# Edge 2017 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?*. 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 TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known) - **Archive year:** 2017 - **Response rows represented:** 205 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 205 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 0 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 8 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 8 - **Not yet promoted:** 197 ## 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 ### EDGE2017-001 — Impedance Matching — W. Daniel Hillis > A familiar example of an impedance matcher is the transmission of an automobile, which couples the energy from the engine into the wheels by converting the relatively fast rotation of the engine into the slower, stronger rotation required to propel the car. The transformer on an electric pole solves an analogous problem, converting the high-voltage electricity on the transmission lines to the high-current electricity required to power your home. Lots of machines, from jet engines to radios, depend on impedance matchers to move energy from one part of the system to another. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Impedance Matching](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27238) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-002 — The Genetic Book of the Dead — Richard Dawkins > In addition to telling us about ancestral environments, the Genetic Book of the Dead can reveal other aspects of history. Demography, for instance. Coalescence analysis performed on my personal genome by my co-author (and ex-student) Yan Wong has revealed that the population from which I spring suffered a major bottleneck, probably corresponding to an out of Africa migration event, some 60,000 years ago. Yan’s analysis may be the only occasion when one co-author of a book has made detailed historical inferences by reading the Genetic Book of the other co-author. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Genetic Book of the Dead](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27237) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-003 — The Scientific Method — Nigel Goldenfeld > There's a saying that there are no cultural relativists at thirty thousand feet. The laws of aerodynamics work regardless of political or social prejudices, and they are indisputably true. Yes, you can discuss to what extent they are an approximation, what are their limits of validity, do they take into account such niceties as quantum entanglement or unified field theory (of course they don't). But the most basic scientific concept that is clearly and disturbingly missing from today's social and political discourse is the concept that some questions have correct and clear answers. Such questions can be called "scientific" and their answers represent truth. Scientific questions are not easy to ask. Their answers can be verified by experiment or observation, and they can be used to improve your life, create jobs and technologies, save the planet. You don't need pollsters or randomized trials to determine if a parachute works. You need an understanding of the facts of aerodynamics and the methodology to do experiments. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 164 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Scientific Method](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27236) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-004 — The Brainstem — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > Since the Brainstem’s activity is related to basic physiological and homeostatic functions, its activity is permanent, allowing the continuum construct of the “self.” Although our external appearance changes during our lifetime, our internal organs and biological functions remain mostly unchanged; if our consciousness is therefore grounded on those constant biological functions, it will also remain mostly constant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Brainstem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27235) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-005 — Sexual Selection — Rory Sutherland > (For almost a century during which few men knew how to type, the typewriter must have damaged business productivity to an astounding degree; it meant that every single business and government communication had to be written twice: once by the originator in longhand and then once again by the typist or typing pool. A series of simple amends could delay a letter or memo by a week. But the ownership and use of a typewriter was a necessary expense to signal that you were a serious business. Any provincial solicitor who persisted in writing letters by hand became a tailless peacock.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy London; Columnist, the Spectator; Author, Alchemy - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sexual Selection](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27234) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-006 — Emotion Contagion — June Gruber > When disrupted, faulty emotion contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know too that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent. Importantly, too, this type of contagion itself spreads across a variety of other psychological phenomenon that indirectly or directly involves emotions ranging from kindness, health-related eating behaviors, and even the darker side of human behaviors including violence and racism. Emotion contagion matters, for better and for worse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Emotion Contagion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27233) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-007 — Genetic Rescue — Stewart Brand > Often genetic diversity can be restored by means as straightforward as connecting isolated populations with wildlife corridors or larger protected areas, but new technological capabilities are broadening the options for genetic rescue. Advanced reproductive technology offers an alternative to transporting whole genetically-distinct parents—artificial insemination has brought genetic refreshment to cheetahs, pandas, elephants, whooping cranes, and black-footed ferrets. With the cost of genome sequencing and analysis coming down, it is becoming possible to examine each stage of genetic rescue at the gene level instead of having to wait for external traits to show improvement. This has already been done with Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep. - **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:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Genetic Rescue](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27232) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Preservation/Genetic Rescue Can Recover Lost Biological Futures by Stewart Brand|Genetic Rescue Can Recover Lost Biological Futures by Stewart Brand]] ### EDGE2017-008 — Allostasis — Tor Nørretranders > Reward prediction has over the past decades become a key notion in understanding perception and behavior in both robots and biological creatures. Navigation is based on predictions and prediction errors rather than a full mapping of the entire environment. The world is described inside-out by throwing predictions at it and seeing how they work out. Controlled hallucinations has become a common phrase to describe this process of generously imagining or predicting a spectrum of perceptional sceneries—made subject to selection by experience. Very much like the scientific process of making hypotheses and testing them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Allostasis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27230) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-009 — Class Breaks — Bruce Schneier > In a sense, class breaks are not a new concept in risk management. It's the difference between home burglaries and fires, which happen occasionally to different houses in a neighborhood over the course of the year, and floods and earthquakes, which either happen to everyone in the neighborhood or no one. Insurance companies can handle both types of risk, but they are inherently different. The increasing computerization of everything is moving us from a burglary/fire risk model to a flood/earthquake model, which a given threat either affects everyone in town or doesn't happen at all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School; Author, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Class Breaks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27229) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-010 — The Longevity Factor — Yuri Milner > What determines this average? Surely the intelligence of the civilizations. The list of existential threats to humanity includes climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, asteroid collisions and perhaps AI. And all of these can be avoided. Some can be addressed here on Earth. Others require activity in space, but with the ultimate aim of protecting the planet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist; Entrepreneur & Venture Capitalist; Science Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Longevity Factor](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27228) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-011 — Intellectual Honesty — Sam Harris > Intellectual honesty allows us to stand outside ourselves and to think in ways that others can (and should) find compelling. It rests on the understanding that wanting something to be true isn’t a reason to believe that it is true—rather, it is further cause to worry that we might be out of touch with reality in the first place. In this sense, intellectual honesty makes real knowledge possible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Philosopher; Author, Making Sense - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Intellectual Honesty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27227) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-012 — Replicator Power — Susan Blackmore > Artificial intelligences, whether confined to desktop boxes and robots or distributed in cyber space, have been created by replicator power just as our own intelligence was created by replicator power. They are evolving far faster than we did and may yet give rise to further even faster replicators. That power will not stop because we want it to. And its products will certainly not be impressed by our claims to be in control or to have designed the machinery on which they thrive. That intelligence will continue to evolve, and the sooner we accept the idea of replicator power the more realistic we are likely to be about the future of our life with intelligent machines. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Replicator Power](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27225) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Evolution/Intelligent Machines Are the Next Replicators by Susan Blackmore|Intelligent Machines Are the Next Replicators by Susan Blackmore]] ### EDGE2017-013 — It's About Time — Dustin Yellin > Self-help books talk confidently about “making time work for you”; so do investment advisors. Physicists and gods laugh when we make plans. Some say all matter is basically fixed; others say bodies reconstitute molecularly, and most agree neither energy nor matter are created or destroyed. Since 1662, we’ve invoked the immortal by the graveside prayer, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” so shall we all cycle in this eternal recurrence. Time plays the trump in every hand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Founder, Pioneer Works - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [It's About Time](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27224) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-014 — Effect Modification — Beatrice Golomb > How is this possible? One factor is that agents that can yield antioxidant effects (like statins), are almost always prooxidant in some patients and settings—including at high doses, where co-antioxidants are depleted. Conversely agents that can have prooxidant effects can, not uncommonly, have antioxidant effects in sufficiently low doses, for some people – via “oxidative preconditioning,” by which a bit of oxidative stress ramps up endogenous antioxidant defenses. For agents meant to alter an aspect of physiology, counterregulatory mechanisms—imposed by evolution—may partly offset the intended effects– and in some people overshoot. So drugs and salt restriction that are meant to lower blood pressure, paradoxically raise blood pressure in some. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Effect Modification](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27223) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-015 — The Virial Theorem — Seth Lloyd > Human society, living organisms, and the planets, stars, and galaxies that make up the universe all function by the orderly exchange of information. Social cues, metabolic signals, and bits of information carried by the force of gravity give rise to societies, organisms, and to the structure of the universe. Chaos, by contrast, is defined by the explosive growth and spread of random information. Memes used to be cultural practices that propagated because they benefited humanity. Accelerating flows of digital information have reduced memes to kitten photos on the Internet. When memes propagate so rapidly they lose their meaning, watch out! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Virial Theorem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27222) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-016 — Neurodiversity — Joichi Ito > With the invention of CRISPR the possibility of editing the human genome at scale has suddenly become feasible. The initial applications that are being developed involve the “fixing” of genetic mutations that cause debilitating diseases, but they are also taking us down a path with the potential to eliminate not only autism but much of the diversity that makes human society flourish. Our understanding of the human genome is rudimentary enough that it will be some time before we are able to enact complex changes that involve things like intelligence or personality, but it’s a slippery slope. I saw a business plan a few years ago that argued that autism was just “errors” in the genome that could be identified and “corrected” in the manner of “de-noising” a grainy photograph or audio recording. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, MIT Media Lab; Coauthor (with Jeff Howe), Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Neurodiversity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27221) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-017 — Exaptation — W. Tecumseh Fitch > I believe exaptation to be a concept of central importance not only for bodily organs, but also for the evolution of mind and brain (e.g. for the evolution of language). Much of what we use our brains for in modern times represents a change in function (e.g. piloting airplanes from basic visually-guided motor control, or mathematical thinking from some basic precursor concepts of number and geometry). These very new cognitive abilities (and many others, like reading) are clearly exaptations, with no further shaping by natural selection (yet). But debate rages about whether older but still-recent human capacities like linguistic syntax have yet been tailored by natural selection to their current role (proposed cognitive precursors for linguistic syntax include hierarchical social cognition as seen in primates, or hierarchical motor control as seen in many vertebrates). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna; Author, The Evolution of Language - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Exaptation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27220) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-018 — Anthropomorphism — Diana Reiss > In 1976, a small book entitled the Question of Animal Awareness by Rockefeller University zoologist Donald Griffin was published. In his book, Griffin compares human brain processes with those of other animals. “Other vertebrate animals also have very complicated brains, and in some cases brains which appear to be physically very much like our own; this suggests that what goes on in animal brains has a good deal in common with what goes on in human brains; laboratory experiments on animal behavior provide some measure of support for this suggestion.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Department of Psychology Hunter College; Author, The Dolphin in the Mirror - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Anthropomorphism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27219) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-019 — Motivated Reasoning — David Pizarro > Perhaps some of these inaccurate beliefs are the result of an increase in the intentional spreading of false information, a problem exacerbated by the efficiency of the Internet. But false information has been spread pretty much since we’ve had the ability to spread information. More importantly, the same technologies that allow for the efficient spreading of false information also provide us with the ability to fact-check our information more efficiently. For most questions we can find a reliable, authoritative answer easier than anyone has ever been able to in all of human history. In short, we have more access to truth than ever. So why do false beliefs persist? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Motivated Reasoning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27218) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-020 — Systemic Bias — Richard Muller > Consider optimism and skepticism bias in the field of energy. Some say solar power is too expensive or too intermittent. Rather than address these directly, we can substitute optimism: let’s let loose American can-do and solve those challenges! (In the world today there are no longer any problems, only challenges.) Electric cars charge too slowly? Look at the computer revolution and lose your confining pessimism! Moore’s law will eventually apply to batteries for energy storage, just as it worked for electronics. Remember the Manhattan Project! Remember the Apollo mission! We can do anything if we put our minds to it. Yes we can! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, UC Berkeley; Author, Now: The Physics of Time - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Systemic Bias](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27217) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-021 — On Average — Kai Krause > There is a constant and real danger in being manipulated, be it by graphs with truncated Y axes, or pies that go beyond 100%, hearing news of sudden greater chances to die of some disease, or the effectiveness of medication, or so many of the tiny footprint notes in advertising claims. It requires a minimum level of awareness to sort through these things. Acquiring common sense needs to include math. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [On Average](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27216) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-022 — The Principle of Least Action — Janna Levin > Complexity makes life interesting. A universe of just Hydrogen is quite bland, but the helpful production of Carbon in stellar cores allows for all kinds of chemical connections. A universe of just two dimensions is pretty limited, but live in at least three and enjoy the greater range of motion and possible spatial permutations. Sitting on a bench in my friend’s garden in California, there’s a lot to look at. The visual information filling my field of view is incredibly complicated. The dry winter leaves trace vortices in the air’s motion. Plants respire and we breathe and the neural connections fire and it’s all complex and interesting. The physicist’s job is to see through the overwhelming intricacy and find the rallying, organizing principle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Barnard College of Columbia University; Author, Black Hole Survival Guide; Director of Sciences, Pioneer Works - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Principle of Least Action](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27215) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-023 — Maxwell’s Demon — Jimena Canales > Neat-fingered and vigilant, he can reverse time, momentarily violate the second law of thermodynamics, power a perpetual motion machine, and generate pockets of hellish heat in substances that should otherwise reach temperature equilibrium. His smarts are debatable, matching those of a virtuoso piano player or those of a humble switchman on railway tracks. No offense is taken if he is compared to a simple valve. On the contrary, it means he can do a lot of work with minimum effort. Frequently portrayed as holding a cricket bat (to send molecules to-and-fro), manning a trapdoor (to let them pass or keep them out) and holding a torch, a flashlight or a photocell (to be able to see in the dark), this miniscule leviathan can wreak havoc. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer and faculty at the Graduate College, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; Author, The Physicist and the Philosopher - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Maxwell’s Demon](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27214) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-024 — Galactic Centre — Koo Jeong - A > In the universe, the beginning of the star are the gases, the different quantities of the elements crashes each other by their own internal pressure become a certain heavier chemical elements billions of years later, it gains the gravity after a quantity constitutes it. When a star repeats the formation by the gravitational collapse, it enters the main sequence and starts to burn hydrogen in its core that derived a mass luminosity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Galactic Centre](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27213) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-025 — Media Richness — Nina Jablonski > Like all primates, humans have nurtured harmonious relationships and maintained social cohesion by being intensely good, high-bandwidth communicators. Media richness is a concept worthy of wider propagation because it will help insure the future of individuals and societies in times of increasing individual social isolation, electronic bullying, touch aversion, personal anxiety, and social estrangement. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist and Paleobiologist; Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University - **Extract length:** 54 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Media Richness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27212) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-026 — Sleeper Sensitive Periods — Linda Wilbrecht > Sensitive period biology may also influence behaviors commonly thought to make up a person’s personality. Experience at different times might alter someone’s appetite for risk, their tolerance for delayed gratification, or kindle their interest in music. It is possible that experience of poverty even during a brief window of development could alter the brain and behavior for a lifetime. When money is available for educational or public health intervention, knowledge of sensitive period biology should become a central aspect of strategy. If sleeper sensitive periods exist in late childhood or teenage years then these periods may become more efficient target years. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Sleeper Sensitive Periods](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27211) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-027 — Construal — Eldar Shafir > Knowledge in the form of scripts, schemas, and heuristics, serves to make sense of stimuli in ways that transcend what is given. What we experience is determined not simply by the objective building blocks of the situation, but by what we know, care about, attend to, understand, and remember. And what we care about, attend to, and remember is malleable. In one study, participants were invited to play a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, referred to as either the Wall Street or the Community game. While the payoffs and set-up were identical, the mere label altered participants’ construal, changing their tendency to cooperate or to defect. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Ph.D., Princeton University; Co-author, Scarcity - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Construal](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27210) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-028 — Confusion — Maximilian Schich > While such questions await solution, as a take home, we should expect critical amounts of confusion in many real life systems, with the optimum in between but not identical with perfect discreteness or perfect homogeneity. Further identifying, understanding, and successfully moderating patterns of confusion in real systems is an ongoing challenge. Solving this challenge is likely essential in a great variety of fields, from materials and medicine to social justice and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Science will help us to clarify, if possible to embrace, and if necessary to avoid confusion. Of course, we should use caution, as the moderation of confusion can be used for peace and war, much like the rods in a nuclear reactor—with the difference that switching off confusion in a social system may be just as deadly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor in Arts and Technology, The University of Texas at Dallas - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Confusion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27209) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-029 — Future Self-Continuity — Brian Knutson > Considering the future self to be an entirely different person could have serious consequences. Philosopher Derek Parfit worries that people who regard the future self as distinct should logically have no more reason to care about that future self than a stranger. By implication, they should have no reason to save money, maintain their health, or cultivate relationships. But perhaps there is a middle ground between self and stranger. To the extent that someone imagines their future self to be similar to their present self, this sense of “future self-continuity” might predict their willingness to at least consider the interests of the future self. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Future Self-Continuity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27208) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Identity/Future Selves Can Be Engineered to Change Present Behavior by Brian Knutson|Future Selves Can Be Engineered to Change Present Behavior by Brian Knutson]] ### EDGE2017-030 — Zone of Proximal Development — Athena Vouloumanos > Clear instruction is essential for learning. But even the clearest instruction can be of limited use, if the learner is not at the right place to receive it. Psychologist Lev Vygotsky had a remarkable insight about how we learn. He coined the term zone of proximal development to describe a sweet spot for learning in the gap between what a learner could do alone, and what that learner could do with help from someone providing knowledge or training just beyond the learner’s current level. With such guidance, learners can succeed on tasks that were too difficult for them to master on their own. Crucially, guidance can then be taken away, like scaffolding, and learners can succeed at the task on their own. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Director, NYU Infant Cognition and Communication Lab, New York University - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Zone of Proximal Development](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27207) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-031 — Synaptic Transfer — David Rowan > Thankfully a solution is suggested by neural networks of a biological kind. Inside our brains, no neuron ever makes direct contact with another neuron; these billions of disconnected cells pursue their own individual agendas without directly communicating with their neighbors. But the reason we are able to form memories, or sustain reasoned debate, is that the very gaps between these neurons are programmed to build connections between them. These gaps—called synapses—connect individual neurons using chemical or electrical signals, and thus unite isolated brain cells into a healthy central and peripheral nervous system. The synapses transfer instructions between neurons, link our sense receptors to other parts of our nervous system, and carry messages destined for our muscles and glands. Truth be told, without these unheralded gap-bridging entities called synapses, our disconnected brain cells would be pretty irrelevant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor, WIRED UK - **Extract length:** 136 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Synaptic Transfer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27206) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-032 — Abstraction — Ursula Martin > You can’t point to a variable or an addition instruction in Babbage’s machine—only to the mechanical activities that represent them. What Lovelace can only tackle with informal explanation was made more precise in the 1960s when computer scientists such as Oxford’s Dana Scott and Christopher Strachey used separate abstractions to model both the machine and the program running on it, so that precise mathematical reasoning could predict its behavior. These concepts have become further refined as computer scientists like Samson Abramsky seek out more subtle abstractions using advanced logic and mathematics to capture not only classical computers, but quantum computation as well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Abstraction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27205) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-033 — Enactivism — Amanda Gefter > The problem, however, is that fundamental physics denies the existence of this observer-independent world. From quantum physics in the early 20th century to the black hole firewall debate that rages today, physicists have found that we tangle ourselves in paradox and violate laws of physics when we attempt to compile multiple viewpoints into a single spacetime. The state of a physical system, we’ve learned, can only be defined relative to a given observer. (Here “observer” does not mean consciousness, but a physical system capable of acting as a measuring device—yet one that itself must enjoy only a relational existence.) Slices of spacetime accessed by different observers cannot be considered broken shards of a single, shared world, but rather as self-contained and incommensurable versions of reality, each a universe unto itself. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Enactivism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27204) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-034 — Supernormal Stimuli — Nancy Etcoff > How do such signals get the brain’s attention? Studies of the brain's reward pathways suggest that dopamine plays a fundamental role in encouraging basic biological behaviors that evolved in the service of natural rewards. Dopamine is involved in learning, and responds to cues in the environment that suggest potential gains and losses. In the early studies of the 1950s, before the role of dopamine was known, scientists likened the effects of supernormal stimuli to addiction, a process we now know is mediated by dopamine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist and faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and of Harvard University - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Supernormal Stimuli](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27203) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-035 — Blind Analysis — Sarah Demers > When we measure a value that is consistent with the prediction our tendency is to trust the result. When we get an unexpected answer we apply greater scrutiny, trying to determine if we’ve made an error before believing the surprise. This tilts us toward revealing errors in one category of measurements and leaving them unexposed in another. It is particularly dangerous when our assumptions are flawed—and if there is anything we should bet on, given the history of progress within physics, it’s that our underlying assumptions are in some way flawed. Bias can creep into the scientific process in predictable and unpredictable ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Horace D. Taft Associate Professor of Physics, Yale University - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Blind Analysis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27202) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-036 — Maladaptation — Aubrey de Grey > Why should it be, though, that evolution accepts these trade-offs? In reality, it doesn't: it is always looking for ways to get closer to the best of both worlds. But that, too, must be considered in the context of how evolution actually works. Some adaptations, even if they may theoretically be possible, just take too long for evolution to find, so what we see is the best that evolution could manage in the time it had. It looks like stability—as if evolution has decided that a particular trade-off is good enough—but that's really just an approximation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Maladaptation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27201) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-037 — Fixpoint — David Dalrymple > Fixpoints are also an extraordinarily useful framework to consider ideas that seem to be defined circularly. As a concrete example, the golden ratio phi can be defined as phi=1+1/phi, which actually means phi is the unique fixpoint of the operation that takes the reciprocal then adds one. In general, self-referential definitions can be classified according to the number of fixpoints of the corresponding operation: more than one, and it's imprecise but potentially serviceable; one, and it's a bona fide definition; lacking any, and it's a paradox (like "this sentence is false"). In fact, it is operations that lack fixpoints which underly a whole host of deeply-related paradoxes in mathematics, and led to Gödel's discovery that the early-20th-century logicians' quest to completely formalize mathematics is impossible. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Fixpoint](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27200) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-038 — The Breeder's Equation — Gregory Cochran > The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating—and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial. - **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:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Breeder's Equation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27199) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-039 — Scaling — Ashvin Chhabra > Benoit Mandelbrot, in his classic paper “How long is the coast of Britain?” provided the insight needed to understand this result. As one measures the coastline with ever-increasing precision, one measures and adds the lengths of ever-smaller fjords, nooks and crannies. The coastline is not a smooth object; over a certain range of length-scales it is rough and undulating enough that it behaves like a self-similar object with a dimension between one and two. This insight led to the development of fractal geometry—the geometry of irregular, fractured objects: coastlines, mountains…broccoli. Systems that possess the property of self-similarity often show power-law scaling—alluding to a beautiful link between geometry and physics. Incorporating fractal geometry also turns out to be important for computer algorithms to generate the realistic-looking artificial worlds in movies and video games that we now take for granted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor, Physicist, Author: The Aspirational Investor - **Extract length:** 138 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Scaling](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27198) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-040 — The Climate System — Giulio Boccaletti > Few know that the coherence of the climate system has also extraordinary function. For example, coherent movement on a planetary scale by both the ocean and the atmosphere ensures that heat is transported poleward from the equator at peak rate of almost 6 PW (or six million billion W—roughly a thousand times all installed power production capacity in the world), thus ensuring that when people say they are boiling in Nairobi or freezing in Berlin, they can be taken figuratively rather than literally. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Climate System](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27197) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-041 — Phenotypic Plasticity — Nicolas Baumard > Humans all over the world share the same genome, the same neural architecture and the same behavioral niche (three-generational system of resource provisioning, long-term pair-bonding between men and women, high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin). At the same time, human cultures are highly variable. Some societies see revenge as a duty, others as a sin; some regard sex as a pleasure, others as a danger, and some reward innovations while others prefer traditions. In many instances, these cultural differences are robust, and can last for millennia despite cultural contacts, political assimilation or linguistic replacement. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Scientist at the CNRS, Paris and Associate Professor at ENS, Paris, France - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Phenotypic Plasticity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27196) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-042 — De-Anonymization — Ross Anderson > A series of high-profile data scandals has hammered home the surprising power de-anonymization. And it’s getting more powerful all the time, as we get ever more social data and other contextual data online. Better machine-learning algorithms help too; they have recently been used, for example, to de-anonymize millions of mobile phone call data records by pattern-matching them against the public friendship graph visible in online social media. So where do we stand now? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [De-Anonymization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27195) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-043 — Cosmological Constant, or Vacuum Energy — Raphael Bousso > The string landscape solves the cosmological constant problem by a strategy similar to throwing many darts randomly: Some will hit the bullseye by accident. In string theory there are many different ways of making empty space, and they would all get realized as vast regions in different parts of the universe. In some regions, the universe “hits the bullseye”—the cosmological constant is accidentally small. There, spacetime does not quickly explode or collapse, so structure and observers are more likely to evolve in these lucky regions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Cosmological Constant, or Vacuum Energy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27194) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-044 — Epsilon — Victoria Stodden > In statistical modeling the use of the Greek letter “epsilon” explicitly recognizes that uncertainty is intrinsic to our world. The statistical paradigm envisions two components: data or measurements drawn from the world we observe; and the underlying processes that generated these observed data. Epsilon appears in mathematical descriptions of these underlying processes and represents the inherent randomness with which the data we observe are generated. Through the collection and modeling of data we hope to make better guesses at the mathematical form of these underlying processes, with the idea that a better understanding of the data generating mechanism will allow us to do a better job modeling and predicting the world around us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Epsilon](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27193) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-045 — Fallibilism — Oliver Scott Curry > Fallibilism is also the guiding principle of free, open, liberal, secular societies. If the "laws" of nature can be wrong, then think how much more fallible are our social and political arrangements. Even our morals, for example, do not reflect some absolute truth—god-given or otherwise. They too are hypotheses—biological and cultural attempts to solve the problems of cooperation and conflict inherent in human social life. They are tentative, provisional, and capable of improvement; and they can be, and have been, improved upon. The awareness of this possibility—allied to the ambition to seize the opportunity it represents, and the scientific ability to do so—is precisely what has driven the tremendous social, moral, legal and political progress of the past few centuries. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Researcher, Director, The Oxford Morals Project, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Fallibilism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27192) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-046 — Sex — Helena Cronin > As for different outcomes in the workplace, the causes are above all different interests and temperaments (and not women being "less clever" than men). Women on average have a strong preference for working with people—hence the nurses and teachers; and, compared to men, they care more about family and relationships and have broader interests and priorities—hence little appeal in becoming CEOs. Men have far more interest in "things"—hence the engineers; and they are vastly more competitive: more risk-taking, ambitious, status-seeking, single-minded, opportunistic—hence the CEOs. So men and women have, on average, different conceptions of what constitutes success (despite the gender quest to impose the same—male—conception on all). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Sex](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27191) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-047 — The Non-Returnable Universe — Andrei Linde > Indeed, let us try to follow the cosmological evolution back in time in this scenario. At first, galaxies move towards each other and the universe becomes very dense, just as in the standard Big Bang theory. But then something really weird happens. Suddenly, at the moment corresponding to the end of inflation, played back in time, all 1090 elementary particles populating our part of the universe completely disappear!... And then—not a flash, not a sound, nothing, except the exponentially shrinking and disappearing empty universe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Father of Eternal Chaotic Inflation; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Non-Returnable Universe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27190) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-048 — General Standardization Theory — Rolf Dobelli > What is the best way to achieve optimal standards? While game theory (coordination games) offers a vast body of knowledge, setting standards in the real world is not easy. However, the advantages are huge. Thus, landing at a relatively low local peak is vastly preferable to no coordination. Let’s call the sum of this theoretical and practical knowledge from management and game theory the “Special Theory of Standardization”—akin to Einstein’s “Special Theory of Relativity.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, Zurich Minds; Journalist; Author, The Art of Thinking Clearly - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [General Standardization Theory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27188) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-049 — Gravitational Lensing — Priyamvada Natarajan > General relativity accurately predicted the displacement between the real and apparent positions. It was the verification of this prediction by the British Astronomer Arthur Eddington that made Einstein a celebrity and a household name. The more dramatic predictions of gravitational lensing—the strong distortions in the shapes of lensed distant galaxies, the production of multiple image of the same distant object have all been verified with data from ground based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, the most convincing evidence for the existence of copious amounts of dark matter in the universe comes from the lensing effects produced by the unseen matter on the shapes of distant galaxies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor in Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, focusing on exotica in the universe—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes; Author, Mapping the Heavens - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Gravitational Lensing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27187) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-050 — Antagonistic Pleiotropy — Gregory Benford > In 1957 George Williams proposed his own theory, called antagonistic pleiotropy. If a gene has two or more effects, with one beneficial and another detrimental, the bad one exacts a cost later on. If evolution is a race to have the most offspring the fastest, then enhanced early fertility could be selected even if it came with a price tag that included decline and death later on. Because ageing was a side effect of necessary functions, Williams considered any alteration of the ageing process to be impossible. Antagonistic pleiotropy is a prevailing theory today, but Williams was wrong: we can offset such effects. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Antagonistic Pleiotropy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27186) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-051 — Humility — Barnaby Marsh > Scientific humility is the key that opens a whole new possibility space- a space where being unsure is the norm; where facts and logic are intertwined with imagination, intuition, and play. It is a dangerous and bewildering place where all sorts of untested and unjustified ideas lurk. What is life? What is consciousness? How can we understand the complex dynamics of cities? Or even my goldfish bowl? Go there are one can see quickly why when faced be uncertainty, most of us would rather quickly retreat. Don't. This is the space where amazing things happen. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary dynamics scholar; Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University; Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Humility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27185) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-052 — Positive Feedbacks in Climate Change — Bruce Parker > Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also varies over a glacial-interglacial cycle. Its concentration is lower during cold glacial periods and higher during warm interglacial periods. There are various processes which can cause carbon dioxide to decrease during cold periods and increase during warm periods (involving temperature effects on carbon dioxide solubility in the ocean, changes in biological productivity in the ocean and on land, changes in salinity, changes in dust reaching the ocean, etc.). So the debate has been whether carbon dioxide causes the warmth that produces an interglacial period or whether something else causes the initial warming which then leads to an increase in carbon dioxide. Either way there is another important positive feedback here involving carbon dioxide because the temperature changes and the changes in carbon dioxide are in the same direction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Positive Feedbacks in Climate Change](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27184) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-053 — Standard Deviation — S. Abbas Raza > The problem is that the impeccable geometric reasoning he used is extremely sensitive to small errors in this measurement. The actual angle (as measured today with much greater precision) is 89.853 degrees, which gives a distance between the Earth and the Sun as 390 times greater than the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Had he made many different measurements and also had the concept of standard deviation, Aristarchus would have known that the possible error in his distance calculation was huge, even for a decent reliability of two standard deviations, or 95% certainty in measuring that angle. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Editor, 3QuarksDaily.com - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Standard Deviation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27183) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-054 — Metamaterials — John Markoff > Another promising area that may soon be transformed by the ability to create what is known as a “negative refractive index”—not found in nature, might be so-called “superlens” enabling microscopes that reach past the resolving power of today’s scientific instruments. They also promise the ability to filter and control sound in news ways. That holds out the possibility of new kinds of ultrasound devices, peering into the human body with enhanced three-dimensional resolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Pulitzer Prize-winning Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Whole Earth - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Metamaterials](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27182) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-055 — Russell Conjugation — Eric R. Weinstein > In an era in which anyone can publish anything, the quest to control information has largely been lost by institutions, with a race on to weaponize empathy by understanding its basis in linguistics and tweaking the social media algorithms which now present our world to us accordingly. As the theory goes, it is not that we don’t have our own opinions so much as that we have too many contradictory ones, and it is generally our emotional state alone which determines on which ones we will predicate action or inaction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Russell Conjugation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-056 — The Big Bounce — Paul J. Steinhardt > All of these questions that have been known for decades and that theorists have failed to answer despite best efforts immediately become moot if the Big Bang is replaced by a Big Bounce. The universe need not ever be dominated by quantum physics and the large-scale structure of the universe can be explained by a non-inflationary process that occurred during the period of contraction leading up to the bounce. This includes avoiding the multi-mess and producing fluctuations in temperature and density without producing large-amplitude gravitational waves or isocurvature fluctuations that would conflict with observations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Big Bounce](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27180) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-057 — Phylogeny — Richard Prum > Despite a lot of empirical progress, the full implications of the concept of phylogeny have yet to been appreciated in evolutionary biology and the culture at large. For example, the concept of homology—similarity relation among organisms and their parts due to common ancestry—can only be understood in terms of phylogeny. Infectious diseases are caused by various species from different branches on the Tree of Life. Defending against them requires understanding how to slow them down without hurting ourselves, which is greatly facilitated by understanding where they and we fit in the historical network of phylogeny. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Ornithologist, Director of Franke Program, Yale University; Author, The Evolution of Beauty - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Phylogeny](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27179) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-058 — Neoteny — Brian Christian > The odds of making a great new discovery are highest the greener you are—and the value of a great discovery is highest when you’ve got the most time to savor it. Conversely, the value of playing to your strengths, going with the sure thing, only goes up over time, both as a function of your experience and as a function of time growing scarce. This naturally puts all of us, then, on an inevitable trajectory: from play to excellence, from craving novelty to preferring what we know and love. The decision-making of the young—whether it’s who to spend time with, where to eat, or how to work and play—really should differ from the decision-making of the old. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Most Human Human; Co-author (with Tom Griffiths), The Alignment Problem - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Neoteny](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27178) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-059 — Relative Deprivation — Kurt Gray > Consider an experiment done by economist Robert Frank. He asked people to choose between two worlds. In World 1, you make $110,000/year and everyone else makes $200,000; in World 2, you make $100,000/year and everyone else makes $85,000. Although people have more objective purchasing power in World 1, most people chose World 2 to feel relatively richer than others. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Co-author (with Daniel Wegner), The Mind Club - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Relative Deprivation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27177) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-060 — Empathic Concern — Daniel Goleman > Brain research at the University of Chicago by Jean Decety and at the Max Planck Institute by Tania Singer has established that each of these varieties of empathy engages its own unique neural circuitry. Neocortical circuitry, primarily, undergirds cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy stems from the social networks that facilitate rapport, and tune us into another person’s pain—my brain’s pain circuitry activates when I see you are in pain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Author (with Richard Davidson), Altered Traits - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Empathic Concern](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27176) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-061 — Alternative Possibilities — Tania Lombrozo > The systematic evaluation of alternative possibilities is a hallmark of scientific thinking, but it isn’t restricted to science. To arrive at the truth (in science or beyond), we generate multiple hypotheses and methodically evaluate how they fair against reason and empirical observation. We can’t learn without entertaining the possibility that our current beliefs are wrong or incomplete, and we can’t seek diagnostic evidence unless we specify the alternatives. Evaluating alternative possibilities is a basic feature of human thinking—a feature that science has successfully refined. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Alternative Possibilities](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27175) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-062 — The Premortem — Richard H. Thaler > Had this exercise been conducted, it might have prevented a disaster for a major airline that cancelled nearly 2000 flights over a three-day period. During much of that time, passengers could not get any information because the reservation system was down. What caused this fiasco? A power surge blew a transformer and critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to backups properly. This havoc was all initiated by the equivalent of blowing a fuse. - **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:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Premortem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-063 — Herd Immunity — Buddhini Samarasinghe > Vaccines work by imitating an infection, thereby helping the body’s own defences to be prepared in case of an actual infection. Unfortunately, no vaccine is 100% effective, and the immunity provided by vaccines can wane over time; these facts are often cited by anti-vaccine activists in an effort to discredit the entire concept of vaccination. But even waning immunity is better than no immunity; for example, the smallpox vaccine was generally thought to be effective for seven to ten years, but a recent analysis showed that even individuals who were vaccinated up to thirty-five years ago would still have substantial resistance to a smallpox infection. It is undeniable that vaccines can still offer protection in the event of an outbreak, and herd immunity helps prevent the spread of disease. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Molecular Biologist - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Herd Immunity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27173) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-064 — Homeostasis — Martin Lercher > Complex systems can hardly be stable without at least some level of homeostasis. The earth’s biosphere is a prime example. Surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels are both affected by biological activities. Higher atmospheric CO2 partial pressure leads to increased plant growth, causing an increased consumption of CO2 and thus maintaining homeostasis. Higher temperatures cause increased phytoplankton growth in the oceans that produces airborne gases and organic matter seeding cloud droplets; more and denser clouds, in turn, lead to an increased reflection of sunlight back into space and thus contribute to temperature homeostasis. These systems also have their limits, though; like an E. coli bacterium with too much copper, our planet’s homeostasis systems on their own may be unable to overcome the current onslaught of human activities on global temperatures and CO2 levels. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computational Cell Biology at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf; Co-author (with Itai Yanai), The Society of Genes - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Homeostasis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27172) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-065 — Reciprocal Altruism — Margaret Levi > Evidence is strong that for many human reciprocal altruists the anticipated repayment is not necessarily for the person who makes the initial sacrifice or even for their family members. By creating a culture of cooperation, the expectation is that sufficient others will engage in altruistic acts as needed to ensure the well being of those within the boundaries of the given community. The return to such long-sighted reciprocal altruists is the establishment of norms of cooperation that endure beyond the lifetime of any particular altruist. Gift-exchange relationships documented by anthropologists are mechanisms for redistribution to ensure group stability; so are institutionalized philanthropy and welfare systems in modern economies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sara Miller McCune Director, Center For Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, professor, Stanford University; Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies, University of Washington - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Reciprocal Altruism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27170) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-066 — Comparative Advantage — Robert Kurzban > Comparative advantage is an important idea, but is indeed difficult to grasp. To try to illustrate the point, consider the economist’s device of simplifying matters to see the underlying point. You and I are on a desert island, harvesting coconuts and catching fish to survive. You need one hour to harvest one coconut and two hours to catch one fish. (For this example, I’ll assume you can meaningfully divide one fish [or one coconut] into fractions.) I, being old and no fisherman, am less efficient than you at both activities; I require two hours per coconut and six hours per fish. It might seem that you need not trade with me; after all, you’re better than I am at both fishing and harvesting coconuts. But the economist David Ricardo famously showed this isn’t so. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Comparative Advantage](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27169) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-067 — Coalitional Instincts — John Tooby > Every human—not excepting scientists—bears the whole stamp of the human condition. This includes evolved neural programs specialized for navigating the world of coalitions—teams, not groups. (Although the concept of coalitional instincts has emerged over recent decades, there is no mutually-agreed-upon term for this concept yet.) These programs enable us and induce us to form, maintain, join, support, recognize, defend, defect from, factionalize, exploit, resist, subordinate, distrust, dislike, oppose, and attack coalitions. Coalitions are sets of individuals interpreted by their members and/or by others as sharing a common abstract identity (including propensities to act as a unit, to defend joint interests, and to have shared mental states and other properties of a single human agent, such as status and prerogatives). - **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:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Coalitional Instincts](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27168) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-068 — Satisficing — Michael Hochberg > Satisficing recognizes constraints on time, capacity and information, and the risk and consequences of failure. In Simon’s own words from his 1956 paper on the subject: “…the organism, like those of the real world, has neither the senses nor the wits to discover an 'optimal' path—even assuming the concept of optimal to be clearly defined—we are concerned only with finding a choice mechanism that will lead it to pursue a 'satisficing' path, a path that will permit satisfaction at some specified level of all of its needs.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionist, CNRS, Santa Fe Institute, Institute for Advanced Study Toulouse - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Satisficing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27166) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-069 — PT Symmetry — Daniel Hook > The future is bright for PT-symmetric quantum mechanics, but there is still work to be done. Many of the experiments mentioned have quantum mechanical aspects but are not full verifications of PT quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, existing experiments are already leading to exciting results. PT is a hot topic in the optics and graphene communities and the idea of creating a computer based on optical rather than electronic principles has recently been suggested. At the beginning of the 21st century, we are finding a new understanding of quantum theory that has the potential to unlock new technologies in the same way that semi-conductor physics was unlocked by the rise of quantum mechanics one hundred years ago. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Digital Science - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [PT Symmetry](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27165) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-070 — Commitment Devices — Michael I. Norton > Dogs beat turtles because they serve as commitment devices—decisions we make today that bind us to be the kind of person we want to be tomorrow. (The most famous example is Odysseus tying himself to the mast to resist the lure of the sirens—he wanted to hear today, but not be shipwrecked tomorrow.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Commitment Devices](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27164) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-071 — Homophily — Matthew O. Jackson > Although we are all familiar with homophily, thinking of it as a scientific, measurable phenomenon, may help it become a bigger part of the discourse on how we can increase mobility and decrease inequality around the world. Solving such problems requires understanding how persistent segregation by income and ethnicity prevents information and opportunities from reaching those who need them most. Homophily lies at the root of many social and economic problems, and understanding it can help us better address the many issues that societies around the globe face, from inequality and immobility, to political polarization. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Economics, Stanford University, Santa Fe Institute, CIFAR - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Homophily](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27163) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-072 — Coarse-Graining — Jessica Flack > Temperature is the average speed of particles in a system. Temperature is a coarse-grained representation of all of the particles’ behavior–the particles in aggregate. When we know the temperature we can use it to predict the system’s future state better than we could if we actually measured the speed of individual particles. This is why coarse-graining is so important–it is incredibly useful. It gives us what is called an effective theory. An effective theory allows us to model the behavior of a system without specifying all of the underlying causes that lead to system state changes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Director of the Collective Computation Group, Santa Fe Institute - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Coarse-Graining](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27162) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-073 — Somatic Evolution — Itai Yanai > Evolution is sometimes confused with progress. From the perspective of a cancer patient, somatic evolution certainly isn’t. Rather, as cancer develops, changes in the composition of the body’s gene pool occur: the very definition of evolution. The notion that cancer is evolution is not an analogy, but a matter of fact characterization of the process. It is humbling indeed that evolution is not only an ancient process that explains our existence on this planet, but is also constantly happening within our bodies—within our soma. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Institute for Computational Medicine; Professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, New York University School of Medicine; Co-author (with Martin Lercher), The Society of Genes - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Somatic Evolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27161) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-074 — Attractors — Kate Jeffery > Many natural systems show attractor-like dynamics. A murmuration of starlings, for example, produces aerial performances of such extraordinary, balletic synchrony that it seems like a vast, amorphous, purposeful organism, and yet the synchronized movements arise simply from the interactions between each bird and its nearest neighbors. Each flow of the flock in a given direction is a transient stable state, and periodic perturbations cause the flock to ruffle up and re-form in a new state, swooping and swirling across the sky. At a finer scale, brain scientists frequently recruit attractor dynamics to explain stable states in brain activity, such as the persistent firing of the neurons that signal which way you are facing, or where you are. Unlike glass particles or starlings, neurons do not physically move, but they express states of activity that influence the activity of their “neighbors” (neurons they are connected to) such that the activity of the whole network eventually stabilizes. Some theoreticians even think that memories might be attractor states—presenting a reminder of a memory is akin to placing the network near a local minimum, and the evolution of the system’s activity towards that minimum, via gradient descent, is analogous to retrieving the memory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University College London - **Extract length:** 199 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Attractors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27160) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-075 — Mating Opportunity Costs — David M. Buss > The complexities are multiple. The benefit-bestowing qualities of passed-over mates are many in number and disparate in nature. And there are inevitable tradeoffs among competing and incommensurate alternatives. Sometimes the choice is between a humorless mate with excellent future job prospects and a fun-loving mate destined for a low-status occupation; or between an attractive mate who carries the costs of incessant attention from others versus a mate who garners little external attention but with whom you have less sexual chemistry. Another intangible quality also factors into the equation—the degree to which competing alternatives appreciate your unique assets, which renders you more irreplaceably valuable to one than the other. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Mating Opportunity Costs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27159) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-076 — Habituation — Katherine D. Kinzler > The basic idea of “habituation” is exceedingly simple at its outset. And humans are not the only species to habituate with familiarity—around the same time as Fantz’s work, related papers studying habituation in other species of infant animals were published. An associated literature on the neural mechanisms of learning and memory similarly finds that neural responses decrease after repeated exposures to the same stimulus. The punch line is clear: Organisms, and their neural responses, get bored. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology and Associate Professor of Human Development, Cornell University; Author, How You Say It - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Habituation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27158) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-077 — Rheology — Matthew Putman > The primary reason for the relative obscurity of such an important topic is the hidden complexity involved. The number of connections in the human brain has been discussed by neuroscientists and often invites a sense of awe and inspiration to reduce and unify. Despite some well-known and simple equations, a complex nano-filled elastomer is also nearly impossible to model. Before it is possible to scale the dreams of today, experiments and theoretical models will need to converge in ways that they do not now. Through rheology, van der waal forces, semiconductivity, superconductivity, Quantum tunneling, and other such properties of composite materials can be harnessed and exploited, rather than hinder. Rheology is the old, newly relevant transdisciplinary science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Applied Physicist; Chairman of the Board, Pioneer Works; CEO, Nanotronics - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Rheology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27157) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-078 — Surreal Numbers — Siobhan Roberts > Over the years, the scheme won distinguished converts. Most notably, in 1973 the Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth spent a week sequestered in an Oslo hotel room in order to write a novella that introduced the concept to the wider world—Surreal Numbers, a love story, in the form of a dialogue between Alice and Bill (now in its twenty-first printing; it was Knuth, in fact, who gave these numbers their name, which Conway adopted, publishing his own expository account, On Numbers and Games, in 1976). Knuth views the surreal numbers as simpler than the reals. He considers the scenario roughly analogous to Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry; he wonders what the repercussions would be if the surreals had come into existence first. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director’s Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Author, Genius at Play and King of Infinite Space - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Surreal Numbers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27156) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-079 — Included Middle — Melanie Swan > Included Middle is a concept already deployed in a variety of scientific domains and could benefit from a wider application in being promoted to “meme” status. This is because beyond its uses in science, Included Middle is a model for thinking. The Included Middle is a conceptual model that overcomes dualism and opens a frame that is complex and multi-dimensional, not merely one of binary elements and simple linear causality. We have now come to comprehend and address our world as one that is complex as opposed to basic, and formal tools that support this investigation are crucial. The Included Middle helps to expose how our thinking process unfolds. When attempting to grasp anything new, a basic “A, not-A” logic could be the first step in understanding the situation. However, the idea is then to progress to the next step which is another level of thinking that holds both A and not-A. The Included Middle is a more robust model that has properties of both determinacy and indeterminacy, the universal and the particular, the part and the whole, and actuality and possibility. The Included Middle is a position of greater complexity and possibility for addressing any situation. Conceiving of a third space that holds two apparent contradictions of a problem is what the Included Middle might bring to contemporary challenges in consciousness, artificial intelligence, disease pathologies, and unified theories in physics and cosmology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosophy and Economic Theory, the New School for Social Research - **Extract length:** 233 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Included Middle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27155) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-080 — Spatial Agency Bias — Simone Schnall > Progressive, dynamic and forward-thinking—these are personal qualities that are highly sought after in practically all social circles and cultures. Do you want to be seen in such positive terms whenever people come across your picture? An intriguing line of psychological research suggests how to accomplish just that: When caught on film you need to pay attention to the direction in which you are facing. People who look toward the right are perceived as more powerful and agentic than those who point to the left. In other words, how a person is represented in space shapes perceivers’ automatic impressions, as if we imagine the depicted person as literally moving from left to right, along an imaginary path that takes them from the present to future accomplishments. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory; Reader in Experimental Social Psychology and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Spatial Agency Bias](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27154) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-081 — The Transcriptome — Andrés Roemer > On the latter approach, RNA based cancer vaccines that activate an individual’s innate immune system are already in clinical trials with promising results in diseases such as lung or prostate cancer. The vaccination with RNA molecules is a promising and safe approach to let the patient’s body produce its own vaccines. By introducing a specific synthetic RNA, the protein synthesis can be controlled without intervening in the human genome and by letting the cell's own protein building machinery work without altering the physiological state of the cell. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-creator, Ideas City; Author, Move UP: Why Some Cultures Advance While Others Don't - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Transcriptome](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27153) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-082 — Isolation Mismatch — David C. Queller > Formation of new biological species usually involves isolation and independent evolution of the two populations. As one toad population evolves through natural selection, each of its novel genes is tried out in many toads and will necessarily be selected to work together with the other genes in its population. Any genes causing within-population mismatches are weeded out. But, novel genes in one toad population are never tested with novel genes in another isolated toad population. Between-population mismatches will not be weeded out and will gradually accumulate, becoming apparent only when the populations later come into contact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist, Washington University in St. Louis - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Isolation Mismatch](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27152) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-083 — Counting — Peter Norvig > John McCarthy, the late co-founder of the field of artificial intelligence, wrote, "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." It seemed incongruous that a professor who worked with esoteric high level math would be touting simple arithmetic, but he was right; in fact in many cases all we need to avoid nonsense is the simplest form of arithmetic: counting. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of Research, Google Inc.; Fellow of the AAAI and the ACM; co-author, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Counting](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27151) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-084 — Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety — John Naughton > W. Ross Ashby was a British cybernetician working in the 1950s who became interested in the phenomenon of homeostasis—the way in which complex systems operating in changing environments succeed in maintaining critical variables (for example, internal body temperature in biological systems) within tightly-defined limits. Ashby came up with the concept of variety as a measurement of the number of possible states of a system. His "Law" of Requisite Variety stated that for a system to be stable, the number of states that its control mechanism is capable of attaining (its variety) must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme; Columnist, the Observer; Author, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-085 — Emergence — Antony Garrett Lisi > Thought, passion, love... this internal world we experience, including all the meaning and purpose in our lives, arises naturally from the interactions of elementary particles. This sounds absurd, but it is so. Scientists have attained a full understanding of all fundamental interactions that can happen at scales ranging from subatomic particles to the size of our solar system. There is magic in our world, but it is not from external forces that act on us or through us. Our fates are not guided by mystical energies or the motions of the planets against the stars. We know better now. We know that the magic of life comes from emergence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Emergence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27149) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-086 — Confirmation Bias — Brian Eno > The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 33 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Confirmation Bias](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27147) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-087 — Double Blind — Scott Draves > A pharmaceutical company develops a new arthritis pill, and hires you to prove its efficacy. The obvious experiment is to give the drug to a group of people, and ask them if it relieved their pain. What’s not so obvious is that you should also have a control group. These subjects get placebos (inactive pills) and this is done without the subject’s knowledge of which kind of pill they get. That’s a single blind experiment, and the idea is that it prevents the subjects’ expectations or desires that this pill will do something that influences their reported results. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Artist - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Double Blind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27146) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-088 — The Symbol Grounding Problem — Joshua Bongard > Growing evidence from neuroscience indicates that heard words light up most parts of the brain, not just some localized language module. Could this indicate a person twisting words, actions, their own former felt experiences, and mental body snatching into sensory/action/experiential braided cables? Might these cables support a bridge from the actions and feelings of others to our own actions and feelings, and back again? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cyril G. Veinott Green and Gold Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont Author, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Symbol Grounding Problem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27145) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-089 — Conceptual Combination — Lisa Feldman Barrett > The more familiar a concept—that is, the more frequently you’ve constructed it—the more efficiently your brain can make it by conceptual combination. Your brain requires less energy to construct the concept “Dog” than the combination, “Hairy, friendly, loyal animal with two eyes, four legs, and a slobbering tongue, who makes a barking sound, eats processed food from a bowl, and rescues children from danger in Disney movies.” That sort of combination is what your brain would have to do if it created the concept “Dog” for the first time. The word “dog” then helps your brain create the concept efficiently in the future. That’s what happened in recent years with the concept “Hangry,” which began as a combination of “Hungry” and “Angry” and “Irritable” but is now more efficiently constructed in many American brains. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University; Research Neuroscientist, Massachusetts General Hospital; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Author, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Conceptual Combination](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27144) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-090 — Cumulative Culture — Cristine H. Legare > Technological complexity is the outcome of our species’ remarkable capacity for cumulative culture; innovations build on each other and are progressively incorporated into a population's stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated repertoires. Innovation is necessary to ensure cultural and individual adaptation to novel and changing challenges, as humans spread to every corner of the planet. Cultural evolution makes individuals more innovative by allowing for the accumulation of prefabricated solutions to problems that can be recombined to create new technologies. The subcomponents of technology are typically too complex for individuals to develop from scratch. The cultural inheritance of the technologies of previous generations allows for the explosive growth of cultural complexity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin; Director, Cognition, Culture, and Development Lab - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cumulative Culture](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27143) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-091 — Time Window — Ernst Pöppel > Modern biology is guided by a principle that has been summarized by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1973 with the memorable sentence: “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” On the basis of this conceptual frame I both generalize, but also suggest more specifically that nothing in neurobiology, psychology, the social sciences (or cognitive science in general), makes sense except in the light of synchronization, i.e., to create common time for temporally and spatially distributed sources of information or events. Without synchronization neural information processing, cognitive control, emotional relations, or social interactions would be either impossible or severely disrupted; without synchronization we would be surrounded by informational chaos, desynchronized activities, unrelated events, or misunderstandings. - **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:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Time Window](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27142) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-092 — Intertemporal Choice — David DeSteno > The second benefit that comes from recognizing the broad reach of intertemporal choice is the expansion of the tool set that can be used to solve its associated dilemmas. While economists and self-control researchers traditionally emphasize using reason, willpower, and the like to overcome our inherent impatience for pleasure, realizing the intertemporal nature posed by many moral dilemmas suggests an alternate route: the moral emotions. Gratitude makes us repay our debts. Compassion makes us willing to help others. Guilt prevents us from acting in selfish ways. These moral emotions—ones intrinsically linked to social living—lead people, directly or indirectly, to value the future. They enhance our character, which when translated to behavior, means they help us to share, to persevere, to be patient, and to be diligent. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University; Author, How God Works - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Intertemporal Choice](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27141) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-093 — Effect Size — Bruce Hood > Humans are complex biological systems affected by a plethora of mechanisms from genetic inheritance to environmental changes that interact in ways that vary from one individual to another and are too complex to map or predict. In an effort to isolate mechanisms, scientists often strip away extraneous variables to reveal the core factors under investigation, but in doing so, create a false impression of the true influence of the mechanism in relation to all the others that play a role. What they find may be significant, but effect size tells you whether it is meaningful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Effect Size](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27139) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-094 — Variety — Lee Smolin > An ecosystem is a system of relations, such as who eats who. A niche is a situation characterized by what you eat and who eats you. An economy is a system of relations including who buys what from who. The variety of an ecosystem is a measure of the extent which each species has a unique niche. The variety of an economy measures the uniqueness of each firm’s role in the market. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Variety](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27138) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-095 — Functional Equations — Jason Wilkes > When Claude Shannon invented information theory, he needed a mathematical definition of uncertainty. What's the right definition? There isn't one. But, whatever definition we choose, it should act somewhat like our everyday idea of uncertainty. Shannon decided he wanted his version of uncertainty to have three behaviors. Paraphrasing heavily: (1) Small changes to our state of knowledge only cause small changes to our uncertainty (whatever we mean by "small"), (2) Dice with more sides are harder to guess (and the dice don't actually have to be dice), and (3) If you stick two unrelated questions together (e.g., "What's your name" and "Is it raining?") your uncertainty about the whole thing should just be the first one's uncertainty plus the second one (i.e., independent uncertainties add). These all seem pretty reasonable. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Graduate student in Psychology, UC Santa Barbara; Author, Burn Math Class - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Functional Equations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27137) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-096 — Boolean Logic — Simon Baron-Cohen > Here’s just one more legacy of Boolean logic. We know that people with autism have very logical minds, and have a strong drive to systemize. If we can generalize, they have a preference for information that can be systemized (such as factual information, or repeating, lawful patterns of information that doesn’t change unlawfully). They don’t cope well with information that is hard to systemize, because it contains ambiguity, or because it changes unexpectedly (such as social interaction, where what people do or say is rarely the same, except in highly ritualized contexts). Our modern understanding of autism as a hyper-systemizing mind owes a huge debt to Boolean logic that enables us to characterize the beauty and the extraordinary power of binary thinking, and also where such thinking is best used. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Boolean Logic](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27136) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-097 — Emptiness — Jaeweon Cho > After crossing the river with a raft, we have to abandon the raft to climb the mountain. Existing knowledge helps but guides us too much that it hinders us from obtaining newly formed representations to become the new corresponding concepts. When we look at a red flower, we may remind ourselves of the refraction of the color rather than think about the role of the color red for the flower to survive in nature. When we find a natural phenomenon with microorganisms, we may rely on genetic information, such as functional genes, rather than stick to the phenomenon as it is. However, when we observe an object or experience an event, we have the capability to create the subsequent representation which brings a new knowledge only when our mind is empty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Engineering, UNIST; Director, Science Walden Center - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Emptiness](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27135) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-098 — “On The Average” — Robert Sapolsky > When scientists present their data, they typically display the average—the mean, the X on a graph, the bar of a particular height in the figure. And it always comes with an “error term—a measure of how much variability there was around that average, a measure of how much confidence there is in saying “on the average.” Measure something or other in three people, observe values of 99, 100, and 101, producing an average of 100; measure that something in three people and observe values of 50, 100, and 150, producing an average of 100. This are two very different circumstance; “the average was 100,” tells you a lot more about how some sliver of the universe works in the first case than the second. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [“On The Average”](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27134) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-099 — Algorithms — Terrence J. Sejnowski > Self-similar fractals grow out of simple recursive algorithms that create patterns resembling bushes and trees. The construction of a real tree is also an algorithm, driven by a sequence of decisions that turn genes on and off as cells divide. The construction of brains, perhaps the most demanding construction project in the universe, is also guided by algorithms embedded in the DNA, which orchestrate the development of connections between thousands of different types of neurons in hundreds of different parts of the brain. - **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:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Algorithms](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27133) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-100 — Historiometrics — Howard Gardner > Enter big data. Neither Quetelet nor Galton had significant computational aids—pencils and paper on one’s desk were the media of choice. When Simonton began his studies in the 1970s, we were in the era of large mainframes, punch cards, and limited computing power. To be sure, Simonton (and other self-styled cliometricians like Charles Murray) has kept up with advances in technology. But only in the last decade or so has it become possible, indeed easy, to pursue historiometric puzzles, drawing on vast amounts of data that are sitting on one’s lap, or, more precisely, on one’s laptop. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Historiometrics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27132) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-101 — Negative Evidence — Bart Kosko > Courts often allow negative evidence if the proponent lays a proper foundation for it. The opponent must also not have shown that the lack of evidence involved something improper or untrustworthy. A convenience store’s videotapes of a robbery can give compelling negative evidence that a suspect did not take an active part in the robbery. But the video recordings would have to cover a sufficient portion of the store and its parking lot. The cameras must also have run continuously throughout the robbery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Negative Evidence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27130) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-102 — Multiverse — Martin Rees > If the answer to this latter question is "yes" there will still be overarching laws governing the multiverse—maybe a version of string theory. But what we’ve traditionally called the laws of nature will be just local bylaws. Even though it makes some physicists foam at the mouth, we then can’t avoid the A-word—“anthropic." Many domains could be still-born or sterile: the laws prevailing in them might not allow any kind of complexity. We therefore wouldn’t expect to find ourselves in a typical universe. Ours would belong to the unusual subset where there was a "lucky draw" of cosmic numbers conducive to the emergence of complexity and consciousness. Its seemingly designed or fine-tuned features wouldn't be surprising. - **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:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Multiverse](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27129) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-103 — Mismatch Conditions — Daniel Lieberman > Mismatches, however, are typically more subtle and most commonly occur when climate change, dispersal or migration alters a species’ environment, including its diet, predators, and more. Natural selection occurs when heritable variations to these sorts of mismatches affect offspring survival and reproduction. For instance, when tropically adapted humans who evolved in Africa dispersed to temperate habitats such as Europe about 40,000 years ago, selection acted rapidly in these populations to favor shifts in body shape, skin pigmentation and immune systems that lessened any resulting mismatches. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University; Author, Exercised - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Mismatch Conditions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27128) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-104 — State — Scott Aaronson > In physics, math, and computer science, the state of a system is an encapsulation of all the information you'd ever need to predict what it will do, or at least its probabilities to do one thing versus another, in response to any possible prodding of it. In a sense, then, the state is a system’s “hidden reality,” which determines its behavior beneath surface appearances. But in another sense, there’s nothing hidden about a state—for any part of the state that never mattered for observations could be sliced off with Occam’s Razor, to yield a simpler and better description. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin; Author, Quantum Computing Since Democritus - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [State](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27127) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-105 — Substrate-Independence — Max Tegmark > Nor could you tell whether the logic gates of the computer were made of transistors, optical circuits or other hardware, or even what the fundamental laws of physics were. Because of this substrate-independence, shrewd engineers have been able to repeatedly replace the technologies inside our computers with dramatically better ones without changing the software, making computation twice as cheap roughly every couple of years for over a century, cutting the computer cost a whopping million million million times since my grandmothers were born. It’s precisely this substrate-independence of computation that implies that artificial intelligence is possible: Intelligence doesn't require flesh, blood or carbon atoms. - **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:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Substrate-Independence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27126) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness May Be Substrate-Independent Twice Over by Max Tegmark|Consciousness May Be Substrate-Independent Twice Over by Max Tegmark]] ### EDGE2017-106 — Transfer Learning — Peter Lee > There is also exceptionally high potential for applications of transfer learning. So much of the practical value of machine learning, for example in search and information retrieval, has traditionally focused on systems that learn from the massive datasets and people available on the World-Wide Web. But what can web-trained systems learn about smaller communities, organizations, or even individuals? Can we foresee a future where intelligent machines are able to learn useful tasks that are highly specialized to a specific individual or small organization? Transfer learning opens the possibility that all the intelligence of the web can form the foundation of machine-learned systems, from which more individualized intelligence is learned, through transfer learning. Achieving this would amount to another step towards the democratization of machine intelligence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Transfer Learning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27125) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/AI Control/Transfer Learning Could Democratize Personalized Machine Intelligence by Peter Lee|Transfer Learning Could Democratize Personalized Machine Intelligence by Peter Lee]] ### EDGE2017-107 — Prediction Error Minimization — Andy Clark > By seeing experience as a construct that merges prediction and sensory evidence, we begin to see how minds like ours reveal a world of human-relevant stuff. For the patterns of sensory stimulation that we most strongly predict are the patterns that matter most to us as both as and as individuals. The world revealed to the predictive brain is a world permeated with human mattering. - **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:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Prediction Error Minimization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27122) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-108 — Mental Emulation — Stephen M. Kosslyn > My colleague Sam Moulton and I characterize mental emulation as follows: Each step of what you imagine represents the corresponding step in the real world, and the transitions between steps represent the corresponding transitions between steps in the event. Moreover, the processes that transition from state to state in the representation mimic the actual processes that transition from state-to-state in the world. If you imagine kicking a ball, you will actually activate motor circuits in the brain, and neural states will specify the transitional states of how your leg is positioned as you kick. And as you imagine tracking the flying ball, your mental images will transition through the intermediate states in ways analogous to what would happen in the real world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Mental Emulation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27121) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-109 — Indexical Information — Anthony Aguirre > What are most people most interested in? Themselves! Of all the people ever to live, you are you, and this creates indexical information particular to you. For example, indexical information results from “our” position in space-time. Why are there no dinosaurs about? Why is the ocean water rather than methane? Those exist in other times and places—but we are here, and now. Without here and now, there is of course no fact of the matter about whether dinosaurs exist; but we are accustomed to considering here, and especially now, to be objective facts of the world. Modern physics indicates this is unlikely. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Author, Cosmological Koans - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Indexical Information](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27120) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-110 — Decentering — Gary Klein > If you were driving with a human navigator who unexpectedly advised you to turn left, all you would have to do is say, “Left?” Most navigators instantly determine from your intonation that you want an explanation, not a louder repetition. Good navigators grasp that you, the driver, didn’t expect a left-hand turn and would quickly (remember, there is traffic getting ready to honk at you) explain, “Heavy traffic ahead.” Your navigator would convey the minimum necessary information, the gist of the explanation. But the gist depends on your own beliefs and expectations—it depends on the navigator’s ability to decenter and get inside your head. Smart technology will never be really smart until it can decenter and anticipate. That’s when it will become a truly smart partner. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Decentering](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27119) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-111 — Social Identity — Ziyad Marar > We know we are ultra-social animals and yet have a consistent blind spot about how truly social we are. Our naïve realism leans us toward a self-image as individual, atomistic rational agents experiencing life as though peering out on the world through a window. And like the fish that swims unaware of the water in which it is suspended, we struggle to see the social reality in which our actions are meaningfully conducted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President of Global Publishing, SAGE; Author, Judged: The Value of Being Misunderstood - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Social Identity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27118) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-112 — The Illusion of Explanatory Depth — Adam Waytz > Rozenblit and Keil initially demonstrated the IOED through multi-phase studies. In a first phase, they asked participants to rate how well they understood artifacts such as a sewing machine, crossbow, or cell phone. In a second phase, they asked participants to write a detailed explanation of how each artifact works, and afterwards asked them re-rate how well they understand each one. Study after study showed that ratings of self-knowledge dropped dramatically from phase one to phase two, after participants were faced with their inability to explain how the artifact in question operates. Of course, the IOED extends well beyond artifacts, to how we think about scientific fields, mental illnesses, economic markets and virtually anything we are capable of (mis)understanding. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Associate Professor of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Author, The Power of Human - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Illusion of Explanatory Depth](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27117) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-113 — Ansatz — Neil Gershenfeld > There's a similar concept in probability, called a prior. This is a guess that you make before you have any evidence. Once you do make observations, the prior gets updated to become what's called a posterior. It's initially equally plausible for the universe to be explained by a Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Feynman Lectures on Physics; the latter becomes more probable once its predictions are tested. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Ansatz](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27116) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-114 — The Scientist — Stuart Firestein > Coleridge, the poet whose quarrels goaded Whewell into inventing the scientist, was actually quite attracted to science (claiming it provided him with some of his best metaphors) and was a close friend and confidant of the famed chemist and head of the Royal Institute, Humphry Davy. In an especially notable correspondence with Davy, Coleridge likened science to art because it was “…necessarily an activity performed with the passion of Hope, it was poetical.” Perhaps the modern scientist meme should be updated to include more of the hopeful poet than authoritarian demagogue. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University; Fellow, AAAS - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Scientist](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27114) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-115 — Scientific Realism — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > Scientific realism is the view that science expands upon—and sometimes radically confutes—the view of the world that we gain by means of our sense organs. Scientific theories, according to this view, extend our grasp of reality beyond what we can see and touch, pulling the curtain of our corporeal limitations aside to reveal the existence of whole orders of unobserved and perhaps unobservable things, hypothesized in order to explain observations and having their reference fixed by the laws governing their behavior. In order for theories to be true (or at any rate, approximations of the truth) these things must actually exist. Scientific theories are ontologically committed. - **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:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Scientific Realism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27113) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-116 — Evolve — Victoria Wyatt > A keen awareness of history is vital to intelligent decision making today. Used accurately in its scientific sense, a metaphor of evolve would encourage historical acumen by emphasizing the significance of specific context. Evolve in its common usage actually obscures the importance of context, undermining interest in connections with the past. This erasure of relationships bears serious implications. Species evolve in complex non-linear ecosystems. Evolve as the metaphor extracts the measure of progress from a multifaceted historical environment, linking it instead to a simple position in linear time. Recognizing present global challenges demands a different vision, one that acknowledges history and context. Climate change denial does not rise from a deep appreciation of complex dynamic relationships. In simplistic linear paradigms, it thrives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of History in Art, University of Victoria - **Extract length:** 122 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Evolve](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27112) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-117 — Common Sense — Jared Diamond > Distinguished scientists who should know better still fall into equivalents of Mr. Bridgess’s trap. I’ll tell you two examples. My first example involves the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, one of the key experiments of modern physics. Beginning in 1881, the American physicists A.A. Michelson and E.W. Morley measured that the speed of light in space did not depend on light’s direction with respect to the Earth’s direction of motion. This discovery became explained only two decades later by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for which the Michelson-Morley experiment offered crucial support. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Common Sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-118 — Positive Illusions — Helen Fisher > More intriguing, we found reduced activity in a region of the cerebral cortex known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with our human tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive (among many other functions linked to social judgment). These brain functions may have evolved millions of years ago—perhaps primarily as an adaptive response to strangers who wandered into one’s neighborhood. Natural selection has long favored those who responded negatively to the one malevolent intruder, rather than positively to myriad friendly guests. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Positive Illusions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27110) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-119 — The Gaia Hypothesis — Hans Ulrich Obrist > When I visited Lovelock last year in his home on Chesil Beach, he told me that it was in September 1965 that he had his epiphany. He was in the Jet Propulsion Lab with the astronomer Carl Sagan and the philosopher Diane Hitchcock, who was employed by NASA to look at the logical consistency of the experiments conducted there. Another astronomer entered the office with the results of an analysis of the atmosphere on Venus and Mars. In both cases, it was composed almost entirely from carbon dioxide, while Earth's atmosphere also contains oxygen and methane. Lovelock asked himself why the Earth's atmosphere was so different from its two sister planets. Where do the gases come from? - **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:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Gaia Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27109) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-120 — Natural Selection — Jonathan B. Losos > There are several messages to be taken from the realization that natural selection functions more like a tinkerer than an engineer. We shouldn’t expect optimality from natural selection—it just gets the job done, taking the easiest, most accessible route. And as a corollary: we humans are not perfection personified, just natural selection’s way of turning a quadrupedal ape into a big-brained biped. Had we not come along, some other species, from some other ancestral stock, might eventually have evolved hyper-intelligence. But from different starting blocks, that species probably would not have looked much like us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University; Curator in Herpetology, Museum of Comparative Zoology; Author, Improbable Destinies - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Natural Selection](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27108) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-121 — Ocean Acidification — Laurence C. Smith > While some of these ideas hold promise for particular locations and species, none can stabilize pH at the global scale. Genetic engineering raises a whole other set of ethical and ecological issues. Furthermore, some of the more hopeful “geoengineering” solutions proposed to combat air temperature warming work by increasing the earth’s reflectivity (e.g. blasting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, to reflect incoming sunlight back into space). These strategies have problems of their own, like unknown impact on global rainfall patterns, but might mitigate CO2-induced air temperature warming. But because they do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, they have zero impact on ocean acidification. At the present time, the only viable way to slow ocean acidification at the global scale is to reduce human induced CO2 emissions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Ocean Acidification](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27107) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-122 — Antisocial Preferences — Steven R. Quartz > For at least fifty years, the rational self-interested agent of neoclassical economics, Homo economicus, has been questioned, rebutted, and in some cases disparaged as a model psychopath. A seminal critique appeared in 1968 with the publication of Garrett Hardin’s article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin invited the reader to consider a pasture open to all neighboring herdsman. If those herdsmen pursued their own rational self-interest, he reasoned they would continue to add cows to their herds, ultimately leading to the pasture’s destruction. This has the structure of a multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemma wherein the individual pursuit of rational self-interest inevitably leads to social catastrophe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Antisocial Preferences](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27106) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-123 — Possibility Space — Ian Bogost > In these cases, not only is it difficult or impossible to diagram the possibility space completely, but also it usually doesn’t even really make sense to try. An economist might build a model of possible evenings out from, say, the net marginal benefit of a movie or a bike ride or a beef wellington in relation to the cost of those benefits, but such a practice assumes a rationalism that doesn’t exist in ordinary life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; Founding Partner, Persuasive Games LLC; Contributing Editor, The Atlantic - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Possibility Space](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27105) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-124 — Non Ergodic — Stuart A. Kauffman > “Non ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept. Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity. “Ergodic” means that the system in question visits all its possible states. In Statistical Mechanics this is based on the famous “ergodic hypothesis, which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems do not visit all of their possible states. In physics perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is a spin glass which “breaks” ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states, hence exhibits history in a deep sense. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Non Ergodic](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27104) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-125 — DNA — George Church > You might feel that “DNA” is already one of the most widely known scientific terms—with 392 million Google hits and Ngram score rising swiftly since 1946 to surpass terms like bread, pen, bomb, surgery and oxygen. DNA even beats seemingly more general terms like genetics or inheritance. This super-geeky acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid (by the way, not an acid in nature, but a salt) has inspired vast numbers of clichés like “corporate DNA” and cultural tropes like crime scene DNA. It is vital for all life on earth, responsible for the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere, is present in every tissue of every one of our bodies. Nevertheless, knowing even a tiny bit (which could save your life) about your DNA in your own body has probably lagged behind your literacy of sports, fictional characters, and the doings of celebrities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis - **Extract length:** 141 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [DNA](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27103) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-126 — Babylonian Lottery — Coco Krumme > The lottery in Babylon begins as a simple game of chance. Tickets are sold, winners are drawn, a prize awarded. Over time, the game evolves. Punishments are doled out alongside prizes. Eventually the lottery becomes compulsory. Its cadence increases, until the outcomes of its drawings come to underpin everything. Mundane events and life turns are subject to the lottery’s "intensification of chance." Or perhaps, as Borges alludes, it is the lottery's explanatory power that grows, as well as that of its shadowy operator the Company, until all occurrences are recast in light of its odds. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Applied Mathematician, UC Berkeley; Founder, Leeward Co. - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Babylonian Lottery](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27102) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-127 — Need For Closure — Dylan Evans > If we could represent the knowledge in any given brain as dry land, and ignorance as water, then even Einstein’s brain would contain just a few tiny islands scattered around in a vast ocean of ignorance. Yet most of us find it hard to admit how little we really know. How often, in the course of our everyday conversations, do we make assertions for which we have no evidence, or cite statistics that are really nothing but guesses? Behind all these apparently innocuous confabulations lies NFC. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO of Projection Point; Author, The Utopia Experiment - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Need For Closure](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27101) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-128 — The Navier-Stokes Equations — Ian McEwan > The question puts us in danger of resembling the man who only looks for his dropped watch under the light of a street lamp: the scientific concept that has the widest impact in our lives may not necessarily be the simplest. The Navier-Stokes equations date from 1822 and apply Newton's Second Law of Motion to viscous fluids. The range of applications is vast—in weather prediction, aircraft and car design, pollution and flood control, hydro-electric architecture, in the study of climate change, blood flow, ocean currents, tides, turbulence, shock waves and the representation of water in video games or animations. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Novelist; Recipient, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Author, Sweet Tooth; Solar; On Chesil Beach; Nutshell; Machines Like Me; The Cockroach - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Navier-Stokes Equations](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27100) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-129 — Polygenic Scores — Robert Plomin > GWA studies needed to break a 0.1% barrier, not just a 1% barrier. This requires samples in the hundreds of thousands. As GWA studies break that barrier, they are scooping up many DNA differences that contribute to heritability. But what good are DNA associations that account for less than 0.1% of the variance? The answer is "not much" if you are a molecular biologist wanting to study pathways from genes to brain to behavior because this means that there is a welter of minuscule paths. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Behavioral Genetics, King's College London; Author, Blueprint - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Polygenic Scores](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27099) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-130 — Bayes's Theorem — Sean Carroll > The other big idea is that your degree of belief in an idea should never go all the way to either zero or one. It’s never absolutely impossible to gather a certain bit of data, no matter what the truth is—even the most rigorous scientific experiment is prone to errors, and most of our daily data-collecting is far from rigorous. That’s why science never “proves” anything; we just increase our credences in certain ideas until they are almost (but never exactly) 100%. Bayes’s Theorem reminds us that we should always be open to changing our minds in the face of new information, and tells us exactly what kind of new information we would need. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Bayes's Theorem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27098) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-131 — Number Sense — Keith Devlin > When I graduated with a bachelors degree in mathematics from one of the most prestigious university mathematics programs in the world (Kings College London) in 1968, I had acquired a set of skills that guaranteed full employment, wherever I chose to go, for the then-foreseeable future—a state of affairs that had been in existence ever since modern mathematics began some three thousand years earlier. By the turn of the new Millennium, however, just over thirty years later, those skills were essentially worthless, having been very effectively outsourced to machines that did it faster and more reliably, and were made widely available with the onset of first desktop- and then cloud-computing. In a single lifetime, then, I experienced a dramatic change in the nature of mathematics and how it played a role in society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Number Sense](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27097) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-132 — The Anthropocene — Jennifer Jacquet > Whether the geologic experts anoint it as an official epoch, enough of society has already decided the Anthropocene is here. Humans are a planetary force. Not since cyanobacteria has a single taxonomic group been so in charge. Humans have proven we are capable of seismic influence, of depleting the ozone layer, of changing the biology of every continent, but not, at least so far, that we are capable of living on any other planet. The more interesting questions may not be about whether the Anthropocene exists or when it began, but about whether we are prepared for this kind of control. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Anthropocene](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27096) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-133 — Complementarity — Frank Wilczek > Here's how it works in quantum theory: The ultimate description of a system is its wave function, but the wave function is not something we can observe directly. It is like a raw material, which must be processed and sculpted in order to build something usable (that is, observable). There are many things we might choose to build from a lode of iron ore—a sword or a plowshare, for example. Both might be useful, in different circumstances. But either uses up the raw material, and precludes building the other. Similarly, we can process the wave function of a particle to predict things about its position, or alternatively to predict things about its velocity, but not both at the same time (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Complementarity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27095) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-134 — Liminality — Christine Finn > I am writing this on the winter solstice. At 5.44am Eastern Standard Time I stood on a porch in Vermont and watched the sky. Nothing to discern that was tangible. But somewhere at ancient sites light passed over etched rock. Over millennia, ancient people such as those once here on the banks of the Connecticut River, marked a transition. The science is there for the shortest day. But what emerges for me is a search for absolute acuteness: that nano point where some thing changes, and every thing changes. So, I am excited by liminality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Liminality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27094) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-135 — Verbal Overshadowing — Nick Enfield > Suppose that two people witness a crime: one describes in words what they saw, while the other does not. When tested later on their memories of the event, the person who verbally described the incident will be worse at later remembering or recognizing what actually happened. This is verbal overshadowing. Putting an experience into words can result in failures of memory about that experience, whether it be the memory of a person’s face, the color of an object, or the speed that a car was going. This effect was discovered by the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her students in experiments exploring witness testimony and the malleability of human memory. The stakes are high. As Loftus has shown, imperfect memories can—and often do—put innocent people behind bars. Our memories define much of what we take to be real. Anything that interferes with memory interferes, effectively, with the truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chair, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney; Author, How We Talk - **Extract length:** 147 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Verbal Overshadowing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27092) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-136 — Quines — Samuel Arbesman > Within the infinite space of computer programs is a special subset of code: programs that, when executed, output that program itself. In other words, these are a kind of self-replicating program; when you run them, they yield themselves. These short programs are often referred to as quines, after the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, based on the term from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Quines](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27091) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-137 — Epigenetics — Leo M. Chalupa > What makes epigenetics important, and why is it so much in vogue these days? Its importance stems from the fact that it provides a means by which biological entities, from plants to humans, can be modified by altering gene activity without changes in the genetic sequence. This means that the age-old “nature versus nurture” controversy has been effectively obviated because experience (as well as a host of other agents) can alter gene activity, so the “either/or” thinking mode no longer applies. Moreover, there is now some tantalizing, but still preliminary evidence that changes in gene activity (induced in this case by an insecticide) can endure for a number of subsequent generations. What happens to you today can affect your great, great, great grandchildren! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Epigenetics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27090) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-138 — Polythetic Entitation — Timothy Taylor > As a prehistoric archaeologist David Clarke knew this, and he also knew that he was continually bundling classes of artefacts into groups and sub-groups without knowing whether his classification would have been recognized emically, that is, in terms understandable to the people who created and used the artefacts. Although the answer is that probably they did have different functions, how might one work back from the purely formal, etic, variance—the measurable features or attributes of an artefact—to securely assign it to its proper category? Are Bronze Age beakers, with all their subtypes, really beakers, and were they all used for the same purposes? Were they "memes" of one another, like the sort of coded repeatable information that enables the endless reproduction of individual computer-generated images? Or were some beakers non-beakers, with a distinct socially-acceptable deployment? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Polythetic Entitation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27086) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-139 — Uncertainty — Lawrence M. Krauss > In 2014 the BICEP experiment claimed to observe gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the Big Bang. This could have been one of the most important scientific discoveries in recent times, if it were true. However, a later analysis discovered an unexpected source of background—dust in our own galaxy. When all the dust had settled, if you forgive the pun, it turned out that the observation had only a 92% likelihood of being correct. In many areas of human activity this would be sufficient to claim its validity. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So the cosmology community has decided that no such claim can yet be made. - **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:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Uncertainty](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27085) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-140 — Deliberate Ignorance — Gerd Gigerenzer > Ignorance is generally pictured as an unwanted state of mind, and the notion of deliberate ignorance may raise eyebrows. Yet people often choose to be ignorant, demonstrating a form of negative curiosity at odds with concepts such as ambiguity aversion, a general need for certainty, and the Bayesian principle of total evidence. Such behavior also contrasts with the standard belief that more knowledge and data are always preferred, expressed in various forms from Aristotle (“All men by nature desire to know”) to the view of humans as informavores to the mission of national surveillance programs. - **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:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Deliberate Ignorance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27084) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-141 — Chronobiology — Douglas Rushkoff > The time-is-money ethos of the Industrial Age and wage labor, combined with the generic quality of computerized time-keeping and digital calendars has all but disconnected us from the temporal rhythms on which biological life has oriented itself for millennia. Like all organisms, the human body has evolved to depend on the cyclical ebbs and flows of light, weather, and even the gravitational pull of the moon in order to function effectively. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Chronobiology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27083) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-142 — Haldane’s Rule of the Right Size — Paul Saffo > Haldane wrote decades before the advent of globalization and digital media, but his elegant rule of right size hovers behind our biggest challenges today. Can mega-cities be sustained? Have social networks scaled beyond the optimum size for sensible exchange? Has cyberspace become so large and complexly interdependent that it is at risk of catastrophic scale-driven failure? Is our human population outstripping its right size given the state of our planetary systems? As we face these and the myriad other surprises to come, we would do well to remember that mice bounce, horses splash—and size truly matters. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 96 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Haldane’s Rule of the Right Size](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27082) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-143 — Alloparenting — Abigail Marsh > Children are not the only beneficiaries of humans’ fulsome alloparenting capacities. Across primate species, the prevalence of alloparenting is also the single best predictor of a behavior that theories portraying human nature as motivated strictly by rational self-interest struggle to explain: altruism. Not reciprocal altruism or altruism toward close kin (which are self-interested) but costly acts of altruism for unrelated others, even strangers. This sort of altruism can seem inexplicable according to dominant accounts of altruism like reciprocity and kin selection. But it is perfectly consistent with the idea that, as alloparents sine qua non, humans are designed to be attuned to and motivated to care for a wide array of needy and vulnerable others. Altruism for one another is likely an exaptation of evolved neural mechanisms that equip us to alloparent. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Alloparenting](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27081) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-144 — Bisociation — James Geary > There is no sharp boundary splitting the bisociation experienced by the scientist from that experienced by the artist, the sage or the jester. The creative act moves seamlessly from the "Aha!" of scientific discovery to the "Ah…" of aesthetic insight to the "Ha-ha" of the pun and the punchline. Koestler even found a place for comedy on the bisociative spectrum of ingenuity: “Comic discovery is paradox stated—scientific discovery is paradox resolved.” Bisociation is central to creative thought, Koestler believed, because “The conscious and unconscious processes underlying creativity are essentially combinatorial activities—the bringing together of previously separate areas of knowledge and experience.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Curator, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; Author, Wit's End - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Bisociation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27080) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-145 — Costly Signalling — Steve Omohundro > If something doesn't make sense, your go-to hypothesis should be "costly signalling." The core idea is more than a century old, but new wrinkles deserve wider exposure. Veblen's "conspicuous consumption" explained why people lit their cigars with $100 bills as a costly signal of their wealth. Later economists showed that a signal of a hidden trait becomes reliable if the cost of faking it is more than the expected gain. For example, Spence showed that college degrees (even in irrelevant subjects) can reliably signal good future employees because they are too costly for bad employees to obtain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist, Self-Aware Systems; Co-founder, Center for Complex Systems Research - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Costly Signalling](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27076) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-146 — Exponential — Bruno Giussani > Hence we find ourselves right now somewhere in the first, maybe in the second square of the second half of the chessboard. This helps make sense of the dramatically fast advances that we see happen in science and technology, from smartphones and language translation and the blockchain to big analytics and self-driving vehicles and artificial intelligence, from robotics to sensors, from solar cells to biotech to genomics and neuroscience and more. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** European Director and Global Curator, TED - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Exponential](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27075) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-147 — Relative Information — Carlo Rovelli > The light that arrives at our eyes carries information about the objects which it has played across; the color of the sea has information on the color of the sky above it; a cell has information about the virus attacking it; a new living being has plenty of information because it is correlated with its parents, and with its species; and you, dear reader, reading these lines, receive information about what I am thinking while writing them, that is to say, about what is happening in my mind at the moment in which I write this text. What occurs in the atoms of your brain is not any more independent from what is happening in the atoms of mine: we communicate. - **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:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Relative Information](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27074) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-148 — Gravitational Radiation — Gino Segre > Four hundred years of observational astronomy, from Galileo’s telescope to the Hubble Space Telescope, has enriched our view of the universe immeasurably. The study of gravitational radiation offers the potential for us to take the next step. The universe only becomes transparent to electromagnetic radiation when the universe has cooled sufficiently for atoms to form, some 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Gravitational radiation does not suffer any such limitations. Some day we may even use it as a tool to observe the inflationary expansion the universe is presumed to have undergone immediately after the Big Bang. - **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:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Gravitational Radiation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27073) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-149 — The Texas Sharpshooter — Charles Seife > Texas-style sharpshooting—moving the goalposts and cherry-picking data so that results seem significant and important when they're not—is extremely common; check out any clinical trials registry and you'll see just how frequently endpoints are tinkered with. It goes almost without saying that a good number of these changes effectively turn the sow's ear of a negative or ambiguous result into the silk purse of a scientific finding worthy of publication. No wonder then that many branches of science are mired in replicability crises; there's no replicating a finding that's the result of a bullseye changing positions instead of reflecting nature's laws. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Texas Sharpshooter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27072) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-150 — The Ideal Free Distribution — Laura Betzig > The gist of the “ideal free distribution” is that individuals in the best of all possible worlds should distribute themselves in the best of all possible ways. They should sort themselves out across space and time so as to avoid predators, find prey, get mates, and leave as many descendants as they can behind. Where information is imperfect, the best spots will be missed; and where mobility is blocked, distributions will be “despotic.” But where information is unlimited and mobility is unrestrained, distributions will be “ideal” and “free.