(2018-04-18) Steven Johnsons Cabinet Of Wonders Announcing My New Book Farsighted

Steven Johnson: Announcing My New Book, Farsighted

I have a new book coming out this September, on the art and science of life’s most difficult choices. It’s called Farsighted: How We Make The Decisions That Matter The Most. Appropriately enough for a book about long-term thinking,

About eight years ago, in the summer in 2010, I started taking notes on a book about complex decisions. I had just finished writing Where Good Ideas Come From, which had explored the cognitive and collaborative practices of creative individuals and groups, across a wide range of disciplines and historical periods.

I started to think more about how literature — and particularly the realist novel — gave us valuable simulations of complex decision-making, ones that could improve our decisions in the real world. I wrote some extended magazine essays about collective decisions and the long-term thinking they required. I began to realize how important prediction is to these kinds of choices, which led me to some fascinating cognitive science research on how the human brain forecasts future events.

There are insights drawn from cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and sociology. But it is also in many ways a book about the importance of storytelling.

All truly complex decisions are by definition unique ones; that’s part of what makes them so difficult. And so a lot of the strategies that Farsighted proposes are not so much ready-made prescriptions as they are tools or hacks for getting you to see the decision you face with as much clarity as possible, to get around the biases and simplifications and old habits that can distort these kinds of choices.