This Explains Everything
150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
John Brockman
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10 quotes
Chapter Chapter 50
- Consider deception on the mating market. If a man is pursuing a short-term mating strategy and the woman in whom he is sexually interested is pursuing a long-term mating strategy, conflict between them is virtually inevitable. Men are known to feign long-term commitment, interest, or emotional involvement for the goal of casual sex, interfering with women’s long-term mating strategy. Men have evolved sophisticated strategies of sexual exploitation; conversely, women sometimes present themselves as costless sexual opportunities and then invade a man’s mating mind so successfully that he wakes up one morning and realizes he can’t live without her—one version of the bait-and-switch tactics in women’s evolved arsenal.May 5 2024 7:05AM
Chapter Chapter 57
- Causation. We explain the predictable relationship between some events we call causes and others we call effects by an appeal to a mysterious power called causation. Yet, as noted by th-century philosopher David Hume, we never “discover anything but one event following another,” and we never directly observe “a force or power by which the cause operates, or any connection between it and its supposed effect.”*May 26 2024 11:26PM
- Nonetheless, each explanation has been seriously attacked at one point or another. Take realism, for example. While many of our current scientific theories are admittedly impressive, they come at the end of a long succession of failures: Every past theory has been wrong. Ptolemy’s astronomy had a good run, but then came the Copernican revolution. Newtonian mechanics is truly impressive, but it was ultimately superseded by contemporary physics. Modesty and common sense suggest that, like their predecessors, our current theories will eventually be overturned. But if they aren’t true, why are they so effective? Intuitive realism is at best a metaphysical half-truth, albeit a fairly harmless one.May 26 2024 11:25PM
- Second, the depth, elegance, and beauty of our intuitive metaphysical explanations can make us appreciate them less rather than more. Like a constant hum, we forget that they are there. It follows that the explanations most often celebrated for their virtues—explanations such as natural selection and relativity—are importantly different from those that form the bedrock of intuitive beliefs. Celebrated explanations have the characteristics of the solution to a good murder mystery. Where intuitive metaphysical explanations are easy to generate but hard to evaluate, scientific superstars like evolution are typically the reverse: hard to generate but easy to evaluate. We need philosophers like Hume to nudge us from complacency in the first case and scientists like Darwin to advance science in the second.May 26 2024 11:26PM
Chapter Chapter 83
- It’s systematic in that you don’t just metaphorically describe anything as anything else. Instead, it’s mostly abstract things that you describe in terms of concrete things. Morality is more abstract than cleanliness. Understanding is more abstract than seeing. And you can’t reverse the metaphors. While you can say “He’s clean” to mean he has no criminal record, you can’t say “He’s moral” to mean that he bathed recently. Metaphor is unidirectional.May 5 2024 7:01AM
Chapter Chapter 128
- Returning to Australia, one of the best known examples of an unintended consequence is the case of rabbits, brought by the First Fleet as food, released into the wild for hunting, with the unintended consequence that rabbit populations grew to staggering proportions, causing untold ecological devastation. This in turn led to the development of measures to control the rabbits, including an exceptionally long fence, which had the unintended consequence of guiding three young girls home in the 1930s—which in turn had the unintended consequence of inspiring an award-winning motion picture (Rabbit-Proof Fence, 2002).May 5 2024 2:17PM
- This is not to say that the consequences will always be undesirable. Recently, certain municipalities changed the laws governing the use of marijuana, making it easier to obtain for medical purposes. The law might or might not have reduced the suffering of glaucoma victims, but data from traffic accidents suggest that the change in the legislation did reduce fatalities on the road by about percent. (People substituted marijuana for alcohol and apparently drive better stoned than drunk.) Saving drivers’ lives was not the intent of the law, but that was the effect.May 5 2024 2:20PM
- Intervention in any sufficiently complicated system is bound to produce unintended effects. We treat patients with antibiotics, and we select for resistant strains of pathogens. We artificially select for wrinkly-faced bulldogs, and less pleasant traits, such as respiratory problems, come along for the ride. We treat morning sickness with thalidomide, and babies with birth defects follow.May 5 2024 2:20PM
- Because governments typically ban only those things for which people have a taste, when bans do arise people find ways to satisfy those tastes, either through substitutes or black markets, both of which lead to varied consequences. Ban sodas, boost sports-drink sales. Ban the sale of kidneys, spawn an international black market for organs and underground surgeries. Ban the hunting of mountain lions, endanger local joggers.May 5 2024 2:21PM
- People will find substitutes for banned or taxed products; removing one species in an ecology typically penalizes populations that prey on them and aids species that compete with them; and so onMay 5 2024 2:22PM