Cover
About the Book
Title Page
DAVID BROOKS: Foreword
JOHN BROCKMAN: Preface
MARTIN REES
“Deep Time” and the Far Future
Far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up until now.
MARCELO GLEISER
We Are Unique
Modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite.
P. Z. MYERS
The Mediocrity Principle
Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.
SEAN CARROLL
The Pointless Universe
Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Copernican Principle
We are not anywhere special.
J. CRAIG VENTER
We Are Not Alone in the Universe
There is a humancentric, Earthcentric view of life that permeates most cultural and societal thinking.
STEWART BRAND
Microbes Run the World
This biotech century will be microbe-enhanced and maybe microbe-inspired.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Double-Blind Control Experiment
Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts, three-quarters believe in angels, a third believe in astrology, three-quarters believe in hell?
MAX TEGMARK
Promoting a Scientific Lifestyle
Our global scientific community has been nothing short of a spectacular failure when it comes to educating the public.
ROGER SCHANK
Experimentation
Experimentation is something done by everyone all the time.
TIMO HANNAY
The Controlled Experiment
When required to make a decision, the instinctive response of most nonscientists is to introspect, or perhaps call a meeting.
GINO SEGRE
Gedankenexperiment
Consciously or unconsciously, we carry out gedankenexperiments of one sort or another in our everyday life.
KATHRYN SCHULZ
The Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science
One generation’s verities … often become the next generation’s falsehoods.
SAMUEL BARONDES
Each of Us Is Ordinary, Yet One of a Kind
This dual view of each of us, as both run-of-the-mill and special, has been so well established by biologists and behavioral scientists that it may now seem self-evident.
JOHN TOOBY
Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattribution Arbitrage
Our self-evidently superior selves and in-groups are error-besotted.
DAVID G. MYERS
Self-Serving Bias
Compared with our average peer, most of us fancy ourselves as more intelligent, better-looking, less prejudiced, more ethical, healthier, and likely to live longer.
GARY MARCUS
Cognitive Humility
Computer memory is much better than human memory because early computer scientists discovered a trick that evolution never did.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Technologies Have Biases
Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them.
GERALD SMALLBERG
Bias Is the Nose for the Story
Our brains evolved having to make the right bet with limited information.
JONAH LEHRER
Control Your Spotlight
Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
The Focusing Illusion
The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.
CARLO ROVELLI
The Uselessness of Certainty
The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
LAWRENCE KRAUSS
Uncertainty
In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability.
AUBREY DE GREY
A Sense of Proportion About Fear of the Unknown
Fear of the unknown is not remotely irrational in principle … but it can be and generally is overdone.
NIGEL GOLDENFELD
Because
Complex systems, such as financial markets or the Earth’s biosphere, do not seem to obey causality.
STUART FIRESTEIN
The Name Game
Even words that, like “gravity,” seem well settled may lend more of an aura to an idea than it deserves.
SETH LLOYD
Living Is Fatal
People are bad at probability on a deep, intuitive level.
GARRETT LISI
Uncalculated Risk
We are afraid of the wrong things, and we are making bad decisions.
NEIL GERSHENFELD
Truth Is a Model
Building models is … a never-ending process of discovery and refinement.
JON KLEINBERG
E Pluribus Unum
The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity.
STEFANO BOERI
A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality
Even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension.
KEVIN KELLY
Failure Liberates Success
Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated.
NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS
Holism
Holism takes a while to acquire and appreciate. It is a grown-up disposition.
ROBERT R. PROVINE
TANSTAAFL
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.
GERALD HOLTON
Skeptical Empiricism
In politics and society at large, important decisions are all too often based on deeply held presuppositions.
THOMAS A. BASS
Open Systems
Now that the Web has frothed through twenty years of chaotic inventiveness, we have to push back against the forces that would close it down.
GEORGE CHURCH
Non-Inherent Inheritance
We are well into an unprecedented new phase of evolution, in which we must generalize beyond our DNA-centric worldview.
PAUL KEDROSKY
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.
MARTIN SELIGMAN
PERMA
The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive.
STEVEN PINKER
Positive-Sum Games
In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself.
ROGER HIGHFIELD
The Snuggle for Existence
Competition does not tell the whole story of biology.
DYLAN EVANS
The Law of Comparative Advantage
At a time of growing protectionism, it is more important than ever to reassert the value of free trade.
JASON ZWEIG
Structured Serendipity
Creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation.
RUDY RUCKER
The World Is Unpredictable
Even if the world is as deterministic as a computer program, you still can’t predict what you’re going to do.
CHARLES SEIFE
Randomness
Without an understanding of randomness, we are stuck in a perfectly predictable universe that simply doesn’t exist outside our heads.
CLIFFORD PICKOVER
The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine
We are reluctant to believe that great discoveries are part of a discovery kaleidoscope and are mirrored in numerous individuals at once.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN
Inference to the Best Explanation
Not all explanations are created equal.
EMANUEL DERMAN
Pragmamorphism
Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism.
NICHOLAS CARR
Cognitive Load
When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
To Curate
In our phase of globalization … there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture.
RICHARD NISBETT
“Graceful” SHAs
An assumption of educators for centuries has been that formal logic improves thinking skills. … But this belief may be mistaken.
ROB KURZBAN
Externalities
The notion of externalities forces us to think about unintended (positive and negative) effects of actions, an issue that looms larger as the world gets smaller.
JAMES O’DONNELL
Everything Is in Motion
Remembering that everything is in motion—feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion—is always hard for us.
DOUGLAS T. KENRICK
Subselves and the Modular Mind
The only way we manage to accomplish anything in life is to allow only one subself to take the conscious driver’s seat at any given time.
ANDY CLARK
Predictive Coding
The brain exploits prediction and anticipation in making sense of incoming signals and using them to guide perception, thought, and action.
DONALD HOFFMAN
Our Sensory Desktop
Our sensory experiences … can be thought of as sensory desktops that have evolved to guide adaptive behavior, not report objective truths.
BARRY C. SMITH
The Senses and the Multisensory
We now know that the senses do not operate in isolation but combine, both at early and late stages of processing, to produce our rich perceptual experiences of our surroundings.
DAVID EAGLEMAN
The Umwelt
Our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality.
ALISON GOPNIK
The Rational Unconscious
The idea of the rational unconscious has … transformed our scientific understanding of creatures whose rationality has traditionally been denied, such as young children and animals.
ADAM ALTER
We Are Blind to Much That Shapes Our Mental Life
Our brains are processing multitudes of information below the surface of conscious awareness.
W. TECUMSEH FITCH
An Instinct to Learn
The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn.”
MICHAEL SHERMER
Think Bottom Up, Not Top Down
Almost everything important that happens in both nature and society happens from the bottom up, not the top down.
IRENE PEPPERBERG
Fixed-Action Patterns
The concept of a fixed-action pattern, despite its simplicity, may prove valuable as a metaphorical means to study and change human behavior.
TERRENCE SEJNOWSKI
Powers of 10
Thinking in powers of 10 is such a basic skill that it ought to be taught along with integers in elementary school.
JUAN ENRIQUEZ
Life Code
As we begin to rewrite existing life, strange things evolve.
STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN
Constraint Satisfaction
When moving into a new house, my wife and I had to decide how to arrange the furniture in the bedroom.
DANIEL C. DENNETT
Cycles
The secret ingredient of improvement is always the same: practice, practice, practice.
JENNIFER JACQUET
Keystone Consumers
A relative few can … ruin a resource for the rest of us.
JARON LANIER
Cumulative Error
Our brains have unrealistic expectations of information transformation.
DAN SPERBER
Cultural Attractors
In spite of variations, an Irish stew is an Irish stew, Little Red Riding Hood is Little Red Riding Hood, and a samba is a samba.
GIULIO BOCCALETTI
Scale Analysis
It is through scale analysis that we can often make sense of complex nonlinear phenomena in terms of simpler models.
FRANK WILCZEK
Hidden Layers
Hidden layers embody in a concrete physical form the fashionable but rather vague and abstract idea of emergence.
LISA RANDALL
“Science”
The theory that works might not be the ultimate truth, but it’s as close an approximation to the truth as you need.
MARCEL KINSBOURNE
The Expanding In-Group
The in-group-vs.-out-group double standard … could in theory be eliminated if everyone alive were considered to be in everyone else’s in-group.
JONATHAN HAIDT
Contingent Superorganisms
It is the most noble and the most terrifying human ability.
CLAY SHIRKY
The Pareto Principle
We are still failing to predict it, even though it is everywhere.
WILLIAM CALVIN
Find That Frame
What has been cropped out of the frame can lead the unwary to an incorrect inference.
JAY ROSEN
Wicked Problems
In the United States, rising health care costs are a classic case of a wicked problem. No “right” way to view it.
DANIEL GOLEMAN
Anthropocene Thinking
Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left the Holocene epoch and entered … the Anthropocene, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life.
ALUN ANDERSON
Homo dilatus
Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto, but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.
SAM HARRIS
We Are Lost in Thought
Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox.
THOMAS METZINGER
The Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model
A transparent self-model necessarily creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood—of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole.
SUE BLACKMORE
Correlation Is Not a Cause
Understanding that a correlation is not a cause could raise levels of debate over some of today’s most pressing scientific issues.
DAVID DALRYMPLE
Information Flow
Saying “A causes B” sounds precise but is actually very vague.
LEE SMOLIN
Thinking in Time Versus Thinking Outside of Time
Thinking outside of time often implies the existence of an imagined realm, outside the universe, where the truth lies.
RICHARD FOREMAN
Negative Capability Is a Profound Therapy
Mistakes, errors, false starts—accept them all.
TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Depth
It is not what is there but what used to be there that matters.
HELEN FISHER
Temperament Dimensions
Temperament is … the foundation of who you are.
GEOFFREY MILLER
The Personality/Insanity Continuum
We are all more or less crazy in many ways.
JOEL GOLD
ARISE
Sometimes it takes a genius to see that a fifth-grade science experiment is all that is needed to solve a problem.
MATTHEW RITCHIE
Systemic Equilibrium
Living on a single planet, we are all participants in a single physical system that has only one direction—toward systemic equilibrium.
LINDA STONE
Projective Thinking
When we cling rigidly to our constructs … we can be blinded to what’s right in front of us.
V. S. RAMACHANDRAN
Anomalies and Paradigms
One can speak of reigning paradigms—what Kuhn calls normal science and what I cynically refer to as a mutual-admiration club trapped in a cul-de-sac of specialization.
DAVID GELERNTER
Recursive Structure
It helps us understand the connections between art and technology, helps us see the aesthetic principles that guide the best engineers and technologists and the ideas of clarity and elegance that underlie every kind of successful design.
DON TAPSCOTT
Designing Your Mind
Want to strengthen your working memory and ability to multitask? Try reverse mentoring—learning with your teenager.
ANDRIAN KREYE
Free Jazz
The 1960 session that gave the genre its name … was a precursor to a form of communication that has left linear conventions and entered the realm of multiple parallel interactions.
MATT RIDLEY
Collective Intelligence
Human achievement is based on collective intelligence—the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves.
GERD GIGERENZER
Risk Literacy
Unlike basic literacy, risk literacy requires emotional rewiring—rejecting comforting paternalism and illusions of certainty and learning to take responsibility and to live with uncertainty.
ROSS ANDERSON
Science Versus Theater
Modern societies waste billions on protective measures whose real aim is to reassure rather than to reduce risk.
KEITH DEVLIN
The Base Rate
In cases where [an] event is dramatic and scary, like a terrorist attack on an airplane, failure to take account of the base rate can result in wasting massive amounts of effort and money trying to prevent something that is very unlikely.
MARTI HEARST
Findex
Although some have written about information overload, data smog, and the like, my view has always been the more information online the better, as long as good search tools are available.
SUSAN FISKE
An Assertion Is Often an Empirical Question, Settled by Collecting Evidence
People’s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.
GREGORY PAUL
Scientists Should Be Scientists
Folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and thinking they’re true to the point of obstinacy, even when they have little or no idea of what they’re talking about in the first place.
JAMES CROAK
Bricoleur
Currently, encompassing worldviews in philosophy have been shelved, and master art movements of style and conclusion folded alongside them; no more isms are being run up the flagpole, because no one is saluting.
MARK HENDERSON
Science’s Methods Aren’t Just for Science
Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of pursuits beyond the laboratory.
NICK BOSTROM
The Game of Life—and Looking for Generators
It’s a brilliant demonstration platform for several important concepts—a virtual “philosophy of science laboratory.”
ROBERT SAPOLSKY
Anecdotalism
Every good journalist knows its power.
TOM STANDAGE
You Can Show That Something Is Definitely Dangerous but Not That It’s Definitely Safe
A wider understanding of the fact that you can’t prove a negative would, in my view, do a great deal to upgrade the public debate around science and technology.
CHRISTINE FINN
Absence and Evidence
Philosophically this is a challenging concept, but at an archaeological site all became clear in the painstaking tasks of digging, brushing, and troweling.