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Historian - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Ideal Free Distribution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27071) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-151 — Type I and Type II Errors — Phil Rosenzweig > In scientific research, we want to accept new results only when they are demonstrably correct. We wish to avoid accepting a false result, or minimize the chance of a Type I error, even if that means we commit a Type II error and fail to accept results that turn out to be true. That’s why we insist that claims are supported by evidence that is statistically significant, often set (by convention) as the probability an observation could be due to random effects is less than one in twenty (p < .05) or less than one in a hundred (p < .01). (How we know the probability distribution in the first place leads us into the debate between frequentists and Bayesians, an exceedingly interesting question but beyond the scope of this note.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Strategy and International Business at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland; Author, Left Brain, Right Stuff - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Type I and Type II Errors](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27070) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-152 — Adaptive Preference — Steve Fuller > The phenomenon of sweet lemons is disorienting to the observer because it highlights just how much we presume that others share our overarching values. We do not simply respect the autonomy of others. We also expect, somewhat paradoxically, that by virtue of their autonomy they will become more like us. Thus, the post-prophecy behavior of Festinger’s cult is confusing because they carried on in a version of what they had previously done. In so doing, they learned from experience. But what they learned was to become more like themselves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick; Author, The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Adaptive Preference](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27069) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-153 — The Noösphere — David Christian > The word “Noösphere” emerged in Paris, in 1924, from conversations between the Russian geologist, Vladimir Vernadsky, and two French scholars, the paleontologist and priest, Teilhard de Chardin, and the mathematician, Édouard Le Roy. In a lecture he gave in Paris in 1925, Vernadsky had already described humanity and the collective human mind as a new “geological force,” by which he seems to have meant a force comparable in scale to mountain building or the movement of continents. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Origin Story - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Noösphere](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27068) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-154 — Determinism — Jerry A. Coyne > Physical determinism of behavior is also supported by experiments that trick people into thinking they’re exercising choice when they’re really being manipulated. Brain stimulation, for instance, can produce involuntary movements, like arm-waving, that patients claim are really willed gestures. Or we can feel we’re not being agents when we are, as with Ouija boards. Further, one can use fMRI brain scans to predict, with substantial accuracy, people’s binary decisions up to ten seconds before they’re even conscious of having made them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author, Why Evolution is True; Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Determinism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27067) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-155 — Equipoise — Nicholas A. Christakis > The concept found a new application in the 1980s, when ethicists were searching for deep justifications for the conduct of randomized clinical trials in medicine. A trial was only justified, they rightly argued, when the doctors and researchers doing the trial (and the medical knowledge they were relying on) saw the new drug or its alternative (a placebo, perhaps) as potentially equally good. If those doing the research felt otherwise, how could they justify the trial? Was it ethical to place patients at risk of harm to do research if doctors had reason to suppose that one course of action might be materially better than another? - **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:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Equipoise](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27066) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-156 — Power Law — Luca De Biase > The power law can help understanding, and maybe correct the dynamics of networks by growing the awareness of its fundamental patterns. Predictions are narratives. And good narratives need some empirical observations. Moore's law is useful to those that share the techno-centered narrative of the exponential growth of computer abilities. The power law is useful to those that want to critically see the evolution of a network. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Power Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27065) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-157 — Premature Optimization — Kevin Kelly > Scientists use a diagram of a mountainous landscape to illustrate this principle. The contours of the undulating landscape indicate adaptive success of a creature. The higher the elevation of an entity, the more successful it is. The lower, the less fit. The lowest elevation is zero adaptation, or in other words, extinction. The evolutionary history of an organism can thus be mapped over time as its population begins in the foothills of low adaptation and gradually ascends the higher mountains of increased environmental adaptation. This is known in biology and in computer science as “hill climbing.” If the species is lucky, it will climb until it reaches a peak of optimal adaptation. Tyrannosaurus Rex achieved peak fitness. The industrial-age Olivetti Corporation reached the peak of optimal typewriter. Sex Pistols reached the summit of punk rock. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Premature Optimization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27063) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-158 — Cognitive Ethology — Irene Pepperberg > For example: Psychologists may test whether a songbird in a laboratory can distinguish between the vocalizations of a bird in a neighboring territory versus that of a stranger and determine what bits of song are relevant for that discrimination. Lab biologists may determine which bits of brain are responsible for these discriminations. Field biologists may collect information testing whether the size of the repertoire of a bird of a given species correlates with the quality of its territory or its reproductive success. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cognitive Ethology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27062) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-159 — Paleoneurology — Juan Enriquez > Given that one in five Americans is now taking a mind-altering drug(s), the experiment continues and accelerates. Never mind fields like optogenetics, which alter and reconnect our brains, thoughts, memories, fears using light stimuli projected inside the brain. Eventual implants will radically change brain design, inputs, and outputs. Having a baseline, a good paleoneurological history of brain design, for ourselves and many other basic species, may teach us a lot about what our brains were, where they came from, but even more important, what they are becoming. I bet this is a challenge Tilly Edinger would have relished. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Paleoneurology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27061) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Brain Implants Will Change What Our Brains Are Becoming by Juan Enriquez|Brain Implants Will Change What Our Brains Are Becoming by Juan Enriquez]] ### EDGE2017-160 — Optimization — Sabine Hossenfelder > Science, too, is an adaptive system. It should optimize knowledge discovery. But science, too, doesn’t miraculously self-optimize what we hope it does—the implementation of the feedback cycle requires careful design and monitoring. It’s a lesson that even scientists haven’t taken sufficiently to heart: If you get something from nothing, it’s most likely not what you wanted. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Research Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies; Author, Existential Physics - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Optimization](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27060) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-161 — Embodied Thinking — Barbara Tversky > When I was seven we moved from the city to the country. There were stars then, half a hollow indigo sphere of sparkling stars encompassing me, everyone; the entire universe right before my eyes. Exhilarating. The speck that was me could be firmly located in that cosmos. In the return address on letters to my grandfather, I wrote my name, my house number, my street, my town, my state, my country, my continent, Planet Earth, the Milky Way, the Universe. A visible palpable route linking the body, my own body, to the cosmic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emerita of Psychology, Stanford University; Professor of Psychology and Education, Columbia Teachers College; Author, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Embodied Thinking](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27059) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-162 — The Cancer Seed and Soil Hypothesis — Azra Raza, M.D. > The concept I want to promote is that of Paget’s seed-and-soil approach to cancer and urge a serious examination of cancer cells as they exist in their natural habitats. Basic researchers want to know what they should replace their synthetic models with. My answer is that first and foremost, they should work directly with the clinical oncologists. If methods to recapitulate human cancers in vitro don’t exist, then we must prepare to study them directly in vivo. We have a number of effective drugs but these usually help only subsets of patients. It would be a tremendous step forward if we can match the right drug to the right patient. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center; Author, The First Cell - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Cancer Seed and Soil Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27058) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-163 — Digital Representation — Jon Kleinberg > The art student is devoting much more time to the task, but there's a sense in which the tourist with the phone is the odd one out. Paint on canvas, like an exposed piece of film, is a purely physical representation: a chemical bloom on a receptive medium. There is no representation distinct from this physical embodiment. In contrast, the cell phone camera's representation of the picture is fundamentally numerical. To a first approximation, the phone's camera divides its field of view into a grid of tiny cells, and stores a set of numbers to record the intensity of the colors in each of the cells that it sees. These numbers are the representation; they are what get transmitted (in a compressed form) when the picture is sent to friends or posted online. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Digital Representation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27057) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-164 — Reynolds Number — George Dyson > The notion of a Reynolds number and critical velocity can also be applied to non-traditional domains: for instance, the flow of information in a computer network, where velocity is represented by bandwidth and viscosity is represented by processing speed of the individual nodes, or the flow of money in an economy, where velocity is represented by how fast funds are moving and viscosity is represented by transaction costs. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Reynolds Number](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27056) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-165 — Fermi Problems — Seth Shostak > Aside from its utility, this skill rewards its practitioners with personal gratification. It’s an everyday demonstration that quantitative knowledge about the world is not simply handed down from on-high. Observation, simplifying assumptions (“let’s approximate a chicken by a sphere…”), and the simplest calculation can get us close to the truth. It is not solely the province of experts with tweed jackets and a wall covered with sheepskins. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute; Author, Confessions of an Alien Hunter - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fermi Problems](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27055) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-166 — "The Big Bang" — John C. Mather > The name “Big Bang” has been misleading scientists, philosophers, and the general public since Sir Fred Hoyle said it on radio in 1949. It conjures up the image of a giant firecracker, an ordinary explosion happening at a place and a time, a collection of material suddenly beginning to expand into the surrounding empty space. But this is so exactly opposite to what astronomers have observed that it is shocking we still use the name, and it is not the least bit surprising that some people object to it. Einstein didn’t like it at first but became convinced. Hoyle never liked it at all. People might like it better if they knew what it meant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Prize in Physics; Senior Astrophysicist, Observational Cosmology Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Coauthor (with John Boslough), The Very First Light - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** ["The Big Bang"](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27054) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-167 — Invariance — Jim Holt > Through the idea of invariance. To have a chance of being objective, our theory of the world must at least be intersubjectively valid: It must take the same form for all observers, regardless of where they happen to be located, or when they happen to be doing their experiment, or how they happen to be moving, or how their lab happens to be oriented in space (or whether they are male or female, or Martian or Earthling, or…). Only by comparing observations from all possible perspectives can we distinguish what is real from what is mere appearance or projection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author and Essayist, New York Times. New Yorker, Slate; Author, Why Does the World Exist? - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Invariance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27053) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-168 — Impossible — Chiara Marletto > The concept of "impossible" underlies all fundamental theories of physics; yet its exact meaning is little known. The impossibility of cloning, or copying, certain sets of states is at the heart of quantum theory and of quantum information. The impossibility of exceeding the speed of light is a fundamental feature of the geometry of spacetime in relativity. The impossibility of constructing perpetual motion machines is the core idea of thermodynamics: No machine can exist that produces energy without consuming any; and the second law demands the impossibility of machines converting "heat" (such as energy stored in the sea at room temperature) completely into "work" (energy that is useful, in that it can be used, for instance, to power a mill). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Materials Department, University of Oxford; Author, The Science of Can and Can't - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Impossible](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27052) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-169 — The Trolley Problem — Daniel Rockmore > We will build driverless cars and they will come with a moral compass—literally. The same will be true of our robot companions. They’ll have values and will necessarily be moral machines and ethical automata, whose morals and ethics are engineered by us. “The Trolley Problem” is a gedankenexperiment for our age, shining a bright light on the complexities of engineering our new world of humans and machines. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematics, William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Trolley Problem](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27051) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-170 — Simplistic Disease Progression — Eric Topol > With a better understanding of what is a heart attack and its basis, more recently, cancer is following suit. The longstanding dogma was that cancer slowly progresses over years until it starts to spread throughout the body. But now it has been shown that metastasis can indeed occur with early lesions, defying the linear model of cancer’s natural history. We knew that mammography picks up early breast cancer, for example, but that has not had a meaningful impact on saving lives. So much for the simplistic notion for how cancer develops, perhaps one of the reasons it has been so difficult to treat. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Simplistic Disease Progression](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27050) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-171 — The Schnitt — Michael Gazzaniga > While I find this a tricky idea on the one hand, it is utterly simple and elegant on the other. Pattee has given us a schema and a way to think about how, using nothing but physics (including the principle of complementarity), life comes out of non-living stuff. The schema, way up the evolutionary scale, also accounts for how the subjective mind can emerge from objective neurons. Pattee suggests that instead of approaching conscious cognition as either information processing or neural dynamics, there is a third approach available. Consciousness is not reducible to one or the other. Both should be kept on the table. They are complementary properties of the same system. I say hats off to Pattee. We brain scientists have our work cut out for us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, UC Santa Barbara; Author, The Consciousness Instinct - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Schnitt](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27049) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Mind and Neurons May Be Complementary Properties of One System by Michael Gazzaniga|Mind and Neurons May Be Complementary Properties of One System by Michael Gazzaniga]] ### EDGE2017-172 — Actionable Predictions — Roger Highfield > Blind gathering of Big Data in biology continues apace, however, emphasizing transformational technologies such as machine learning—artificial neural networks, for instance—to find meaningful patterns in all the data. But no matter their "depth" and sophistication, neural nets merely fit curves to the available data. They may be capable of interpolation, but extrapolation beyond their training domain can be fraught. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Actionable Predictions](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27046) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-173 — Iatrotropic Stimulus — Gerald Smallberg > There are always problems to be addressed that are not limited to medical conditions but that happen to us as members of the larger society we inhabit. As we each try to confront these problems, the iatrotropic stimulus is an important concept to know—the "why now?" is a question for us to continually keep in mind. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Practicing Neurologist, New York City; Playwright, Off-Off Broadway Productions, Charter Members; The Gold Ring - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Iatrotropic Stimulus](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27045) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-174 — Effective Theory — Lisa Randall > Yet, ultimately that chair is made of molecules, which are made of atoms composed of nuclei—protons and neutrons—with electrons orbiting them with probability functions in agreement with quantum mechanical calculations. Those electrons are on average very far from the nuclei, meaning from a perspective of matter, they are mostly empty space. And those protons and neutrons are made of quarks bound together by the dynamics of the strong force. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Effective Theory](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27044) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-175 — Information Pathology — Thomas A. Bass > Take, for example, the comedian George Carlin’s Hippy Dippy Weatherman who announces, “Tonight’s forecast, dark. Continued dark tonight. Turning to partly light in the morning.” Since this message conveys information already known to us in advance, the amount of information it carries, according to Shannon, is zero. But according to McLuhan—and anyone who has watched George Carlin pace the stage as he delivered Al Sleet’s weather report—the message contains a raft of information. The audience guffaws at mediated pomposity, the unreliability of prediction, and the dark future, which, if we survive it, might possibly turn partly light by morning. - **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:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Information Pathology](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27042) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-176 — Criticality — César Hidalgo > As humans, we love individual narratives. We evolved to learn from stories and communicate almost exclusively in terms of them. But as Richard Feynman said repeatedly: The imagination of nature is often larger than that of man. So, maybe our obsession with individual narratives is nothing but a reflection of our limited imagination. Going forward we need to remember that systems often make individuals irrelevant. Just like none of your cells can claim to control your body, society also works in systemic ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab; Author, Why Information Grows - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Criticality](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27041) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-177 — Morphogenetic Field — Robert Provine > The probabilistic, epigenetic processes of morphogenetic fields force a reconsideration of what it means to be "genetically determined" and illustrate why genes are better understood as recipes than blueprints; genes provide instructions for assembly, not a detailed plan for the final product. For psychologists and other social scientists whose developmental studies are based more on philosophical than biological foundations, morphogenetic fields provide a good starting point for learning how development works. Embryos provide excellent instruction about development for those knowing where to look and how to see. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Morphogenetic Field](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27037) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-178 — Networks — Sheizaf Rafaeli > We do not yet have the network equivalent of the pocket calculator. Let's make that a next improvement in public awareness of science. While a few decades ago it was clear the public needed to be taught about mean, media and mode, standard deviations and variance, percentages and significance, it is now the turn of network concepts to come to the fore. For us to understand the spread of truth and lies, political stances and viruses, wealth and social compassion, we need to internalize the mechanisms and measures of the networks along which such dynamics take place. The opposite of networking is not working. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Director, The Center for Internet Research, University of Haifa, Israel - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Networks](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27036) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-179 — Recursion — Read Montague > Recursion resides at the core of all intelligence. Recursion requires the ability to reference an algorithm or procedure, and keep the reference distinct from the contents. And this capacity to refer is a centerpiece of the way that organisms form models of the world around them and even of themselves. Recursion is a profoundly computational idea and lies at the heart of Godel’s incompleteness theorem and the philosophical consequences that flow from that work. Turing’s own work on computable numbers requires recursion at its center. It’s an open question about how recursion is implemented biologically, but one could speculate that it has been discovered by evolution many times. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Director, Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit, Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute; Author, Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Recursion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27035) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-180 — Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics — Frank Tipler > To me, this analysis shows that we indeed have free will, even though the evolution of the universe is totally deterministic. Even if you think my analysis has been too facile—entire books can and have been written on the free will problem—nevertheless, my simple analysis shows that these books are themselves too facile, because they never consider the implications of the existence of the parallel universes for the free will question. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27034) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-181 — Simulated Annealing — Emanuel Derman > In physics and mathematics one often has to find the lowest energy or minimum state of some complicated function of many variables. For very complicated functions, that can’t be done analytically via a formula; it requires an algorithmic search. An algorithm that blindly tried to head downwards could get stuck in a local minimum and never find the global minimum. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University; Author, Models.Behaving.Badly - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Simulated Annealing](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27033) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-182 — Peircean Semiotics — Daniel L. Everett > The course followed by humans on the path to language was a progression through natural signs to human symbols. Signs and symbols are explained in reference to a theory of "semiotics," the study of signs, in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, usually known simply as C.S. Peirce). Peirce was perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher who ever lived. Bertrand Russell said of him, "Beyond doubt ... he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Linguistic Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, How Language Began - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Peircean Semiotics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27032) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-183 — Unruh Radiation — Jeremy Bernstein > Many people have heard of Hawking radiation, which is a form of radiation emitted by a black hole. Less familiar is Unruh radiation, named after Bill Unruh who first described it. It also is emitted by black holes. Close to a black hole, the radiation is predominantly Unruh; further away, it is predominantly Hawking. Unruh radiation is observed by a detector when it is placed in a state of uniform acceleration, whereas if the same detector is at rest or in a state of uniform motion, no radiation is observed. The Unruh radiation in the case of uniform acceleration is like a black body with a temperature proportional to the acceleration. The relevance to black holes is that, close to a black hole, the geometry of a spherical black hole can be transformed so that it looks like that of a uniformly accelerated object. John Bell suggested that Unruh radiation might be observed in an electron storage ring. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Stevens Institute of Technology; Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker - **Extract length:** 158 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Unruh Radiation](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27031) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-184 — Matter — Hans Halvorson > We now know that quantum mechanics is not literally true—at least not if Einstein's relativity theory is true. In the middle of the 20th century, physicists saw that if you combine relativity with quantum mechanics, then wavefunctions cannot be localized—the result is that, strictly speaking, there aren't any localized material objects. But what there are, they said, are quantum fields—these nebulous quantum entities that spread themselves throughout all of space. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Matter](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27030) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-185 — Population Thinking — Dan Sperber > Population thinking readily extends beyond biology to the study of cultural evolution (as argued by Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Peter Godfrey-Smith). Cultural phenomena can be thought of as populations, the members of which share features because they influence one another even though they do not beget one another the way organisms do and are not exactly copies of one another. Here are three examples. - **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:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Population Thinking](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27029) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-186 — Case-Based Reasoning — Roger Schank > We do case-based reasoning naturally, and without conscious thought, so we tend to ignore its importance in thinking and learning. Whenever you participate in a conversation with someone about a subject of mutual interest you are having a kind of case-based reasoning party: exchanging stories and constantly being reminded of new stories to tell. Both participants come out slightly changed from the experience. That experience itself is, of course, a new case to be remembered and to be reasoned from in the future. - **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:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Case-Based Reasoning](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27028) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-187 — Illusory Conjunction — Diana Deutsch > The concept of an illusory conjunction is not sufficiently explored in studies of perception and memory, and it is rarely discussed in philosophy. Yet this concept is of considerable importance to our understanding of perceptual and cognitive function. For example, when we hear a musical tone, we attribute a pitch, a loudness, a timbre, and we hear the tone as coming from a particular spatial location; so each perceived tone can be described as a bundle of attribute values. It is generally assumed that this bundle reflects the characteristics and location of the sound that is emitted. However, when multiple sequences of tones arise simultaneously from different regions of space, these bundles of attribute values sometimes fragment and recombine incorrectly, so that illusory conjunctions result. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Diego; Author, Musical Illusions and Phantom Words - **Extract length:** 125 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Illusory Conjunction](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27027) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-188 — The Holographic Principle — Donald D. Hoffman > If spacetime is not fundamental, then our perception of visual space, and of objects in that space, is not a high-fidelity reconstruction of fundamental reality. What, then, is it? From the theory of evolution we can conclude that our sensory systems have been shaped by natural selection to inform us about the fitness contingencies relevant to us in our niche. We have assumed that this meant that our senses inform us of fitness-relevant aspects of fundamental reality. Apparently, they do not. They simply inform us about fitness, not fundamental reality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Holographic Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27026) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-189 — Negativity Bias — Michael Shermer > Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good then taking a gamble to improve them a little bit more was not perceived to be worth the risk of things turning south for the worst. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Negativity Bias](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27025) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-190 — The Law of Small Numbers — Adam Alter > In 1832, a Prussian military analyst named Carl von Clausewitz explained that “three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of . . . uncertainty.” The best military commanders seemed to see through this “fog of war,” predicting how their opponents would behave on the basis of limited information. Sometimes, though, even the wisest generals made mistakes, divining a signal through the fog when no such signal existed. Often, their mistake was endorsing the law of small numbers—too readily concluding that the patterns they saw in a small sample of information would also hold for a much larger sample. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Law of Small Numbers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27024) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-191 — The Second Law of Thermodynamics — Steven Pinker > Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Second Law of Thermodynamics](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-192 — Length-Biased Sampling — Elizabeth Wrigley-Field > The solution is adopting the right perspective. Consider the family puzzle. One side is about what parents do; the other side is about what kids experience. If families all had the same number of kids, these perspectives would coincide: The context parents create is the context kids live in. But when families aren’t all the same size, it matters whose perspective you take. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Faculty Member, Minnesota Population Center - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Length-Biased Sampling](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27022) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-193 — Life History — Alison Gopnik > Natural selection often operates on “life history” characteristics, and life history plays an important role in evolution, in general. Biologists long distinguished between “K” species and “R” species. R species, most fish, for example, may produce thousands of offspring, but most of them die and the rest live only a short time. In contrast “K” species like primates and whales, have only a few babies, invest a great deal in their care, and live a long time. Generally speaking, a “K” life history strategy is correlated with a larger brain and higher intelligence. We are the ultimate “K” species. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Life History](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27020) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-194 — Mysterianism — Nicholas G. Carr > Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The mysterians argue that the human mind may be incapable of understanding itself, that we will never understand how consciousness works. But if mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.” - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Mysterianism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27017) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-195 — Referential Opacity — Nicholas Humphrey > Consider, then, what may happen when, in the context of an election, choice blindness combines with referential opacity. Suppose the majority of voters choose to elect Mr A, with never a thought to electing Mr B. But, after the election, it transpires that, unwittingly and unaccountably, they have in fact got Mr B in place of Mr A. Now people’s need to remain on plot and to make sense of this outcome leads them to rewrite history and persuade themselves it was Mr B they wanted all along. - **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:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Referential Opacity](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27015) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-196 — Fundamental Attribution Error — Richard Nisbett > My students, and everyone else in Western society, are confident that people behave honestly because they have the virtue of honesty, conscientiously because they have the virtue of conscientiousness. (In general, non-Westerners are less susceptible to the fundamental attribution error, lacking as they do sufficient knowledge of Aristotle!) People are believed to behave in an open and friendly way because they have the trait of extroversion, in an aggressive way because they have the trait of hostility. When they observe a single instance of honest or extroverted behavior they are confident that, in a different situation, the person would behave in a similarly honest or extroverted way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fundamental Attribution Error](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27014) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-197 — Regression to the Mean — James J. O'Donnell > In this somber time, asking what scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known sounds like the setup for a punchline, something like “2+2=4” or “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” We can make a joke like that, but the truth the joke reveals is that “science” is indeed very much a human conception and construction. Science is all in our minds, even as we see dramatic examples of the use of that science all around us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Regression to the Mean](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27013) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-198 — Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking — Gordon Kane > Magnetism is a familiar real world example. The equations describing individual iron atoms don’t distinguish different directions in space. But when a piece of iron is cooled below about 770°C, it spontaneously develops a magnetic field in some direction. The original symmetry between different directions is broken. Describing this is how the name “spontaneous symmetry breaking” originated. In physics what happens is understood—known electromagnetic forces tend to make the spins of individual atoms become parallel, and each spin is a little magnet. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Particle Physicist and Cosmologist; Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Author, Supersymmetry and Beyond - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27012) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-199 — The Neural Code — John Horgan > The neural code is science’s deepest, most consequential problem. If researchers crack the code, they might solve such ancient philosophical mysteries as the mind-body problem and the riddle of free will. A solution to the neural code could also give us unlimited power over our brains and hence minds. Science fiction—including mind control, mind reading, bionic enhancement and even psychic uploading—will become reality. Those who yearn for the Singularity will get their wish. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Neural Code](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27011) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Cracking the Neural Code Could Give Us Power Over Mind by John Horgan|Cracking the Neural Code Could Give Us Power Over Mind by John Horgan]] ### EDGE2017-200 — The Copernican Principle — Mario Livio > Even the stuff we are made of—ordinary (baryonic) matter—constitutes less than 5 percent of the cosmic energy budget, with the rest being in the form of dark matter—matter that does not emit or absorb light (constituting about 25 percent), and dark energy—a smooth form of energy that permeates all space (about 70 percent). And if all of that is not enough, in recent years, some theoretical physicists started speculating that even our entire universe may be but one member in a huge ensemble of universes—a multiverse (another scientific concept we ought to get used to). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Astrophysicist; Author, Why?: What Makes Us Curious - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Copernican Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27010) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-201 — Reflective Beliefs — Hugo Mercier > To help explain these apparent contradictions, Dan Sperber has introduced a distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are formed through simple perceptual and inferential processes. They can also be acquired through communication provided that the information that is communicated is of a kind that could have been acquired through simple perception and inference. For instance, if someone tells you they have a table in their living room, you can form an intuitive belief about the table. Intuitive beliefs are the common stock of our minds, the basic data on which we rely to guide our behavior and inference in everyday life—as do many other animals. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, French National Center for Scientific Research; Author, Not Born Yesterday - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Reflective Beliefs](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27009) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-202 — Menger Sponge — Clifford Pickover > Fractals, such as the Menger Sponge, often exhibit self-similarity, which suggests that various exact or inexact copies of an object can be found in the original object at smaller size scales. The detail continues for many magnifications—like an endless nesting of Russian dolls within dolls. Some of these shapes exist only in abstract geometric space, but others can be used as models for complex natural objects such as coastlines and blood vessel branching. The dazzling computer-generated images can be intoxicating, perhaps motivating students’ interest in math as much as any other mathematical discovery in the last century. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Menger Sponge](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27007) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-203 — Naïve Realism — Matthew D. Lieberman > In the absence of a thorough appreciation for how our brain ensures that we will end up as naïve realists, we can’t help but see complex social events differently from one another, with each of us denigrating the other for failing to see what is so obviously true. Although there are real differences that separate groups of people, naïve realism might be the most pernicious undetected source of conflicts and their durability. From Israel vs. Palestinians, to the American political left and right, to the fight over vaccines and autism—in each case our inability to appreciate our own miraculous construction of reality is preventing us from appreciating the miraculous construction of reality happening all around us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UCLA; Author, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Naïve Realism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27006) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-204 — Stigler’s Law of Eponymy — William Poundstone > The generalization is not limited to science. Elbridge Gerry did not invent gerrymandering, nor Karl Baedeker the travel guide. Historians of rock music trace the lineage of the Bo Diddley beat, which didn’t originate with that bluesman. The globe is filled with place names honoring explorers who discovered places already well known to indigenous peoples (Hudson River, Hudson Bay; Columbia, District of Columbia and Columbus, Ohio; etc. Perhaps there are extraterrestrials who would consider the Magellanic Clouds a particularly egregious example). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck?: Secrets to Succeeding at Interview Mind Games and Getting the Job You Want; Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Stigler’s Law of Eponymy](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27004) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2017-205 — Affordances — Daniel C. Dennett > The huge gap in Gibson’s perspective was his refusal even to entertain the question of how this “direct pickup” of information was accomplished by the brain. As a Gibsonian slogan put it, “it’s not what’s in your head; it’s what your head is in.” But as a revisionary description of the purpose of vision and the other senses, and a redirection of theorists’ attention from retinal images to three-dimensional optical arrays (the information is in the light) through which the organism moves, Gibson’s idea of affordances has much to recommend it—and we’ll do a better job of figuring out how the neural machinery does its jobs when we better understand the jobs assigned to it. - **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:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Affordances](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27002) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted