Steven Johnson Quotes.

1. "We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they want to connect, fuse, recombine.... They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete. The single maxim that runs through the book: Where Good Ideas Come From ."
- Quote by Steven Johnson

2. "A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box."
- Quote by Steven Johnson

3. "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."
- Quote by Steven Johnson

4. "The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower."
- Quote by Steven Johnson

5. "If you’re trying to transform reality you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don’t just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches."
- Quote by Steven Johnson

6. "That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior."
- Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants

7. "A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities—capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group."
- Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants

8. "An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence. We’re blind to our blindness."
- Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants

9. "cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties, she wrote. They get their order from below; they are learning machines, pattern recognizers—even when the patterns they respond to are unhealthy ones."
- Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants

10. "But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. Although queen is a term that reminds us of human political systems, Gordon explains, the queen is not an authority figure. She lays eggs and is fed and cared for by the workers. She does not decide which worker does what. In a harvester ant colony, many feet of intricate tunnels and chambers and thousands of ants separate the queen, surrounded by interior workers, from the ants working outside the nest and using only the chambers near the surface. It would be physically impossible for the queen to direct every worker’s decision about which task to perform and when. The harvester ants that carry the queen off to her escape hatch do so not because they’ve been ordered to by their leader; they do it because the queen ant is responsible for giving birth to all the members of the colony, and so it’s in the colony’s best interest—and the colony’s gene pool—to keep the queen safe. Their genes instruct them to protect their mother, the same way their genes instruct them to forage for food. In other words, the matriarch doesn’t train her servants to protect her, evolution does. Popular culture trades in Stalinist ant stereotypes—witness the authoritarian colony regime in the animated film Antz—but in fact, colonies are the exact opposite of command economies. While they are capable of remarkably coordinated feats of task allocation, there are no Five-Year Plans in the ant kingdom. The colonies that Gordon studies display some of nature’s most mesmerizing decentralized behavior: intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up."
- Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants