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Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas
A brilliant and groundbreaking argument that innovation and progress are often achieved by revisiting and retooling ideas from the past rather than starting from scratch—from The Guardian columnist and contributor to The Atlantic.
Innovation is not always as innovative as it may seem. This is the story of how old ideas that were mocked or ignored for centuries are now storming back to the cutting edge of science and technology, informing the way we lead our lives. This is the story of Lamarck and the modern-day epigeneticist whose research vindicated his mocked 200-year-old theory of evolution; of the return of cavalry use in the war in Afghanistan; of Tesla’s bringing back the electric car; and of the cognitive scientists who made breakthroughs by turning to ancient Greek philosophy.
Drawing on examples from business to philosophy to science, Rethink shows what we can learn by revisiting old, discarded ideas and considering them from a novel perspective. From within all these rich anecdotes of overlooked ideas come good ones, helping us find new ways to think about ideas in our own time—from out-of-the-box proposals in the boardroom to grand projects for social and political change.
Armed with this picture of the surprising evolution of ideas and their triumphant second lives, Rethink helps you see the world differently. In the bestselling tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Poole’s new approach to a familiar topic is fun, convincing, and brilliant—and offers a clear takeaway: if you want to affect the future, start by taking a look at the past.
Innovation is not always as innovative as it may seem. This is the story of how old ideas that were mocked or ignored for centuries are now storming back to the cutting edge of science and technology, informing the way we lead our lives. This is the story of Lamarck and the modern-day epigeneticist whose research vindicated his mocked 200-year-old theory of evolution; of the return of cavalry use in the war in Afghanistan; of Tesla’s bringing back the electric car; and of the cognitive scientists who made breakthroughs by turning to ancient Greek philosophy.
Drawing on examples from business to philosophy to science, Rethink shows what we can learn by revisiting old, discarded ideas and considering them from a novel perspective. From within all these rich anecdotes of overlooked ideas come good ones, helping us find new ways to think about ideas in our own time—from out-of-the-box proposals in the boardroom to grand projects for social and political change.
Armed with this picture of the surprising evolution of ideas and their triumphant second lives, Rethink helps you see the world differently. In the bestselling tradition of Malcolm Gladwell, Poole’s new approach to a familiar topic is fun, convincing, and brilliant—and offers a clear takeaway: if you want to affect the future, start by taking a look at the past.
400 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
September 10, 2016
This is a terrific book. It offers a critique of 'new technology' and - indeed - new ideas. Poole provides a history and historiography of science 'discovery.' I was very impressed with how Poole probed 'bad ideas' and data sets that did not create new knowledge. The failed technologies are given a trajectory. Sometimes they return. Sometimes they emerge in a new form. Sometimes they die.
This is a well written, provocative and evocative book. It demonstrates how the histories of technologies and ideas intertwine. Excellence.
This is a well written, provocative and evocative book. It demonstrates how the histories of technologies and ideas intertwine. Excellence.
August 26, 2020
Here are my Notes,* in case someone is considering reading the book. It provides a sampling of the ideas discussed:
RETHINK by Steven Poole
P6 Innovators can often make things better by resurrecting and improving the past – as with the Tesla electric car.
We all love a good idea but how can we tell if an idea is good? Is it useful, or financially profitable or merely revolutionizes one’s picture of the universe, or morally praiseworthy or because it inspires other thinkers?
P12 When a thing is new, people say ‘It is not true.’ Later, when the truth become obvious, they say: “it is not important.’ Finally when its importance cannot be denied, the say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.’
P15 If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! [Coleridge]
P22 the medicinal leech has three jaws and a hundred teeth. With them it saws into the skin and injects anesthetics to avoid disturbing its meal, chemicals that delete the blood vessels to get a better flow of the good stuff, and anticoagulants to stop the blood clotting and impeding its feast. A leech can take up to ten times its body weight in blood.
P24 leeches also relieve symptoms of osteoarthritis, when applied to the knees, because of anti-inflammatory and other compounds in their saliva that are still not fully understood.
P28 You can’t change was has happened to you but you can change what you think about it and what you feel about it.
P30 What bad habit have you put right today? Which fault did you take a stand against? In what respect are you better? [Seneca ~AD50]
P43 Cuvier brutally mocked Lamarck’s notion that animals could transform themselves and stoutly defended the commonsense picture of species as fixed.
P47 The field of epigenetics studies how, in response to environmental cues, chemical reactions in an animal’s body actually switches off and on in the DNA. - In particular chronic stress.
P50 Think of all the trauma humankind has experienced. Why aren’t we all depressed all the time? Because > Epigenetic changes can be reversible.
P54 circa 1847 – Semmelweis promotes washing hands and death rates dropped 90% in maternity wards and spread the message only to be ridiculed.
P66 Whereas deduction is reasoning logically from an existing set of facts, induction is hypothesizing about future fact based on current knowledge.
P71 In April 1626 Francis Bacon wondered if you could preserve meat with ice. They had a local woman kill a chicken and stuffed the carcass with snow. Bacon died of pneumonia a few days later, however the bird was perfectly preserved. The idea of frozen food was pursued again until 1912-15 when Clarence Birdseye saw Inuit hang fish out to freeze.
P77 An old idea might be considered viable only when attitudes change.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. [Max Planck]
P91-92 Grace Hopper created the first ‘compiler’, a program that would translate a new more human-friendly set of instructions into machine code automatically. This was vastly more efficient. What used to take 42 hours a functional program could solve the same equation in one hour. Instead of being celebrated, the head of computer operations at General Electric argued that programming was too delicate and ingenious an activity to be left to the computer itself. FLOW-MATIC, also Python (COBOL)
P134 Galen Strawson says “There are seven and a half billion people who believe in consciousness and are there are maybe two or three hundred philosophers who don’t.” he calls the denial of mind “the silliest view that has ever been held in the whole history of the human race.”
P142 In regards to a book “Mind and the Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel, Steven Pinker sneered at “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” It was the most despised science book of 2012 – that someone had dared to take seriously the banned concept of teleology.
It used to be called natural philosophy, held that things – in particular living things – had a natural end, or telos, at which they aimed. The idea first appeared in Plato and was developed in relation to the natural world by Aristotle, who argued that the acorn, for example, sprouted and grew into a seedling because its purpose was to become a mighty oak. We would now say that the acorn’s DNA contains all the instructions necessary to build an oak tree but that no “picture” of the final tree it encoded in the genes.
P144 Nagel says that the appearance of conscious beings such as us can be described as the universe waking up. Yet to him it seems unlikely that life would have ever got started in the first place by somehow springing forth from dead matter; still more unlikely that some forms of life would have developed consciousness; and extremely improbable that one from of life would have acquired “transcendent” power of reason. To explain these events, Nagel suggests, you need more than simply the “mechanistic” tools of the laws of physics, natural selection and so on. And you might even need teleology.
What infuriated his critics was Nagels’ doubtful attitude towards evolutionary biology. “It is prima facie highly implausible’ he intuits, “that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection”. There are insuperable “questions of improbability.”
P149 Imagine, Malthus suggests that a “Supreme Being” suddenly gave us, in irrefutable and totally credible fashion, an explanation of the nature and structure of the mind… and the whole plan and scheme of the Universe.” Such a revelation he argues, would give people nothing left to strive for in the intellectual realm, and so it “would act like the touch of a torpedo, on all intellectual exertion and would almost put an end to the existence of virtue.” The lure of the darkness is precisely what keeps us thinking at all.
P151 If fifty million people say something foolish, it is still foolish. [Somerset Maugham]
P170 Thomas Kuhn points out “lifelong resistance” to a revolutionary idea “is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself.
P177 By 1674, Copernicanism had become a majority view view among astronmers, yet Robert Hooke of the Royal Society pointed out no one had been able to demonstrate its superiority to the “Tychonic” system. According to some historians Brahe’s model “fit the available data better than Copernicus’s system did.”
P178-79 Thomas Kuhn emphasizes in his seminal “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” that has never been any such thing as a theory completely free of troubling anomalies and apparently contradictory evidence.
P183 Sheldrake looked at a historical concept that today is deader than the dodo – vitalism, that there is something special about living things, and they cannot be totally explained by reference to the physical attractions of matter. Today the term vitalism is a byword for historical superstition. It is taboo.
Sheldrake had decided that “mechanistic biology was heading towards a brick wall” and that genes were “hopelessly overrated” as a way to explain the inheritance of instinct and biological form. “The attempt to reduce life to molecules and molecules interacting just seem to so far from being able to understand things like homing pigeons, or migration, or consciousness… so maybe it’s worth looking at what the vitalists actually said.
P184 The problem that Sheldrake was wrestling with in 1973 was this: if morphogenetic fields exist, how can they be inherited? Following Henri Bergson’s unusual ideas about how human memory worked, Sheldrake decided, that perhaps morphogenetic fields cold be “inherited, as it were, nonmaterially: by a direct connection across time.” This process he christened “morphic resonance.”
P185 After four years of thinking about it, Sheldrake discussed morphic resonance with some Indian colleagues, and found out the idea of memory in nature is mainstream in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. “So something like a large proportion of humanity had been thinking along those lines for …millennia.
P186 Three months after the publishing of “A New Science of Life” a review appeared in “Nature”. John Maddox, the editor, wrote: “this infuriating tract was an exercise in pseudo-science, well on its way to being a point of reference for the motley crew of creationists, anti-reductionists, neo-Lamarckians and the rest.” Maddox said “it was the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.” Sheldrake’s career was destroyed, and he never worked in a scientific institution again.
P187 Sheldrake suggested controversially that when rats learn their way through a maze in one city, rats all over the world should subsequently learn the same maze more quickly, via the shared global rat memory. He tried to get morphic resonance experiments done [testable] but his interest in telepathy was enough for some to refuse to take him seriously.
P196 In 1875, Max Planck was told not to go into Physics because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.”