JOHN McWHORTER
Path Dependence
One may assume that cats cover their waste out of fastidiousness, when the same creature will happily consume its own vomit and then jump on your lap.
SCOTT D. SAMPSON
Interbeing
Each of us is far more akin to a whirlpool, a brief, ever-shifting concentration of energy in a vast river that has been flowing for billions of years.
DIMITAR SASSELOV
The Other
Astronomy and space science are intensifying the search for life on other planets. … The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself.
BRIAN ENO
Ecology
We now increasingly view life as a profoundly complex weblike system with information running in all directions.
STEPHON H. ALEXANDER
Dualities
A duality allows us to describe a physical phenomenon from two different perspectives.
AMANDA GEFTER
Dualities
Dualities are as counterintuitive a notion as they come, but physics is riddled with them.
ANTHONY AGUIRRE
The Paradox
Nature appears to contradict itself with the utmost rarity, and so a paradox can be an opportunity for us to lay bare our cherished assumptions.
ERIC TOPOL
Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box”
Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web.
DAVID ROWAN
Personal Data Mining
We need to [mine] our own output to extract patterns that turn our raw personal data stream into predictive, actionable information.
SATYAJIT DAS
Parallelism in Art and Commerce
[Damien] Hirst was the artist of choice for conspicuously consuming hedge-fund managers, who were getting very rich.
LAURENCE C. SMITH
Innovation
In the world of science, innovation stretches the mind to find an explanation when the universe wants to hold on to its secrets just a little longer.
KEVIN HAND
The Gibbs Landscape
The systems we have designed and built are inefficient and incomplete in the utilization of energy to do the work of civilization’s ecosystems.
VINOD KHOSLA
Black Swan Technologies
Who would be crazy enough to have forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones as to latrines?
GLORIA ORIGGI
Kakonomics
Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them.
ERIC WEINSTEIN
Kayfabe
It provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.
KAI KRAUSE
Einstein’s Blade in Ockham’s Razor
And there it was, the dancing interplay between simplex and complex that has fascinated me in so many forms.
DAVE WINER
Heat-Seeking Missiles
Your weakness is attractive. Your space is up for grabs.
MARCO IACOBONI
Entanglement
Entanglement feels like magic. … Yet [it] is a real phenomenon, measurable and reproducible in the lab.
TIMOTHY TAYLOR
Technology Paved the Way for Humanity
Thinking through things and with things, and manipulating virtual things in our minds, is an essential part of critical self-consciousness.
PAUL SAFFO
Time Span of Discretion
We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with.
TANIA LOMBROZO
Defeasibility
Between blind faith and radical skepticism is a vast but sparsely populated space where defeasibility finds its home.
RICHARD THALER
Aether
Aether variables are extremely common in my own field of economics.
MARK PAGEL
Knowledge as a Hypothesis
There will always be some element of doubt about anything we come to “know” from our observations of the world.
EVGENY MOROZOV
The Einstellung Effect
Familiar solutions may not be optimal.
EDUARDO SALCEDO-ALBARÁN
Homo sensus sapiens: The Animal That Feels and Reasons
We are the tension of the sensus and the sapiens.
FIERY CUSHMAN
Understanding Confabulation
Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized and even goal-driven.
DAVID M. BUSS
Sexual Selection
Research on human mating strategies has exploded over the past decade, as the profound implications of sexual selection become more deeply understood.
BART KOSKO
QED Moments
We can really only prove tautologies.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
Objects of Understanding and Communication
I want help flying through my waking dreams connecting the threads of these epiphanies.
CARL ZIMMER
Life as a Side Effect
Everyone would do well to overcome that urge to see agents where there are none.
GREGORY COCHRAN
The Veeck Effect
It occurs whenever someone adjusts the standards of evidence in order to favor a preferred outcome.
JOSHUA GREENE
Supervenience!
A TOE won’t tell you anything interesting about Macbeth or the Boxer Rebellion.
HAZEL ROSE MARKUS AND ALANA CONNER
The Culture Cycle
Just as there is no such thing as a culture without agents, there are no agents without culture.
VICTORIA STODDEN
Phase Transitions and Scale Transitions
Our intuition regularly seems to break down with scale.
BRIAN KNUTSON
Replicability
Replication should be celebrated rather than denigrated.
XENI JARDIN
Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation
Facts are more fluid than in the days of our grandfathers.
DIANE F. HALPERN
A Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process
“Statistically significant difference” is a core concept in research and statistics, but … it is not an intuitive idea.
