smarter than you think - clive thompson

[...]... computers came along, back when Kasparov was a young boy in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, learning grand-master-level chess was a slow, arduous affair If you showed promise and you were very lucky, you could find a local grand master to teach you If you were one of the tiny handful who showed world-class promise, Soviet leaders would fly you to Moscow and give you access to their elite chess library, which... geographic; if you picked a day and mapped your check-ins, you d see a version of yourself moving around the city It reminded him of a trope from the video games he’d played as a kid: “racing your ghost.” In games like Mario Kart, if you had no one to play with, you could record yourself going as fast as you could around a track, then compete against the “ghost” of your former self Wegener thought it would... forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions 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. .. name comes to us (Clive Thompson! ) In contrast, digital tools don’t have our brain’s problem with inaccuracy; if you give it Clive, ” it’ll quickly pull up everything with a Clive associated, in perfect fidelity But machine searching is brittle If you don’t have the right cue to start with—say, the name Clive —or if the data didn’t get saved in the right way, you might never find your way back to... mnemonic performing seal I wound up barking weird trivia questions just to see if he could answer them When was the first-ever e-mail you sent your son? 1996 Where did you go to church when you were a kid? Here’s a First Methodist Sunday School certificate Did you leave a tip when you bought a coffee this morning on the way to work? Yep—here’s the pictures from Peet’s Coffee But Bell believes the deepest... thing with check-ins—show people what they’d been doing on a day in their past In one hectic weekend of programming, he created a service playfully called FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo Each day, the service logged into your Foursquare account, found your check-ins from one year back (as well as any “shout” status statements you made), and e-mailed a summary to you Users quickly found the daily e-mail would stimulate... to you, ’” he tells me The agent wound up saving him from precisely the same spaced-out forgetfulness that causes us so many problems, interpersonal and intellectual, in everyday life “It keeps you from looking stupid,” he adds You discover things even you didn’t know you knew.” Fellow students started pestering him for trivia “They’d say, ‘Hey Brad, I know you ve got this augmented brain, can you. .. 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,... 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. .. the library’s role and bested it Young chess enthusiasts could buy CD-ROMs filled with hundreds of thousands of chess games Chess-playing software could show you how an artificial opponent would respond to any move This dramatically increased the pace at which young chess players built up intuition If you were sitting at lunch and had an idea for a bold new opening move, you could instantly find out which . when Kasparov was a young boy in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, learning grand-master-level chess was a slow, arduous affair. If you showed promise and you were very lucky, you could find a local. how your brain is being “rewired.” Almost everything rewires it, including this book. The brain you had before you read this paragraph? You don’t get that brain back. I’m hoping the trade-off. of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. ISBN 97 8-1 -1 0 1-6 387 1-2 To Emily, Gabriel, and Zev Contents Title