P207 Only when the mind combines different harmonics in its internal processing do we recognize the sound and perceive it as the sound of a violin (re musical synthesizer). Perception, therefore, must itself involve some process of unconscious reasoning.
P208 Charles Sanders Peirce introduced a third kind of logical inference he called abduction, the reasoning from the data you have to what could have been the cause of those data. Which is what Helmholtz was saying perception is: an act of abduction.
P214 Science writer, Michael Brooks > “What everyone thinks of as “the placebo effect’ turned out to be a whole array of different effects, each with a unique biochemical mechanism.”
A group was given diazepam (Valium) and told they were receiving an anxiety-alleviating drug. They subsequently felt less anxious. The second group was covertly given the same dosage of diazepam but not told about it. These patients remained just as anxious as before. Fabrizio Benedetti concluded that it was a placebo effect. Yet if you tell people they are given them diazepam and give them something inert, the effect wont’ be as large as if they had real diazepam. So the placebo effect here depends on the patients’ expectations plus a certain chemical.
P216 People judge dishes with fancier names to be more delicious than exactly the same food described more simply.
[Now with this, and other “generalizations” the author makes, is bothersome because it doesn’t work with everyone and my quarrel with Psychology is they (usually) don’t try to find out why some are not influenced – what makes them different/immune?]
P226 Same has issued an elegant denunciation of the idea of “Free Will.” It seems to be incompatible with modern science. Harris argues we should just give up the notion. We’re not free in the way we suppose and it doesn’t matter that we aren’t but the question remains, Do we know that don’t have free will?
P229 So whether we have free will or not, the idea that we have free will seems to be an important placebo. It might be a social placebo as well: some research suggests that people who are persuaded they don’t have free will are more likely to act dishonestly.
P232 If mind is already inherent in every electron, so is free will to enable the electron to make those “choices” between quantum states. If you can have panpsychism, you have a neo-Schopenshauerian panwillism. I don’t know if that is true, but it makes me feel better.
P250 The inventors of democracy themselves chose their government by lottery. It’s called sortation, and maybe it’s time to try it again.
P251 Alexander Guerrero’s lottocracy main feature is rather than have on big assembly, it has a couple of dozen “single-issue legislatures” – one for transport, one for agriculture, one for health care, one for education and so on. Citizens serving on such expert-advised legislation for several years would have more time to learn about the topic than current politicians…
P252 Just as turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, it is difficult to see the entire political class voting itself out of existence.
P259 As the science fiction writer William Gibson said “The future is already here it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
P264 The slogan “survival of the fittest,” coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, tends to obscure the equally valid perspective that the nonsurvival of the nonfittest is the true, bloody engine of evolution.
P268 A thought prompted by the suggestion that neuroepigenetics that stress and depression arising from trauma can be passed onto the next generation. This implies that parents who avoid traumatic situations are thereby acting eugenically, protecting their children from an undesirable inheritance. What if that could be done through CRISPR-style genome editing – that would plainly alleviate a lot of suffering that would otherwise be caused by hereditary disease…?
P273 Guns don’t kill as many people as compared to cars. More than a million people die every year because of road accidents, and tens of millions are injured.
Computerized cars will be able to drive faster and closer together, reducing congestion while also being safer
P274 Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. Should the self-driving car drive off the bridge and kill you to save the children? … driving a car is not simply a technical operation… it is also a moral operation. If we let cars do the driving, we are outsourcing not only our motor control but also our moral judgment.
P301 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said George Santayana – the same goes for the history of ideas … none of the debating points in the great new-atheism struggles of the 21st Century would have been unfamiliar to medieval monks.
*it took me as long to type up as read the book
RETHINK by Steven Poole
P6 Innovators can often make things better by resurrecting and improving the past – as with the Tesla electric car.
We all love a good idea but how can we tell if an idea is good? Is it useful, or financially profitable or merely revolutionizes one’s picture of the universe, or morally praiseworthy or because it inspires other thinkers?
P12 When a thing is new, people say ‘It is not true.’ Later, when the truth become obvious, they say: “it is not important.’ Finally when its importance cannot be denied, the say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.’
P15 If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! [Coleridge]
P22 the medicinal leech has three jaws and a hundred teeth. With them it saws into the skin and injects anesthetics to avoid disturbing its meal, chemicals that delete the blood vessels to get a better flow of the good stuff, and anticoagulants to stop the blood clotting and impeding its feast. A leech can take up to ten times its body weight in blood.
P24 leeches also relieve symptoms of osteoarthritis, when applied to the knees, because of anti-inflammatory and other compounds in their saliva that are still not fully understood.
P28 You can’t change was has happened to you but you can change what you think about it and what you feel about it.
P30 What bad habit have you put right today? Which fault did you take a stand against? In what respect are you better? [Seneca ~AD50]
P43 Cuvier brutally mocked Lamarck’s notion that animals could transform themselves and stoutly defended the commonsense picture of species as fixed.
P47 The field of epigenetics studies how, in response to environmental cues, chemical reactions in an animal’s body actually switches off and on in the DNA. - In particular chronic stress.
P50 Think of all the trauma humankind has experienced. Why aren’t we all depressed all the time? Because > Epigenetic changes can be reversible.
P54 circa 1847 – Semmelweis promotes washing hands and death rates dropped 90% in maternity wards and spread the message only to be ridiculed.
P66 Whereas deduction is reasoning logically from an existing set of facts, induction is hypothesizing about future fact based on current knowledge.
P71 In April 1626 Francis Bacon wondered if you could preserve meat with ice. They had a local woman kill a chicken and stuffed the carcass with snow. Bacon died of pneumonia a few days later, however the bird was perfectly preserved. The idea of frozen food was pursued again until 1912-15 when Clarence Birdseye saw Inuit hang fish out to freeze.
P77 An old idea might be considered viable only when attitudes change.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. [Max Planck]
P91-92 Grace Hopper created the first ‘compiler’, a program that would translate a new more human-friendly set of instructions into machine code automatically. This was vastly more efficient. What used to take 42 hours a functional program could solve the same equation in one hour. Instead of being celebrated, the head of computer operations at General Electric argued that programming was too delicate and ingenious an activity to be left to the computer itself. FLOW-MATIC, also Python (COBOL)
P134 Galen Strawson says “There are seven and a half billion people who believe in consciousness and are there are maybe two or three hundred philosophers who don’t.” he calls the denial of mind “the silliest view that has ever been held in the whole history of the human race.”
P142 In regards to a book “Mind and the Cosmos” by Thomas Nagel, Steven Pinker sneered at “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” It was the most despised science book of 2012 – that someone had dared to take seriously the banned concept of teleology.
It used to be called natural philosophy, held that things – in particular living things – had a natural end, or telos, at which they aimed. The idea first appeared in Plato and was developed in relation to the natural world by Aristotle, who argued that the acorn, for example, sprouted and grew into a seedling because its purpose was to become a mighty oak. We would now say that the acorn’s DNA contains all the instructions necessary to build an oak tree but that no “picture” of the final tree it encoded in the genes.
P144 Nagel says that the appearance of conscious beings such as us can be described as the universe waking up. Yet to him it seems unlikely that life would have ever got started in the first place by somehow springing forth from dead matter; still more unlikely that some forms of life would have developed consciousness; and extremely improbable that one from of life would have acquired “transcendent” power of reason. To explain these events, Nagel suggests, you need more than simply the “mechanistic” tools of the laws of physics, natural selection and so on. And you might even need teleology.
What infuriated his critics was Nagels’ doubtful attitude towards evolutionary biology. “It is prima facie highly implausible’ he intuits, “that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection”. There are insuperable “questions of improbability.”
P149 Imagine, Malthus suggests that a “Supreme Being” suddenly gave us, in irrefutable and totally credible fashion, an explanation of the nature and structure of the mind… and the whole plan and scheme of the Universe.” Such a revelation he argues, would give people nothing left to strive for in the intellectual realm, and so it “would act like the touch of a torpedo, on all intellectual exertion and would almost put an end to the existence of virtue.” The lure of the darkness is precisely what keeps us thinking at all.
P151 If fifty million people say something foolish, it is still foolish. [Somerset Maugham]
P170 Thomas Kuhn points out “lifelong resistance” to a revolutionary idea “is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself.
P177 By 1674, Copernicanism had become a majority view view among astronmers, yet Robert Hooke of the Royal Society pointed out no one had been able to demonstrate its superiority to the “Tychonic” system. According to some historians Brahe’s model “fit the available data better than Copernicus’s system did.”
P178-79 Thomas Kuhn emphasizes in his seminal “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” that has never been any such thing as a theory completely free of troubling anomalies and apparently contradictory evidence.
P183 Sheldrake looked at a historical concept that today is deader than the dodo – vitalism, that there is something special about living things, and they cannot be totally explained by reference to the physical attractions of matter. Today the term vitalism is a byword for historical superstition. It is taboo.
Sheldrake had decided that “mechanistic biology was heading towards a brick wall” and that genes were “hopelessly overrated” as a way to explain the inheritance of instinct and biological form. “The attempt to reduce life to molecules and molecules interacting just seem to so far from being able to understand things like homing pigeons, or migration, or consciousness… so maybe it’s worth looking at what the vitalists actually said.
P184 The problem that Sheldrake was wrestling with in 1973 was this: if morphogenetic fields exist, how can they be inherited? Following Henri Bergson’s unusual ideas about how human memory worked, Sheldrake decided, that perhaps morphogenetic fields cold be “inherited, as it were, nonmaterially: by a direct connection across time.” This process he christened “morphic resonance.”
P185 After four years of thinking about it, Sheldrake discussed morphic resonance with some Indian colleagues, and found out the idea of memory in nature is mainstream in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. “So something like a large proportion of humanity had been thinking along those lines for …millennia.
