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Zusammenfassung von Subtract

Name: Subtract
Rating: 4.2 (1264 reviews)
Author: Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz

The Untapped Science of Less

4.2 (1264 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Subtract by Leidy Klotz is an insightful book that highlights how we can solve problems and innovate through subtraction. It emphasizes that less is often more and provides practical tools for streamlining ideas, designs, and processes.

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Das Gehirn Anthropologie Kultur Neurowissenschaft

Inhaltsübersicht

Subtract
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What’s in it for me? Subtract your urge to add.

We’ve all heard that less is more. But look around your city, your home, or your office, and you’ll find that most of us live by the mantra that more is better. Whether we’re going shopping or writing an email, we itch to add.

These blinks will explain why. You’ll take a whistle-stop tour through human history to discover why we’re so in love with adding, and why we don’t like its opposite: subtracting. From the cradle of civilization to our modern economies, from our genes to our architecture, you’ll discover how addition and subtraction are intimately linked to our humanity – and to our way of life.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how subtraction can fight racial injustice;
why we prefer to add things than take them away; and
what Legos can teach us about psychology.

Subtraction is an overlooked force for change.

In 1985, Sue Bierman was a city planner with a mission. She wanted the people of San Francisco to agree to remove something from their city. The thing she wanted taken away? An ugly double-decker freeway that blocked the city’s waterfront. Without this freeway, Bierman argued, San Franciscans could actually enjoy their beautiful shoreline. But Bierman quickly encountered the problem you’ll discover in these blinks: people don’t like to subtract.

Even though Bierman’s proposal was sound, San Franciscans from all walks of life – politicians to business owners to ordinary citizens – voted to keep the freeway. It was only four years later, when the freeway was badly damaged by the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake, that the city finally had no choice but to remove it.

This is the key message: Subtraction is an overlooked force for change.

What happened after the freeway was subtracted from San Francisco? Well, these days, the space it used to occupy is known as the Embarcadero waterfront. It's one of the most popular tourist attractions in America, bringing visitors, jobs, and money to the city.

Sue Bierman realized she could create positive change by taking something away. But like the citizens of San Francisco, most of us struggle to think positively about subtraction.

When we think about how to make things better, we usually think about adding things. Not convinced? Then consider these questions: When you make a New Year’s resolution, do you resolve to do more of something rather than less? When you’re working on a piece of writing, do you spend more time writing new sentences than editing what you’ve already written? If you answered yes to either of the above, then you might be neglecting subtraction – and suffering as a result.

Think about your home. Your house might not be packed with ugly freeways, but the average American home contains over 250,000 items! That’s a lot of stuff; it’s also a mammoth task to keep it all organized. Failing to subtract is a problem on a much larger scale, too. Most of us realize that we’re adding too much carbon to our climate. But when we consider global warming, we often focus on how to add carbon more slowly – and rarely talk about how we can remove existing carbon from the atmosphere.

In the next blink, we’ll explore why we fail to subtract.

Subtracting is less mentally accessible than adding.

Like Sue Bierman, the author’s own journey into subtraction also began with architecture. It all started when the author and his little boy were building a Lego bridge, and the bridge’s supporting pillars ended up being different heights. Instinctively, the author picked up another block to add to the shorter pillar.

At that moment, the author had a startling realization: it would never even have occurred to him to take away a block from the taller pillar. Could this be an indication of something bigger, he wondered? Might it be that human beings overwhelmingly add rather than subtract?

Adding makes us feel competent and happy.

So, human beings tend to overlook subtraction. But the question remains: Why? Perhaps the behavior of another species might suggest an answer.

Male bowerbirds also do a lot of adding. But they don't add soup ingredients or Lego blocks. Instead, they add sticks, leaves, and colorful objects to their nests – bowerbirds are the showy architects of the bird world. What's more, a lot of this addition seems arbitrary. The bowerbirds never use these nests. As soon as the female has decided which complicated nest she likes the most, she mates with the male who built it, and then they leave the palatial nest behind.

First came addition; then came civilization.

Our journey into the science of adding and subtracting now takes us to Turkey – specifically, to an archaeological site called Göbekli Tepe. What archaeologists found here shows us that adding isn’t just a biological instinct that we share with other animals. Instead, adding might be the driving force behind human civilization itself.

So what incredible wonder is Göbekli Tepe hiding? The answer is an ancient stone temple. This temple is an extremely early example of monumental architecture, a type of building whose sheer scale and intricacy goes far beyond what is necessary for its purpose.

Keynesian economics tells us we can get rich by adding.

So we’ve inherited our ancestors’ preference for adding. But there’s also a very modern reason why we prefer to add rather than subtract: our economies demand it. And not only do modern capitalist economies encourage us to add – we’re also urged to think of constant adding as a good thing.

But what do economics, addition, and morality have to do with one another?

Systemic oppression can be tackled with subtraction.

Before any subtraction happens, there needs to be understanding – after all, you have to know all the constituent parts of the thing, or situation, that you want to change. Only then can you make informed decisions about which parts to take away. That’s because a lot of the things we want to change don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re complex systems that are more than the sum of their parts.

To demonstrate this point, let’s take a look at something that many people would like to change: racism. Author Ibram X. Kendi argues that all racism is systemic racism because the systems that govern our lives, like the justice system, are innately racist. Racism is so difficult to “subtract” because most people don’t fully understand how these systems perpetuate it.

Subtraction is well worth the extra effort.

You may have heard the expression, I’ve written you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one. This pithy remark has been attributed to the author Mark Twain – but it could have been written by any one of us going about our daily lives. That’s because it gets at an essential truth: subtraction is hard work.

Whether you’re chipping away at a concrete freeway or a wordy sentence, cutting out the unnecessary to arrive at something better takes much more effort than just leaving things as they are. It's easier to walk away when something’s “good enough.” After all, that short letter probably would have been better, but the longer one did the job, too.

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Worum geht es in Subtract?

Subtract (2021) explores subtraction as a way to make positive change. It examines the human love affair with adding and having “more” – and it explains how our brains and environments work against subtraction.

Wer Subtract lesen sollte

Design professionals looking for a fresh perspective
Psychology buffs wanting new insights
Anthropology enthusiasts

Über den Autor

Leidy Klotz is a professor of Engineering at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the connections between design and behavioral science.

Kategorien mit Subtract

Wissenschaft Gesellschaft & Kultur Psychologie

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