BEATRICE GOLOMB
The Dece(i)bo Effect
Key presumptions regarding placebos and placebo effects are more typically wrong than not.
ANDREW REVKIN
Anthropophilia
More fully considering our nature … could help identify certain kinds of challenges that we know we’ll tend to get wrong.
MAHZARIN R. BANAJI
A Solution for Collapsed Thinking: Signal Detection Theory
Signal-detection theory … provides a mathematically rigorous framework for understanding the nature of decision processes.
DAVID PIZARRO
Everyday Apophenia
The pattern-detection responsible for so much of our species’ success can just as easily betray us.
ERNST PÖPPEL
A Cognitive Toolkit Full of Garbage
Because we are a victim of our biological past, and as a consequence a victim of ourselves, we end up with shabby SHAs, having left behind reality.
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by John Brockman
Copyright
Foreword by David Brooks
DAVID BROOKS
Columnist, New York Times; author, The Social Animal
Every era has its intellectual hotspots. We think of the Bloomsbury Group in London during the early twentieth century. We think of the New York intellectuals who wrote for little magazines like Partisan Review in the 1950s. The most influential thinkers in our own era live at the nexus of the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, and information technology. This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere.
Many of the leaders of this network are in this book. They are lucky enough to be at the head of fast-advancing fields. But they are also lucky enough to have one another. The literary agent and all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman gathers members of this network for summits. He arranges symposia and encourages online conversations. Through Edge.org, he has multiplied the talents of everybody involved. Crucially, he has taken scholars out of their intellectual disciplines, encouraging them to interact with people in different fields, to talk with business executives, to talk with the general public.
The disciplinary structure in the universities is an important foundation. It enforces methodological rigor. But it doesn’t really correlate with reality (why do we have one field, psychology, concerning the inner life and another field, sociology, concerning the outer life, when the distinction between the two is porous and maybe insignificant?). If there’s going to be a vibrant intellectual life, somebody has to drag researchers out of their ghettos, and Brockman has done that, through Edge.
The book you hold in your hand accomplishes two things, one implicit, one explicit. Implicitly it gives you an excellent glimpse of what some of the world’s leading thinkers are obsessed with at the moment. You can see their optimism (or anxiety) about how technology is changing culture and interaction. You’ll observe a frequent desire to move beyond deductive reasoning and come up with more rigorous modes of holistic or emergent thinking.
You’ll also get a sense of the emotional temper of the group. People in this culture love neat puzzles and cool questions. Benoit Mandelbrot asked his famous question “How long is the coast of Britain?” long before this symposium was written, but it perfectly captures the sort of puzzle people in this crowd love. The question seems simple. Just look it up in the encyclopedia. But as Mandelbrot observed, the length of the coast of Britain depends on what you use to measure it. If you draw lines on a map to approximate the coastline, you get one length, but if you try to measure the real bumps in every inlet and bay, the curves of each pebble and grain of sand, you get a much different length.
That question is intellectually complexifying but also clarifying. It gets beneath the way we see, and over the past generation the people in this book have taken us beneath our own conscious thinking and shown us the deeper patterns and realms of life. I think they’ve been influenced by the ethos of Silicon Valley. They seem to love heroic attempts at innovation and don’t believe there is much disgrace in an adventurous failure. They are enthusiastic. Most important, they are not coldly deterministic. Under their influence, the cognitive and other sciences have learned from novels and the humanities. In this book, Joshua Greene has a brilliant entry in which he tries to define the relationship between the sciences and the humanities, between brain imaging and Macbeth. He shows that they are complementary and interconnected magisteria. In this way the rift between the two cultures is being partially healed.
The explicit purpose of this book is to give us better tools to think about the world. Though written by researchers, it is eminently practical for life day to day.
As you march through or dance around in this book, you’ll see that some of the entries describe the patterns of the world. Nicholas Christakis is one of several scholars to emphasize that many things in the world have properties not present in their parts. They cannot be understood simply by taking them apart; you have to observe the interactions of the whole. Stephon Alexander is one of two writers (appropriately) to emphasize the dualities found in the world. Just as an electron has both wave-like and particle-like properties, so many things can have two sets of characteristics simultaneously. Clay Shirky emphasizes that while we often imagine bell curves everywhere, in fact the phenomena of the world are often best described by the Pareto Principle. Things are often skewed radically toward the top of any distribution. Twenty percent of the employees in any company do most of the work, and the top 20 percent within that 20 percent do most of that group’s work.