P186 Three months after the publishing of “A New Science of Life” a review appeared in “Nature”. John Maddox, the editor, wrote: “this infuriating tract was an exercise in pseudo-science, well on its way to being a point of reference for the motley crew of creationists, anti-reductionists, neo-Lamarckians and the rest.” Maddox said “it was the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.” Sheldrake’s career was destroyed, and he never worked in a scientific institution again.
P187 Sheldrake suggested controversially that when rats learn their way through a maze in one city, rats all over the world should subsequently learn the same maze more quickly, via the shared global rat memory. He tried to get morphic resonance experiments done [testable] but his interest in telepathy was enough for some to refuse to take him seriously.
P196 In 1875, Max Planck was told not to go into Physics because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.”
P207 Only when the mind combines different harmonics in its internal processing do we recognize the sound and perceive it as the sound of a violin (re musical synthesizer). Perception, therefore, must itself involve some process of unconscious reasoning.
P208 Charles Sanders Peirce introduced a third kind of logical inference he called abduction, the reasoning from the data you have to what could have been the cause of those data. Which is what Helmholtz was saying perception is: an act of abduction.
P214 Science writer, Michael Brooks > “What everyone thinks of as “the placebo effect’ turned out to be a whole array of different effects, each with a unique biochemical mechanism.”
A group was given diazepam (Valium) and told they were receiving an anxiety-alleviating drug. They subsequently felt less anxious. The second group was covertly given the same dosage of diazepam but not told about it. These patients remained just as anxious as before. Fabrizio Benedetti concluded that it was a placebo effect. Yet if you tell people they are given them diazepam and give them something inert, the effect wont’ be as large as if they had real diazepam. So the placebo effect here depends on the patients’ expectations plus a certain chemical.
P216 People judge dishes with fancier names to be more delicious than exactly the same food described more simply.
[Now with this, and other “generalizations” the author makes, is bothersome because it doesn’t work with everyone and my quarrel with Psychology is they (usually) don’t try to find out why some are not influenced – what makes them different/immune?]
P226 Same has issued an elegant denunciation of the idea of “Free Will.” It seems to be incompatible with modern science. Harris argues we should just give up the notion. We’re not free in the way we suppose and it doesn’t matter that we aren’t but the question remains, Do we know that don’t have free will?
P229 So whether we have free will or not, the idea that we have free will seems to be an important placebo. It might be a social placebo as well: some research suggests that people who are persuaded they don’t have free will are more likely to act dishonestly.
P232 If mind is already inherent in every electron, so is free will to enable the electron to make those “choices” between quantum states. If you can have panpsychism, you have a neo-Schopenshauerian panwillism. I don’t know if that is true, but it makes me feel better.
P250 The inventors of democracy themselves chose their government by lottery. It’s called sortation, and maybe it’s time to try it again.
P251 Alexander Guerrero’s lottocracy main feature is rather than have on big assembly, it has a couple of dozen “single-issue legislatures” – one for transport, one for agriculture, one for health care, one for education and so on. Citizens serving on such expert-advised legislation for several years would have more time to learn about the topic than current politicians…
P252 Just as turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, it is difficult to see the entire political class voting itself out of existence.
P259 As the science fiction writer William Gibson said “The future is already here it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
P264 The slogan “survival of the fittest,” coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, tends to obscure the equally valid perspective that the nonsurvival of the nonfittest is the true, bloody engine of evolution.
P268 A thought prompted by the suggestion that neuroepigenetics that stress and depression arising from trauma can be passed onto the next generation. This implies that parents who avoid traumatic situations are thereby acting eugenically, protecting their children from an undesirable inheritance. What if that could be done through CRISPR-style genome editing – that would plainly alleviate a lot of suffering that would otherwise be caused by hereditary disease…?
P273 Guns don’t kill as many people as compared to cars. More than a million people die every year because of road accidents, and tens of millions are injured.
Computerized cars will be able to drive faster and closer together, reducing congestion while also being safer
P274 Suppose you are in a self-driving car going across a narrow bridge and a school bus full of children hurtles out of control towards you. Should the self-driving car drive off the bridge and kill you to save the children? … driving a car is not simply a technical operation… it is also a moral operation. If we let cars do the driving, we are outsourcing not only our motor control but also our moral judgment.
P301 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said George Santayana – the same goes for the history of ideas … none of the debating points in the great new-atheism struggles of the 21st Century would have been unfamiliar to medieval monks.
*it took me as long to type up as read the book
December 25, 2024
This is an amazing book. I absolutely recommend It. Why? Because we tend to think that inventors have a magic gene or are beyond our capacity to understand them.
The author shows how human creativity isn’t always about coming up with something completely original but about combining or rethinking existing ideas in clever ways. The book is full of interesting stories from history, science, and philosophy, making it easy to see how ideas evolve and come back around in surprising ways.
While it sometimes jumps between topics a bit quickly, Poole’s writing is smart, witty, and easy to follow, making it a great read for anyone curious about where ideas really come from and how they shape our world.
