People seem to have a strong preference for centralization in almost everything they think and do. People tend to look for the cause, the reason, the driving force, the deciding factor. When people observe patterns and structures in the world (for example, the flocking patterns of birds or the foraging patterns of ants), they often assume centralized causes where none exist. And when people try to create patterns and structures in the world (for example, new organizations or new machines), they often impose centralized control where none is needed(p.120).

...

The centralized mindset has undoubtedly affected many theories and trends in the history of science. Just as children assimilate new information by fitting it into their preexisting models and conceptions of the world, so do scientists. As Keller puts it, "In our zealous desire for familiar models of explanation, we risk not noticing the discrepancies inherent in natural phenomena. In short we risk imposing on nature the very stories we like to hear." In particular, we risk imposing centralized models on a decentralized world (p.122).

...

... Poeple continue to construct centralized theories to explain the patterns they see in the world. In trying to understand the origin of the species, for example, many people still resist the idea of evolution by natural selection. More than a century after Darwin, many people continue to believe that only a centralized Designer of Life could have created the wonderful diversity and complexity of the living world (p.123).

...

In Science of the Artificial (1969), Herbert Simon describes a scene in which an ant is walking on a beach. Simon notes that the ant's path might be quite complex. But the complexity of the path, says Simon, is not necessarily a reflection of the complexity of the ant. Rather, it might reflect the complexity of the beach.

Simon's point: don't underestimate the role of the environment in influencing and constraining behavior. People often seem to think of the environment as something to be acted upon, not something to be interacted with. People tend to focus on the behaviors of individual objects, ignoring the environment that surrounds (and interacts with) the objects. (p.142)

To the roster of favorite oxymorons that includes "jumbo shrimp," "military intelligence" and "healthy tan," a new report proposes a tart addition: "artistic freedom."

By the reckoning of three Israeli researchers, nothing imprisons the mind more thoroughly, nothing stifles inventiveness and artistry more brutally, than too much freedom, too much wiggle room for the imagination.

Instead, they argue, the real source of productive creativity may lie in art's supposed bugaboos: rules, structure, even the occasional editor or two.
...

...
Creativity, by this measure, is not some mystical, inchoate process, beyond analysis and delineation, but rather is composed of a series of distinct subroutines, which can be rallied repeatedly to churn out ideas that seem the opposite of routine.

The notion of creative thinking as amenable to parsing and replication is both cheering and disheartening: cheering because it means that just about anybody can learn to do it at least passably well, and disheartening for showing, once again, that even genius is so much meat in motion.
...

In their report, they describe experiments in which they deconstructed renowned advertisements and found that they often followed specific formulas, which they term templates.
One of the commonest templates they found is the so-called replacement template.

For example, they considered a Nike ad, in which a group of firemen are standing around in a rescue pose, looking up as though someone was about to jump from a burning building into their net. In lieu of a net is a giant Nike sneaker, with copy boasting of how the new Nike walking shoes are "very safe places to land." In this advertisement, the sneaker replaces an object whose most salient characteristic is "cushioning." Indeed, the life net cushions a person from death itself.

Similarly, a series for Bally shoes shows various objects that symbolize freedom -- a beach, clouds in the sky -- in the shape of a foot, the implication being that the wearing of Bally shoes frees the wearer from cares, the rat race, bunions.
...

Dr. Goldenberg and Dr. Mazursky, who are in the school of business, and Dr. Solomon, of the physics department, designed the program to counter a hoary principle in creativity theory that the most original ideas are born of utter freedom, a shifting of paradigms, a circling of the square, a streaming of consciousness, a squelching of the internal editor.

Instead, they argue, their work on templates indicates that constraining options and focusing thought in a specific, rigorous and discerning direction may yield comparatively fresher results.
"To suspend criticism and think any idea is possible or good may ultimately be destructive to creativity," said Dr. Goldenberg.
...

"Humans can criticize themselves, and computers can't," said Dr. Mazursky.
"As Oscar Wilde said, imagination is imitative -- the real innovation lies in criticism.

"Limits can be powerful motivator," said Roger von Oech, a creativity consultant for businesses and author of a classic in the field, "A Whack on the Side of the Head," published in its third edition last year by Warner Books.

"If you're given a really tight deadline and a small budget, you'll probably be more resourceful than if you have a ton of time and a limitless budget.
Skyscrapers weren't invented by people with a lot of land, but by those who had to figure out how to build more offices on tight and incredibly expensive real estate."
...

Von Oech says that in his corporate seminars and training sessions, he gives his clients very specific tasks.
Most of them are centered on humor, his belief being that, as he puts, "there's a close relationship between the ha-ha of humor and the ah-ha of discovery." For example, he asks people to come up with offbeat mottoes for themselves or their companies, and he has stimulated some beauties.
From the Bank of America group: "Bank of America: Where you're never alone until you need a loan."
From Microsoft: "We're arrogant, and we should be."

Anyone who has been to the racetrack knows that picking a horse is part art and part science: a gambler can pick the horse with the best odds, pick a horse that won its last race, pick the horse that has the best winning streak or choose on the basis of a hunch. It was intuition, after all, not statistics, that rewarded those who picked Charismatic to win the Kentucky Derby in May at 32-to-1 odds.

Now, a small group of researchers say that such intuition can, at least in part, be duplicated by computers. Rules of thumb that are only partially accurate can be combined into precise prediction tools using an artificial intelligence technique called boosting.

