Clive Thompson Quotes
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Insurance firms have always carefully studied real-world data to figure out what, precisely, constitutes a risky activity.
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Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.
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We're dumber and less cognitively nimble if we're not around other people - and, now, other machines.
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There is something about the ability to externalize our thoughts and compare them with other people in a public way that is really transformative for the average person.
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Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.
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The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result.
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The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
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Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.
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The main message of 'Smarter Than You Think' is an attempt to look at the productively new and interesting ways that we have begun to learn about the world, to think about what we found, and to mull it over and argue about it with other people as we use technology.
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Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is when people almost remember something but need a computer, or someone else, to help them find it. The problem is, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. They were like that way before the Internet came along.
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Personally, I'd love to see more social media firms develop business models that aren't reliant on advertising. If you're a social media firm selling ads, your goal is to get people to interrupt what they're doing all day long so they come and stare at your service as much as possible.