What is Emergent Thinking?

David Brooks: Carl Popper, the great philosopher said, “All problems are either clouds or clocks.”  A clock is a… to understand a clock, you can take it apart, it’s individual pieces and you study the pieces and then you can understand how a clock works.  A cloud, you can’t take apart a cloud.  A cloud is a dynamic system.  A cloud you can only study as a whole.

So an emergent system is something you only can study as a whole.  So for example, a cloud is an emergent system, but your brain is an emergent system.  When you think of an idea like apple, it’s not in any one neuron in the brain; it’s in the interplay of many different neurons.  A culture is an emergent system.  There’s no one person who exemplifies American culture, but the interaction of all of us Americans creates this thing called American culture.  And once
that thing exists, then it has an influence on the rest of us, it shapes our behavior.

So we’re surrounded by these patterns of interaction, these emergent systems.  And so a corporate culture is an emergent system, team spirit is an emergent system, poverty is an emergent system.  So what are the things that contribute to poverty? Well some
of it is just sheer lack of money, but some of it is certain habits, some of it is racism, there’s a whole bunch of fake things that factor in.  And so one of the problems that we have as a culture is we take clouds and we pretend they’re clocks.  We take problems that are emergent and we pretend we can solve them through deductive reasoning, but just picking them apart.  And we always want to find the one thing that will lead to that, so we always want to find “X” leads to “Z”. The problem with an emergent system, you don’t have those kinds of straight causal relationships.  Everything, it’s all about the interplay.  It’s all about the dance.

And so when you talk about a corporate culture or a marketplace or anything, it’s about the complex interplay of all these different things.  And if we thought about emergent systems, we just have a much more supple view of how the world actually works.  We wouldn’t spend all our time trying to break everything apart and studying it by studying the details.

If we took a much more supple view of how the world actually works, we wouldn’t spend all our time trying to break everything apart to study the details.

To the very beginning: going back in time with Steven Weinberg (Part 2)

What was the universe like one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang? Science has an answer.

Credit: gonin via Adobe Stock
  • Following Steven Weinberg's lead, we plunge further back into cosmic history, beyond the formation of atomic nuclei.
  • Today, we discuss the origin of the quark-gluon plasma and the properties of the famous Higgs boson, the "God Particle."
  • Is there a limit? How far can we go back in time?
Keep reading Show less

Surprisingly modern lessons from classic Russian literature

Though gloomy and dense, Russian literature is hauntingly beautiful, offering a relentlessly persistent inquiry into the human experience.

Credit: George Cerny via Unsplash
Personal Growth
  • Russian literature has a knack for precisely capturing and describing the human condition.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are among the greatest writers who ever lived.
  • If you want to be a wiser person, spend time with the great Russian novelists.
Keep reading Show less

3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota

"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.

Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
Surprising Science
  • The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
  • It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
  • Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Keep reading Show less

Do we still need math?

We spend much of our early years learning arithmetic and algebra. What's the use?

Credit: Antoine Dautry via Unsplash
Technology & Innovation
  • For the average person, math seems to play little to no role in their day-to-day life.
  • But, the fanciest gadgets and technologies are all heavily reliant on mathematics.
  • Without advanced (and often obscure) mathematics, modern society would not be possible.
Keep reading Show less