As you read through the entries that seek to understand patterns in the world, you’ll run across a few amazing facts. For example, I didn’t know that twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.
But most of the essays in the book are about metacognition. They consist of thinking about how we think. I was struck by Daniel Kahneman’s essay on the Focusing Illusion, by Paul Saffo’s essay on the Time Span Illusion, by John McWhorter’s essay on Path Dependence, and Evgeny Morozov’s essay on the Einstellung Effect, among many others. If you lead an organization, or have the sort of job that demands that you think about the world, these tools are like magic hammers. They will help you, now and through life, to see the world better, and to see your own biases more accurately.
But I do want to emphasize one final thing. These researchers are giving us tools for thinking. It sounds utilitarian and it is. But tucked in the nooks and crannies of this book there are insights about the intimate world, about the realms of emotion and spirit. There are insights about what sort of creatures we are. Some of these are not all that uplifting. Gloria Origgi writes about Kakonomics, our preference for low-quality outcomes. But Roger Highfield, Jonathan Haidt, and others write about the “snuggle for existence”: the fact that evolution is not only about competition, but profoundly about cooperation and even altruism. Haidt says wittily that we are the giraffes of altruism. There is something for the poetic side of your nature, as well as the prosaic.
The people in this book lead some of the hottest fields; in these pages they are just giving you little wisps of what they are working on. But I hope you’ll be struck not only by how freewheeling they are willing to be, but also by the undertone of modesty. Several of the essays in this book emphasize that we see the world in deeply imperfect ways, and that our knowledge is partial. They have respect for the scientific method and the group enterprise precisely because the stock of our own individual reason is small. Amid all the charms to follow, that mixture of humility and daring is the most unusual and important.
JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher and editor, Edge
In 1981 I founded the Reality Club. Through 1996, the club held its meetings in Chinese restaurants, artists’ lofts, the boardrooms of investment-banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. The Reality Club differed from the Algonquin Round Table, the Apostles, or the Bloomsbury Group, but it offered the same quality of intellectual adventure. Perhaps the closest resemblance was to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal gathering of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age—James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin. In a similar fashion, the Reality Club was an attempt to gather together those people exploring the themes of the postindustrial age.
In 1997, the Reality Club went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.
For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I have asked contributors for their responses to a question that comes to me, or to one of my correspondents, in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a question. As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have.
This year’s question, suggested by Steven Pinker and seconded by Daniel Kahneman, takes off from a notion of James Flynn, intelligence researcher and emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who defined shorthand abstractions (SHAs) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates. “Market,” “placebo,” “random sample,” and “naturalistic fallacy” are a few of his examples. His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk, which can be used as an element in thinking and in debate.
The Edge Question 2011
Here, the term “scientific” is to be understood in a broad sense—as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be human behavior, corporate behavior, the fate of the planet, or the future of the universe. A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or any other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous tool that can be summed up succinctly but has broad application to understanding the world.
MARTIN REES
President emeritus, the Royal Society; professor of cosmology & astrophysics; master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival
WE NEED TO extend our time horizons. Especially, we need deeper and wider awareness that far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up until now.
Our present biosphere is the outcome of about 4 billion years of evolution, and we can trace cosmic history right back to a Big Bang that happened about 13.7 billion years ago. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture and understanding—even though the concept may not yet have percolated to all parts of Kansas and Alaska. But the immense time horizons that stretch ahead—though familiar to every astronomer—haven’t permeated our culture to the same extent.
Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporizing any life that might then remain on Earth. But even after the sun’s demise, the expanding universe will continue, perhaps forever—destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. That, at least, is the best long-range forecast that cosmologists can offer, though few would lay firm odds on what may happen beyond a few tens of billions of years.
Awareness of the “deep time” lying ahead is still not pervasive. Indeed, most people—and not only those for whom this view is enshrined in religious beliefs—envisage humans as in some sense the culmination of evolution. But no astronomer could believe this; on the contrary, it would be equally plausible to surmise that we are not even at the halfway stage. There is abundant time for posthuman evolution, here on Earth or far beyond, organic or inorganic, to give rise to far more diversity and even greater qualitative changes than those that have led from single-celled organisms to humans. Indeed, this conclusion is strengthened when we realize that future evolution will proceed not on the million-year time scale characteristic of Darwinian selection but at the much accelerated rate allowed by genetic modification and the advance of machine intelligence (and forced by the drastic environmental pressures that would confront any humans who were to construct habitats beyond the Earth).
