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New tools equal new perceptions.
Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.
And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.
Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.
Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn't want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.
Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
151 Contributors: Alan Alda, Chris Anderson, Alun Anderson, Stephon H. Alexander, Mahzarin R. Banaji, John D. Barrow, Patrick Bateson, Gregory Benford, Yochai Benkler, Jesse Bering, David Berreby, Jamshed Bharucha, Susan Blackmore, David Bodanis, Stefano Boeri, Lera Boroditsky, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, David Buss, William Calvin, Leo Chalupa, Nicholas A. Christakis, Andy Clark, Gregory Cochran, M. Csikszentmihalyi, Austin Dacey, David Dalrymple, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Emanuel Derman, Daniel C. Dennett, Keith Devlin, Betsy Devine, Eric Drexler, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, David Eagleman, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Daniel Everett, Paul Ewald, Christine Finn, Eric Fischl, Helen Fisher, Kenneth W. Ford, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, Joel Garreau, James Geary, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Marcelo Gleiser, Daniel Goleman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Brian Goodwin, Alison Gopnik, April Gornik, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Haim Harari, Henry Harpending, Sam Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Marti Hearst, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Gerald Holton, Donald D. Hoffman, Verena Huber-Dyson, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Eric Kandel, Stuart Kauffman, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, MD, Brian Knutson, Terence Koh, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Laurence Krauss, Andrian Kreye, A. Garrett Lisi, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, Ian McEwan, Thomas Metzinger, Oliver Morton, David G. Myers, P.Z. Myers, Steve Nadis, Monica Narula, Randolph Nesse, Tor Nørretranders, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James J. O'Donnell, Gloria Origgi, Dean Ornish, M.D., Mark Pagel, Bruce Parker, Philippe Parreno, Gregory Paul, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford A. Pickover, Steven Pinker, Ernst Pöppel, Corey S. Powell, Robert R. Provine, Lisa Randall, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Paul Saffo, Scott Sampson, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar Sasselov, Roger Schank, Stephen H. Schneider, Peter Schwartz, Charles Seife, Gino Segrè, Tino Sehgal, Terrence Sejnowski, Martin Seligman, Robert Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Shermer, Kevin Slavin, Barry Smith, Laurence C. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Paul J. Steinhardt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Frank J. Tipler, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Joseph F. Traub, Sherry Turkle, Alexander Vilenkin, J. Craig Venter, Frank Wilczek, Ian Wilmut, Anton Zeilinger
—John Brockman
Editor and Publisher
[Continue to The Edge Annual Question 2009]
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"Answer is the betrayal of the open spirit of Question."
James Lee Byars, founder of The World Question Center
James Lee Byars
A Study of Posterity
Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified,
since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial.
By Thomas McEvilley
(Art in America, November, 2008)
...It is the next period, the fourth, starting about 1969, that has to be
considered his mature phase, the moment when he did, in fact, find his
metier, recognize it with blinding clarity and apply himself to exploring it
exhaustively. The discovery was, as Byars called it, "Question." Question
was primarily an immaterial mode of art. (Materiality would be more a
statement than a question.) It could be a very minimal performance or even
less. Byars once described it by saying, "1 create atmospheres." His pursuit
of the immaterial through the ephemeral is shown by a work of the mid·'60s
for which he released 100 pink helium-filled balloons to rise toward the
sphere of the moon.6
When I began my first writing about him, for an ArtForum article of 1981
called "James Lee Byars and the Atmosphere of Question," I sat Byars
down, took out a pencil and pad, and started to ask him questions.
Evincing impatience with the prosaic clerical approach, he exclaimed, "Oh,
Thomas, just make me up!" Truly he would rather remain a question than
allow anyone to turn him into an answer. I saw the point, and I made him
up. Specifically, 1 made him up in the way that I made sense of his work,
the way it made sense for me-in terms of philosophy. I made him up with
references to Democritus, Sextus Empiricus, Edmund Husserl and other
thinkers whom he had heard of barely or not at all. I did not claim that these
references came from him; 1 simply allowed my way of understanding his
work to enter into my picture of it. It seems a mistake to describe Byars as trained in philosophy, though certain writers have done so.
Byars was, as he himself put it, "interested in philosophy" but had actually
read almost nothing but some scraps of Wittgenstein (Zettel and bits of the Blue Book and Brown Book). He was aware that Wittgenstein had become a
cult figure in the 1960s, and that he was antisocial or socially perverse, and
Byars liked that; but he could not have begun to explain what Wittgenstein
had meant. Question is after all not an answer; in fact, in Byars's way of
seeing it, a question is smudged, polluted, cancelled out by having an answer.
