This week we talk to Leidy Klotz about his book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.

Leidy Klotz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Schools of Engineering, Architecture, and Business. His wide-ranging, prolific, and highly-awarded research is filling in unexplored overlaps between design and behavioral science. Nationally recognized as one of 40-under-40 professors who inspire, Leidy has taught thousands of students, including 21 Ph.D. advisees, whose designing and teaching shapes the world. He founded and directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative, which brings together scholars, funders, media, and practitioners to advance behavioral science for design.

We discuss the human cognitive bias to try and solve a problem by adding new elements rather than by subtracting pieces from the problem; how deeply-rooted and pernicious this is in both our evolution and our economics, and how it has contributed to the complex and compounding crises in which we find ourselves today; the implications of subtraction thinking for civil engineering, governance and collective behavior; how to communicate a subtraction strategy as a net positive without setting off people’s loss aversion alarms; whether it’s possible to “subtract” systemic racism and other structural inequalities; and in what ways the evolution of the technosphere will make for future humans both more and less than we are…

https://www.leidyklotz.com/

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Related Reading & Notes:

Edward Tufte - PowerPoint is Evil

https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdf

NPR - To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/11/729314248/to-save-the-science-poster-researchers-want-to-kill-it-and-start-over

Martin Nowak, Joshua Plotkin, Vincent A. A. Jansen - The evolution of syntactic communication

https://www.nature.com/articles/35006635

Things:

optimization

satisficing

complex systems

traffic

cognition

interoperability

daylighting

science communication

persuasion

Parkinson’s Law

Jevons’ Paradox

hoarding

decluttering

pollution

The Anthropocene

urban design

landscape architecture

entropy

defund the police

information design

the non-euclidean curved attention landscape

People:

Joseph Leidy

Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live by

Brian Eno / The Long Now Foundation

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow

Systems researcher Tim Clancy

Kate Orff’s Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE / Landscape

Marie Kondo

Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World

Rajiv Sethi & Brendan Flaherty’s Shadow of Doubt

Hunter Maats

Ann Blair

Herbert Simon

Kirell Benzi

Richard Doyle’s Darwin’s Pharmacy

Chris Ryan’s Civilized To Death

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow

Michael Phillips

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Program Info:

Episode mostly edited by my amazing wife, Nicole Taylor.

Theme music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder.  

Intro bed music by Michael Garfield.

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