Transcription
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming out bright and early in the night's chilly air. I should be used to this; I'm Canadian. But I was walking around complaining and whining. It's, I think I've lost all my Canadian-ness after 15 years in the U.S.
So, um, as, as the introducer said, I'm Claire Thompson. I write about technology and how it affects the way we think. And so I'm actually here to talk a little bit about socially connected thinking. But I'm gonna begin by how I nearly made an idiot of myself a few weeks ago. It was at South by Southwest. I, I was playing on stage and I was gonna do a talk and, and it was gonna mention, um, Goethe. But I realized about like half an hour before I went on stage that I had no idea how to pronounce the name. I'd never, I'd read it, I'd never actually heard it pronounced. And I'm, and I'm gonna look like a complete fool in front of everyone.
So of course, I, you know, I, I realized, how do I, how do I solve this problem? I went to Twitter and I put up a thing saying, "I'm going to go on stage, I said, if I self-West and, and mention Goethe, how do you pronounce something correctly? I'm pretty sure I'm mangling it right now." So fortunately, I have enough people follow me that they noticed this and they began to chime in. You know, I, uh, Alex Howard, a friend of mine in DC, said, "I'd go with Gerta." And he sent me a little YouTube, you know, link with the pronunciation. And then Gideon Litchfield, I don't know him at all. I guess he just must have seen this. He's actually German. He was like, "No, it's, it's Carter." Where the, where the, you can keep the R quiet. Kevin Speaker, friend of mine from, old friend of mine, Koota, ah, knows that correct pronunciation sounds like you're about to hork up something nasty. And then, and then friends just started hassling me, you know, like, you know, Koota, you know, it's pronounced Yolo. Pronounce it so it sounds completely wrong in North American, then it's right. And I won't even go after the one at the end of that list.
The upshot of it was, I, I had several German speakers chime up and give me the correct pronunciation. So I was able to constantly go on stage and say, "Goethe," I think, like that. So that's sort of what I'm here to talk about today to open up, which is, which is the power of thinking so much in public. You know, what does it mean when we start broadcasting so many more of our thoughts, things we're wandering about, in front of other people? And we've been actually doing this, obviously, you know, you know, as a civilization for a long time. But for the, a huge amount of time, it was incredibly expensive. If you wanted to broadcast thinking, you had to have, you know, in the 15th century, and I'd have something like this, you know, like a, an old-fashioned press. Just, this is, this is a Gutenberg innovation to take a winepress and turn into something that could produce text, send it to other people. A great idea. But for hundreds of years, this was too expensive for the average person to use to broadcast their thinking. And so it was kept to the elites.
And, and this is the same thing, not just with, like, in a broadcasting ideas across the entire country, but even broadcasting the idea to yourself. Getting her hands on a, on a clean piece of paper was actually surprisingly hard until the 21st century. You know, this is from, this is from one of George Washington's commanders in the Revolutionary War. He's writing a letter and he's apologizing for having written on the back of another used dry-ink letter because that's how hard it was to get pieces of paper back then. So for an enormous amount of time throughout civilization, it was actually very hard for us to set down our ideas and share them with anyone else at all. And that's why, you know, if you talk to the scholars of rhetoric, they'll tell you that, you know, until the internet came along, the average person, you know, went to high school, if they went to university, and they wrote papers and they showed them to their, you know, to their professors. And they wrote a bunch. But after they graduated, they basically wrote nothing down for the rest of their lives. That was pretty much it.
I have some proof this in a funny way because I talked to the, the least wired person in Northern Ontario, which is my mother. She's in her late 70s. She's never used a computer in her life. She does know how to type. And we were talking one day and I asked her, I've been talking to you scholars of rhetoric and I said, um, "When's the last time you wrote something like, like a paragraph in length?" And the line went dead. And if she was thinking about it, I said, "Well, what about in the last year?" She said, "No, God, no." And I said, "Well, how about the last decade?" And she said, "No, I don't think so." And so we sort of went on this archaeological dig to find the last time she'd written anything more than a sentence long. And it was probably in the '70s, you know, when she wrote four or five letters to, you know, the family at Christmas saying, "Here's what's happening." And that was all sort of killed off by cheaper long distance.
