In today's information age, in many companies and on many teams, the objective is no longer error prevention and replicability. On the contrary, it's creativity, speed, and keenness. In the industrial era, the goal was to minimize variation. But in creative companies today, maximizing variation is more essential. In these situations, the biggest risk isn't making a mistake or losing consistency; it's failing to attract top talent, to invent new products, or to change direction quickly when the environment shifts. Consistency and repeatability are more likely to suppress fresh thinking than to bring your company profit. A lot of little mistakes, while sometimes painful, help the organization learn quickly and are a critical part of the innovation cycle. In these situations, rules and process are no longer the best answer. A symphony isn't what you're going for. Leave the conductor and the sheet music behind. Build a jazz band instead.

People seem to recognize that the arts are cultural activities that draw on (or react against) certain cultural traditions, certain shared understanding, and certain values and ideas that are characteristic of the time and place in which the art is created. In the case of science, however, opinions differ. Some scientists, like the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane, see science in a similar light ― as a historical activity that occurs in a particular time and place, and that needs to be understood within that context. Others, however, see science as a purely objective pursuit, uninfluenced by the cultural viewpoint and values of those who create it. In describing this view of science, philosopher Hugh Lacey speaks of the belief that there is an underlying order of the world which is simply there to be discovered ― the world of pure fact stripped of any link with value. The aim of science according to this view is to represent this world of pure fact, independently of any relationship it might bear contingently to human practices and experiences.

Mental development consists of individuals increasingly mastering social codes and signals themselves, which they can master only in social situations with the support of more competent individuals, typically adults. In this sense, mental development consists of internalizing social patterns and gradually becoming a responsible actor among other responsible actors. In Denmark, the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years, which means that we then say that people have developed sufficient mental maturity to be accountable for their actions at this point. And at the age of 18 people are given the right to vote and are thereby formally included in the basic democratic process. I do not know whether these age boundaries are optimal, but it is clear that mental development takes place at different rates for different individuals, and depends especially on the social and family environment they have been given. Therefore, having formal limits for responsibility from a specific age that apply to everyone is a somewhat questionable practice. But the question, of course, is whether it can be done any differently.

The first human beings probably evolved in tropical regions where survival was possible without clothing. It is likely that they had very dark skin because light skin would have given little protection against the burning rays of the sun. There is a debate about whether these people spread into other parts of the world or, instead, whether people developed independently in various parts of the world. Whichever the case, it is believed that in time they became capable of spreading out from Africa, eventually to most of the world. This was probably because their physical characteristics changed. For instance, early hominids probably did not walk upright, but when they developed that ability, they could travel more efficiently. More important, perhaps, was their development of tool making. With tools, they could hunt other animals, so they could consume more protein and fat than their low-energy vegetarian diet would have provided. Not only their bodies but also their brains would have been changed with more energy. The brain needs lots of energy to grow. As their diet expanded, hominids could physically and intellectually expand their territory.

When we get an unfavorable outcome, in some ways the last thing we want to hear is that the process was fair. As outraging as the combination of an unfavorable outcome and an unfair process is, this combination also brings with it a consolation prize: the possibility of attributing the bad outcome to something other than ourselves. We may reassure ourselves by believing that our bad outcome had little to do with us and everything to do with the unfair process. If the process is fair, however, we cannot nearly as easily externalize the outcome; we got what we got "fair and square." When the process is fair we believe that our outcome is deserved, which is another way of saying that there must have been something about ourselves (what we did or who we are) that caused the outcome.

The well-known American ethnologist Alfred Louis Kroeber made a rich and in-depth study of women's evening dress in the West, stretching back about three centuries and using reproductions of engravings. Having adjusted the dimensions of these plates due to their diverse origins, he was able to analyse the constant elements in fashion features and to come up with a study that was neither intuitive nor approximate, but precise, mathematical and statistical. He reduced women's clothing to a certain number of features: length and size of the skirt, size and depth of the neckline, height of the waistline. He demonstrated unambiguously that fashion is a profoundly regular phenomenon which is not located at the level of annual variations but on the scale of history. For practically 300 years, women's dress was subject to a very precise periodic cycle: forms reach the furthest point in their variations every fifty years. If, at any one moment, skirts are at their longest, fifty years later they will be at their shortest; thus skirts become long again fifty years after being short and a hundred years after being long.

