Notion Templates For Quotes

In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past. When publishing executives passed on Harry Potter, they said it was too long for a children’s book; when Brandon Tartikoff saw the Seinfeld pilot, he felt it was “too Jewish” and “too New York” to appeal to a wide audience. Rice professor Erik Dane finds that the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. He points to studies showing that expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed, and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law. As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.

In the post-Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone now wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way that he did.

From the standpoint of physics, I had merely introduced into my brain a small collection of foreign particles. But that change was enough to eliminate the familiar impression that I freely control the activities playing out in my mind. While the reductionist-level template remained in full force (particles governed by physical laws), the human-level template (a reliable mind endowed with free will navigating through a stable reality) was upended. Of course, I am not presenting a mind-altering moment as an argument for or against free will. But the experience made visceral an understanding that would otherwise have remained abstract. Our sense of who we are, the capacities we have, and the freedom of will we seemingly exert all emerge from the particles moving through our heads. Fiddle with the particles, and those familiar qualities can fall away. It’s an experience that helped align my rational grasp of the physics with my intuitive sense of the mind. Everyday experience and everyday language are filled with references, implicit and explicit, to free will. We speak of making choices and coming to decisions. We speak of actions that depend on those decisions. We speak of the implications that these actions have on our lives and the lives of those we touch. Again, our discussion of free will does not imply that these descriptions are meaningless or need to be eliminated. These descriptions are told in the language appropriate to the human-level story. We do make choices. We do come to decisions. We do undertake actions. And those actions do have implications. All of this is real. But because the human-level story must be compatible with the reductionist account, we need to refine our language and assumptions. We need to set aside the notion that our choices and decisions and actions have their ultimate origin within each of us, that they are brought into being by our independent agencies, that they emerge from deliberations that stand beyond the reach of physical law. We need to recognize that although the sensation of free will is real, the capacity to exert free will—the capacity for the human mind to transcend the laws that control physical progression—is not. If we reinterpret “free will” to mean this sensation, then our human-level stories become compatible with the reductionist account. And together with the shift in emphasis from ultimate origin to liberated behavior, we can embrace an unassailable and far-reaching variety of human freedom.

In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail.26 When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset. To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past. When

And harder economic times strained civic trust. As the U.S. growth rate started to slow in the 1970s—as incomes then stagnated and good jobs declined for those without a college degree, as parents started worrying about their kids doing at least as well as they had done—the scope of people’s concerns narrowed. We became more sensitive to the possibility that someone else was getting something we weren’t and more receptive to the notion that the government couldn’t be trusted to be fair. Promoting that story—a story that fed not trust but resentment—had come to define the modern Republican Party. With varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of success, GOP candidates adopted it as their central theme, whether they were running for president or trying to get elected to the local school board. It became the template for Fox News and conservative radio, the foundational text for every think tank and PAC the Koch Brothers financed: The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn’t share our values, who didn’t work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making. The intensity of these convictions put Democrats on the defensive, making leaders less bold about proposing new initiatives, limiting the boundaries of political debate. A deep and suffocating cynicism took hold. Indeed, it became axiomatic among political consultants of both parties that restoring trust in the government or in any of our major institutions was a lost cause, and that the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better.