Darwin himself realized that “not one living species will preserve its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.” We now know that “futurity” extends far further—and alterations can occur far faster—than Darwin envisioned. And we know that the cosmos, through which life could spread, is far more extensive and varied than he envisioned. So humans are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree but a species that emerged early in cosmic history, with special promise for diverse evolution. But this is not to diminish their status. We humans are entitled to feel uniquely important, as the first known species with the power to mold its evolutionary legacy.
MARCELO GLEISER
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy, Dartmouth College; author, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe
TO IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S cognitive toolkit, the required scientific concept has to be applicable to all humans. It needs to make a difference to us as a species, or, more to the point I am going to make, as a key factor in defining our collective role. This concept must affect the way we perceive who we are and why we are here. It should redefine the way we live our lives and plan for our collective future. This concept must make it clear that we matter.
A concept that might grow into this life-redefining powerhouse is the notion that we, humans on a rare planet, are unique and uniquely important. But what of Copernicanism, the notion that the more we learn about the universe the less important we become? I will argue that modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite. Whereas it does say that we are an accident in an indifferent universe, it also says that we are a rare accident and thus not pointless.
But wait! Isn’t it the opposite? Shouldn’t we expect life to be common in the cosmos and us to be just one of many creatures out there? After all, as we discover more and more worlds circling other suns, the so-called exoplanets, we find an amazing array of possibilities. Also, given that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same across the universe, we should expect life to be ubiquitous: If it happened here, it must have happened in many other places. So why am I claiming that we are unique?
There is an enormous difference between life and intelligent life. By intelligent life, I don’t mean clever crows or dolphins but minds capable of self-awareness and of developing advanced technologies—that is, not just using what’s at hand but transforming materials into devices that can perform a multitude of tasks. I agree that single-celled life, although dependent on a multitude of physical and biochemical factors, shouldn’t be an exclusive property of our planet—first, because life on Earth appeared almost as quickly as it could, no more than a few hundred million years after things quieted down enough; and second, because the existence of extremophiles, life-forms capable of surviving in extreme conditions (very hot or cold, very acidic or/and radioactive, no oxygen, etc.), show that life is resilient and spreads into every niche it can.
However, the existence of single-celled organisms doesn’t necessarily lead to that of multicellular ones, much less to that of intelligent multicellular ones. Life is in the business of surviving the best way it can in a given environment. If the environment changes, those creatures that can survive under the new conditions will. Nothing in this dynamic supports the notion that once there’s life all you have to do is wait long enough and poof! up pops a clever creature. This smells of biological teleology, the concept that life’s purpose is to create intelligent life, a notion that seduces many people for obvious reasons: It makes us the special outcome of some grand plan. The history of life on Earth doesn’t support this evolution toward intelligence. There have been many transitions toward greater complexity, none of them obvious: prokaryotic to eukaryotic unicellular creatures (and nothing more for 3 billion years!), unicellular to multicellular, sexual reproduction, mammals, intelligent mammals, Edge.org … Play the movie differently and we wouldn’t be here.
As we look at planet Earth and the factors that enabled us to be here, we quickly realize that our planet is very special. Here’s a short list: the long-term existence of a protective and oxygen-rich atmosphere; Earth’s axial tilt, stabilized by a single large moon; the ozone layer and the magnetic field, which jointly protect surface creatures from lethal cosmic radiation; plate tectonics, which regulates the levels of carbon dioxide and keeps the global temperature stable; the fact that our sun is a smallish, fairly stable star not too prone to releasing huge plasma burps. Consequently, it’s rather naïve to expect life—at the complexity level that exists here—to be ubiquitous across the universe.
A further point: Even if there is intelligent life elsewhere—and, of course, we can’t rule that out (science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don’t)—it will be so remote that for all practical purposes we are alone. Even if SETI finds evidence of other cosmic intelligences, we are not going to initiate an intense collaboration. And if we are alone, and alone are aware of what it means to be alive and of the importance of remaining alive, we gain a new kind of cosmic centrality, very different and much more meaningful than the religion-inspired one of pre-Copernican days, when Earth was the center of Creation. We matter because we are rare and we know it.
The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another’s company.
P. Z. MYERS
Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula
AS SOMEONE WHO just spent a term teaching freshman introductory biology and will be doing it again in the coming months, I have to say that the first thing that leaped to my mind as an essential skill everyone should have was algebra. And elementary probability and statistics. That sure would make my life easier, anyway; there’s something terribly depressing about seeing bright students tripped up by a basic math skill they should have mastered in grade school.