The author shows how human creativity isn’t always about coming up with something completely original but about combining or rethinking existing ideas in clever ways. The book is full of interesting stories from history, science, and philosophy, making it easy to see how ideas evolve and come back around in surprising ways.
While it sometimes jumps between topics a bit quickly, Poole’s writing is smart, witty, and easy to follow, making it a great read for anyone curious about where ideas really come from and how they shape our world.
August 26, 2017
In an age in which ideas have to be epically disruptive in order to be considered worthy, Poole adroitly reminds us that while there is new, there isn’t as much as we may think. A lot of innovative ideas were innovative hundreds of years ago and didn’t catch on for a variety of reasons he explains with clarity.
I believe this is a must-read book for anyone who values thinking. Poole either has a massive research staff or doesn’t sleep—or both. He attacks the issue of thought from all possible angles and his awareness of the history of science is unparalleled in my experience.
The writing is quite thoughtful and good but I did find myself having to reread several sentences to gain full understanding. Let me rush to say, however, that I found this to be a reflection of the subject matter, not the writing. The mind-twister is what this book is ultimately all about.
The narrative does, at times, resemble what you would expect to hear among a coffee clutch of extreme enthusiasts on any topic. It can seem a bit excessive on sheer enthusiasm, but I think that’s what makes a potentially dry subject quite palatable to those who don’t breathe science. It’s impassioned, and that’s a good thing.
Under the banner of what was once condemned may deserve further consideration Poole does touch on some hot button political and social issues (e.g., eugenics) that are sure to offend some readers. To his credit, he makes an effort to focus on the science of the issues but can’t completely prevent giving his own political values a strong whisper of a voice. That’s to be expected, however. It’s the nature of dialogue.
In the end I think of this book as a book of philosophy as much as science. Which is one of its attractions. While scientists can be quick to dismiss philosophy as empirically unsupportable, philosophy was once defined as all knowledge, including the knowledge of science. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which includes the word philosophy in its title, really launched the scientific method as we know it today.
And that, I think, is the ultimate contribution of this book. And it’s a big one—maybe epic! He rethinks the link between philosophy and science and in so doing he expands our understanding of both.
I received this book as a gift and was not asked for a review. Nor do I have any connection to the author.
I believe this is a must-read book for anyone who values thinking. Poole either has a massive research staff or doesn’t sleep—or both. He attacks the issue of thought from all possible angles and his awareness of the history of science is unparalleled in my experience.
The writing is quite thoughtful and good but I did find myself having to reread several sentences to gain full understanding. Let me rush to say, however, that I found this to be a reflection of the subject matter, not the writing. The mind-twister is what this book is ultimately all about.
The narrative does, at times, resemble what you would expect to hear among a coffee clutch of extreme enthusiasts on any topic. It can seem a bit excessive on sheer enthusiasm, but I think that’s what makes a potentially dry subject quite palatable to those who don’t breathe science. It’s impassioned, and that’s a good thing.
Under the banner of what was once condemned may deserve further consideration Poole does touch on some hot button political and social issues (e.g., eugenics) that are sure to offend some readers. To his credit, he makes an effort to focus on the science of the issues but can’t completely prevent giving his own political values a strong whisper of a voice. That’s to be expected, however. It’s the nature of dialogue.
In the end I think of this book as a book of philosophy as much as science. Which is one of its attractions. While scientists can be quick to dismiss philosophy as empirically unsupportable, philosophy was once defined as all knowledge, including the knowledge of science. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which includes the word philosophy in its title, really launched the scientific method as we know it today.
And that, I think, is the ultimate contribution of this book. And it’s a big one—maybe epic! He rethinks the link between philosophy and science and in so doing he expands our understanding of both.
I received this book as a gift and was not asked for a review. Nor do I have any connection to the author.
March 16, 2017
Being vindicated hundred or thousand years later is not a scientist or philosopher dream, but experience confirms this happens all the time. Meanwhile, the world enriches with their knowledge, and humanity uses the discoveries to progress.
Innovation could be a revival of past ideas whose time have come through rediscovery and upgrading. This is Steven Poole argument in his book Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. Steven Poole compiles plenty of examples in different areas.
Some ideas from the past are controversial such as immunization, and terrifying like ideas behind eugenic. Other nonsense ideas resurface such as the belief that the earth is flat or the tongue-map myth – I believed the tongue-map to be true by the way – it’s the result of a mistranslation according to Steven Poole.
The ideas we use today could be wrong, but convey the best of our abilities nowadays. Ideas remain useful until they are proven wrong, and get improved or replaced. An idea is dynamic as Steven Pole says it is a moving target, is a process as much as a thing.
The science environment is anything but merciful on its transgressors, and some careers have ended because of a review on a prestigious magazine contrary to the scientist point of view. Somehow, a brave heart has to be the one to dare to publish something against the establishment. His/her career can end in a blink of an eye or a review.
The past is full of useful, not so useful and better forgotten ideas. Moreover, right now scientist and philosophers are digging into the past for the next innovations, and having the courage to publish them.