So, so this was the experience of the vast majority of people. Unless you were in one of these rare, you know, jobs like a journalist or or an academic or an analyst, you basically didn't set down your ideas. Particularly, you didn't set down and send other people your, your weird, strange passions, the things you're really interested in. Now, that, of course, has changed dramatically online. I, I tried to calculate how many, you know, or the metric tons of words that were spewing out online all day long, with every email, with every text message, with every Instagram discussion thread. And I came up with three point six trillion words a day, which is about the same size as the U.S. Library of Congress every single day.
So this is unprecedentedly massive. Those are not all good words, you know, of course. I think if anyone has looked at the bottom of a newspaper article and read the threads, has discovered probably online discourse follows what you could call Sturgeon's Law. Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer and he was asked, um, "Why is so much science fiction so bad?" And he said, "Well, it's true that 90% of science fiction is terrible, but 90% of everything is terrible." And, and that probably obtains to our online discourse. 90% of it is, you know, throwaway observations, silly stuff, trolling. The 10% that's amazing is huger than any volume of human expression in history.
Because the skill, what's going on, and what particularly interested me here that I want to talk about today is what it actually does to the sort of warp and woof and timbre of our thinking to be doing this public expression. If you talk to psychologists and say, you know, "What happens when you, when you just thinking about something to put in front of other people?" They'll tell you, well, you get the audience effect, you know, which is, which is the sort of transition when you move in from an audience like I am in front of you right now, and you realize, "Oh my God, I actually have to be more clever than I am at everyday life." I, you know, I can't just wing this. I have to prepare. And that happens every time someone sits down to write something that's going to anyone else. And you see it's over and over again when you study students in college. If they write something for the professor, that, you know, they kind of, they kind of do an okay job. But if you say to me, "No, we're gonna put this online and all your peers around the world are gonna look at it," they suddenly write 40% longer, more complex sentences and more complex ideas because they don't want to look stupid in front of a real audience.
In fact, one of my, one of my favorite stories of this is, um, a woman up in Vancouver. I'm Canadian. I know some Canadian academics. She teaches Canadian literature. And so she's trying to get her students to write essays on Canadian poets and Canadian short fiction writers. And as you might imagine, this is not always the most compelling material for the students. So, you know, the red means essays, and they're kind of, yeah, they're kind, they're kind of, they're okay, basically. So she says, "I'm on, yeah, I'm gonna give you a real challenge, a real audience. I want you to get these essays into Wikipedia as the entry for these Canadian writers." The students go, "Okay." They greatly, they, they upload their essays, duly to, you know, to Wikipedia, and hit publish. And they sit back. And then like 15 seconds later, every single one on this delete. You know, because the Wikipedians are a pretty hard crowd, you know, the, and they're all like, you know, "This is, this is crap. It's badly written. You didn't provide any, any sourcing at all."
So teachers, the students come back to the teacher sort of tears in their eyes, going, "You know, what do we do?" And she said, "Well, you're going to have to make them better." And they would. And they, they went back and they, they added more research, they wrote them better, they resubmitted it, got deleted, resubmitted, got deleted. You could see them doing this at like 11 o'clock at night, and, you know, 1:00 in the morning, 2:00. And when people finally, at the end of the week, all of these these things get accepted into Wikipedia. And the joke she said to me was, you know, "And that's, my students were, this clicker. Their students were often content to get a bad grade from me, but they didn't want the Wikipedia community to tell them their research was lazy or sloppy." And that's the aspect of a real authentic audience. On us, over and over again, we sort of, we sort of become a better version of ourselves, better thinkers, when we have to satisfy people.
It's also partly because we know they're gonna be writing back to us. We're in this funny thing right now with the literary literacy scholar Deborah Brandt says, we're, it's almost like the, the blues break room in the UK, where everyone who's who's a reader is also a writer, responding to other people who read it, right? And this, you know, the pressure just sort of say something clever helps us crystallize our thoughts. Gabe Weinberg, a fantastic guy, he runs a pro-privacy search engine, DuckDuckGo. And every time he runs into a problem at work, his first thought is, "I have to like write something about this and send it out there." Because it forces him to realize what he's actually worrying about and crystallize, because the hand-waviness goes away. Or as Cecil Day-Lewis says, you know, "We don't write in order to be understood. We write in order to understand." To understand what's going on and set our own minds. And so that's one of the first transformations that happens as we do so much of this thinking.
Is the other sort of fun, I think, effects that happen from our online explosion of writing moves. The generation effect, which is when you actually have to sit down and write something and formalize a thought, it actually encodes in your mind. That you, you remember better the stuff that you write. Whether that is a tweet, whether that is an email to someone else, whether that's a blog post or a discussion thread. Anytime we're writing something down, we're taking the knowledge that we have and really getting it inside our heads because we're wrestling with it.
Now, one of the really fantastic things about the fact that we're networked when we're doing all this writing is it taps into something that scientists they call the law of multiples. Now, scientists have long discovered sort of an uncomfortable fact about science, which is that, you know, you think you have an amazing idea, amazing discovery, you work on it for years and years, you publish it, only to discover that someone else was doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. And this has happened over and over in in science. You know, the sunspots on the sun were discovered by four different people pretty much in the same year. The theory of evolution came up by two different people who didn't know each other existed. Radio is invented by about five people at the same time, not knowing each other existed. So over and over again, scientists discover this phenomenon, multiples. And they learned over time that the best way to deal with this is to think out in public, to publish in journals, other people can see what you're doing so you can find other people knocking about ideas with them, collaborate with them, ratchet ideas up into it, just sort of, you know, a bigger and more interesting size.
And so this is what you see when people become really practiced public thinkers online. The really interesting multiples get resolved. Now, I think a lot of people here probably know Ory Okolloh. She's the one of the co-founders of Ushahidi, but a famous crisis mapping tool. But there's a great story that I like about how Ushahidi came about. So Ory was a blogger and she was in Kenya and she was doing this great blogging of a political scene. And in 2007, in the 2007 election, the government, you know, kind of rigged the election. And, you know, because there was a lot of dissent about that, they shut down the media. And there was actually a fair amount of violence that was erupting at the polls, a lot of voter intimidation. And because the government wasn't letting the media report on it, Ory and the other bloggers were working hard to try and document this stuff. They were getting people to email, you know, all the sort of notes in the text notes in. And she's constantly updating her blog. And in the middle of this, you know, because she's a public thinker, she just sort of thinks out loud. She says, "You know, wouldn't it be a better way to do this? Couldn't we have some sort of Google Maps mashup that lets people do this?" And because, you know, she's thinking out loud, and because, you know, multiples exist, lo and behold, you know, friends of hers are reading this, realized, "Wait a minute, you know, we know people that could put this together." And within 48 hours, they do. You know, so that, so Ushahidi was born because Ory was accustomed to thinking out loud. And whenever an interesting problem occurred to her, she sort of got out of there in the open.
And this is how really interesting big ideas come about. Because when we're sort of talking in public and doing more public expression of our ideas, it catalyzes what sociologists would call the power of weak links. And sociologists sort of divided the world into, into two groups. There's the strong links and the weak links, the strong ties and the weak ties. And the strong ties are the people we know really well, you know, our friends, our family, the people who we spend a lot of face-to-face time with. But it's the weak ties that turned out to be incredibly interesting. Mark Granovetter discovered this back in the '70s when he, he did research into how people find a job. And he asked hundreds of people, "How did you get a job?" And it turned out that the people who had the best jobs, the ones that paid the most, and the ones who were most satisfied with, had all heard about their jobs from a weak link, from someone they didn't know very well, someone that they talked to maybe once a year. They didn't hear about it from their close friends. You know, why is that? You would think if your close friends would be the ones who are most looking out for you, who are trying to find something amazing for you. And that's true. But the problem is, your close friends are too informationally similar to you. They know about the jobs you know about. They're not going to know anything new. The new information in our lives comes from these weak links.
Now, you know, it used to be incredibly hard to pay any attention to weak links because who was gonna pick up the phone 50 times a week to call someone they barely know and say, "Hey, what's going on?" You know? But as we live in a world with public thinking, more and more of these connections happen. And weak links can catalyze groups that have amazingly diverse pools of knowledge and skill. There's a really funny example of that. So this is, so this is written by the CEO of Pinboard, which is one of these, some bookmarking, bookmarking sites. Maciej Cegłowski. He noticed that a bunch of people were starting to use his tool who were fanfiction people. So fanfiction people would be writing stories about, you know, The Hunger Games or Harry Potter or whatever. And they would be using, they'd be tagging all of their stories using using his tool. And he just sort of out loud, he was just wondering, you know, "Is there anything that would be useful for me to, to put it already had any sort of features you'd like?" He just says this out loud. But, you know, the fanfiction community is extremely wired online. They do a lot of public making and paying attention to public thinking. So within like ten minutes, there was a Google Doc set up and there was about dozens and dozens, all their ideas in there. And within two days, they'd written a sixteen-thousand-word document including code specifications. They actually crashed the Google Doc. And it turns out they discovered, I did not know this, only fifty people at a time can fit inside one Google Doc. They tried to get 51 and it didn't work, basically.
So, so this fantastic collaboration happened because he was thinking out loud and they were accustomed to working together and being able to think out loud. I think these people do not waste time. In only two days, he had, he had the next year of his corporate development work dead for him. So this happens and all, in all these different ways. It happens, it happens to me. I, I actually wrote a book last fall that this talk is partly based on. That book and Readability is an app that allows people to, to sort of socially collaboratively do marginalia in a book. You open it up and if you see something interesting, you can comment in the margins. And other people, if they want, can see your comments and they can, they can comment on your comments. You can have these sort of conversations in the margins of books. I thought that sounded pretty cool. And so the, the Readability folks emailed me and said, "You know, could you give us an excerpt of your book to run?" And I said, "Sure." So I gave them a chunk and they put it up. And within minutes, there was all these fascinating comments appearing that were so interesting that I'd build. And I started talking to people. And we went on for about, uh, about a week of really rich conversation. At the end of it, when the conversation sort of ran its course, I, I just did a word count and realized that in two thousand words of text, we had written 8,000 words of commentary, a four to one ratio. And I've begun to realize this is almost a sort of, it's almost like a dark matter, white matter universe, or the, or the sort of cognitive space that's that's that in the, in the iceberg floating underneath the water. There is an enormous amount of thinking that is latent, that is there in the world, that people are interested in throwing forward if they're given the environment in which to do it, right?
And this happens all the time. You see it particularly in weird areas of passion. Like I'm a guitar player. I've built guitar pedals. So I've been in the guitar pedal forums. Now, you guys probably don't visit those forums. But you have something weird that you like to do. And you're in those forums. And so, you know, it's like there's all these weirdos and they're passionate about it. They're talking. And as soon as someone has a problem or wonders about something, everyone just pounces on it. So this was, this was an evening out a little while ago where someone mentioned the strange fuzz pedal from the 1960s, the Baldwin "Buzzaround." It's a really cool sounding pedal. And here it was broken. He didn't know how to fix it because he didn't have a schematic for it. So lo and behold, of course, people immediately started pulling out their Baldwin "Buzzaround" and in about 48 hours, they had a complete schematic worked out. Because this is exactly what happens when you're thinking out loud and you're throwing your problems out in front of people who care about the exact same weird, strange problem that no one else except the people in that room care about.
Now, I'm gonna give you an example of someone realizing the power of all this public thinking and turning it to a real big public good. This is a story of Foldit. Foldit is a project by David Baker. He's a scientist and he studies diseases and how to fight diseases and how to design drugs to fight diseases. If you want to design a drug to attack a disease, you have to understand what's causing that disease. And that usually means figuring out how the protein is being folded that creates that disease in the body. Now, you can think of folding a protein as like, you know, a long string and you sort of just swirl it with your fingers and you get a little ball. And there are millions, you can imagine millions or billions of ways to roll that ball. If you don't roll it the right way, you won't be able to understand the protein. So for decades, scientists like David Baker would just do this randomly, able to get supercomputers to randomly fold and fold and refold these proteins in the hopes that they would just sort of get it right randomly. And they would run out of processing power, basically, because the supercomputers would be going, you know, 90 days.
And so a couple of years ago, he thought, "Well, maybe I should ask for help. I could, I could make a screensaver and people could download it and when their computer is not doing anything, it could, it could fold proteins for me." That's what he did. And sure enough, people were very altruistic. You know, thousands of them downloaded the screensaver and they started folding proteins for science. But then he started getting emails from people saying, "Well, David, here's the problem. This, this algorithm is folding it randomly, but it keeps on making a mistake, you know, but 10% of the land and the whole thing is lost. And I can see it making a mistake. So why don't you let me fold the protein because I'm probably better at this than the computer is?" And so a light bulb went off in his head. He realized he wasn't, he wasn't sitting on top of the altruistic donation of thousands of computers. He was, he was actually sitting on top of something far more powerful, which was the altruistic donation of thousands of actual intelligent human beings, right? Who are willing to work together on something.
So he put together this, and this is essentially a little game that gives you a real-world protein and challenges you to fold it into the smallest space possible. It's called Foldit. And it's a really hard game to play. It's hard to do this. So all the players immediately began engaging in this public thinking. They set up blogs where they would talk about the strategies that they were doing and have discussion boards filled with people arguing about what's the best way to fold this or that protein. They had Twitter feeds so that whenever someone discovered something new, it would ricochet around to everyone else. They had chat windows up more, they talked to each other about this stuff. And because they were doing all this public thinking and pooling of knowledge, they've gotten really good at it. Like he could see them getting better and better and better. And he decided, "Okay, I'm gonna give him a real hard, real-world problem." And he took this puzzle of HIV that had baffled him and his researchers for 10 years. And when he gave it to them, they solved it in 3 weeks, basically. They, they actually figured out exactly how to do this, something that they had been unable to do with all their supercomputers in years and years and years of work.
In fact, this is, this is a great document because this is, as far as I can tell, the first scientific paper co-written by individual scientists and groups of game players. The Foldit Contenders group, the Foldit Void Crushers group, they're like, they're like quick clans, basically, put together to play games and in this case, solve science. And so what was really interesting to me when I talked to David was that he understood the power of public thinking and he understood how to create an environment that would get the best out of people, that would that would sort of encourage them to cluster around an interesting problem. And, and this is really one of the interesting challenges, I think, for everyone in this room, is that we know we live in this world where people are putting their heads together. And many heads are bigger than one, smarter than one. But how do we create an environment that allows them and encourages them to do that? This is really what, you know, Tim O'Reilly calls the architecture of participation. You know, what creates, what creates a great environment where people want to get into it?
Well, I had a great conversation once with the, with the CEO, founding CEO of Quora. Because Quora is an interesting situation. There are a lot of question-answering sites out there. Most were pretty dreadful. I mean, you go to Yahoo Answers and it's, you know, it's not the most edifying answer. It's basically the core was different. He was, they were getting people were writing these hundred-thousand-long answers that were very articulate. And I said, "You know, how did you do this?" And he said, "Well, you know, it was all about the architecture of participation." He realized one thing, which is that, that the quality of the question was a big deal. That if you can convince people to ask really interesting questions, this unlocks a lot of knowledge that people have inside their heads. We all walk around with all sorts of knowledge that we're not sharing with anyone else because we don't know that they're interested in it. When someone sees a question, a well-phrased, interesting question, it gives us permission to step forward and publicly share the stuff that we know. And so Quora was all about encouraging the high-quality questions at first, realizing that that would be the thing that would encourage the high-quality answers.
So I'm gonna wrap up in a few minutes here. And obviously, I've been talking about the, the sort of joys and I think the cognitive benefits of all this public talking. But, you know, I'm not exactly going to tell you to, you know, to leave here and then, you know, go online and never get off again. Because to a certain extent, one of the things that's the flip side of public thinking is that private thinking is still an incredibly powerful thing. If I could get this to work, there we go. Private thinking. It's still an incredibly powerful thing. We live in an environment now that allows for this type of social contact, and that's enormously catalytic of all the forces of good that I've talked about here. But private thinking is still an unbelievably important mode for mulling over things, for coming to conclusions, for deep-baking problems. And so I think one of the things that's really interesting about our modern world is that we have to practice something we didn't have to practice before, which is metacognition. Which is thinking about our thinking. What type of a problem are we trying to solve? And where is it best solved? Is this something that works best if I go for a long walk and just think about it myself, or read a book quietly for three hours? Or is this something that would benefit from the voices of other people? Think I'm gonna talk to them and get their ideas and throw my ideas out and have ideas crystallized that way? As we move, as we learn to move back and forth between these two domains, we're learning to be modern thinkers. Because as Goethe said, "Sharing is more difficult than you think." Thank you very much.