Answer is the betrayal of the open spirit of Question.
The answer to which we cannot aspire ("Is is?") is the true doorway to the
openness or emptiness he exalted.
The many works of Question constitute the center of Byars's career, his
highest insight, the principle to which he was most committed. But the
immateriality presented problems. Like many other artists of his generation,
Byars worked constantly but rarely, if ever, had anything to sell. In the U.S.
his reputation was mostly that of a charlatan or mountebank. Village lVice
critic Kim Levin recalls once hearing him described as "the Liberace of the art world," which is a way of mocking the vulgarity of his
pretentions and costumes and special airs.7 But in Europe he had been
more or less accepted from the beginning (meaning from about 1970-71).
The Europeans had no problem with his denial that he was an American.
They could see perfectly well he was not an American. Perhaps not a
European either-surely, a prince of an imaginary kingdom.
After 1970, a long period ensued in which Byars shuttled more or less
constantly between Europe and the United States; like many art
ists and intellectuals of earlier centuries, he went wherever a patron
offered him a place to stay for a while, usually in conjunction with some
show or work in the neighborhood. These were the years of Byars's artistic
maturity. They fall into two phases, but one must bear in mind that in
Byars's career, stylistic or thematic phases tended to overlap; there were
not clean breaks between them.
The first was the period of Question-from around 1969 until 1985 or 1990-when Byars rarely made any concrete object-works; the very idea
made him literally shudder. ("The artist comes in," he said with withering
contempt, "carrying his little Kunst ... ") The point was that any formed
object would be an answer, and thus the antithesis of Question. Question
was open because it had not yet received any form; it was a kind of prime
matter, or a substance that existed in a realm of potentiality, an indefinite
state that had not yet become anything in particular and maybe never
would. But any formed object, on the other hand, would have denied all
that: if it has already received form it is over, closed, ended; it has slid
from the vague cloud of potentiality into a collision with the flat wall of
fact that lay hidden behind it. Byars was far more amenable to the mode of
becoming than to that of being: an object whose form was somehow
always changing, so you could never say that at a certain moment it was
exactly this or that, was acceptable to him because it avoided certainty.
During the Question phase, Byars claimed to renounce more or less all
his earlier work. He seemed genuinely to have no interest in it anymore.
He fell in love with the lightness of Question; he swore that thenceforth
nothing material (nothing "heavy") would pollute his consciousness. Byars
never employed religio-sentimental terms like "spirituality," but it would
perhaps not be offensive to him to say that Question, for him, was the
most precious manifestation of spirit.
At Documenta V in 1972, Byars shouted German names from the top of
the Fridericianum and passed out tiny Eucharist-like paper discs with the
letter Q printed in "the smallest print that twenty-twenty vision can read,"
Byars claimed. Sometimes the performance element got bigger, as in the
World Question Center (1969), where elaborate efforts were made to
elicit from a group of world intellectuals their most interesting questions.
In one situation, a group of students sat at desks with telephones as in a
telethon and attempted to reach people, mostly scientists, from a list of
names that Byars had assembled. The event was broadcast live on Belgian
TV. These procedures didn't always work out, as when one famous
scientist said, "What do you mean, questions?" though in other instances
the spirit seemed to pass over, as when physicist John Wheeler said,
"Axiology?" (Axiology is a method of studying how values are
determined, and in the form of a question it seems to imply a questioning
of value judgments.) Sometimes the object took on a larger role, as in The
Black Book, 1971, "a one page book with one hundred questions printed
in tiny gold letters on black tissue paper with imaginary covers." Indeed,
books became the quintessential genre of Question, most often as volumes
containing brief philosophical passages or abbreviations of phrases he had
made up ("QR," for example, meant "Question is in the Room"). Sometimes
the books were made pure Question by being wordless. ...
Continue to "James Lee Byars: A Study In Posterity" By Thomas McEvilley, an illustrated profile of the late artist who founded The World Question Center. [Click here].
