For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. Gary Wolf More Quotes by Gary Wolf More Quotes From Gary Wolf Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can't even answer the simplest questions. Gary Wolf vision blind attention sometimes The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Gary Wolf great you age knowledge The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. Gary Wolf words internet problem matter Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. Gary Wolf answer human time forget Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene. Gary Wolf think disease discovery long During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that, for warnings to work, it's not enough for them to be delivered. They must also overcome that human tendency to pause; they must trigger a series of effective actions, mobilizing the informal networks that we depend on in a crisis. Gary Wolf disaster truth-is truth work People are saying, 'Big Data is the new oil.' Gary Wolf saying new data people Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Gary Wolf step balance behavior time Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Gary Wolf apple next first-time time To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story. Gary Wolf best future technology hope The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz. Gary Wolf internet leadership roots busy SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Gary Wolf moment you practice time As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies. Gary Wolf computers memory intelligence science The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. Gary Wolf great internet information world Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. Gary Wolf only free cooperation business Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier's checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. Gary Wolf credit fake numbers sometimes Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows. Gary Wolf every-day day trust advice The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures. Gary Wolf stand experiments medical history Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products of specific mutations but emergent phenomena arising from extremely complex interactions between genes, environment, and life experience. Gary Wolf us environment experience life Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion. Gary Wolf physical books ancient passion
