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Famous Steven Johnson Quotes

“Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.”

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Book:Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
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“And so it was with the Broad Street well that the decision to remove the pump handle turned out to be more significant than the short-term effects of that decision [Cholera outbreak abated.] . . . .But the pump handle stands for more than that local redemption. It marks a turning point in the battle between urban man and V. cholerae, because for the first time a public institution had made an informed intervention into a cholera outbreak based on a scientifically sound theory of the disease. . . . For the first time, the V. cholerae's growing dominion over the city would be challenged by reason, not superstition.”

Science Vs Everyday Knowledge
Book:The Ghost Map
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“Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.”

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“The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like 'Lost' or 'Alias' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.”

MeanShowsLostFansTelevisionProgramEconomicsThirdsPressureFinancialComplicatedThanksIntensityScholarEpisodesMultipleSiteRevealingReservedCommentaryNuanceDvdsForumsAliasesAnnotationFinancial Pressure
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“Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.”

NeedsMindKindImportantRevolutionMeaningfulConsistentGrainParadigmGreat MindsGunpowderRubble
Book:The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America
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“This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.”

EnoughMomentsHappensAgeWaterPracticeBuildingGeniusIntellectualStandingShouldersLiftsPhrasesGiantsRisingDozenIsolatedFloodBreakthroughNewtonLabsPrecedentObstruction
Book:The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
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“The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”

WritingArtIdeasWholeTogetherSimpleWalksMistakeEmbracePatternsLinksMultipleWiserHobbiesMessyLiquidSerendipityTangledHunchesFolders
Book:Where Good Ideas Come From
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“How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.”

PeopleTheoryDisciplinePeriodsEvidenceDeserveIntelligentErrorsOverwhelmingSociology
Book:The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
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“Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory, in the dense network of your neurons. Most slow hunches pass in and out of our memory too quickly, precisely because they possess a certain murkiness. You get a feeling that there's an interesting avenue to explore, a problem that might lead you to a solution, but then you get distracted by more pressing matters and the hunch disappears. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.”

WritingMatterFeelingsProblemMightCertainChallengesMemoriesSimpleInterestingSecretAliveSolutionsDisappearScalesPreservesMultipleDistractedAvenuesOur MemoriesCultivationDenseHunchesNeuronsStarters
Author:Steven Johnson
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“Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.”

PeopleThinkingWayLooksDifferentValuesIndividualLanguageRealizingCommonGroupsMovementFieldsOne DayWaveFollowingLook UpLocationRecognizingTrajectoryCommon LanguageVicinityShared ValuesVectors
Author:Steven Johnson
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“One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.”

PeopleWayFirstsBookStoriesLove IsInterestingNeededFirst TimeEuropePressesEverydayReactionsChainsMakersPoolEveryday LifeLensesExpertisePrintingTelescopesMicroscopesSpectaclesPrinting PressChain ReactionsGutenberg
Author:Steven Johnson
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“Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.”

GivingYearsMeanSelfSometimesOrderMemoriesPartyHappenedShareInformationConsciousDefenseKitchenConcertsCollaborationHostSmarterAntsImmuneEmergenceDecreeImmune SystemNo Memory
Author:Steven Johnson
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“Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.”

YearsHas BeensTodayPastCultureGamesChallengesGrowingTelevisionInternetIntellectualStandardsAverageDecadesDespiteMake SenseThirtyThirty YearsOver The PastPopular CultureDumbing Down
Author:Steven Johnson
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“Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.”

WorldLooksChildrenEnoughMemoriesChildhoodObjectsSacredVividTriggersOutside WorldTalismansVivid MemoriesGrown Children
Book:Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
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“I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.”

PeopleIfsKindStoriesGamesSportsMillionsGenerationsStrategyChessDragonsSuspectsDiplomacyMy GenerationDungeonsSimulationGeopolitical
Book:Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
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“It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.”

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Author:Steven Johnson
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“Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.”

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Book:Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
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“What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.”

PeopleLooksHas BeensIdeasEndsDoneMomentsInspirationSeeingPossibilityInnovationBrilliantBoundariesPushingLeapGood IdeasExploringBreakthroughFrontiersIdeas And Innovation
Author:Steven Johnson
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