But that isn’t enough. Elementary math skills are an essential tool we ought to be able to take for granted in a scientific and technological society. What idea should people grasp to better understand their place in the universe?
I’m going to recommend the mediocrity principle. It’s fundamental to science and it’s also one of the most contentious, difficult concepts for many people to grasp. And opposition to the mediocrity principle is one of the major linchpins of religion and creationism and jingoism and failed social policies. There are a lot of cognitive ills that would be neatly wrapped up and easily disposed of if only everyone understood this one simple idea.
The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn’t privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn’t the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws—laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit—given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. The rules of inheritance and the nature of biology meant that when your parents had a baby, it was anatomically human and mostly fully functional physiologically, but the unique combination of traits that make you male or female, tall or short, brown-eyed or blue-eyed, were the result of a chance shuffle of genetic attributes during meiosis, a few random mutations, and the luck of the draw in the grand sperm race at fertilization.
Don’t feel bad about that, though; it’s not just you. The stars themselves form as a result of the properties of atoms, the specific features of each star set by the chance distribution of ripples of condensation through clouds of dust and gas. Our sun wasn’t required to be where it is, with the luminosity it has; it just happens to be there, and our existence follows from this opportunity. Our species itself is partly shaped by the force of our environment through selection and partly by fluctuations of chance. If humans had gone extinct a hundred thousand years ago, the world would go on turning, life would go on thriving, and some other species would be prospering in our place—and most likely not by following the same intelligence-driven, technological path we did.
And that’s OK—if you understand the mediocrity principle.
The reason this principle is so essential to science is that it’s the beginning of understanding how we came to be here and how everything works. We look for general principles that apply to the universe as a whole first, and those explain much of the story; and then we look for the quirks and exceptions that led to the details. It’s a strategy that succeeds and is useful in gaining a deeper knowledge. Starting with a presumption that a subject of interest represents a violation of the properties of the universe, that it was poofed uniquely into existence with a specific purpose, and that the conditions of its existence can no longer apply, means that you have leaped to an unfounded and unusual explanation with no legitimate reason. What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.
SEAN CARROLL
Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
THE WORLD CONSISTS of things, which obey rules. If you keep asking “why” questions about what happens in the universe, you ultimately reach the answer “because of the state of the universe and the laws of nature.”
This isn’t an obvious way for people to think. Looking at the universe through our anthropocentric eyes, we can’t help but view things in terms of causes, purposes, and natural ways of being. In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle saw the world teleologically—rain falls because water wants to be lower than air; animals (and slaves) are naturally subservient to human citizens.
From the start, there were skeptics. Democritus and Lucretius were early naturalists who urged us to think in terms of matter obeying rules rather than chasing final causes and serving underlying purposes. But it wasn’t until our understanding of physics was advanced by thinkers such as Avicenna, Galileo, and Newton that it became reasonable to conceive of the universe evolving under its own power, free of guidance and support from anything beyond itself.
Theologians sometimes invoke “sustaining the world” as a function of God. But we know better; the world doesn’t need to be sustained, it can simply be. Pierre-Simon Laplace articulated the very specific kind of rule that the world obeys: If we specify the complete state of the universe (or any isolated part of it) at some particular instant, the laws of physics tell us what its state will be at the very next moment. Applying those laws again, we can figure out what it will be a moment later. And so on, until (in principle, obviously) we can build up a complete history of the universe. This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the iron grip of an unbreakable pattern.
This view of the processes at the heart of the physical world has important consequences for how we come to terms with the social world. Human beings like to insist that there are reasons why things happen. The death of a child, the crash of an airplane, or a random shooting must be explained in terms of the workings of a hidden plan. When Pat Robertson suggested that Hurricane Katrina was caused in part by God’s anger at America’s failing morals, he was attempting to provide an explanatory context for a seemingly inexplicable event.
Nature teaches us otherwise. Things happen because the laws of nature say they will—because they are the consequences of the state of the universe and the path of its evolution. Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme but as a by-product of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium. Our impressive brains don’t develop because life is guided toward greater levels of complexity and intelligence but from the mechanical interactions between genes, organisms, and their surroundings.
None of which is to say that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Only that these are things we create, not things we discover out there in the fundamental architecture of the world. The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to us to make sense of it and give it value.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
Applied mathematician; postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School; affiliate, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
THE SCIENTIST NICOLAUS