Boosting has two qualities that distinguish it from existing computer prediction methods. While highly accurate, it is simpler to execute than many other programs. And it is able to make predictions even when the programmer provides very general -- or even conflicting -- guidelines. In other words, it simulates, albeit in a more sophisticated and accurate manner, human intuition.

"Philosophically it's an interesting result," said Robert Schapire, who has done seminal work on boosting with fellow AT&T researchers Yoav Freund and Yoram Singer. "You can take a set of prediction rules that is better than random guessing and combine them into something that is very accurate. It's kind of counterintuitive."

[Campbell's Rule]

We should think of it like this --- evolutionary theory describes how design is created by the competition between replicators. Genes are one example of a replicator and memes another. The general thoery of evolution must apply to both of them, but the specific details of how each replicaor works may be quite different.
This relationship was clearly seen by the American psychologst Donal Campbell long before the idea of memes was invented. He argued that organic evolution, creative thought and cultural evolution resemble each other and they do so because all are evolving systems where there is blind variation among the replicated units and selective retention of some variants at the expense of others. Most importantly, he explained that the analogy with cultural accumulations is not from organic evolution per se; but rather from a general model of evolutionary change for which organic evolution is but one instance. Durham calls this principle 'Campbell's Rule'.(p.17)

* * *
[Meme-Gene Coevolution]

I am going to propose an entirely new theory based on memetics. In summary it is this. The turning point in our evolutionary history was when we began to imitate each other. From this point on a second replicator, the meme, came into play. Memes changed the environment in which genes were selected, and the direction of change was determined by the outcome of memetic selection. So the selection pressures which produced the massive increase in brain size were initiated and driven by memes. (pp.74-75)

* * *
[Feelings as Logic Executers]

Genes are invisile. A monkey that is going to share some food cannot be sure whether the other monkey is really her sister or not, and certainly cannot look inside and find out just which genes the two of them have in common. However, this does not matter for the principle to work. Monkeys that, in general, share resources with kin more than with non-kin will get more of their genes into the next generation. How they achieve this may vary, and probably involves various simple heuristics such as 'share with another monkey you were brought up with' or 'share with other monkeys that look, smell, or feel like your mother' or share most with monkeys you spend most time with'. Depending on the lifestyle of the animals concerned, different heuritsics will work better than others. They work not by making the monkeys calculate sums, but by giving them feelings that make them act appopriately. The same applies to us. In other words, people 'execute evolutionary logic not via coonscious calculation, but by following their feelings, which were designed as logic executers'.(p.149)

* * *
[Religious Memes]

Dawkins was he first to give memetic answers, although his ideas on religion have frequently been criticised. He took Roman Catholicism as an example. The memes of Catholicism include the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, risen from the dead after his crucifixion and now (and fore ever) able to hear our prayers. In addition, Catholics believe that their priests can absolve them from sins after confession, the Pope literally speaks the word of God, and when priests administer the mass, the bread and wine literally change into the flesh and blood of Christ.
To anyone uninfected with any Cristian memes these ideas must seem bizarre in the extreme.
How can an invisible God be both omnipotent and omniscient?
Why should we believe a two-thousand-year-old story that a virgin gave birth?
What could it possibly mean to say that the wine 'literally' becomes the blood of Christ?
How could someone have died for our sins when we were not even born?
How could he rise from the dead, and where is he now?
How could a prayer, said silently to yourself, really work? (p.187)

There are many claims for the efficacy of prayer in healing the sick, and even a little experimental evidence, but few of the experiments have controlled adequately for placebo effects, expectation, and spontaneous recovery, and some have shown that people with the strongest religious faith were less likely to recover from acute illness. Against the claims are hundreds of years of people praying for the health of their royal famlies or heads of state with no apparent effect, and the inability of modern-day religious healers to make any obvious differnece in hospitals. Then there are all those countless wars in which both sides routinly pray for God to help their side and kill the enemy. Yet millions of people all over the world profess themselves Catholics and pray to Jesus, his mother Mary, and God the Father. They spend vast amounts of their valuable time and money supporting and spreading the faith to others, and the Catholic Church is among the richest institutions in the world. Dawkins explains how religious memes, even if they are not true, can be successful. (p.188)

* * *
[Hypocrisy]

Much of the money donated to churches, temples, or synagogues is not used for the poor or needy, but to perpetuate the religion's memes by erecting beautiful buildings or paying for clergy. (pp.189-190)

* * *
[Inner Self as Illusion]

Another series of experiments by Libet adds an interesting twist to the argument. Consicious sensory impressions can be induced by stimulating the brain, but only when it is continuously stimulated for about half a second. It is as though consciousness takes some time to build up. This would lead to the odd idea that our conscious appreciation of the world lags behind the events, but because of a process Libet calls 'subjective antedating' we never realise it is lagging behind. The story we tell ourselves puts events in order. Further experiments showed that with short stimuli (too short to induce conscious sensation) people could nevertheless guess correctly whether they were being stimulated or not. In other words they could make correct responses without awareness. Again the implication is that consciousness does not direct the action. Conscious awareness comes all right, but not in time. ...
...
In this, and many other ways, we seem to have an enormous desire to describe ouselves (falsely) as a self in control of 'our' lives. The British psychologist Guy Claxton suggests that what we take for self control is just a more or less successful attempt at prediction. ...
Claxton concludes that consiousness is 'a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a superfluous and inaccurate sense of self'. Our error is to think of the self as separete, persistent, and autonomous. Like Dennett, Claxton thinks that the self is really only a story about a self. The inner self who does things is an illusion. (pp.226-228)