# Edge 2011 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Archive year:** 2011 - **Response rows represented:** 166 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 166 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 6 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 6 - **Not yet promoted:** 160 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2011-001 — The Controlled Experiment — Timo Hannay > When required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most non-scientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting. The scientific method dictates that wherever possible we should instead conduct a suitable controlled experiment. The superiority of the latter approach is demonstrated not only by the fact that science has uncovered so much about the world in which we live, but also, and even more powerfully, by the fact that such a lot of it — from the Copernican principle and evolution by natural selection to general relativity and quantum mechanics — is so mind-bendingly counter-intuitive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Managing Director, SchoolDash; Co-organizer, Sci Foo Camp - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Controlled Experiment](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25084) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-002 — Aether — Richard H. Thaler > Both risk and risk aversion are concepts that were once well defined, but are now in danger of becoming Aetherized. Stocks that earn surprisingly high returns are labeled as risky, because in the theory, excess returns must be accompanied by higher risk. If, inconveniently, the traditional measures of risk such as variance or covariance with the market are not high, then the Aetherists tell us there must be some other risk; we just don't know what it is. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Father of Behavioral Economics; Recipient, 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Author, Misbehaving - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Aether](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11935) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-003 — Chunks With Handles — Vilayanur Ramachandran > You will see a general rule of thumb emerging here. Anomalies (1) and (2) were not ignored because of lack of empirical evidence. Even a school child can see the fit between continental coastlines or similarity of fossils. It was ignored solely because it didn't fit the big picture—the notion of terra firma or a solid, immovable earth—and there was no conceivable mechanism that would allow continents to drift (until plate tectonics was discovered). Likewise, (2) was repeatedly confirmed but ignored because it challenged the fundamental doctrine of biology—the stability of species. But notice that the third (telepathy) was rejected for two reasons; first, it didn't fit the big picture and second because it was hard to replicate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor & Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, UC, San Diego; Author, The Tell-Tale Brain - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Chunks With Handles](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11951) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-004 — The Double-Blind Control Experiment — Richard Dawkins > Let's not give the defeatist answer and blame it all on stupidity. That's probably part of the story, but let's be optimistic and concentrate on something remediable: lack of training in how to think critically, and how to discount personal opinion, prejudice and anecdote, in favour of evidence. I believe that the double-blind control experiment does double duty. It is more than just an excellent research tool. It also has educational, didactic value in teaching people how to think critically. My thesis is that you needn't actually do double-blind control experiments in order to experience an improvement in your cognitive toolkit. You only need to understand the principle, grasp why it is necessary, and revel in its elegance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Double-Blind Control Experiment](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11969) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-005 — Focusing Illusion — Daniel Kahneman > Politicians are almost as good as marketers in causing people to exaggerate the importance of issues on which their attention is focused. People can be made to believe that school uniforms will significantly improve educational outcomes, or that health care reform will hugely change the quality of life in the United States — either for the better or for the worse. Health care reform will make a difference, but the difference will be smaller than it appears when you focus on it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Recipient, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002; Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton; Author, Thinking, Fast and Slow and Co-Author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Focusing Illusion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-006 — Ecology — Brian Eno > Before ''ecology'' we understood the world in the metaphor of a pyramid — a heirarchy with God at the top, Man a close second and, sharply separated, a vast mass of life and matter beneath. In that model, information and intelligence flowed in one direction only — from the intelligent top to the ''base'' bottom — and, as masters of the universe, we felt no misgivings exploiting the lower reaches of the pyramid. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Ecology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11920) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-007 — Ambient Memory And The Myth Of Neutral Observation — Xeni Jardin > Facts are more fluid than in the days of our grandfathers. In our networked mind, the very act of observation--reporting or tweeting or amplifying some piece of experience--changes the story. The trajectory of information, the velocity of this knowledge on the network, changes the very nature of what is remembered, who remembers it, and for how long it remains part of our shared archive. There are no fixed states. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tech Culture Journalist; Partner, Contributor, Co-editor, Boing Boing; Executive Producer, host, Boing Boing Video - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Ambient Memory And The Myth Of Neutral Observation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11617) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-008 — Kayfabe — Eric R. Weinstein > Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Kayfabe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-009 — Information Flow — David Dalrymple > Information flow is symmetric: if information about A were to allow us to update our estimate of B, then information about B would allow us to update our estimate of A. But since we cannot change the past or know the future, these constraints are only useful to us when contextualized temporally and arranged in order of occurrence. Information flow is always from the past to the future, but in our minds, some of the arrows may be reversed. Resolving this ambiguity is essentially the problem that science was designed to solve. If you can master the technique of visualizing all information flow and keeping track of your priors, then the full power of the scientific method — and more — is yours to wield from your personal cognitive toolkit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Information Flow](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11632) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-010 — Cognitive Humility — Gary Marcus > Computer memory is much more better than human memory because early computer scientists discovered a trick that evolution never did: organizing information according by assigning every memory to a sort of master map, in which each bit of information that is to be stored is assigned a specific, uniquely identifiable location in the computer's memory vaults. Human beings, in contrast. appear to lack such master memory maps, and instead retrieve information in far more haphazard fashion, by using clues (or cues) to what it's looking for, rather than knowing in advance where in the brain a given memory lies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Cognitive Humility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11799) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-011 — Uncalculated Risk — Antony Garrett Lisi > Quantum mechanics dictates that the world we experience will happen according to this probability — the likelihood of the event. In this bizarre way, quantum mechanics reconciles the frequentist and "Bayesian" points of view, equating the frequency of an event over many possible worlds with its likelihood. An "expectation value," such as the expected number of people killed by the judge's decision, is the number of people killed in the various contingencies, weighted by their probabilities. This expected value is not necessarily likely to happen, but is the weighted average of the expected outcomes — useful information when making decisions. In order to make good decisions about risk we need to become better at these mental gymnastics, improve our language, and retrain our intuition. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Uncalculated Risk](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11647) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-012 — The Other — Dimitar D. Sasselov > The concept of 'otherness' or 'the Other' is about how a conscious human being perceives their own identity: "Who am I and how do I relate to others?"; a part of what defines the self and is constituent in self-consciousness. It is a philosophical concept widely used in psychology and social science. Recent advances in the life and physical sciences have opened the possibility for new and even unexpected expansions of this concept. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Other](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11814) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-013 — The Gibbs Landscape — Kevin P. Hand > Civilizations and the rise of industrial and technological ecosystems bring a new challenge to our understanding of the dynamic between energy needs and energy resources. The Gibbs landscape provides a short-hand abstraction for conceptualizing this dynamic. We can imagine any given city, country, or continent overlain with a map of energy available to do work. This includes, but extends beyond the chemical energy framework used in the context of biological ecosystems. For instance, automobiles with internal combustion engines metabolize gasoline with air. Buildings eat the electricity supplied by power plants or rooftop solar panels. Every component in modern industrial society occupies some niche in the landscape. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Gibbs Landscape](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-014 — Because — Nigel Goldenfeld > The search for causal structure is nowhere more futile than in the debate over the origin of organismal complexity: intelligent design vs. evolution. Fueling the debate is a fundamental notion of causality, that there is a beginning to life, and that such a beginning must have had a single cause. On the other hand, if there is instead a web of causation driving the origin and evolution of life, a skeptic might ask: has anyone seen the spider? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Because](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11829) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-015 — The Senses and the Multi-Sensory — Barry C. Smith > . For anyone unlucky enough to have disturbance in their vestibular system they will feel the world is spinning although cues from the eyes and the body should be telling them everything is still. Instead, the brain goes with the combined picture and vision and proprioception fall in line. Luckily, our senses cooperate and we get us around the world, and the world we inhabit is not a sensory, but a multisensory world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Senses and the Multi-Sensory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11677) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-016 — Proxemic of Urban Sexuality — Stefano Boeri > Even the most insurmountable ethnic or religious barriers can suddenly disappear with the furor of an intercourse; even the warmest and cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in absence of erotic tension. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Architect; Professor, Politecnico of Milan; Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD; Editor-in-Chief, Abitare magazine - **Extract length:** 31 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Proxemic of Urban Sexuality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11844) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-017 — A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process — Diane F. Halpern > A better understanding of the pitfalls associated with this term would go a long way toward improving our "cognitive toolkits." If common knowledge of what this term means included the ideas that a) the findings may not be important and b) conclusions based on finding or failure to find statistically significant differences may be wrong, then we would have significantly advanced general knowledge. When people read or use the term "statistically significant difference," it is an affirmation of the scientific process, which, for all of its limitations and misunderstandings, is a significant advance over alternative ways of knowing about the world. If we could just add two more key concepts to the meaning of that phrase, we could improve how the general public thinks about science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Claremont McKenna College; Past-president, American Psychological Association; Author, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11693) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-018 — Microbes Run the World — Stewart Brand > Microbial evolution, which has been going on for over 3.6 billion years, is profoundly different from what we think of as standard Darwinian evolution, where genes have to pass down generations to work slowly through the selection filter. Bacteria swap genes promiscuously within generations. They have three different mechanisms for this "horizontal gene transfer" among wildly different kinds of bacteria, and thus they evolve constantly and rapidly. Since they pass on the opportunistically acquired genes to their offspring, what they do on an hourly basis looks suspiciously Lamarckian — the inheritance of acquired characteristics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Microbes Run the World](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-019 — The Dece(i)bo Effect — Beatrice Golomb > Another explanation consistent with these results is specific physiological benefit. The study used a nonabsorbed fiber — microcrystalline cellulose — as the "Placebo" that subjects were told would be effective. The authors are applauded for disclosing its composition. But other nonabsorbed fibers benefit both constipation and diarrhea — symptoms of irritable bowel — and are prescribed for that purpose; psyllium is an example. Thus, specific physiological benefit of the "Placebo" to symptoms cannot be excluded. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Dece(i)bo Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11708) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-020 — A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory — Mahzarin Banaji > In the town of Pondicherry in South India, where I sit as I write this, many do not share this assessment. There are those, including some close to me, who believe there are extrasensory paths to knowing the world that transcend the five senses, that untested "natural" foods and methods of acquiring information are superior to those based in evidence. On this trip, for example, I learned that they believe that a man has been able to stay alive without and caloric intake for months (although his weight falls, but only when he is under scientific observation). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Department Chair; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author (with Anthony Greenwald), Blind Spot - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11874) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-021 — Phase Transitions And Scale Transitions: Conceptualizing Unexpected Changes Due To Scale — Victoria Stodden > One interesting aspect of the concept of the phrase transition is that it describes a shift to a state seemingly unrelated to the previous one, and hence provides a model for phenomena that challenge our intuition. With only knowledge of water as a liquid, who would have imagined a conversion to gas with the application of heat? The mathematical definition of a phase transition in the physical context is well-defined, but even without this precision I argue this idea can be usefully extrapolated to describe a much broader class of phenomena today, particularly those that change abruptly and unexpectedly with an increase in scale. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Phase Transitions And Scale Transitions: Conceptualizing Unexpected Changes Due To Scale](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11556) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-022 — The Name Game — Stuart Firestein > Too often in science we operate under the principle that "to name it is to tame it", or so we think. One of the easiest mistakes, even among working scientists, is to believe that labeling something has somehow or another added to an explanation or understanding of it. Worse than that we use it all the time when we are teaching, leading students to believe that a phenomenon that is named is a phenomenon that is known, and that to know the name is to know the phenomenon. It's what I, and others, have called the nominal fallacy. In biology especially, we have labels for everything — from molecules to anatomical parts, to physiological functions, to organisms, to ideas or hypotheses. The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University; Fellow, AAAS - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Name Game](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-023 — Deep Time And The Far Future — Martin Rees > Darwin himself realised that "No living species will preserve its unaltered likeness into a distant futurity". We now know that "futurity" extends far further, and alterations can occur far faster — than Darwin envisioned. And we know that the cosmos, through which life could spread, is far more extensive and varied than he envisaged. So humans are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree, but a species that emerged early in cosmic history, with special promise for diverse evolution. But this is not to diminish their status. We humans are entitled to feel uniquely important as the first known species with the power to mould its evolutionary legacy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Deep Time And The Far Future](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11889) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Deep Time/Humans Are Not the Terminal Branch of Evolution by Martin Rees|Humans Are Not the Terminal Branch of Evolution by Martin Rees]] ### EDGE2011-024 — The Power of 10 — Carl Page > The total cost of CA high speed rail is projected to be $45 billion. Using exponents to estimate, remember that a billion is 9 digits. 45 billion adds another digit. Since 4 is larger than 3, you can add another half a digit, and about 1.6 digits. So that is about 10 to the 10.6 . - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Serial Entrepreneur; Co-founder, eGroups - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Power of 10](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-025 — Anthropophilia — Andrew Revkin > To sustain progress on a finite planet that is increasingly under human sway, but also full of surprises, what is needed is a strong dose ofanthropophilia. I propose this word as shorthand for a rigorous and dispassionate kind of self regard, even self appreciation, to be employed when individuals or communities face consequential decisions attended by substantial uncertainty and polarizing disagreement. The term is an intentional echo of Ed Wilson's valuable effort to nurturebiophilia, the part of humanness that values and cares for the facets of the non-human world we call nature. What's been missing too long is an effort to fully consider, even embrace, the human role within nature and — perhaps more important still — to consider our own inner nature, as well. Historically, many efforts to propel a durable human approach to advancement were shaped around two organizing ideas: "woe is me" and "shame on us," with a good dose of "shame on you" thrown in. The problem? Woe is paralytic, while blame is both divisive and often misses the real target. (Who's the bad guy, BP or those of us who drive and heat with oil?) Discourse framed around those concepts too often produces policy debates that someone once described to me, in the context of climate, as "blah, blah, blah bang." The same phenomenon can as easily be seen in the unheeded warnings leading to the most recent financial implosion and the attack on the World Trade Center. More fully considering our nature — both the "divine and felonious" sides, as Bill Bryson has summed us up — could help identify certain kinds of challenges that we know we'll tend to get wrong. The simple act of recognizing such tendencies could help refine how choices are made — at least giving slightly better odds of getting things a little less wrong the next time. At the personal level, I know when I cruise into the kitchen tonight I'll tend to prefer to reach for a cookie instead of an apple. By pre-considering that trait, I might have a slightly better chance of avoiding a couple of hundred unnecessary calories. Here are a few instances where this concept is relevant on larger scales. There's a persistent human pattern of not taking broad lessons from localized disasters. When China's Sichuan province was rocked by a severe earthquake, tens of thousands of students (and their teachers) died in collapsed schools. Yet the American state of Oregon, where more than a thousand schools are already known to be similarly vulnerable when the great Cascadia fault off the Northwest Coast next heaves, still lags terribly in speeding investments in retrofitting. Sociologists understand with quite a bit of empirical backing why this disconnect exists even though the example was horrifying and the risk in Oregon is about as clear as any scientific assessment can be. But does that knowledge of human biases toward the "near and now" get taken seriously in the realms where policies are shaped and the money to carry them out is authorized? Rarely, it seems. Social scientists also know, with decent rigor, that the fight over human-driven global warming — both over the science and policy choices — is largely cultural. As in many other disputes (consider health care) the battle is between two quite fundamental subsets of human communities — communitarians (aka, liberals) and individualists (aka, libertarians). In such situations, a compelling body of research has emerged showing how information is fairly meaningless. Each group selects information to reinforce a position and there are scant instances where information ends up shifting a position. That's why no one should expect the next review of climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to suddenly create a harmonious path forward. The more such realities are recognized, the more likely it is that innovative approaches to negotiation can build from the middle, instead of arguing endlessly from the edge. The same body of research on climate attitudes, for example, shows far less disagreement on the need for advancing the world's limited menu of affordable energy choices. Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multi-dimensional problems, to take a "crude look at the whole" — a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW. It's imperative, where possible, for that look to include an honest analysis of the species doing the looking, as well. There will never be a way to invent a replacement for, say, the United Nations or the House of Representatives. But there is a ripe opportunity to try new approaches to constructive discourse and problem solving, with the first step being an acceptance of our humanness, for better and worse. That's anthropophilia. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University's Academy - **Extract length:** 781 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Anthropophilia](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11738) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-026 — We Are Not Alone In The Universe — J. Craig Venter > I cannot imagine any single discovery that would have more impact on humanity than the discovery of life outside of our solar system. There is a human-centric, Earth-centric view of life that permeates most cultural and societal thinking. Finding that there are multiple, perhaps millions of origins of life and that life is ubiquitous throughout the universe will profoundly affect every human. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** A leading scientist of the 21st century for Genomic Sciences; Co-Founder, Chairman, Synthetic Genomics, Inc.; Founder, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [We Are Not Alone In The Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11905) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-027 — Replicability — Brian Knutson > Why not construct a replicability (or “r”) index to complement impact factors? As with h, r could indicate that a scientist has originally documented r separate effects that independently replicate r or more times (so, Susie Sharp has an r-index of 5 if she has published 5 independent effects, each of which others have replicated 5 or more times). Replication indices would necessarily be lower than citation indices, since effects have to first be published before they can be replicated, but might provide distinct information about research quality. As with citation indices, replication indices might even apply to journals and fields, providing a measure that can combat biases against publishing and publicizing replications. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Replicability](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11587) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-028 — Everyday Apophenia — David Pizarro > The human brain is an amazing pattern-detecting machine. We possess a variety of mechanisms that allow us to uncover hidden relationships between objects, events, and people. Without these, the sea of data hitting our senses would surely appear random and chaotic. But when our pattern-detection systems misfire they tend to err in the direction of perceiving patterns where none actually exist. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Everyday Apophenia](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11753) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-029 — Living is fatal — Seth Lloyd > A well-developed scientific method for dealing with the unknown has existed for many years — the mathematical theory of probability. Probabilities are numbers whose values reflect how likely different events are to take place. People are bad at assessing probabilities. They are bad at it not just because they are bad at addition and multiplication. Rather, people are bad at probability in a deep, intuitive level: they overestimate the probability of rare but shocking events -- a burglar breaking into your bedroom while you're asleep, say. Conversely, they underestimate the probability of common, but quiet and insidious events — the slow accretion of globules of fat on the walls of an artery, or another ton of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Living is fatal](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11602) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-030 — It Ain't Necessarily So — Neri Oxman > Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than the state by which they may appear or thought to be — a rather ambiguous definition given our known limits to observation and comprehension of concepts and methods. This ambiguity, captured by the aphorism thatthings are not what they seem, and again with swing in Sportin' Life's songIt Ain't Necessarily So, is a thread that seems to consistently appear throughout the history of science and the evolution of the natural world. In fact, ideas that have challenged accepted doctrines and created new realities have prevailed in fields ranging from warfare to flight technology, from physics to medicinal discoveries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Architect, Researcher, MIT; Founder, Materialecology - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [It Ain't Necessarily So](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11767) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-031 — An Instinct to Learn — W. Tecumseh Fitch > One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture. Many psychologists, linguists and social scientists, along with the popular press, continue to treat nature and nurture as combatting ideologies, rather than complementary perspectives. For such people, the idea that something isboth "innate" and "learned", or both "biological" and "cultural", is an absurdity. Yet most biologists today recognize that understanding behavior requires that we understand the interaction between inborn cognitive processes (e.g. learning and memory) and individual experience. This is particularly true in human behaviour, since the capacities for language and culture are some of the key adaptations of our species, and involve irreducible elements of both biology and environment, of both nature and nurture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [An Instinct to Learn](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11453) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-032 — The Paradox — Anthony Aguirre > Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions, and discover which of them we must let go. But a good paradox can take us farther, to reveal that the not just the assumptions but the very modes of thinking we employed in creating the paradox must be replaced. Particles and waves? Not truth, just convenient models. The same number of integers as perfect squares of integers? Not crazy, though you might be if you invent cardinality. This sentence is false. And so, says Godel, might be the foundations of any formal system that can refer to itself. The list goes on. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Author, Cosmological Koans - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Paradox](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11302) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-033 — Scientific Concept — Max Tegmark > All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future. The curriculum should shift from one watered down by consensus and lobbying to skills our century needs, for relationships, health, contraception, time management, critical thinking and recognizing propaganda. For youngsters, learning a global language and typing should trump long division and writing cursive. In the internet age, my own role as a classroom teacher has changed. I'm no longer needed as a conduit of information, which my students can simply download on their own. Rather, my key role is inspiring a scientific lifestyle, curiosity and desire to learn more. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0 - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientific Concept](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11468) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-034 — Knowledge — Mark Pagel > The Oracle of Delphi famously pronounced Socrates to be "the most intelligent man in the world because he knew that he knew nothing". Over 2000 years later the physicist-turned-historian Jacob Bronowski would emphasize — in the last episode of his landmark 1970s television series the "Ascent of Man" — the danger of our all-too-human conceit of thinking we know something. What Socrates knew and what Bronowski had come to appreciate is that knowledge — true knowledge — is difficult, maybe even impossible, to come buy, it is prone to misunderstanding and counterfactuals, and most importantly it can never be acquired with exact precision, there will always be some element of doubt about anything we come to "know"' from our observations of the world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Reading University, UK; Fellow, Royal Society; Author, Wired for Culture - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Knowledge](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11151) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-035 — Objects of Understanding and Communication — Richard Saul Wurman > THE TOOLS IN MY TOOLBOX RESPOND TO ME. THEY NOD WHEN I TALK, GIVE ME EVIDENCE OF ME, AND SUGGEST SECONDARY AND TERTIARY JOURNEYS THAT EXTEND MY CURIOSITIES. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, TED Conference; EG Conference; TEDMED Conferences; Architect, Cartographer; Author, Information Architects - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Objects of Understanding and Communication](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11316) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-036 — Diversity is Universal — Joan Chiao > The mark of multiple populations lies in the fabric of our DNA. The signature of selfhood in the brain holds dual frames, one for thinking about one's self as absolute, the other in context of others. From this biological diversity in humans arises cultural diversity directly observable in nearly every aspect of how people think, feel and behavior. From classrooms to conventions across continents, the range and scope of human activities is stunning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Diversity is Universal](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11483) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-037 — Einstellung Effect — Evgeny Morozov > The Einstellung Effect is more ubiquitous than its name suggests. We constantly experience it when trying to solve a problem by pursuing solutions that have worked for us in the past - instead of evaluating and addressing it on its own terms. Thus, while we may eventually solve the problem, we may also be wasting an opportunity to so in a more rapid, effective, and resourceful manner. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy; Syndicated Columnist; Author, The Net Delusion - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Einstellung Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11166) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-038 — We Are Unique — Marcelo Gleiser > A further point: even if there is intelligent life elsewhere and, of course, we can't rule that out (science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don't), it will be so remote that for all practical purposes we are alone. Even if SETI finds evidence of other cosmic intelligences, we are not going to initiate a very intense collaboration. And if we are alone, and alone have the awareness of what it means to be alive and of the importance of remaining alive, we gain a new kind of cosmic centrality, very different — and much more meaningful — from the religiously-inspired one of pre-Copernican days, when Earth was the center of Creation: we matter because we are rare and we know it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We Are Unique](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11331) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-039 — The Umwelt — David M. Eagleman > I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Incognito, Sum, The Brain - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Umwelt](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11498) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-040 — Reason — Paul Bloom > We are powerfully influenced by irrational processes such as unconscious priming, conformity, groupthink, and self-serving biases. These affect the most trivial aspects of our lives, such as how quickly we walk down a city street, and the most important, such as who we choose to marry. The political and moral realms are particularly vulnerable to such influences. While many of us would like to think that our views on climate change or torture or foreign policy are the result of rational deliberation, we are more affected than we would like to admit by considerations that have nothing to do with reason. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Reason](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11181) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-041 — The Snuggle For Existence — Roger Highfield > As once argued by the American ecologist Garrett Hardin, the biggest issues of all — saving the planet and maximizing the collective lifetime of the species Homo sapiens — cannot be solved by technology alone. If we are to win the struggle for existence, and avoid a precipitous fall, there's no choice but to harness this extraordinary creative force. It is down to all of us to refine and to extend our ability to cooperate. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Snuggle For Existence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11348) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-042 — Confabulation — Fiery Cushman > Ironically, that is exactly what makes confabulation so dangerous. If we routinely got the explanation for our behavior totally wrong — as completely wrong as split-brain patients sometimes do — we would probably be much more aware that there are pervasive, unseen influences on our behavior. The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake "party right" for "completely right", and thereby fail to recognize the equal influence of the unconscious, or to guard against it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Confabulation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11513) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-043 — Homo Sensus-Sapiens: The animal that feels and rationalizes — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > The inner and oldest areas of human's brain, the reptilian brain, generate and regulate instinctive and automatic responses, which have a role in preserving the organism. Because of these areas, we move without analyzing the consequence of each action; we move like a machine of automatic and unconscious induction. We walk without determining if the floor's structure will remain after each step and we run faster than normal when we feel a threat, not because of rational planning, but because of automatic responses. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Homo Sensus-Sapiens: The animal that feels and rationalizes](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11196) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-044 — Life As A Side Effect — Unattributed Edge contributor > It's been over 150 years since Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species, but we still have trouble appreciating the simple, brilliant insight at its core. That is, life's diversity does not exist because it is necessary for living things. Birds did not get wings so that they could fly. We do not have eyes so that we can read. Instead, eyes, wings, and the rest of life's wonder has come about as a side effect of life itself. Living things struggle to survive, they reproduce, and they don't do a perfect job of replicating themselves. Evolution spins off of that loop, like heat coming off an engine. We're so used to seeing agents behind everything that we struggle to recognize life as a side effect. I think everyone would do well do overcome that urge to see agents where there are none. It would even help us to understand why we are so eager to see agents in the first place. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 162 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Life As A Side Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11364) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-045 — The Culture Cycle — Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner > Moreover, built into the culture cycle are the instructions for how to reverse engineer it: a sustainable change at one level usually requires change at all four levels. There are no silver bullets. The ongoing U.S. Civil Rights Movement, for example, requires the opening of individual hearts and mind; and the mixing of people as equals in daily life, along with media representations thereof; and the reform of laws and policies; and fundamental revision of our nation's idea of what a good human being is. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Co-author, Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World, and Co-founder, Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). | Cultural psychologist, writer, and consultant - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Culture Cycle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11527) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-046 — Nexus causality, moral warfare and misattribution arbitrage. — John Tooby > Alternatively, even modest individual-level improvements in our conceptual toolkit can have transformative effects on our collective intelligence, promoting incandescent intellectual chain reactions among multitudes of interacting individuals. If this promise of intelligence-amplification through conceptual tools seems like hyperbole, consider that the least inspired modern engineer, equipped with the conceptual tools of calculus, can understand, plan and build things far beyond what da Vinci or the mathematics-revering Plato could have achieved without it. We owe a lot to the infinitesimal, Newton's counterintuitive conceptual hack — something greater than zero but less than any finite magnitude. Far simpler conceptual innovations than calculus have had even more far reaching effects — the experiment (a danger to authority), zero, entropy, Boyle's atom, mathematical proof, natural selection, randomness, particulate inheritance, Dalton's element, distribution, formal logic, culture, Shannon's definition of information, the quantum… - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 137 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Nexus causality, moral warfare and misattribution arbitrage.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11211) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-047 — Innovation — Laurence C. Smith > In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer. This can-do attitude is made all the more valuable, not less, in a world constrained by ultimate barriers like continuity of mass and energy, Absolute zero, or the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. Innovation is a critical enabler of discovery around and of these bounds. It is the occasional architect of that rare, wonderful breakthrough even when the tide of scientific opinion is against you. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Innovation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11378) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-048 — Personal data mining — David Rowan > Both I as a citizen and society as a whole would gain if individuals' personal datastreams could be mined to extract patterns upon which we could act. Such mining would turn my raw data into predictive information that can anticipate my mood and improve my efficiency, make me healthier and more emotionally intuitive, reveal my scholastic weaknesses and my creative strengths. I want to find the hidden meanings, the unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors of which I had been unaware. In an era of oversharing, we need to think more about data-driven self-discovery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, WIRED UK - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Personal data mining](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11541) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-049 — Sexual Selection — David M. Buss > When most people think about evolution by selection, they conjure up phrases such as "survival of the fittest" or "nature red in tooth and claw." These focus attention on the Darwinian struggle for survival. Many scientists, but few others, know that evolution by selection occurs through the process of differential reproductive success by virtue of heritable differences in design, not by differential survival success. And differential reproductive success often boils down to differential mating success, the focus of Darwin's 1871 theory of sexual selection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Sexual Selection](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11226) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-050 — Depth — Tor Nørretranders > The concept of depth in complexity science was expressed in different ways: You could talk about the actual amount of physical information that was involved in bringing about something — the thermodynamic depth — or the amount of computation it took to arrive at a result— the logical depth. Both express the notion that the process behind is more important than the eventual product. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Depth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11393) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-051 — Q. E. D. Moments — Bart Kosko > Feeling proof comes from finishing a proof. It does not come from pointing at a proof in a book or in the brain of an instructor. It comes when the prover himself takes the last logical step on the deductive staircase. Then he gets to celebrate that logical feat by declaring "Q. E. D." or "Quod Erat Demonstrandum" or just "Quite Easily Done." Q. E. D. states that he has proven or demonstrated the claim that he wanted to prove. The proof need not be original or surprising. It just needs to be logically correct to produce a Q. E. D. moment. A proof of the Pythagorean Theorem has always sufficed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Q. E. D. Moments](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11242) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-052 — The Veeck Effect — Gregory Cochran > Some anthropologists have carried the effort further, denying that any culture was ever cannibalistic. They don't just deny Anasazi archaeology — they deny every kind of evidence, from archaeology to historical accounts, even reports from people alive today. When Álvaro de Mendaña discovered the Solomon Islands, he reported that a friendly chieftain threw a feast and offered him a quarter of a boy. Made up, surely. The conquistadors described the Aztecs as a cannibal kingdom — can't be right, even if the archeology supports it. When Papuans in Port Moresby volunteered to have a picnic in the morgue — to attract tourists, of course — they were just showing public spirit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Consultant; Adaptive Optics and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Veeck Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11409) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-053 — Correlation is not a cause — Susan Blackmore > Some say that the greatest mystery facing science is the nature of consciousness. We seem to be independent selves having consciousness and free will, and yet the more we understand how the brain works, the less room there seems to be for consciousness to do anything. A popular way of trying to solve the mystery is the hunt for the "neural correlates of consciousness". For example, we know that brain activity in parts of the motor cortex and frontal lobes correlates with conscious decisions to act. But do our conscious decisions cause the brain activity, does the brain activity cause our decisions, or are both caused by something else? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Correlation is not a cause](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11257) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-054 — Duality and World Piece — Stephon H. Alexander > In physics one of the most beautiful yet underappreciated ideas is that of duality. A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives; often a flash of creative insight is needed to find both. However the power of the duality goes beyond the apparent redundancy of description. After all, why do I need more than one way to describe the same thing? There are examples in physics where either description of the phenomena fails to capture its entirety. Properties of the system 'beyond' the individual descriptions 'emerge'. I will provide two beautiful examples of how dualities manage to yield 'emergent' properties and, end with a speculation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Duality and World Piece](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11424) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-055 — The Mediocrity Principle — P Z Myers > Don't feel bad about that, though, it's not just you. The stars themselves form as a result of the properties of atoms, the specific features of each star set by the chance distribution of ripples of condensation through clouds of dust and gas. Our sun wasn't required to be where it is, with the luminosity it has — it just happens to be there, and our existence follows from this opportunity. Our species itself is partly shaped by the force of our environment through selection, and partly by fluctuations of chance. If humans had gone extinct 100,000 years ago, the world would go on turning, life would go on thriving, and some other species would be prospering in our place — and most likely not by following the same intelligence-driven technological path we did. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Morris - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Mediocrity Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11272) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-056 — Supervenience! — Joshua D. Greene > Perhaps the threat from physics was never all that serious. Today, the real threat, if there is one, is from the behavioral sciences, especially the sciences that connect the kind of "hard" science we all studied in high school to humanistic concerns. In my opinion, three sciences stand out in this regard: behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. I study moral judgment, a classically humanistic topic. I do this in part by scanning people's brains while they make moral judgments. More recently I've started looking at genes, and my work is guided by evolutionary thinking. My work assumes that the mind supervenes on the brain, and I attempt to explain human values — for example the tension between individual rights and the greater good — in terms of competing neural systems. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Neuroscientist and Philosopher, Harvard University - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Supervenience!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11438) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-057 — We are Lost in Thought — Sam Harris > While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [We are Lost in Thought](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11287) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-058 — Kakonomics — Gloria Origgi > Paradoxically, if one of the two parties delivers a High-quality outcome instead of the expected Low-quality one, the other party resents it as a breach of trust, even if he may not acknowledge it openly. In the example, the author may resent the publisher if she decides to deliver a High-quality editing. Her being trustworthy in this relation means to deliver Low-quality too. Contrary to the standard Prisoner Dilemma game, the willingness to repeat an interaction with someone is ensured if he or she delivers Low-quality too rather than High-quality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kakonomics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10993) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-059 — The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science — Kathryn Schulz > Good scientists understand this. They recognize that they are part of a long process of approximation. They know that they are constructing models rather than revealing reality. They are comfortable working under conditions of uncertainty — not just the local uncertainty of "Will this data bear out my hypothesis?", but the sweeping uncertainty of simultaneously pursuing and being cut off from absolute truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** journalist - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11135) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-060 — Path Dependence — John McWhorter > Or, we hear much lately about a crisis in general writing skills, suposedly due to email and texting. But there is a circularity here — why, precisely, could people not write emails and texts with the same "writerly" style that people used to couch letters in? Or, we hear of a vaguely defined effect of television, despite that kids were curled up endlessly in front of the tube starting in the fifties, long before the eighties when outcries of this kind first took on their current level of alarm in the report A Nation at Risk. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Path Dependence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10852) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-061 — Einstein's Blade in Ockham's Razor — Kai Krause > Could it really be true, that the innocent sounding 'keep it simple' is really such an optimal strategy for dealing with questions large and small, scientific as well as personal? Surely, trying to eliminate superflous assumptions can be a useful tenet, and can be found from Sagan to Hawking as part of their approach to thinking in science. But something never quite felt right to me — intuitively it was clear that sometimesthings are just not simple — and that merely "the simplest" of all explanations cannot be taken as truth or proof. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Einstein's Blade in Ockham's Razor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11007) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-062 — INTERBEING — Scott Sampson > Not quite. It turns out that "you" are not one life form — that is, one self — but many. Your mouth alone contains more than 700 distinctkinds of bacteria. Your skin and eyelashes are equally laden with microbes and your gut houses a similar bevy of bacterial sidekicks. Although this still leaves several bacteria-free regions in a healthy body — for example, brain, spinal cord, and blood stream — current estimates indicate that your physical self possesses about a trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In other words, at any given moment, your body is about 90% nonhuman, home to many more life forms than the number of people presently living on Earth; more even than the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy! To make things more interesting still, microbiological research demonstrates that we are utterly dependent on this ever-changing bacterial parade for all kinds of "services," from keeping intruders at bay to converting food into useable nutrients. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 164 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [INTERBEING](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10866) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-063 — Non-Inherent Inheritance — George Church > Short-hand abstractions are only one device that we employ to construct the "Flynn Effect". How many of us noticed the minor milestone when the SAT tests first permitted calculators? How many of us have participated in conversations semi-discreetly augmented by Google or text messaging? Even without invoking artificial intelligence, how far are we from commonplace augmentation of our decision-making the way we have augmented our math, memory, and muscles? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Non-Inherent Inheritance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11021) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-064 — Duality — Amanda Gefter > Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them. When physicists looking to unite quantum theory with gravity found themselves with five very different but equally plausible string theories, it was an embarrassment of riches — everyone was hoping for one "theory of everything", not five. But duality proved to be the key ingredient. Remarkably, all five string theories turned out to be dual to one another, different expressions of a single underlying theory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Duality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10880) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-065 — While We Are Social Creatures, It's Often Best Not To Admit It — Dave Winer > Not good. A sign of weakness. Whether the oncoming traffic is aware or not, he or she will take advantage of this weakness and charge right into your path, all the while not making eye contact. There is no appeal. All you can do is shift out of their path, but even this won't avoid a collision because your adversary will unconsciously shift closer to you. Your weakness is attractive. Your space is up for grabs. At this point you have no choice but to collide, and in the etiquette of New York street walking you're responsible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Blogging and RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [While We Are Social Creatures, It's Often Best Not To Admit It](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11035) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-066 — Hunting for Root Cause: The Human Black Box — Eric Topol > Root cause analysis is an attractive concept for certain matters in industry, engineering and quality control. A classic application is to determine why a plane crashed by finding the proverbial "black box" — the tamper-proof event data recorder. Even though this box is usually bright orange, the term symbolizes the sense of dark matter, a container with critical information to help illuminate what happened. Getting the black box audio recording is just one component of a root cause analysis for why a plane goes down. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Hunting for Root Cause: The Human Black Box](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10895) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-067 — Entanglement — Marco Iacoboni > Entanglement feels like magic. It is really difficult to wrap our heads around it. And yet, entanglement is a real phenomenon, measurable and reproducible in the lab. And there is more. While for many years entanglement was thought to be a very delicate phenomenon, only observable in the infinitesimally small world of quantum physics ("oh good, our world is immune from that weird stuff") and quite volatile, recent evidence suggests that entanglement may be much more robust and even much more widespread than we initially thought. Photosynthesis may happen through entanglement, and recent brain data suggest that entanglement may play a role in coherent electrical activity of distant groups of neurons in the brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Entanglement](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11048) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-068 — Shifting Baseline Syndrome — Paul Kedrosky > In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined a phrase for this troubling ecological obliviousness — he called it "shifting baseline syndrome". Here is how Pauly first described the syndrome: "Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…" - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, Infectious Greed; General Partner, SK Ventures - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Shifting Baseline Syndrome](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10755) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-069 — Homo Dilatus — Alun Anderson > Our species might well be renamed Homo Dilatus, the procrastinating ape. Somewhere in our evolution we acquired the brain circuitry to deal with sudden crises and respond with urgent action. Steady declines and slowly developing threats are quite different. "Why act now when the future is far off," is the maxim for a species designed to deal with near-term problems and not long term uncertainties. It's a handy view of humankind which everyone who uses science to change policy should keep in their mental took kit, and one that that is greatly reinforced by the endless procrastination in tacking climate change. Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Homo Dilatus](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10909) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-070 — Control Your Spotlight — Jonah Lehrer > Furthermore, this mental skill is only getting more valuable. We live, after all, in the age of information, which makes the ability to focus on the important information incredibly important. (Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.") The brain is a bounded machine and the world is a confusing place, full of data and distractions — intelligence is the ability to parse the data so that it makes just a little bit more sense. Like willpower, this ability requires the strategic allocation of attention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Wired; Author, A Book About Love - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Control Your Spotlight](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11062) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-071 — Science Versus Theatre — Ross Anderson > Our traditional approach was the painstaking accumulation of knowledge that enables people to understand risks, options and consequences. But theatre is a deliberate construct rather than just an accidental side-effect of ignorance, so perhaps we need to become more sophisticated about theatrical mechanisms too. Science communicators need to become adept at disrupting the show, illuminating the dark corners of the stage and making the masks visible for what they are. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science Versus Theatre](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10769) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-072 — Parallel Errors — Satyajit Das > Hirst's most iconic work — The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — is a 14-foot (4.3 meter) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a vitrine weighing over two tons. Charles Saatchi (the advertising guru) bought it for £50,000. In December 2004, Saatchi sold the work to Steve Cohen, founder and principal of the uber hedge fund — SAC Capital Advisers, which manages $20 billion. Cohen paid $12 million for The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, although there are allegation that it was only $8 million. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former Financier; Author, Age of Stagnation - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Parallel Errors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10922) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-073 — Technology Came Before Humanity And, Evolutionarily, Paved The Way For It — Timothy Taylor > Ideas such as evolution and a deep prehistory for humanity are as factually well-established as the idea of a round earth, or gravity as a force pulling apples from trees. Only bigots and the misled can doubt them. But the idea that the first chipped stone tool pre-dates, by at least half a million years, the expansion of mind that is so characteristic of humans, should also be knowable by all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Technology Came Before Humanity And, Evolutionarily, Paved The Way For It](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11076) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Technology Came Before Humanity by Timothy Taylor|Technology Came Before Humanity by Timothy Taylor]] ### EDGE2011-074 — The "Cognitive Iceberg:" Humans Are Blind To Many Of The Processes That Shape Their Mental Lives — Adam Alter > The human brain is an inconceivably complex tool, and while we're focusing on the business of daily life, our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness. Meanwhile, this peripheral information subtly shapes our thoughts, feelings and actions, and crafts some of our most critical life outcomes. This information takes many forms, but I'll illustrate the principle with three brief examples: - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The "Cognitive Iceberg:" Humans Are Blind To Many Of The Processes That Shape Their Mental Lives](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-075 — Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses — Geoffrey Miller > Psychologists have shown that in many domains, our instinctive intuitions are fallible (though often adaptive). Our intuitive physics — ordinary concepts of time, space, gravity, and impetus — can't be reconciled with relativity, quantum mechanics, or cosmology. Our intuitive biology — ideas of species essences and teleological functions — can't be reconciled with evolution, population genetics, or adaptationism. Our intuitive morality — self-deceptive, nepotistic, clannish, anthropocentric, and punitive — can't be reconciled with any consistent set of moral values, whether Aristotelean, Kantian, or utilitarian. Apparently, our intuitive psychiatry has similar limits. The sooner we learn those limits, the better we'll be able to help people with serious mental illnesses, and the more humble we'll be about our own mental health. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10936) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-076 — Wicked Problems — Jay Rosen > When General Motors was about go bankrupt and throw tends of thousands of people out of work that was a big, honking problem, which rightly landed on the president's desk, but it was not a wicked one. Barack Obama's advisors could present him with a limited range of options; if he decided to take the political risk and save General Motors from collapse he could be reasonably certain that the recommended actions would work. If they didn't, he could try more drastic measures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Wicked Problems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11091) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-077 — Game of Life — And Looking For Generators — Nick Bostrom > • Levels of explanation — One quickly notices patterns arising that can be efficiently described in higher-level terms (such as "gliders", a specific kind of pattern that crawls across the screen) but that are quite cumbersome to describe in the language of the basic physics upon which the patterns supervene (i.e., in terms of individual pixels being alive or dead) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Oxford University; Director, Future of Humanity Institute; Author, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Game of Life — And Looking For Generators](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10797) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-078 — Cultural Attractors — Dan Sperber > Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: they are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So, we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issue of journals, millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below rounded numbers — $9.99 or $9,990 are likely price tags — , so as to avoid the evocation of a higher magnitude. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Cultural Attractors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10950) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-079 — Time Span of Discretion — Paul Saffo > After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with, what Jaques called "Time span of discretion," or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake. Jaques observed that organizations implicitly recognize this fact in everything from titles to salary: line workers are paid hourly, managers annually, and senior executives compensated with longer-term incentives such as stock options. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Time Span of Discretion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11105) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-080 — The Lure Of A Good Story — Robert Sapolsky > Another useful scientific concept is "genetic vulnerability." This would be great if it found its way into everyone's cognitive toolkit because its evil cousins of genetic inevitability and genetic determinism are already deeply entrenched there, and with long long legacies of bad consequences. Everyone should be taught about work like that of Avshalom Caspi and colleagues, who looked at genetic polymorphisms related to various neurotransmitter systems that are associated with psychiatric disorders and anti-social behaviors. Ah ha, far too many people will say, drawing on that nearly useless, misshapen tool of genetic determinism, have one of those polymorphisms and you're hosed by inevitability. And instead, what those studies beautifully demonstrate is how these polymorphisms carry essentially zero increased risk of those disorders…..unless you grow up in particularly malign environments. Genetic determinism, my tuches. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Lure Of A Good Story](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10811) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-081 — The Black Swan Technology — Vinod Khosla > To do so we must reinvent the infrastructure of society by harnessing and motivating bright minds with a whole new set of future assumptions, asking "what could possibly be?" rather than "what is." We need to create a dynamic environment of creative contention and collective brilliance that will yield innovative ideas from across disciplines to allow innovation to triumph. We must encourage a social ecosystem that encourages taking risks on innovation. Popularization of the concept of the "Black Swan Technology," is essential to incorporate the right mindset into the minds of entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors and the public: that anything (maybe even everything) is possible. If we harness and motivate these bright new minds with the right market signals and encouragement, a whole new set of future assumptions, unimaginable today, will be tomorrow's conventional wisdom. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Black Swan Technology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10964) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-082 — Defeasibility — Tania Lombrozo > The concept of defeasibilility has proven valuable in characterizing artificial and natural intelligence. Everyday inferences, no less than scientific inferences, are vetted by the harsh judge of novel data: additional information that can potentially defeat current beliefs. On further inspection, the antique may turn out to be a fake and the alleged culprit an innocent victim. Dealing with an uncertain world forces cognitive systems to abandon the comforts of deduction and engage in defeasible reasoning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Defeasibility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11106) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-083 — Absence and Evidence — Christine Finn > When my parents died and I inherited their house, the task of clearing their rooms was both emotional, and archaeological. The last mantelpiece in the sitting room had accreted over 35 years of married life, a midden of photos, ephemera, beach-combing trove and containers of odd buttons and old coins. I wondered what a stranger — maybe a forensic scientist, or traditional archaeologist — would make of this array if the narrative was woven simply from the tangible evidence. But as I took the assemblage apart in a charged moment, I felt there was a whole lot of no-thing which was coming away with it. Something invisible, and unquantifiable, which had been holding these objects in that context. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Absence and Evidence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10824) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-084 — You can show something is definitely dangerous, but not definitely safe — Tom Standage > As a journalist I have lost count of the number of times that people have demanded that a particular technology be "proven to do no harm". This is, of course, impossible, in just the same way that proving that there are no black swans is impossible. You can look for a black swan (harm) in various ways, but if you fail to find one that does not mean that none exists: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Business Affairs Editor, The Economist; Author, The Edible History of the Humanity - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [You can show something is definitely dangerous, but not definitely safe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10978) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-085 — A Cognitive Toolkit Full Of Garbage — Ernst Pöppel > Of course we depend on communication (SHA), and this requires verbal references usually tagged with language. But if we do not understand within the communicative frame or reference system (SHA) that we are a victim of ourselves by "ontologizing" and continuously creating "practical" SHA's, we simply use a cognitive toolkit of mental garbage. Is there a pragmatic way out other than to radically get rid of mental garbage? Yes, perhaps: Simply not using the the key SHA's explicitly in one's toolkit. Working on "consciousness", don't use (at least for one year) the SHA consciousness; if you work on the "self", never refer explicitly to self. Going through the own garbage one discovers many misleading SHA's, like just a few in my focus of attention (SHA): the brain as a net, localization of function, representation, inhibition, threshold, decision, the present, .... An easy way out is of course to refer to some of these SHA's as metaphors (SHA), but this again is evaiding the problem (SHA). I am aware of the fact (SHA) that I am also a victim of evolution, and to suggest "garbage" as a SHA also suffers from the same problem; even the concept of garbage required a discovery (SHA). But we cannot do otherwise than simply being aware of this challenge (SHA) that the content of the cognitive toolkit is characterized by self–referentiality (SHA), i.e. by the fact that the SHA's define themselves by their unreflected use. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 240 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A Cognitive Toolkit Full Of Garbage](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11120) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-086 — E Pluribus Unum — Jon Kleinberg > The Cloud is not a single thing; what you think of as your Gmail account or Facebook profile is in fact made possible by the teamwork of a huge number of physically dispersed components — a distributed system, in the language of computer science. But we can think of it as a single thing, and this is the broader point: The ideas of distributed systems apply whenever we see many small things working independently but cooperatively to produce the illusion of a single unified experience. This effect takes place not just on the Internet, but in many other domains as well. Consider for example a large corporation that is able to release new products and make public announcements as though it were a single actor, when we know that at a more detailed level it consists of tens of thousands of employees. Or a massive ant colony engaged in coordinated exploration, or the neurons of your brain creating your experience of the present moment. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 164 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [E Pluribus Unum](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10838) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-087 — Subselves and the Modular Mind — Douglas T. Kenrick > State dependent memory helps sort out all that incoming information for later use, by categorizing new info according to context — if you learn a stranger's name after drinking a doppio espresso at the local java house, it will be easier to remember that name if you meet again at Starbucks than if the next encounter is at a local pub after a martini. For several months after I returned from Italy, I would start speaking Italian and making expansive hand gestures every time I drank a glass of wine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University; Author, Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life; Editor, Evolution and Social Psychology - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Subselves and the Modular Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10270) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-088 — Systemic Equilibrium — Matthew Ritchie > Our one real opportunity is to use the certain knowledge of ever increasing systemic equilibrium to build a model for an equitable and sustainable future. The mass distribution of knowledge and access to information through the world wide web is our civilization's signal achievement. Societies that adopt innovative, predictive and adaptive models designed around a significant, on-going redistribution of global resources will be most likely to survive in the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Systemic Equilibrium](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10551) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-089 — Hidden Layers — Frank Wilczek > In this picture, the flow of information runs from top to bottom. Sensory neurons — the eyeballs at the top — take input from the external world and encode it into a convenient form (which is typically electrical pulse trains for biological neurons, and numerical data for the computer "neurons" of artificial neural networks). They distribute this encoded information to other neurons, in the next layer below. Effector neurons — the stars at the bottom — send their signals to output devices (which are typically muscles for biological neurons, and computer terminals for artificial neurons). In between are neurons that neither see nor act upon the outside world directly. These inter-neurons communicate only with other neurons. They are the hidden layers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Hidden Layers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10351) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Information/Hidden Layers Create New Emergent Concepts by Frank Wilczek|Hidden Layers Create New Emergent Concepts by Frank Wilczek]] ### EDGE2011-090 — Bricoleur — James Croak > A Bricoleur is not a new thing, but it has become a new way of understanding old things: Epistemology, the Counter-Enlightenment, and the endless parade of "isms" of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Marxism, Modernism, Socialism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism — the list is endless, and often exclusive, each insisting that the other cannot be. The exegesis of these grand theories by deconstruction — substituting trace for presence — and similar activities during the past century shows these worldviews not as discoveries, instead but assemblies, by creative Bricoleurs who had been working in the background, stapling together meaning producing scenarios from textual bric-a-brac lying about. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 105 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Bricoleur](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10695) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-091 — Find That Frame — William H. Calvin > Comparison is an important part of trying ideas on for size, for finding related memories, and exercising constructive skepticism. Without it, you can become trapped in someone else's framing of a problem. You often need to know where someone is coming from — and while Compare 'n' Contrast is your best friend, you may also need to search for the cognitive framing. What has been cropped out of the frame can lead the unwary to an incorrect inference, as when they assume that what is left out is unimportant. For example, "We should reach a 2°C (3.6°F) fever in the year 2049" always makes me want to interject "Unless another abrupt climate shift gets us there next year." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Find That Frame](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10449) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-092 — The Copernican Principle — Samuel Arbesman > The Copernican Principle has also been extended to our temporal position by astrophysicist J. Richard Gott to help provide estimates for lifetimes of events, independent of additional information. As Gott elaborated, other than the fact that we are intelligent observers, there is no reason to believe we are in any way specially located in time. It allows us to quantify our uncertainty and recognize that we are often neither at the beginning of things, nor at the end. This allowed Gott to estimate correctly when the Berlin Wall would fall, and has even provided meaningful numbers on the lifetime of humanity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Copernican Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10277) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-093 — Suspending Disbelief — Linda Stone > Everything we know, our strongly held beliefs, and, in some cases, even what we consider to be "factual," creates the lens through which we see and experience the world, and can contribute to a critical, reactive orientation. This can serve us well: Fire is hot; it can burn if touched. It can also compromise our ability to observe and to think in an expansive, generative way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hi-Tech Industry Consultant; Former Executive at Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Suspending Disbelief](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10562) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-094 — Science — Lisa Randall > "Effective theory" is one of the more important notions within and outside of science. The idea is to determine what you can actually measure and decide — given the precision and accuracy of your measuring tools — and to find a theory appropriate to those measurable quantities. The theory that works might not be the ultimate truth—but it's as close an approximation to the truth as you need and is also the limit to what you can test at any given time. People can reasonably disagree on what lies beyond the effective theory, but in a domain where we have tested and confirmed it, we understand the theory to the degree that it's been tested. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10359) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-095 — Bias Is The Nose For The Story — Gerald Smallberg > Our perceptions are crucial in appreciating truth. However, we do not apprehend objective reality. Perception is based on recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli derived from patterns of electrical impulses. From this data, the brain creates analogues and models that simulate tangible, concrete objects in the real world. Experience, though, colors and influences all of our perceptions by anticipating and predicting everything we encounter and meet. It is the reason Goethe advised that "one must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste." This preferential set of intuitions, feelings, and ideas, less poetically characterized by the term bias, poses a challenge to the ability to weigh evidence accurately to arrive at truth. Bias is the non-dispassionate thumb which experience puts on the scale. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Practicing Neurologist, New York City; Playwright, Off-Off Broadway Productions, Charter Members; The Gold Ring - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Bias Is The Nose For The Story](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10712) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-096 — Uncertainty — Lawrence M. Krauss > In fact, however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful. Being able to quantify uncertainty, and incorporate it into models, is what makes science quantitative, rather than qualitative. Indeed, no number, to measurement, no observable in science is exact. Quoting numbers without attaching an uncertainty to them implies they have, in essence, no meaning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Uncertainty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10459) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-097 — Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down — Michael Shermer > Which is why the Internet is the ultimate bottom up self-organized emergent property of millions of computer users exchanging data across servers, and although there are some top-down controls involved—just as there are some in mostly bottom-up economic and political systems—the strength of digital freedom derives from the fact that no one is in charge. For the past 500 years humanity has gradually but ineluctably transitioned from top down to bottom up systems, for the simple reason that both information and people want to be free. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10284) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-098 — Recursive Structure — David Gelernter > The idea of recursive structure came into its own with the advent of computer science (that is, software science) in the 1950s. The hardest problem in software is controlling the tendency of software systems to grow incomprehensibly complex. Recursive structure helps convert impenetrable software rainforests into French gardens — still (potentially) vast and complicated, but much easier to traverse and understand than a jungle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Recursive Structure](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10574) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-099 — Technologies Have Biases — Douglas Rushkoff > Marshall McLuhan exhorted us to recognize that our media have impacts on us beyond whatever content is being transmitted through them. And while his message was itself garbled by the media through which he expressed it (the medium is the what?) it is true enough to be generalized to all technology. We are free to use any car we like to get to work — gasoline, diesel, electric, or hydrogen — and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile towards distance, commuting, suburbs, and energy consumption. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Technologies Have Biases](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10368) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-100 — Open Systems — Thomas A. Bass > Unfortunately, the ideal of an open web is not embraced by companies that prefer walled gardens, silos, proprietary systems, aps, tiered levels of access, and other metered methods for turning citizens into consumers. Their happy-face web contains tracking systems useful for making money, but these systems are also appreciated by the police states of the world, for they, too, have a vested interest in surveillance and closed systems. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Open Systems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10726) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-101 — Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model — Thomas Metzinger > A self-model is the inner representation some information-processing systems have of themselves as a whole. A representation is phenomenally transparent, if it a) is conscious and b) cannot be experienced as a representation. Therefore, transparent representations create the phenomenology of naïve realism, the robust and irrevocable sense that you are directly and immediately perceiving something which must be real. Now apply the second concept to the first: A "transparent self-model", necessarily, creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood, of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10461) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Identity/The Self May Be a Transparent Model by Thomas Metzinger|The Self May Be a Transparent Model by Thomas Metzinger]] ### EDGE2011-102 — Fixed-Action Patterns: Using The Study Of Animal Instinct As A Metaphor For Human Behavior — Irene Pepperberg > The relevance is that, if we wish to understand why as humans we often act in certain predictable ways, and particularly if there is a desire or need to change these behavioral responses, we can remember our animal heritage and look for the possible releasers that appear to stimulate our FAPs. Might the FAP actually be a response learned over time, initially with respect to something even more basic than we expect? The consequences could affect aspects of our lives from our social interactions to what we see as our quick decision-making processes in our professional lives. Given an understanding of our FAPs, and those of the other individuals with whom we interact, we — as humans with cognitive processing powers — could begin to re-think our behavior patterns. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Fixed-Action Patterns: Using The Study Of Animal Instinct As A Metaphor For Human Behavior](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10291) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-103 — Designing Your Mind — Don Tapscott > The existence of lifelong neuroplasticity is no longer in doubt. The brain runs on a "use it or lose it" motto. So could we "use it to build it right?" Why don't we use the demands of our information-rich, multi-stimuli, fast-paced, multi-tasking, digital existence to expand our cognitive capability? Psychiatrist Dr. Stan Kutcher, an expert on adolescent mental health who has studied the effect of digital technology on brain development, says we probably can: "There is emerging evidence suggesting that exposure to new technologies may push the Net Generation [teenagers and young adults] brain past conventional capacity limitations." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Designing Your Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10586) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-104 — The Expanding In-Group — Marcel Kinsbourne > The in-group versus out-group double standard, which had and has such catastrophic consequences, could in theory be eliminated if everyone alive were to be considered to be in everyone else's in-group. This Utopian prospect is remote, but an expansion of the conceptual in-group would expand the range of friendly, supportive and altruistic behavior. This effect may already be in evidence in the increase in charitable activities in support of foreign populations that are confronted by natural disasters. Donors identifying to a greater extent with recipients make this possible. The rise in frequency of international adoptions also indicates that the barriers set up by discriminatory and nationalistic prejudice are becoming porous. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Expanding In-Group](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10377) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-105 — Science's Methods Aren't Just For Science — Mark Henderson > Most people tend to think of science in one of two ways. It is a body of knowledge and understanding about the world: gravity, photosynthesis and evolution. Or it is the technology that has emerged from the fruits of that knowledge: vaccines, computers and cars. Science is both of these things, yet as Carl Sagan so memorably explained in The Demon-Haunted World, it is something else besides. It is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an imperfect one) to discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Communications, Wellcome Trust; Author, The Greek Manifesto - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Science's Methods Aren't Just For Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10741) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-106 — Thinking In Time Versus Thinking Outside Of Time — Lee Smolin > Thinking outside of time often implies the existence of an imagined realm outside the universe where the truth lies. This is a religious idea, because it means that explanations and justifications ultimately refer to something outside of the world we experience ourselves to be a part of. If we insist there is nothing outside the universe, not even abstract ideas or mathematical objects, we are forced to find the causes of phenomena entirely within our universe. So thinking in time is also thinking within the one universe of phenomena our observations show us to inhabit. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Thinking In Time Versus Thinking Outside Of Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10473) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-107 — Powers of 10 — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Two neurons can communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the computational unit in the brain. The typical cortical synapse is less than a micron in diameter (10[-6] meter), near the resolution limit of the light microscope. If the economy of the world is a stretch for us to contemplate, thinking about all the synapses in your head is mind boggling. If I had a dollar for every synapse in your brain I could support the current economy of the world for 10 years. Cortical neurons on average fire once a second, which implies a bandwidth of around 10[15] bits per second, greater than the total bandwidth of the internet backbone. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Powers of 10](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10298) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-108 — Free Jazz — Andrian Kreye > If you're able to play music and you manage to get yourself invited to a Free Jazz session, there is an incredible moment, when all musicians find what is considered "The Pulse". It is a collective climax of creativity and communication that can leap to the audience and create an electrifying experience. It's hard to describe, but might be comparable to the moment when a surfer finds the point when the catalyst of a surfboard bring together the motor skills of his body and the forces of the swell of an ocean start in these few seconds of synergy on top of a wave. It is a fusion of musical elements though that defies common musical theory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Free Jazz](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10599) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-109 — Contingent Superorganism — Jonathan Haidt > Building on Hölldobler and Wilson's work on insect societies, we can define a "contingent superorganism" as a group of people that form a functional unit in which each is willing to sacrifice for the good of the group in order to surmount a challenge or threat, usually from another contingent superorganism. It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability. It is the secret of successful hive-like organizations, from the hierarchical corporations of the 1950s to the more fluid dot-coms of today. It is the purpose of basic training in the military. It is the reward that makes people want to join fraternities, fire departments, and rock bands. It is the dream of fascism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist; Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University Stern School of Business; Author, The Righteous Mind - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Contingent Superorganism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10386) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-110 — Negative Capability Is A Profound Therapy — Richard Foreman > My reference point (as a playwright, not a scientist) was Keat's notion of negative capability (from his letters). Being able to exist with lucidity and calm amidst uncertainty, mystery and doubt, without "irritable (and always premature) reaching out" after fact and reason. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 42 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Negative Capability Is A Profound Therapy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10484) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-111 — Life Code — Juan Enriquez > First ignorance then controversy continued dogging life code as humanity moved from reading it to copying it. Tadpoles were cloned in 1952, but few focused until Dolly the sheep begat wonder, consternation, and fear. Much the same occurred with in vitro fertilization and Louise Brown, a breakthrough that got the Nobel in 2010, a mere 37 years after the first birth. Copying genes and dozens of species, leading to hundreds of thousands of almost identical animals is now commonplace. The latest controversy is no longer how do we deal with rare clones but should we eat them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Life Code](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10306) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-112 — Collective intelligence — Matt Ridley > Human achievement is based on collective intelligence — the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand. As the economist Leonard Read observed in his essay "I, Pencil' (which I'd like everybody to read), no single person knows how to make even a pencil — the knowledge is distributed in society among many thousands of graphite miners, lumberjacks, designers and factory workers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Collective intelligence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10612) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Civilization/Civilization Is a Network No Individual Understands by Matt Ridley|Civilization Is a Network No Individual Understands by Matt Ridley]] ### EDGE2011-113 — Truth is a Model — Neil Gershenfeld > Kepler packing Platonic solids to explain the observed motion of planets made pretty good predictions, which were improved by his laws of planetary motion, which were improved by Newton's laws of motion, which were improved by Einstein's general relativity. Kepler didn't become wrong because of Newton being right, just as Newton didn't then become wrong because of Einstein being right; this succession of models differed in their assumptions, accuracy, and applicability, not their truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Truth is a Model](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10395) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Information/Uncertainty Is a Feature of Discovery by Neil Gershenfeld|Uncertainty Is a Feature of Discovery by Neil Gershenfeld]] ### EDGE2011-114 — Sensory Desktop — Donald D. Hoffman > Graphical desktops for personal computers have existed for about three decades. Yet they are now such an integral part of daily life that we might easily overlook a useful concept that they embody. A graphical desktop is a guide to adaptive behavior. Computers are notoriously complex devices, more complex than most of us care to learn. The colors, shapes and locations of icons on a desktop shield us from the computer's complexity, and yet they allow us to harness its power by appropriately informing our behaviors, such as mouse movements and button clicks, that open, delete and otherwise manipulate files. In this way, a graphical desktop is a guide to adaptive behavior. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Sensory Desktop](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10495) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-115 — The Uselessness of Certainty — Carlo Rovelli > There is a widely used notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of "scientifically proven". Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never 'certain'. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Uselessness of Certainty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10314) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-116 — Risk Literacy — Gerd Gigerenzer > Even at the university level, law and medical students are rarely taught statistical thinking — even though they are pursuing professions whose very nature it is to deal with matters of uncertainty. U.S. judges and lawyers have been confused by DNA statistics and fallen prey to the prosecutor's fallacy; their British colleagues drew incorrect conclusions about the probability of recurring sudden infant death. Many doctors worldwide misunderstand the likelihood that a patient has cancer after a positive screening test and can't critically evaluate new evidence presented in medical journals. Experts without risk literacy skills are part of the problem rather than the solution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Risk Literacy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10624) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-117 — Predictive Coding — Andy Clark > The basic idea is simple. It is that to perceive the world is to successfully predict our own sensory states. The brain uses stored knowledge about the structure of the world and the probabilities of one state or event following another to generate a prediction of what the current state is likely to be, given the previous one and this body of knowledge. Mismatches between the prediction and the received signal generate error signals that nuance the prediction or (in more extreme cases) drive learning and plasticity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Predictive Coding](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10404) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-118 — Anthropocene Thinking — Daniel Goleman > When, for example, will neuroeconomics tackle the brain's perplexing indifference to the news about planetary meltdown, let alone how that neural blindspot might be patched? Might cognitive neuroscience one day offer some insight that might change our collective decision-making away from a lemmings' march to oblivion? Could any of the computer, behavioral or brain sciences come up with an information prosthetic that might reverse our course? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Anthropocene Thinking](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10506) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-119 — Constraint Satisfaction — Stephen M. Kosslyn > Constraint satisfaction is pervasive in part because it does not require "perfect" solutions. It's up to you to decide what the most important constraints are, and just how many of the constraints in general must be satisfied (and how well they must be satisfied). Moreover, constraint satisfaction need not be linear: You can appreciate the entire set of constraints at the same time, throwing them into your "mental stewpot" and letting them simmer. And this process need not be conscious. "Mulling it over" seems to consist of engaging in unconscious constraint satisfaction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Constraint Satisfaction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10322) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-120 — Base rate — Keith Devlin > The second figure here is the base rate. Since it is just a number, obtained by the seemingly dull process of counting, it frequently gets overlooked when there is new information, particularly if that new information is obtained by "clever experts" using expensive equipment. In cases where the event is dramatic and scary, like a terrorist attack on an airplane, failure to take account of the base rate can result in wasting massive amounts of effort on money trying to prevent something that is very unlikely. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Base rate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10638) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-121 — Pareto Principle — Clay Shirky > The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto undertook a study of market economies a century ago, and discovered that no matter what the country, the richest quintile of the population controlled most of the wealth. The effects of this Pareto Distribution go by many names — the80/20 Rule, Zipfs Law, the Power Law distribution, Winner-Take-All — but the basic shape of the underlying distribution is always the same: the richest or busiest or most connected participants in a system will account for much much more wealth, or activity, or connectedness than average. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); Author, Cognitive Surplus - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Pareto Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10413) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-122 — Scale Analysis — Giulio Boccaletti > Non-linear complexity has also the unfortunate characteristic of being difficult to manage, high-speed computing not withstanding, because it tends to lack the generality of linear solutions. As a result we have a tendency to try and view the world in terms of linear models — much for the same reason that looking for lost keys under a lamppost might make sense: because that is where the light is. Understanding — of the kind that "rests in the mind" — seems to require simplification, one in which complexity is reduced where possible and only the most material parts of the problem are preserved. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scale Analysis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10517) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-123 — Cycles — Daniel C. Dennett > The word "computations" is aptly chosen, for it turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, re-entrant, reflexive information-transformation processes from the biochemical scale within the neuron to the whole brain sleep cycle, waves of cerebral activity and recovery revealed by EEGs. Computer programmers have been exploring the space of possible computations for less than a century, but their harvest of invention and discovery so far includes millions of loops within loops within loops. The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Cycles](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10329) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-124 — Findex — Marti Hearst > Although some have written about information overload, data smog, and the like, my view has always been the more information online, the better, so long as good search tools are available. Sometimes this information is found by directed search using a web search engine, sometimes by serendipty by following links, and sometimes by asking hundreds of people in our social network or hundreds of thousands of people on a question answering website such as Answers.com, Quora, or Yahoo Answers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 79 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Findex](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10653) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-125 — The Virtues of Negative Results — Kevin Kelly > Failure was not always so noble. In fact much of the world today failure is still not embraced as a virtue. It is a sign of weakness, and often a stigmata that prohibits second chances. Children in many parts of the world are taught that failure brings disgrace, and that one should do everything in one's power to succeed without failure. The rise of the West is in many respects due to the rise in tolerating failure. Indeed many immigrants trained in a failure-intolerant culture may blossom out of stagnancy once moved into a failure-tolerant culture. Failure liberates success. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Virtues of Negative Results](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10422) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-126 — Self-Serving Bias — David G. Myers > Studies of self-serving bias and its cousins — illusory optimism, self-justification, and ingroup bias — remind us of what literature and religion have taught: pride often goes before a fall. Perceiving ourselves and our groups favorably protects us against depression, buffers stress, and sustains our hopes. But it does so at the cost of marital discord, bargaining impasses, condescending prejudice, national hubris, and war. Being mindful of self-serving bias beckons us not to false modesty, but to a humility that affirms our genuine talents and virtues, and likewise those of others. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Self-Serving Bias](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10256) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-127 — Temperament Dimensions — Helen Fisher > Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of "character;" and those of "temperament." Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family's interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a living and relax: innumerable cultural forces build your unique set of character traits. The balance of your personality is your temperament, all the biologically based tendencies that contribute to your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, put it, "I am, plus my circumstances." Temperament is the "I am," the foundation of who you are. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Temperament Dimensions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10528) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-128 — Keystone Consumer — Jennifer Jacquet > Biologists are familiar with the term 'keystone species', coined in 1969 after Bob Paine's intertidal exclusion experiments. Paine found that by removing the few five-limbed carnivores, Pisaster ochraceus, from the seashore, he could cause an overabundance of its prey, mussels, and a sharp decline in diversity. Without seastars, mussels outcompeted sponges. No sponges, no nudibranchs. Anenomes were also starved out because they eat what the seastars dislodge. Pisaster was the keystone that kept the intertidal community together. Without it, there were only mussels, mussels, mussels. The term keystone species, inspired by the purple seastar, refers to a species that has a disproportionate effect relative to its abundance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Keystone Consumer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10336) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-129 — An Assertion Is Often An Empirical Question, Settled By Collecting Evidence — Susan Fiske > The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality, peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People's stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Eugene Higgins Professor, Department of Psychology, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 54 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [An Assertion Is Often An Empirical Question, Settled By Collecting Evidence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10667) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-130 — The Rational Unconscious — Alison Gopnik > Earlier thinkers like Locke and Hume anticipated many of the discoveries of psychological science but thought that the fundamental building blocks of the mind were conscious "ideas". Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human "computers" like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely unconscious machine with the same results. A machine could rationally decode the German ciphers using the same steps that the conscious "computers" went through. And the unconscious relay and vacuum tube computers could get to the right answers in the same way that the flesh and blood ones could. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Rational Unconscious](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10431) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-131 — Everything Is In Motion — James J. O'Donnell > Because we think and move at human scale in time and space, we can deceive ourselves. Pre-Copernican astronomies depended on the self-evident fact that the "fixed stars" orbited around the other in a slow annual dance; and it was an advance in science to declare that "atoms" (in Greek, literally "indivisibles") were the changeless building blocks of matter — until we split them. Edward Gibbon could be puzzled by the fall of the Roman Empire without realizing that its most amazing feature was that it lasted so long. Scientists discover magic disease-fighting compounds only to find that the disease changes faster than they can keep up. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Everything Is In Motion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10263) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-132 — ARISE — Joel Gold > ARISE, or Adaptive Regression In the Service of the Ego, is a psychoanalytic concept recognized for decades, but little appreciated today. It is one of the ego functions which, depending on who you ask, may number anywhere from a handful to several dozen. They include reality testing, stimulus regulation, defensive function and synthetic integration. For simplicity, we can equate the ego with the self (though ARISS doesn't quite roll off the tongue). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [ARISE](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10539) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-133 — Cumulative Error — Jaron Lanier > The illusion of Platonic information reappears as a belief that a higher-level representation must always be better. Each time a transaction is gauged to an assessment of the risk of another transaction, however, even if it is in a vertical structure, at least a little bit of error and artifact is injected. By the time a few layers have been compounded, the information becomes bizarre. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Cumulative Error](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10343) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-134 — Scientists Should Be Scientists — Gregory Paul > The archenemy of scientific thinking is conversation. As in typical human conversational discourse, much of which is BS. Personally I have become rather fed up with talking to people. Seriously, it is something a problem. Fact is, folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and then actually thinking they are true to the point of obstinacy, even when they have little or no idea of what they are talking about in the first place. We all do it. It is part of how the sloppy mind generating piece of meat between our ears we call the human brain is prone to work. Humans may be the most rational beings on the planet these days — but that's not saying much considering that the next most rational are chimpanzees. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Scientists Should Be Scientists](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10681) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-135 — Holism — Nicholas A. Christakis > For example, carbon atoms have particular, knowable physical and chemical properties. But the atoms can be combined in different ways to make, say, graphite or diamond. The properties of those substances — properties such as darkness and softness and clearness and hardness — are not properties of the carbon atoms, but rather properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Moreover, which particular properties the collection of atoms has depends entirely on how they are assembled — into sheets or pyramids. The properties arise because of the connections between the parts. I think grasping this insight is crucial for a proper scientific perspective on the world. You could know everything about isolated neurons and not be able to say how memory works, or where desire originates. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Holism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10440) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-136 — How Would You Disprove Your Viewpoint?! — Howard Gardner > In a democratic and demotic society like ours, the biggest challenge to scientific thinking is the tendency to embrace views on the basis of faith or of ideology. A majority of Americans doubt evolution because it goes against their religious teachings; and at least a sizeable minority are skeptical about global warming — or more precisely, the human contributions to global change — because efforts to counter climate change would tamper with the 'free market'. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [How Would You Disprove Your Viewpoint?!](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10066) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-137 — Skeptical Empiricism — Gerald Holton > To be sure, in politics and daily life, on some topics decisions have to be made very rapidly, on few or conflicting data. Yet, precisely for that reason it will be wise also to launch a more considerate program of skeptical empiricism on the same topic, if only to be better prepared for the consequences, intended or not, that followed from the quick decision. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Skeptical Empiricism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10123) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-138 — Antifragility — or— The Property Of Disorder-Loving Systems — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > Now the central point. By a simple mathematical property, one can show why, under a model of uncertainty, items on the right column will be likely to benefit in the long run, and thrive, more than shown on the surface, and items on the left are doomed to perish. Over the past decade managers of companies earned in, the aggregate, trillions while retirees lost trillions (the fact that executives get the upside not the downside gives them a convex payoff "free option"). And aggressive tinkering fares vastly better than directed research. How? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Antifragility — or— The Property Of Disorder-Loving Systems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10199) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-139 — Possibility Spaces: Thinking Beyond Cause and Effect — W. Daniel Hillis > One of the best ways to generate all the possibilities is to find a set of independent pieces of information that tell you everything you could possibly need to know about what could happen. For example, in the case of the Monty Hall problem, it would be sufficient to know what choice the guests is going to make, whether the host will reveal the leftmost or rightmost dud, and where the prize is located. Knowing these three pieces of information would allow you to predict exactly what is going to happen. It is also important that these three pieces of information are completely independent, in the sense that knowing one of them tells you nothing about any of the others. The possibility space is constructed by creating every possible combination of these three unknowns. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Possibility Spaces: Thinking Beyond Cause and Effect](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10071) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-140 — PERMA — Martin Seligman > Scientists commonly predict dystopias: nuclear war, overpopulation, energy shortage, dysgenic selection, widespread soundbyte mentality, and the like. You don't get much attention predicting that the human future will work out. I am not, however, going to predict that a positive human future will in fact occur, but it becomes more likely if we think about it systematically. We can begin by laying out the measurable elements of well being and then asking how those elements might be achieved. I address only measurement. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; Author, Flourish - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [PERMA](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10129) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-141 — A Sense Of Proportion About Fear Of The Unknown — Aubrey de Grey > One particular aspect of this problem stands out in its potential for public self-harm, however: risk-aversion. When uncertainty revolves around such areas as ethics (as with nuclear transfer) or economic policy (as with flu vaccination), the issues are potentially avoidable by appropriate forward planning. This is not the case when it comes to the public attitude to risk. The immense fall in uptake of vaccinations for major childhood diseases following a single, contentious study lining them to autism is a prime example. Another is the suspension of essentially all clinical trials of gene therapy for at least a year in response to the death of one person in a trial: a decision taken by regulatory bodies, yes, but one that was in line with public opinion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Sense Of Proportion About Fear Of The Unknown](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10206) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-142 — A Probability Distribution — John Allen Paulos > Related ideas of mean, median, and variance are also important, of course, but the simple notion of a distribution implicitly suggests these and weans people from the illusion that certainty and precise numerical answers are always attainable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 37 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A Probability Distribution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10072) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-143 — Positive-Sum Games — Steven Pinker > A zero-sum game is an interaction in which one party's gain equals the other party's loss — the sum of their gains and losses is zero. (More accurately, it is constant across all combinations of their courses of action.) Sports matches are quintessential examples of zero-sum games: winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, and nice guys finish last. A nonzero-sum game is an interaction in which some combinations of actions provide a net gain (positive-sum) or loss (negative sum) to the two of them. The trading of surpluses, as when herders and farmers exchange wool and milk for grain and fruit, is a quintessential example, as is the trading of favors, as when people take turns baby-sitting each others' children. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Positive-Sum Games](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10135) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-144 — Pragmamorphism — Emanuel Derman > We have discovered useful metrics for material objects -- length, temperature, pressure, volume, kinetic energy, etc. Pragmamorphism is a good word for the attempt to assign such one-dimensional thing-metrics to the mental qualities of humans. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University; Author, Models.Behaving.Badly - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Pragmamorphism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10213) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-145 — The Edge of the Circle — Haim Harari > We know that a circle has no edge, and we also know that, when you travel on a circle far enough to the right or to the left, you reach the same place. Today's world is gradually moving towards extremism in almost every area: Politics, law, religion, economics, education, ethics, you name it. This is probably due to the brevity of messages, the huge amounts of information flooding us, the time pressure to respond before you think and the electronic means (Twitter, text messages) which impose superficiality. Only extremist messages can be fully conveyed in one sentence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Edge of the Circle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10077) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-146 — The Law of Comparative Advantage — Dylan Evans > On reflection, I plumped for the law of comparative advantage, which explains how trade can be beneficial for both parties even when one of them is more productive than the other in every way. At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade. Since trade in labor is roughly the same as trade in goods, the law of comparative advantage also explains why immigration is almost always a good thing — a point which also needs emphasizing at a time when xenophobia is on the rise. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO of Projection Point; Author, The Utopia Experiment - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Law of Comparative Advantage](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10142) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-147 — Cognitive Load — Nicholas G. Carr > There are times when you want to be awash in messages and other info-bits. The resulting sense of connectedness and stimulation can be exciting and pleasurable. But it's important to remember that, when it comes to the way your brain works, information overload is not just a metaphor; it's a physical state. When you're engaged in a particularly important or complicated intellectual task, or when you simply want to savor an experience or a conversation, it's best to turn the information faucet down to a trickle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Cognitive Load](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10220) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-148 — The Mirror Fallacy — Christian Keysers > When the person we see has the exact same body and brain as we do, mirroring would tell us what the other feels. Whenever the other person is different in some relevant way, however, mirroring will mislead us. Imagine a masochist receiving a whiplash. Your mirror system might make you feel his pain — because you would feel pain in his stead. What he actually feels though is pleasure. You committed the mirror fallacy of incorrectly feeling that he would have felt what you would have felt — not what he actually felt. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Director, Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience; Author, The Empathic Brain - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Mirror Fallacy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10082) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-149 — Structured Serendipity — Jason Zweig > More recently, research in Mark Jung-Beeman's lab at Northwestern has found that sudden bursts of insight — the Aha! or Eureka! moment — comes when brain activity abruptly shifts its focus. The almost ecstatic sense that makes us cry "I see!" appears to come when the brain is able to shunt aside immediate or familiar visual inputs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Personal Finance Columnist, The Wall Street Journal; Author, Your Money and Your Brain - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Structured Serendipity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10153) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-150 — To Curate — Hans Ulrich Obrist > To curate, in this sense, is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations. But there is another case for curating as a vanguard activity for the 21st century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [To Curate](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10227) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-151 — The Multiverse — Nicholas Humphrey > The scientific concept of the "multiverse" has already entered popular imagination. But the full implications of the idea that every possible universe has been and will be actualised have yet to sink in. One of these, which could do more to change our view of things than anything is that we are all destined to be immortal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Multiverse](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10087) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-152 — Gedankenexperiment — Gino Segre > The notion of gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment, has been integral to theoretical physics' toolkit ever since the discipline came into existence. It involves setting up an imagined piece of apparatus and then running a simple experiment with it in your mind for the purpose of proving or disproving a hypothesis. In many cases agedankenexperiment is the only approach. An actual experiment to examine retrieval of information falling into a black hole cannot be carried out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Gedankenexperiment](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10157) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-153 — Each Of Us Is Ordinary, And Yet One Of A Kind — Samuel Barondes > Each of us is also unique, the possessor of a particular selection of gene variants from the collective human genome, and immersed in a particular family, culture, era, and peer group. With inborn tools for adaptation to the circumstances of our personal world we keep building our own ways of being and the sense of who we are. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 58 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Each Of Us Is Ordinary, And Yet One Of A Kind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10234) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-154 — Conceptual Metaphor — George Lakoff > Perhaps most remarkable, there appear to be brain structures that we are born with that provide pathways ready for metaphor circuitry. Edward Hubbard has observed that critical brain regions coordinating space and time measurement are adjacent in the brain, making it easy for the universal metaphors for understanding space in terms of time to develop (as in "Christmas is coming" or "We're coming up on Christmas.") Mirror neuron pathways linking brain regions coordinating vision and hand actions provide a natural pathway for the conceptual metaphor that Seeing Is Touching (as in "Their eyes met"). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow at The Rockridge Institute; Author, The Little Blue Book - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Conceptual Metaphor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10093) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-155 — The Pointless Universe — Sean Carroll > Nature teaches us otherwise. Things happen because the laws of nature say they will — because they are the consequences of the state of the universe and the path of its evolution. Life on Earth doesn't arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme, but rather as a byproduct of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium. Our impressive brains don't develop because life is guided toward greater levels of complexity and intelligence, but from the mechanical interactions between genes, organisms, and their surroundings. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Pointless Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10164) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-156 — Graceful SHA's — Richard Nisbett > 1. A university needs to replace its aging hospital. Cost estimates indicate that it would be equally expensive to remodel the old hospital vs. to demolish it and build a new one from scratch. The main argument offered by the proponents of the former is that the original hospital had been very expensive to build and it would be wasteful to simply demolish it. The main argument by the proponents of a new hospital is that a new hospital would inevitably be more modern than a remodeled one. Which seems wiser to you — remodel or build a new hospital? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Graceful SHA's](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10241) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-157 — GIGO — Milford H. Wolpoff > In computer work, garbage results can arise from bad data or from poorly conceived algorithms applied to analysis — I don't expect that the results from both of these combined are a different order of garbage because bad is bad enough. The science I am used to practicing has far too many examples of mistaken, occasionally fraudulent data and inappropriate, even illogical analysis, and it is all too often impossible to separate conclusions from assumptions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan; Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [GIGO](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10099) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-158 — The World is Unpredictable — Rudy Rucker > We often suppose that unpredictability is caused by random inputs from higher spirits or from low-down quantum foam. But chaos theory and computer science tell us that non-random systems produce surprises on their own. The unexpected tornado, the cartoon safe that lands on Uncle George, the winning pull on a slot machine odd things pop out of a computation. The world can simultaneously be deterministic and unpredictable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The World is Unpredictable](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10171) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-159 — Externalities — Robert Kurzban > When I go about doing what I do, frequently I affect you as an incidental side effect. In many such cases, I don't have to pay you to compensate for any inadvertent harm done; symmetrically, you frequently don't have to pay me for any inadvertent benefits I've bestowed upon you. The term — externalities — refers to these cases, and they are pervasive and important because, especially in the modern, interconnected world, when I go about pursuing my own goals, I wind up affecting you in any number of different ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Externalities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10248) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-160 — Analog Computing — George Dyson > In the age of all things digital, "Web 2.0" is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital — reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. The fastest-growing computers of 2010 — search engines and social networks — are analog computers in a big, new, and important way. Instead of meaningful information being encoded as unambiguous (and fault-intolerant) digital sequences referenced by precise numerical addressing, meaningful information is increasingly being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by fault-tolerant template rather than by unforgiving numerical address. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Analog Computing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10105) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-161 — Randomness — Charles Seife > If you walk into a Las Vegas casino and observe the crowd gathered around the craps table, you'll probably see someone who thinks he's on a lucky streak. Because he's won several rolls in a row, his brain tells him that he's going to keep winning, so he keeps gambling. You'll probably also see someone who's been losing. The loser's brain, like the winner's, tells him to keep gambling. Since he's been losing for so long, he thinks he's due for a stroke of luck; he won't walk away from the table for fear of missing out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Randomness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10178) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-162 — Experimentation — Roger Schank > We learn about experimentation in school. What we learn is that scientists conduct experiments and if we copy exactly what they did in our high school labs we will get the results they got. We learn about the experiments that scientists do, usually about about the physical and chemical properties of things and we learn that they report their results in scientific journals. So, in effect we learn that experimentation is boring, is something done by scientists and has nothing to do with our daily lives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Experimentation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10111) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-163 — Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine — Clifford Pickover > We are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are part of a discovery kaleidoscope and mirrored in numerous individuals at once. However, as further examples, there were several independent discoveries of sunspots in 1611, even though Galileo gets most of the credit today. Halley's Comet, named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, was not first discovered by Halley because it had actually seen by countless observers even before the time of Jesus. However, Halley's useful calculations enabled earlier references to the comet's appearance to be found in the historical record. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed their own patents on telephone technologies on the same day. As sociologist of science Robert Merton remarked, "The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10185) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-164 — Haecceity — Bruce Hood > Today, both haecceity and quiddity have been subsumed under the more recognizable term, "essentialism." Richard Dawkins has recently called essentialism, "the dead hand of Plato," because, as he points out, a intuitive belief in distinct identities is a major impediment to accepting the reality that all diverse life forms have a common biological ancestry. However drawing the distinction within essentialism is important. For example, it is probably intuitive quiddity that makes some people unhappy about genetic modification because they see this as a violation of integrity of the species as a group. On the other hand it is intuitive haecceity that forms our barrier to cloning, where the authenticity of the individual is compromised. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Haecceity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10061) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-165 — TANSTAAFL — Robert Provine > My students hear a lot about TANSTAAFL, from the biological costs of the peacock's tail, to our nervous system that distorts physical reality to emphasize changes in time and space. When the final tally is made, peahens cast their ballot for the sexually exquisite plumage of the peacock and its associated vigor, and it is more adaptive for humans to detect critical sensory events than to be high fidelity light and sound meters. In such cases, lunch is not free but comes at reasonable cost as determined by the grim but honest accounting of natural selection, a process without hand-waving and incantation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [TANSTAAFL](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10117) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2011-166 — Inference To The Best Explanation — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > Many of our most rancorous scientific debates — say, over string theory or foundations of quantum mechanics — have been over which competing criteria for judging explanations the best ought to prevail. So, too, have debates that many of us have been having over scientific versus religious explanations. These debates could be sharpened by bringing to bear on them the rationality-steeped notion of inference to the best explanation, its invocation of the sorts of standards that make some explanations objectively better than others, beginning with Peirce's enjoiner that extraordinary hypotheses be ranked far away from the best. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Inference To The Best Explanation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10192) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted