas he wanted to blog about the next day. But as usual, those ideas were rather fuzzy, and it wasn’t until he sat down at the keyboard that he realized he wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to say. He was hand waving.

      “Even if I was publishing it to no one, it’s just the threat of an audience,” Weinberg tells me. “If someone could come across it under my name, I have to take it more seriously.” Crucially, he didn’t want to bore anyone. Indeed, one of the unspoken cardinal rules of online expression is be more interesting—the sort of social pressure toward wit and engagement that propelled coffeehouse conversations in Europe in the nineteenth century. As he pecked away at the keyboard, trying out different ideas, Weinberg slowly realized what interested him most about the movie. It wasn’t any particularly clever bit of math the general manager had performed. No, it was how his focus on numbers had created a new way to excel at baseball. The manager’s behavior reminded Weinberg of how small entrepreneurs succeed: they figure out something that huge, intergalactic companies simply can’t spot, because they’re stuck in their old mind-set. Weinberg’s process of crafting his idea—and trying to make it clever for his readers—had uncovered its true dimensions. Reenergized, he dashed off the blog entry in a half hour.

      Social scientists call this the “audience effect”—the shift in our performance when we know people are watching. It isn’t always positive. In live, face-to-face situations, like sports or live music, the audience effect often makes runners or musicians perform better, but it can sometimes psych them out and make them choke, too. Even among writers I know, there’s a heated divide over whether thinking about your audience is fatal to creativity. (Some of this comes down to temperament and genre, obviously: Oscar Wilde was a brilliant writer and thinker who spent his life swanning about in society, drawing the energy and making the observations that made his plays and essays crackle with life; Emily Dickinson was a brilliant writer and thinker who spent her life sitting at home alone, quivering neurasthenically.)

      But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.

      You can see this audience effect even in small children. In one of my favorite experiments, a group of Vanderbilt University professors in 2008¹² published a study in which several dozen four- and five-year-olds were shown patterns of colored bugs and asked to predict which would be next in the sequence. In one group, the children simply solved the puzzles quietly by themselves. In a second group, they were asked to explain into a tape recorder how they were solving each puzzle, a recording they could keep for themselves. And in the third group, the kids had an audience: they had to explain their reasoning to their mothers, who sat near them, listening but not offering any help. Then each group was given patterns that were more complicated and harder to predict.

      The results? The children who solved the puzzles silently did worst of all. The ones who talked into a tape recorder did better—the mere act of articulating their thinking process aloud helped them think more critically and identify the patterns more clearly. But the ones who were talking to a meaningful audience—Mom—did best of all. When presented with the more complicated puzzles, on average they solved more than the kids who’d talked to themselves and about twice as many as the ones who’d worked silently.

      Researchers have found similar effects with older students and adults. When asked to write for a real audience of students in another country,¹³ students write essays that are substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re writing for their teacher. When asked to contribute to a wiki—a space that’s highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words—college students snap to attention, writing more formally and including more sources to back up their work. Brenna Clarke Gray, a professor at Douglas College in British Columbia, assigned her English students to create Wikipedia entries on Canadian writers, to see if it would get them to take the assignment more seriously. She was stunned how well it worked. “Often they’re handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they suddenly were staying up to two a.m. honing and rewriting the entries and carefully sourcing everything,” she tells me. The reason, the students explained to her, was that their audience—the Wikipedia community—was quite gimlet eyed and critical. They were harder “graders” than Gray herself. When the students first tried inputting badly sourced articles, the Wikipedians simply deleted them. So the students were forced to go back, work harder, find better evidence, and write more persuasively. “It was like night and day,” Gray adds.

      Sir Francis Bacon figured this out four centuries ago, quipping that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”¹⁴

      Interestingly, the audience effect doesn’t necessarily require a big audience to kick in. This is particularly true online. Weinberg, the DuckDuckGo blogger, has about two thousand people a day looking at his blog posts; a particularly lively response thread might only be a dozen comments long. It’s not a massive crowd, but from his perspective it’s transformative. In fact, many people have told me they feel the audience effect kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of ten people (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from ten people to a million people.

      This is something that the traditional thinkers of the industrial age—particularly print and broadcast journalists—have СКАЧАТЬ