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Diverse groups tend to make more nuanced and original decisions than homogeneous ones do It trains us to be better at making decisions.

Experiencing these simulated lives is practice for our own.

That’s why a lot of this book is about reading Middlemarch.

You can see how people deliberated and whether they made the correct assessment.īut I also think there’s this really important process of storytelling, which is a kind of simulation, that’s part of those more personal decisions. The first is we do have some science looking at real-world decisions – for instance, there’s interesting research involving mock juries. There are a couple of different ways to answer that question.

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This book is not about how to be 100% right with your decisions – it’s just that you will get better outcomes if you take time to go through the process that I talk about.Īs there is no control group for this alternative “us”, how can we know that deliberation will produce better results? But personal decisions – whether you should get married, for example – are made from a position of ignorance on some level it’s unknowable. There are enough similarities between the techniques or mindset we need for making personal and global decisions that it is useful to examine both in the same book. Those two things together made me think that it would be interesting to write about complex decisions and how we make them.Īre the decisions that matter most personal or global ? Is there a difference in approach between the m? At the same time, I became obsessed with moving from New York to California. It’s the same technique most people learn to this day, which meant that on some level the science of decision-making has been stagnant for 170 years. Then I stumbled across Darwin’s notebooks in which he has this two-page pros and cons list, trying to decide whether to get married. I love those books but it did seem odd that I’d spent so much time looking at short-term decisions when the decisions that really end up shaping your life require deliberation and foresight and all of these properties that I felt were being unappreciated. There had been a lot of books about decisions, but they were almost all focused on short-term instinctive Blink-like decisions. I first started taking notes on it eight years ago. It had the longest incubation period of any of my books, which is maybe appropriate for a book that’s about long-term decision making. What made you decide to write about decision-making? It focuses on long-term and complex decision-making – both political and personal. Now 50, he divides his time between California and New York, the decision of where to live being at the heart of his latest book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He focused on issues such as communications technology, ways in which innovation affects government policy an daily lives, copyright and intellectual property, and the impact of developments in online technology and social media on the economy and lives of Americans.Steven Johnson is a popular science author of 11 books, including the bestseller Everything Bad Is Good for You.

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He is the author of eight books: Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (1999) Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (2002) Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (2005) Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (2005) The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (2006) Īuthor Steven Johnson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of FEED, the former science and culture web magazine, talked about his life, career, and body of…Īuthor Steven Johnson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of FEED, the former science and culture web magazine, talked about his life, career, and body of work and responded to telephone calls and electronic communicatons. He focused on issues such as communications technology, ways in which innovation affects government policy an daily lives, copyright and intellectual property, and the impact of developments in online technology and social media on the economy and lives of Americans. T00:00:00-04:00 Author Steven Johnson, co-founder and editor-in-chief of FEED, the former science and culture web magazine, talked about his life, career, and body of work and responded to telephone calls and electronic communicatons.

Steven johnson author