Over the last few centuries, humanity's collective prosperity has skyrocketed, as technological progress has made us far wealthier than ever before. To share out those riches, almost all societies have settled upon the market mechanism, rewarding people in various ways for the work that they do and the things that they own. But rising inequality, itself often driven by technology, has started to put that mechanism under strain. Today, markets already provide immense rewards to some people but leave many others with very little. And now, technological unemployment threatens to become a more radical version of the same story, taking place in the particular market we rely upon the most: the labor market. As that market begins to break down, more and more people will be in danger of not receiving a share of society's prosperity at all.

It's often said that those who can't do, teach. It would be more accurate to say that those who can do, can't teach the basics. A great deal of expert knowledge is implicit, not explicit. The further you progress toward mastery, the less conscious awareness you often have of the fundamentals. Experiments show that skilled golfers and wine aficionados have a hard time describing their putting and tasting techniques — even asking them to explain their approaches is enough to interfere with their performance, so they often stay on autopilot. When I first saw an elite diver do four and a half somersaults, I asked how he managed to spin so fast. His answer: "Just go up in a ball." Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to clearly express all the steps to take. Their brain dump is partially filled with garbage.

It would seem obvious that the more competent someone is, the more we will like that person. By "competence," I mean a cluster of qualities: smartness, the ability to get things done, wise decisions, etc. We stand a better chance of doing well at our life tasks if we surround ourselves with people who know what they're doing and have a lot to teach us. But the research evidence is paradoxical: In problem-solving groups, the participants who are considered the most competent and have the best ideas tend not to be the ones who are best liked. Why? One possibility is that, although we like to be around competent people, those who are too competent make us uncomfortable. They may seem unapproachable, distant, superhuman ― and make us look bad (and feel worse) by comparison. If this were true, we might like people more if they reveal some evidence of fallibility. For example, if your friend is a brilliant mathematician, superb athlete, and gourmet cook, you might like him or her better if, every once in a while, they screwed up.

A computational algorithm that takes input data and generates some output from it doesn't really embody any notion of meaning. Certainly, such a computation does not generally have as its purpose its own survival and well-being. It does not, in general, assign value to the inputs. Compare, for example, a computer algorithm with the waggle dance of the honeybee, by which means a foraging bee conveys to others in the hive information about the source of food (such as nectar) it has located. Some bees might not bother to make the journey, considering it not worthwhile. The input, such as it is, is processed in the light of the organism's own internal states and history; there is nothing prescriptive about its effects. The "dance" ― a series of stylized movements on the comb ― shows the bees how far away the food is and in which direction. But this input does not simply program other bees to go out and look for it. Rather, they evaluate this information, comparing it with their own knowledge of the surroundings.

There are deep similarities between viral contagion and behavioral contagion. For example, people in close or extended proximity to others infected by a virus are themselves more likely to become infected, just as people are more likely to drink excessively when they spend more time in the company of heavy drinkers. But there are also important differences between the two types of contagion. One is that visibility promotes behavioral contagion but inhibits the spread of infectious diseases. Solar panels that are visible from the street, for instance, are more likely to stimulate neighboring installations. In contrast, we try to avoid others who are visibly ill. Another important difference is that whereas viral contagion is almost always a bad thing, behavioral contagion is sometimes negative ― as in the case of smoking ― but sometimes positive, as in the case of solar installations.

Sleep is clearly about more than just resting. One curious fact is that animals that are hibernating also have periods of sleep. It comes as a surprise to most of us, but hibernation and sleep are not the same thing at all, at least not from a neurological and metabolic perspective. Hibernating is more like being anesthetized: the subject is unconscious but not actually asleep. So a hibernating animal needs to get a few hours of conventional sleep each day within the larger unconsciousness. A further surprise to most of us is that bears, the most famous of wintry sleepers, don't actually hibernate. Real hibernation involves profound unconsciousness and a dramatic fall in body temperature ― often to around 32 degrees Fahrenheit. By this definition, bears don't hibernate, because their body temperature stays near normal and they are easily awakened. Their winter sleeps are more accurately called a state of torpor.

The concern about how we appear to others can be seen in children, though work by the psychologist Ervin Staub suggests that the effect may vary with age. In a study where children heard another child in distress, young children (kindergarten through second grade) were more likely to help the child in distress when with another child than when alone. But for older children ― in fourth and sixth grade ― the effect reversed: they were less likely to help a child in distress when they were with a peer than when they were alone. Staub suggested that younger children might feel more comfortable acting when they have the company of a peer, whereas older children might feel more concern about being judged by their peers and fear feeling embarrassed by overreacting. Staub noted that "older children seemed to discuss the distress sounds less and to react to them less openly than younger children." In other words, the older children were deliberately putting on a poker face in front of their peers.