Innovation could be a revival of past ideas whose time have come through rediscovery and upgrading. This is Steven Poole argument in his book Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. Steven Poole compiles plenty of examples in different areas.
Some ideas from the past are controversial such as immunization, and terrifying like ideas behind eugenic. Other nonsense ideas resurface such as the belief that the earth is flat or the tongue-map myth – I believed the tongue-map to be true by the way – it’s the result of a mistranslation according to Steven Poole.
The ideas we use today could be wrong, but convey the best of our abilities nowadays. Ideas remain useful until they are proven wrong, and get improved or replaced. An idea is dynamic as Steven Pole says it is a moving target, is a process as much as a thing.
The science environment is anything but merciful on its transgressors, and some careers have ended because of a review on a prestigious magazine contrary to the scientist point of view. Somehow, a brave heart has to be the one to dare to publish something against the establishment. His/her career can end in a blink of an eye or a review.
The past is full of useful, not so useful and better forgotten ideas. Moreover, right now scientist and philosophers are digging into the past for the next innovations, and having the courage to publish them.
January 29, 2023
4 stars for making me think (and rethink), sharing discoveries and a long view that at times brought humor and comfort and clarity. Other ideas brought great discomfort, and it bothered me that the author was fairly forward about his opinion on many of them. That made it harder for me to feel freedom and permission to disagree with his evaluation of those ideas, although I think he would argue for freedom of engaged thought on these ideas and coming to your own conclusions. Overall, I am glad I read this one and will likely come back to parts of it again.
February 25, 2017
It started strong, with stories of big innovations of today that turned out to be old ideas resurfaced (e.g. electric cars and epigenetics). But then he spends the rest of the book diving into ideas that the establishment has dismissed, helping us see how it might be a good idea after all.
I love the concept, but the more I read the more I saw a narrow focused pattern. Almost all of the ideas he would like us to rethink come from his particular worldview. By the end of the book I had been preached to about religion, economic policy, and moral values.
What started as a great book on the innovation process in history slid into a book promoting his worldview. Oh well.
I love the concept, but the more I read the more I saw a narrow focused pattern. Almost all of the ideas he would like us to rethink come from his particular worldview. By the end of the book I had been preached to about religion, economic policy, and moral values.
What started as a great book on the innovation process in history slid into a book promoting his worldview. Oh well.
August 24, 2016
Enjoyable and quite light, deceptively so at times. If it doesn't grab you or gets too challenging, give it 5 pages and another idea will come along. The exposition and recaps that top and tail each chapter are a bit heavy-handed but there's some fascinating stuff along the way about the history of invention, philosophy and belief.
August 7, 2017
Was really fascinated by the back cover but the book itself is not so interesting. Too many ancedotes about ancient philosopy and science (which I know from school) and too few about anyhting else. I also started to feel repetition at some point, because we all get that new ideas come from old ideas
August 16, 2017
It started off well, but was too focused on the (boring) philosophical, rather than the technological aspects. Plus the author was very chauvinistic in places.
October 3, 2016
Free early reviewer book. Malcolm Gladwell, you have many sins to answer for, including the “big idea” book. Here, the overarching idea is supposedly that many ideas aren’t new, but are actually renewals of old ideas, or variants, or old ideas that wouldn’t work in the past whose time has finally come. It’s really, it seems to me, an excuse for the author to write about trends in physics and philosophy that he finds particularly interesting, but I don’t. I did find this line interesting: “the disease model of alcoholism can help a person with alcoholism even if it is not factually accurate: it is a placebo idea.” He ties this to Nietzche’s statement that “the falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it,” a rather more fraught claim when stated that broadly. Tidbits: “hard-core programmers,” which is to say, men, mocked Grace Hopper’s computer language because it was too easy to understand. Also, a statement from the author of The Joy of Sex, articulating something I feel deeply: “I would think that it is more true to say that whether people have the right to produce children depends on the circumstances. What I am sure of is that no other persons have the right to prevent them, which is a different matter.”
May 21, 2017
While reading this book, I realized I've read several "thinking about how we think" books and have accordingly added a shelf for them.
Refreshing read on revival of ideas though the author would probably point out it's not particularly new to revive ideas or reconsider them. Some positives mentioned- ideas that were only rethought when missing components were found (Lamarkianism & epigenetics), ideas that act as a placeholder stepping stone to other ideas (dark matter in physics), but also negative consequences (flat Earth believers, homeopathy, etc.)
Refreshing read on revival of ideas though the author would probably point out it's not particularly new to revive ideas or reconsider them. Some positives mentioned- ideas that were only rethought when missing components were found (Lamarkianism & epigenetics), ideas that act as a placeholder stepping stone to other ideas (dark matter in physics), but also negative consequences (flat Earth believers, homeopathy, etc.)
August 3, 2017
An intriguing concept and great collection of stories to support how many new ideas are actually old, reimagined, or even failed ideas in another time or form. Poole provides a diversity of examples across many fields- philosophy, technology, economics, war, medicine, etc. It's an inspiring "big idea" book with a good dose of history!
