Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas

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.)

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 show more 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.” show less