Further Reading on Edge on James Lee Byars and The World Question Center: "He Confuses One And Two The 200 I.Q.: Mr. Byars By Mr. Brockman" |
On "Self-Awareness: The Last Frontier" by V.S. Ramachandran
Marc D. Hauser, V.S. Ramachandran, Timothy D. Wilson, Arnold Trehub, Robert Provine
MARC. D HAUSER: In case you glossed it, here it is, word for word: "One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness." Really? One of the last problems in Science, capital S Science, as in not only psychology, but evolutionary biology, anthropology, and molecular biology, not to mention physics, and chemistry? Now that is a claim! Let's keep at bay all the unsolved problems in chemistry and physics, and focus instead on some a bit closer to psychology, say evolutionary biology. We still don't understand how sex evolved, really! ...
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN: But if Hauser were to poll his colleagues in all sciences, asking them what the last remaining mysteries are, he would find that consciousness and self awareness on everyone's list. It doesn't follow that there wouldn't be plenty of other scientific problems in the list as well such as recursiveness in language, linking quantum mechanics with gravity, the viability of string theory, etc., but consciousness and the precise nature of time (in physics) would rank very near the top simply because we don't even know where to begin. ...
TIMOTHY D. WILSON: The message seems to be that major puzzles about the mind—such as the nature of the "self"—will be solved by the field neuroscience. There is nary a mention of vast areas of research on the self from psychology, particularly social psychology, that have contributed much more to our understanding of the nature of the human self than neuroscience ever has or, in my opinion, ever will.
ARNOLD TREHUB:
The key
questions of how the neuronal mechanisms and systems of our brain create the
phenomenal experience of our self as the subjective origin of a surrounding
world, and how we are able to parse and analyze the world to do our science are
are now being addressed in a detailed neuronal model that relates our phenomenal
experience of a personal world-space to our metaphorical theater of
consciousness. ...
ROBERT PROVINE: So far, mirror neurons concern the disembodied neurological correlates of the action of others; they have not been shown to produce actual behavior. While we wait for these data, investigators lacking electrophysiological laboratories and fMRIs can explore mirror-like contagious acts such as yawning and laughing that are familiar to everyone, are associated with actual behavior, and are typically neglected by investigators of mirror neurons. ...
... |
SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER [1.1.09]
By V.S. Ramachandran
An Edge Original
Essay
One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of
consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial
vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple
with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask
disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I"
is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.
It really breaks down into two
problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My
colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a
valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an
empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some
ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the
qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle
the "Self." I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence
that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most
people reading this column. But not qualia.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is a Neuroscientist, Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego; Author, Phantoms in the Brain.
... |
On "Can Science Help Solve the Ecoomic Crisis?" by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Sanger, Mike Brown, George Dyson, Emanuel Derman, Michael Shermer, Paul Romer, Tor Nørretranders
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I urge all you scientists to go take your "science" where it may work—and leave us in the real world without more problems. Please, please, enough of this "science". We have enough problems without you. ...
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The greatest danger of this compromised and arbitrary "scientific-style" approach to economics is that it implies an equivalence of the economy with nature. The sense is that the economy is really an ecology in which the laws of physics and nature actually apply. Sure they apply, but only as much as they apply to any utterly synthetic and manufactured environment. ...
MIKE BROWN: I think the main thing science has to offer in this crisis right now is a
little dose of its traditional empirical humility, and when things have
gotten pretty screwed up, that is usually a good place to start, if only
just for good form. It would also, of course, be wise to remain skeptically
mindful of where science may have contributed to the mess. ...
LARY SANGER: Any scientific project to take on economics and boldly transform it into a hard science will run into that problem of a complexity that is not amenable to rigorous scientific model-building. The other trouble with an "economic Manhattan project" suggestion is the fact that work in the social sciences is inherently ideological. I suppose that the title of the article's section 4, "What is to be done?" was chosen ironically—being the title of Lenin's most famous tract and all. ...
GOERGE DYSON: "Ten years ago I started a company based on the assumption that people are basically good," argued E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar (at the Santa Fe Institute) in 2004. "And now I have the data to prove it." Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new financial system, not another model). ...
EMANUEL DERMAN: This is a noble proposal, but I remain a bit of a skeptic with respect to the ability of a cohort of scientists and economists to find a scientific solution to the problems of our economy. Economies are living organisms, about as old as the oldest profession, and rebuilding the economic system from scratch is a problem in engineering and social engineering, not in science. Human's and scientists don't have a good history as regards social engineering. ...
MICHAEL SHERMER: Expand the problem by many orders of magnitude and we get a sense of the breathtaking inanity of trying to control an entire economy, no matter how smart the experts in our hypothetical economic Manhattan Project may be. The economy is a product of human action, not of human design. Trying to redesign something that was never designed in the first place is futile. I vote no on an economic Manhattan Project. ...
PAUL ROMER: To be successful, a Capital Markets Safety Board (CMSB) would require both funding and careful attention to incentives. Like the NTSB, a CMSB should be truly independent from the government agencies that are responsible for crisis prevention and crisis management. It should also be protected from influence by firms in the financial sector. In its data collection efforts, it should not rely on university researchers who are themselves susceptible to influence by the interested government agencies or the private sector players. Nor should it use academics who have a personal or professional stake in any particular view about what caused a crisis. It's the soft corruption of lobbying and regulatory capture that should worry us, not ideology. Institutionalized transparency is the best antidote. ...
TOR NØRRETRANDERS: We now know from experimental economics, game theory and the anthropology of gift giving that this creature exists only in the mind of economists, not in the real world. Humans (and other primates) treat each other with empathy and a striving for fair play (often through the punishment of free riders). Therefore the laudable new discussion of models of the economic system fail to discuss the real issue: Our model of human beings. And it fails to discuss the crucial externality to the economic process: Sometimes we decide to do great things that will lift each and everyone up where we belong. ...
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Some salvageable models have been kept on life support by adding epicycle after epicycle to deal with their obvious incompatibilities with markets and observed human behavior (e.g. the inexplicable neoclassical insistence on fixed preferences) while common risk measures like Value-at-Risk are probably flawed beyond hope. And yet, insights from fields as diverse as gauge theory, and evolutionary psychology may have a positive role to play in healing what ails the cartoonish homo economicus model to create a more realistic scientific theory of market agency. But the best way to do this is too subject the models to a marketplace of ideas somewhat more vigorous than modern day economics. ...
BRIAN KNUTSON: What are some implications of these findings for the current crisis? Presently, we need to put a price on ambiguous derivatives (a job for the economists). As long as the value of these contracts remains unresolved, this could generate ultra-uncertainty, which will promote fear, which will keep money in peoples' mattresses and out of the market. In the future, we should regulate (or incentivize) against contracts that resist pricing. ...
... |
The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out
pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas
and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For
example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the markets to equilibrium", because
the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak
of "restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state."
In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan
project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know
a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in
other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge,
to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and
modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.
CAN SCIENCE HELP SOLVE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS?
By Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin
MIKE BROWN is Past Chairman of The Nasdaq Stock Market Board of Directors, past
governor of the National Association of Securities Dealers, and past CFO of
Microsoft Corporation, currently a director of EMC Corporation, VMware,
Administaff Inc., Pipeline Financial Group Inc., and Thomas Weisel Partners.
STUART KAUFFMAN is Professor of biology, physics and astronomy and head of the
Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary, also
emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a
MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Author of
The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations and Reinventing
the Sacred.
ZOE-VONNA PALMROSE is PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor of Auditing and
Accounting, University of Southern California. Formerly served as Deputy Chief
Accountant for Professional Practice in the Office of the Chief Accountant at
the Securities and Exchange Commission. Co-author, with Mike Brown, of Thog's
Guide to Quantum Economics.
LEE SMOLIN is Founding and senior faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics. Author of Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The
Trouble with Physics.
... |
JOHN MARKOFF TO JOIN SCIENCE
"A small anarchic community of wireheads and hackers made the mistake of giving fire to the masses. Nobody is going to give it back. It is paradise lost. This wonderful community is not a community anymore. It's a society. It is a city on the Net, and in the back alleys of this electronic city, people are getting rolled. It is no different than being in New York. Let me be a couch potato if this is what Internet activity is about."
[Announcement from The New York Times:]
John Markoff, whose trailblazing work for The Times is a virtual history of the computer age, is taking an exciting new assignment. John is switching from Business Day to Science, where he will write widely and deeply about the impact of computer science in every modern endeavor.
One of the more alarming areas John will explore — you don't even want to know — is cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. He will cover, too, advances in computational science that are transforming the pursuit of other kinds of science. And he will peer into the future of computing to tell us how our everyday lives may change.
Another important part of his portfolio will be national science and technology policy, as the Obama administration gears up for a new era of government investment in research and development. To the extent that this push is tied to hopes for economic recovery and American competitiveness, John will often find himself in the thick of the news.
For more than three decades John has been the pre-eminent chronicler of Silicon Valley, having started as a defense and technology writer for Pacific News Service in 1977. He joined The Times in 1988, and has since been regaling and informing readers about this fascinating and increasingly important part of our world. ... And he was the first to write about the ever-evolving World Wide Web.
Further Reading on Edge: "The Scibe" in Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite
|
SOCIAL
NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS
By Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler
We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.
NICHOLAS
A. CHRISTAKIS, a physician and sociologist, is a Professor at
Harvard University with joint appointments in the Departments
of Health Care Policy, Sociology, and Medicine. JAMES H. FOWLER is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
...
|
These findings may capture people's imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism. But even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. It just means that you are more likely to be genetically predisposed. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases.
CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION
A
Talk with Dean Ornish
DEAN ORNISH is a clinical professor of medicine at UCSF and the founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine and Research Institute in Sausalito. His most recent book is The Spectrum.
... |
SYNC, AND SWIM TOGETHER
By Daniel Kahneman and Andrew M. Rosenfield
When faced with disaster, the natural response of people — and businesses — is to fight for time and hope for the best. The likely outcome of this strategy would be a succession of failures that would spare no one. We believe that there is a better way: simultaneous bankruptcy filing by all three companies would substantially reduce both the uncertainty and the stigma for each one.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton, received the Nobel in economics in 2002. ANDREW M. ROSENFIELD is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the chairman of an investment advisory firm.
... |
THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY
By Christopher Badcock
FL.jpg)
According to the so-called imprinted brain theory,
the paradoxes can be explained in terms of the expression of genes, and not
simply their inheritance. Imprinted genes are those which are only expressed
when they are inherited from one parent rather than the other. The classic
example is IGF2, a growth factor gene only normally expressed when inherited
from the father, but silent when inherited from the mother. According to the most
widely-accepted theory, genes like IGF2 are silenced by mammalian mothers
because only the mother has to pay the costs associated with gestating and
giving birth to a large offspring. The father, on the other hand, gets all the benefit
of larger offspring, but pays none of the costs. Therefore his copy is activated.
The symbolism of a tug-of-war represents the mother's genetic self-interest in
countering the growth-enhancing demands of the father's genes expressed in the
foetus—the mother, after all, has to gestate and give birth to the baby at
enormous cost to herself.
CHRISTOPHER BADCOCK is a Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of PsychoDarwinism and Evolutionary Psychology: A Clinical Introduction.
... |
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT NOW AVAILABLE
What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important. —Daniel Kahneman
A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL
ECONOMICS
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
RICHARD H. THALER, Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Coauthor (with Cass Sunstein), Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, Professor of Economics, Harvard; recipient, MacArthur award; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Princeton; Recipient, Nobel Prize, Economics, 2002.
PARTICIPANTS: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc, Marketing Professor; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Tesla Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter.
INTRODUCTION
By Daniel Kahneman
... I cannot imagine a psychologist who could be counted as a good economist without formal training in that discipline, but it seems to be easier for economists to be good psychologists. This is certainly the case for both Dick and Sendhil Mullainathan—they know a great deal of what is going on in modern psychology, but more importantly they have superb psychological intuition and are willing to trust it. ...
FIRST DAY SUMMARY
By Nathan Myhrvold
Sendhil Mullainathan gave a fascinating talk about applying behavior economics to understand poverty. If this succeeds (it is a work in progress) it would be extremely important. ...
SECOND DAY SUMMARY
By George Dyson
...After the break we begin to wrap things up. Richard Thaler suggests a "nudge" model of the world. The same way a digital camera has both an "expert mode" and an "idiot mode," what the economy needs is an "idiot mode" resistant to experts making mistakes. ...
Photo Gallery: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way.
LIBERTARIAN PATERNALISM: WHY IT IS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO NUDGE (Class 1)
Richard Thaler
At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal. —Richard Thaler
IMPROVING CHOICES WITH MACHINE READABLE DISCLOSURE
(Class 2)
Richard Thaler & Sendhil Mullainathan
Let's put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let's ask, "Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?" One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCARCITY (Class 3)
Sendhil Mullainathan
There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!
TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Class 4) Daniel Kahneman
I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice.
THE IRONY OF POVERTY (Class 5)
Sendhil Mullainathan
A lot of what makes behavioral economics interesting is psychology, it is about what happens inside the mind. These phenomena are taking things that are happening inside the mind and interfacing them with things happening in the world, the environment, and getting feedback or getting interesting responses from that.— Sendhil Mullainathan
PUTTING PSYCHOLOGY INTO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS (Class 6)
Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Sendhil Mullainathan
Photo Gallery: The San Francisco 2008 Science Dinner
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OF GENITAL THIEVES
The exploration of economic irrationality
By Andrian Kreye
It was one of those watershed moments in science at which you would like to have been present. Last summer in Sonoma, three generations behavioral economists convened at a Master Class run by the Edge Foundation...If you are interested in getting your head around the current global economic meltdown, read through the transcript of this master class once more this autumn. You may not find direct answers, but you will certainly find elements of an explanation. ...
ANDRIAN KREYE is the editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He is also an Edge contributor.
Andrian Kreye's Edge Bio Page
... |
The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.
A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A
Talk with Alva Noë
ALVA NOË is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works principally on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with special interest in the theory of perception, and is also interested in the philosophy of art, the history of analytic philosophy, Phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.
Alva Noë's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Arnold Trehub
... |
| THE DOUBLE HELIX MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH [11.6.08]
James D. Watson & J. Craig Venter
At the Cold Spring Harbor Board of Director's Dinner in New York City, James Watson and Craig Venter were co-recipients of the Double Helix Medal for Scientific Research. |
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Once again, real life is not a casino with simple bets. This is the error that helps the banking system go bust with an astonishing regularity.
REAL LIFE IS NOT A CASINO
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Introduction
 On New Years day I received a a prescient essay from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as his response to the 2008 Edge Question: "What Have You Change Your Mind About?" In "Real Life Is Not A Casino", he wrote:
I've shown that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans—such as banks and some classes of insurance ventures—have almost never been profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mortgage mess is not so much that the "quants" and other pseudo-experts in bank risk-management were wrong about the probabilities (they were) but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes.
Taleb had changed his mind about his belief "in the centrality of probability in life, and advocating that we should express everything in terms of degrees of credence, with unitary probabilities as a special case for total certainties and null for total implausibility".
Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields.
The essay is one of more than one hundred that have been edited for a new Edge book What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (forthcoming, Harper Collins, January 9th). See below.
—John Brockman
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edge Bio page
Further reading on Edge: The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08] |
In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)
SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE
By Jerry Coyne
Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.
JERRY
COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution
at the University of Chicago, where he
works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics. He is the author
(with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation, and Why Evolution Is True.
Jerry
Coyne's Edge Bio
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____
Enough already. I bit my tongue when I heard that Sarah Palin believed that dinosaurs and humans once lived side by side and that she and John McCain wanted creationism taught in the public schools.
And I just shook my head when McCain derided proposed funding for a sophisticated planetarium projection machine as wasteful spending on an "overhead projector."
But the Republican ticket's war on science has finally gone too far. Last week, Sarah Palin dissed research on fruit flies.
In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)
As a geneticist, I've worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about fruit flies.
...
Further reading on Edge: "Don't Know Much Biology" By Jerry Coyne |
Why do we live in a society that, having ruined its natural environment, is now about to knowingly ruin its social environment and the lives of an entire generation? In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond specified the causes that encourage elites to destroy their societies."They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals."
WHAT'S NEXT? [10.15.08]
By Frank Schirrmacher
FRANK SCHIRRMACHER is a German journalist, essayist, writer, and since 1994 co-publisher of the leading national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). He is one of Germanys leading journalists.
...
Further Reading on Edge: "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech" By Frank Schirrmacher[7.10.00] |
"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."
— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006) |
ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM [9.24.08]
Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
By George Dyson
George Dyson writes: "Readers of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant may enjoy the following piece on fraud-resistant financial instruments of the 13th century—progenitors of a multitude of derivatives that are plaguing us today." ...
...The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks? ...
...
Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08] |
On "THE
FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS"
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
JARON
LANIER: This is a superb piece and I hope it is widely
read and taken to heart in Wall Street, Silicon Valley,
and Washington. All these centers of power and creativity
are drowning in illusions brought about by thunderous misuses
of statistics that have become implacably seductive only
with the recent availability of vast, connected computer
resources.
Edge.org
has become the most dramatic point of contact between the
critics and supporters of the fallacies Taleb elucidates. ...