April 19, 2019
Some interesting bits. A book to speed-read in an hour in the library and put back on the shelf.
May 16, 2021
Steven Poole provides insight for our tomorrow. Rethink will ask you to view those ideas of the past in a whole new light. That discovery is more often than not rethinking & upgrading of ones past & how ideas once overlooked can become opportunities for the future. Extraordinary ideas are sometimes inspired by initial concepts that were deemed bad or simply didn’t quite work, yet as Steven Poole reminds us: ‘we might not be able to pin down a precise definition of idea, but as the judge said about pornography, we know it when we see it’.
His philosophy behind the science is that any human understanding can only lead to innovation & forward thinking once there has been promotion of all error, exposing the mistakes too often kept hidden is where the real research and a new design can begin. In the art of rethinking is where real discovery begins.
‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’- step back first, to be able to jump further.
In a marketplace of today where the race of entrepreneurship demands something shiny & new, Steven Poole suggests that even here in what is thought as the ‘brightest minds producing the best ideas, there will be something that finds a deep root of what came before.
His philosophy behind the science is that any human understanding can only lead to innovation & forward thinking once there has been promotion of all error, exposing the mistakes too often kept hidden is where the real research and a new design can begin. In the art of rethinking is where real discovery begins.
‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’- step back first, to be able to jump further.
In a marketplace of today where the race of entrepreneurship demands something shiny & new, Steven Poole suggests that even here in what is thought as the ‘brightest minds producing the best ideas, there will be something that finds a deep root of what came before.
November 12, 2018
My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.
June 14, 2020
Simply excellent all around. The chosen topics are intriguing, the prose is clear and motive, and the arguments are compelling.
If there's one area I'd improve, it's that I wish the author would have spent a bit more time on the chapter concerning the theory of mind/experiences. I think this one felt a bit more rushed, as the scope was larger and more esoteric than many of the other chapters.
If there's one area I'd improve, it's that I wish the author would have spent a bit more time on the chapter concerning the theory of mind/experiences. I think this one felt a bit more rushed, as the scope was larger and more esoteric than many of the other chapters.
September 21, 2017
May ideas, or to be precise stories, about inventions, invented again. In the first part, there are answers to such questions like:
- Why we write code in English?
- When were electric cars used on the streets?
- How can ancient ideas affect medicine?
Nice to read
- Why we write code in English?
- When were electric cars used on the streets?
- How can ancient ideas affect medicine?
Nice to read
December 31, 2019
i guess it’s hard to have an original idea. somewhere down history someone could have thought about it first. a great book about rethinking of old ideas and bring them into fruition. this shall be my last book for the year. looking forward to read more exciting books in 2020.
January 8, 2020
An intetresting take on the ups and downs of scientific and philosophical ideas. Some examples are compelling, others not so. The central tenet is persuasive but the follow-up discussion towards the end fizzles out a bit. 3.5*
March 3, 2020
I was really intrigued by the back of the book, but once i started reading it, the author didnt catch my attention and the longer i read, the longer i got bored and i felt as if i was forced to read it. I had to stop in the middle.
November 8, 2017
All new ideas are old.
Electric cars were running in 1837.
Leeches are back as a medical treatment.
etc.
Electric cars were running in 1837.
Leeches are back as a medical treatment.
etc.
January 22, 2020
Very interesting views on how history really does repeat itself (can get slow at times)
April 15, 2020
Entertaining, well-organized, covered many topics
November 6, 2020
A trite, catch-all thesis, unpersuasively and interminably argued.
October 18, 2021
Most interesting indeed.
February 24, 2022
Definitely put a new perspective on things in our world and how we can make changes.
November 9, 2023
Don’t know what I got myself into but started well and after page 80, boredom took over .
October 25, 2019
Book: Rethink: the surprising history of new ideas
Author: Steven Poole
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Sometimes we wonder how this excellent idea came from? What a beautiful mind! But the most world-changing innovative idea is actually developed a long time ago.
Like the first electric car was built in 1837, there are lots of idea and technology which were invented before the time of acceptance or requirements.
This book will flood your brain with such a valuable invention, technic, idea etc. In the context of philosophy and science, it is a very good book for keeping your mind beautiful.
Author: Steven Poole
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Sometimes we wonder how this excellent idea came from? What a beautiful mind! But the most world-changing innovative idea is actually developed a long time ago.
Like the first electric car was built in 1837, there are lots of idea and technology which were invented before the time of acceptance or requirements.
This book will flood your brain with such a valuable invention, technic, idea etc. In the context of philosophy and science, it is a very good book for keeping your mind beautiful.
May 11, 2022
This book shows how old ideas that didn't make it later get revived when new knowledge comes along or the world changes in a way that allows the failed ideas to succeed. There are many examples and it is often educational. Will read this again.
I've read it again and got even more out of it this time. It's back on my read-again shelf.
I've read it again and got even more out of it this time. It's back on my read-again shelf.
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