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

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СКАЧАТЬ or the marketplace—conversational media gains authority by revealing its mechanics. James Bridle, a British writer, artist, and publisher, made this point neatly when he took the entire text of every edit of Wikipedia’s much-disputed entry on the Iraq War during a five-year period and printed it as a set of twelve hardcover books. At nearly seven thousand pages, it was as long as an encyclopedia itself. The point, Bridle wrote, was to make visible just how much debate goes into the creation of a factual record: “This is historiography.³⁰ This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.” Public thinking is messy, but so is knowledge.

      I’m not suggesting here, as have some digital utopians (and dystopians), that traditional “expert” forms of thinking and publishing are obsolete, and that expertise will corrode as the howling hive mind takes over. Quite the opposite. I work in print journalism, and now in print books, because the “typographical fixity” of paper³¹—to use Elizabeth Eisenstein’s lovely phrase—is a superb tool for focusing the mind. Constraints can impose creativity and rigor. When I have only six hundred words in a magazine column to make my point, I’m forced to make decisions about what I’m willing to commit to print. Slowing down also gives you time to consult a ton of sources and intuit hopefully interesting connections among them. The sheer glacial nature of the enterprise—spending years researching a book and writing it—is a cognitive strength, a gift that industrial processes gave to civilization. It helps one escape the speed loop of the digital conversation, where it’s easy to fall prey to what psychologists call recency:³² Whatever’s happening right now feels like the most memorable thing, so responding right now feels even more urgent. (This is a problem borrowed from face-to-face conversation: You won’t find a lot of half-hour-long, thoughtful pauses in coffeehouse debates either.) And while traditional “expert” media are going to evolve in form and style, I doubt they’re going to vanish, contrary to some of the current hand-wringing and gloating over that prospect. Business models for traditional reportage might be foundering, but interest is not: one analysis by HP Labs³³ looked at Twitter’s “trending topics” and found that a majority of the most retweeted sources were mainstream news organizations like CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters.

      The truth is that old and new modes of thinking aren’t mutually exclusive. Knowing when to shift between public and private thinking—when to blast an idea online, when to let it slow bake—is a crucial new skill: cognitive diversity. When I get blocked while typing away at a project on my computer, I grab a pencil and paper, so I can use a tactile, swoopy, this-connects-to-that style of writing to unclog my brain. Once an idea is really flowing on paper, I often need to shift to the computer, so my seventy-words-per-minute typing and on-tap Google access can help me move swiftly before I lose my train of thought.

      Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky describes human smarts³⁴ as stemming from the various ways our brains will tackle a problem; we’ll simultaneously throw logic, emotion, metaphor, and crazy associative thinking at it. This works with artificial thinking tools, too. Spent too much time babbling online? Go find a quiet corner and read. Spent a ton of time working quietly alone? Go bang your ideas against other people online.

      Ethan Hein is a musician who lives not far from me in Brooklyn. He teaches music and produces songs and soundtracks for indie movies and off-Broadway shows.

      But most people know him as a guy who answers questions.

      Tons of them. From strangers.

      Hein is an enthusiastic poster on Quora, one of the current crop of question-answering sites: anyone can show up and ask a question, and anyone can answer. Hein had long been an online extrovert, blogging about music and tweeting. But he could also be, like many of us, lazy about writing. “I was always a half-assed journal keeper,” he tells me. “It was like, I should write something—wait a minute, what’s on TV?” But in early 2011 he stumbled upon Quora and found the questions perversely stimulating. (Question: “What does the human brain find exciting about syncopated rhythm and breakbeats?” Hein’s answer began: “Predictable unpredictability. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine …”) Other times, he chimed in on everything from neuroscience and atheism to “What is it like to sleep in the middle of a forest?” (A: “Sleeping in the woods gratifies our biophilia.”) Within a year, he was hooked.

      “I will happily shuffle through the unanswered questions as a form of entertainment,” Hein says. “My wife is kind of worried about me. But I’m like, ‘Look, I’d be using this time to play World of Warcraft. And this is better—this is contributing. To the world!’” He even found that answering questions on Quora invigorated his blogging, because once he’d researched a question and pounded out a few paragraphs, he could use the answer as the seed for a new post. In barely one year he’d answered over twelve hundred questions and written about ninety thousand words. I tell him that’s the length of a good-sized nonfiction hardcover book, and, as with Ory Okolloh and her two telephone books’ worth of online writing, he seems stunned.

      Public thinking is powerful, but it’s hard to do. It’s work. Sure, you get the good—catalyzing multiples, learning from the feedback. But it can be exhausting. Digital tools aren’t magical pixie dust that makes you smarter. The opposite is true: they give up the rewards only if you work hard and master them, just like the cognitive tools of previous generations.

      But as it turns out, there are structures that can make public thinking easier—and even irresistible.

      Question answering is a powerful example. In the 1990s, question-answering sites like Answerbag.com began to emerge; by now there are scores of them. The sheer volume of questions answered is remarkable:³⁵ over one billion questions have been answered at the English version of Yahoo Answers, with one study finding the average answerer has written about fifty-one replies. In Korea, the search engine Naver set up shop in 1999 but realized there weren’t very many Korean-language Web sites in existence, so it set up a question-answering forum, which became one of its core offerings. (And since all those questions are hosted in a proprietary database³⁶ that Google can’t access, Naver has effectively sealed Google out from the country, a neat trick.) Not all the answers, or questions, are good; Yahoo Answers in particular has become the butt of jokes for hosting spectacularly illiterate queries (“I CAN SMELL EVERYTHING MASSIVE HEAD ACHE?”) or math students posting homework questions, hoping they’ll be answered. (They usually are.) But some, like Quora, are known for cultivating thought-provoking questions and well-written answers. One of my favorite questions was “Who is history’s greatest badass,³⁷ and why?”—which provoked a twenty-two-thousand-word rush of answers, one of which described former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt being shot by a would-be assassin before a speech and then, bleeding profusely, continuing to give the 1.5-hour-long address.

      Why do question sites produce such outpourings of answers? It’s because the format is a clever way of encouraging people to formalize and share knowledge. People walk around with tons of information and wisdom in their heads but with few outlets to show it off. Having your own Web site is powerful, but comparatively few people are willing to do the work. They face the blank-page problem. What should I say? Who cares what I say? In contrast, when you see someone asking a question on a subject you know about, it catalyzes your desire to speak up.

      “Questions are a really useful service for curing writer’s block,” as Charlie Cheever, the soft-spoken cofounder of Quora,³⁸ tells me. “You might think you want to start a blog, but you wind up being afraid to write a blog post because there’s this sense of, who asked you?” Question answering provides a built-in, instant audience of at least one—the original asker. This is another legacy of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates asks questions of his debating partners (often faux-naive, concern-trolling ones, of course) and they pose questions of him in turn. СКАЧАТЬ