GEORGE DYSON: ...What to do now? I'd prefer less Paulson, and more Newton. In the 17th century, English coinage had become widely debased, much as our system of financial instruments has become debased today. In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, with authority to prosecute counterfeiters, who were not only hung, but drawn and quartered. This, accompanied by a systematic recoinage, worked.
... |
THE
FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS [9.15.08]
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
An Edge Original
Essay
 Statistical
and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge;
statistics is what tells you if something is true, false,
or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science";
it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools
of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not
think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers.
The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the
casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school.
Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government
right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it:
use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks
did just blow up the banking system).
REALITY
CLUB: Jaron
Lanier, George Dyson
BLOGWATCH
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NOW AVAILABLE IN STORES AND ONLINE
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
Publishers Weekly
"An intellectual treasure trove"
San
Francisco Chronicle
[Forthcoming, January 9, 2009]
Contributors include: STEVEN PINKER on the future of human evolution • RICHARD DAWKINS on the mysteries of courtship • SAM HARRIS on why Mother Nature is not our friend • NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB on the irrelevance of probability • ALUN ANDERSON on the reality of global warming • ALAN ALDA considers, reconsiders, and re-reconsiders God • LISA RANDALL on the secrets of the Sun • RAY KURZWEIL on the possibility of extraterrestrial life • BRIAN ENO on what it means to be a "revolutionary" • HELEN FISHER on love, fidelity, and the viability of marriage…and many others.
Praise for the online publication of
What Have You Change Your Mind About?
"The
splendidly enlightened Edge website (www.edge.org) has rounded off
each year of inter-disciplinary debate by asking its heavy-hitting
contributors to answer one question. I strongly recommend a visit." The
Independent
"A
great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." El
Mundo
"As
fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." The
Independent
"They
are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to
make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. But in
a refreshing show of new year humility, the world's best thinkers
have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change
their minds." The Guardian
"Even the world's
best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists
respond to a new year challenge." The
Times
"Provocative
ideas put forward today by leading figures."The
Telegraph
The
world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful,
humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual
treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening
reading you can do for the new year. Read it now." San
Francisco Chronicle
"As
in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly
open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." The
News & Observer
"A
jolt of fresh thinking...The answers address a fabulous array of issues.
This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake — bracing,
possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up." The
Globe and Mail
"Answers
ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate
pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." The
Toronto Star
"For
an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this
is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" National
Review Online
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WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?
Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better
Edited by John Brockman
Introduction
by DANIEL C. DENNETT
[2007]
"The
optimistic visions seem not just wonderful but plausible." Wall
Street Journal
"Persuasively
upbeat." O, The Oprah Magazine
"Our
greatest minds provide nutshell insights on how science will help
forge a better world ahead." Seed
"Uplifting...an
enthralling book." The Mail on Sunday
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WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
Edited
by John Brockman
Introduction
by STEVEN PINKER
Afterword
by RICHARD DAWKINS
[2006]
"Danger – brilliant
minds at work...A brilliant bok: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling." The
Evening Standard (London)
"A selection of the most
explosive ideas of our age." Sunday
Herald
"Provocative" The
Independent
"Challenging notions put forward by
some of the world's sharpest minds" Sunday
Times
"A titillating compilation" The
Guardian
"Reads like an intriguing dinner party
conversation among great minds in science" Discover
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WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE?
Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
Edited by John Brockman
Introduction by IAN MCEWAN
[2006]
"Whether or not we believe proof or prove belief, understanding belief itself becomes essential in a time when so many people in the world are ardent believers." LA Times
"Belief appears to motivate even the most rigorously scientific minds. It stimulates and challenges, it tricks us into holding things to be true against our better judgment, and, like scepticism -its opposite -it serves a function in science that is playful as well as thought-provoking. not we believe proof or prove belief, understanding belief itself becomes essential in a time when so many people in the world are ardent believers." The Times
"John Brockman is the PT Barnum of popular science. He has always been a great huckster of ideas." The Observer
"An
unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing
short of an oracle — a book ro be dog-eared and debated." Seed
"Scientific
pipedreams at their very best." The
Guardian
"Makes for some astounding
reading." Boston Globe
"Fantastically
stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world....
Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question." BBC
Radio 4
"Intellectual
and creative magnificence" The
Skeptical Inquirer
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[2008]
"Compelling"
"Stellar"
"Important"
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TULIPS
(Crunchy Con Blog)
Richard Thaler
Sendhil Mullainathan
