Sciencespeaking topic
You can easily predict what one person will do, but no one can predict what a million people will do on the stock market, in traffic, in a panic. A crowd is smarter or dumber than a single person, but never just one person scaled up. Why do the individual and the collective behave like entirely different creatures?
— collective behavior / complex systems
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- In a forest the trees are linked underground by threads of fungus; old trees send sugar to sick saplings and share warning signals. Is the forest we imagine to be pure competition actually a single network talking over a hidden internet?
- Occam's razor: if two explanations account for the same thing, choose the one requiring fewer assumptions. But why should the simpler one be the same as the true one?
- A single neuron in your brain doesn't 'think,' it knows nothing. But when 86 billion of them come together, 'you' emerge. So you are the byproduct of parts, none of which know you. If consciousness is something the parts don't have, where does it come from?
- If we blew an atom up to the size of a football field, the nucleus would be a marble in the center and everything else would be empty. When matter is almost nothing, why does the world feel so 'full'?
- In a market, everyone sells because they fear 'the others will sell,' and the price falls, and the fall proves the fear right. So danger becomes real not because it was real but because everyone believed in it. How does a belief turn itself into reality?