THE ATLANTIC
7.29.2010

THE FIVE MORAL SENSES
Alexis Madrigal

University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt delivered an absolutely dynamite talk on new advances in his field last week. The video and a transcript have been posted by Edge.org, a loose consortium of very smart people run by John Brockman. Haidt whips us through centuries of moral thought, recent evolutionary psychology, and discloses which two papers every single psychology student should have to read. Through it all, he's funny, erudite, and understandable. Here, we excerpt a few paragraphs from his conclusion, in which Haidt tells us how to think about our moral minds: ...

[...]

"THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY" [7.23.10]

An Edge Conference

Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Joshua D. Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris,
Marc D. Hauser, Josua Knobe, Elizabeth Phelps, David Pizarro

INTRODUCTION
By John Brockman

Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials: all are questions of critical importance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature.

This began in the early seventies, when, as a graduate student at Harvard, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers wrote five papers that set forth an agenda for a new field: the scientific study of human nature. In the past thirty-five years this work has spawned thousands of scientific experiments, new and important evidence, and exciting new ideas about who and what we are presented in books by scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Edward O. Wilson among many others.

In 1975, Wilson, a colleague of Trivers at Harvard, predicted that ethics would someday be taken out of the hands of philosophers and incorporated into the "new synthesis" of evolutionary and biological thinking. He was right.

Scientists engaged in the scientific study of human nature are gaining sway over the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.

No where is this more apparent than in the field of moral psychology. Using babies, psychopaths, chimpanzees, fMRI scanners, web surveys, agent-based modeling, and ultimatum games, moral psychology has become a major convergence zone for research in the behavioral sciences.

So what do we have to say? Are we moving toward consensus on some points? What are the most pressing questions for the next five years? And what do we have to offer a world in which so many global and national crises are caused or exacerbated by moral failures and moral conflicts? It seems like everyone is studying morality these days, reaching findings that complement each other more often than they clash.

— JB

PARTICIPANTS

Culture is humankind’s biological strategy, according to Roy F. Baumeister, and so human nature was shaped by an evolutionary process that selected in favor of traits conducive to this new, advanced kind of social life (culture). To him, therefore, studies of brain processes will augment rather than replace other approaches to studying human behavior, and he fears that the widespread neglect of the interpersonal dimension will compromise our understanding of human nature. Morality is ultimately a system of rules that enables groups of people to live together in reasonable harmony. Among other things, culture seeks to replace aggression with morals and laws as the primary means to solve the conflicts that inevitably arise in social life. Baumeister’s work has explored such morally relevant topics as evil, self-control, choice, and free will.

According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, humans are born with a hard-wired morality. A deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher Joshua D. Greene sees our biggest social problems — war, terrorism, the destruction of the environment, etc. — arising from our unwitting tendency to apply paleolithic moral thinking (also known as "common sense") to the complex problems of modern life. Our brains trick us into thinking that we have Moral Truth on our side when in fact we don't, and blind us to important truths that our brains were not designed to appreciate.

University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt's research indicates that morality is a social construction which has evolved out of raw materials provided by five (or more) innate "psychological" foundations: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. Highly educated liberals generally rely upon and endorse only the first two foundations, whereas people who are more conservative, more religious, or of lower social class usually rely upon and endorse all five foundations.

The failure of science to address questions of meaning, morality, and values, notes neuroscientist Sam Harris, has become the primary justification for religious faith. In doubting our ability to address questions of meaning and morality through rational argument and scientific inquiry, we offer a mandate to religious dogmatism, superstition, and sectarian conflict. The greater the doubt, the greater the impetus to nurture divisive delusions.

Evil, says Harvard psychologist and evolutionary biologist Marc D. Hauser, evolved, and emerges in daily life, as an accident of our brain's engineering. Unlike any other creature, present or past, only we combine processes of the mind that have independent and highly adaptive consequences for survival to create the ingredients of evil. When our desire for personal gain combines with our capacity for denial, we turn to excessive harms, aimed at eliminating, effacing, humiliating, and obliterating those who stand in the way.

A lot of Yale experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe's recent research has been concerned with the impact of people's moral judgments on their intuitions about questions that might initially appear to be entirely independent of morality (questions about intention, causation, etc.). It has often been suggested that people's basic approach to thinking about such questions is best understood as being something like a scientific theory. He has offered a somewhat different view, according to which people's ordinary way of understanding the world is actually infused through and through with moral considerations. He is arguably most widely known for what has come to be called "the Knobe effect" or the "Side-Effect Effect."

NYU psychologist Elizabeth Phelps investigates the brain activity underlying memory and emotion. Much of Phelps' research has focused on the phenomenon of "learned fear," a tendency of animals to fear situations associated with frightening events. Her primary focus has been to understand how human learning and memory are changed by emotion and to investigate the neural systems mediating their interactions. A recent study published in Nature by Phelps and her colleagues, shows how fearful memories can be wiped out for at least a year using a drug-free technique that exploits the way that human brains store and recall memories.

Disgust has been keeping Cornell psychologist David Pizarro particularly busy, as it has been implicated by many as an emotion that plays a large role in many moral judgments. His lab results have shown that an increased tendency to experience disgust (as measured using the Disgust Sensitivity Scale, developed by Jon Haidt and colleagues), is related to political orientation.

Among the members of the press in attendance were: Sharon Begley, Newsweek, Drake Bennett, Ideas, Boston Globe, David Brooks, OpEd Columnist, New York Times, Daniel Engber, Slate, Amanda Gefter, Opinion Editor, New Scientist, Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Gary Stix, Scientific American, Pamela Weintraub, Discover Magazine.

PROCEEDINGS

Each of the nine participants led a 45-minute session on Day One that consisted of a 25-minute talk, followed by 20-minutes of discussion.

Day Two consisted of two 90-minute open discussions on "The New Science of Morality". The first session, "Consensus/Outstanding Disagreements", led by Jonathan Haidt, explored the the scientific aspects of where we are, how much consensus we have, and what empirical or theoretical questions are still outstanding in the science of morality. The second session, "Applications/Implications", led by Marc D. Hauser, gave the participants an opportunity to think big about how the science of morality can be applied to make the world a better place, make governments work better, improve corporate governance, law, the Internet, etc. The goal for Day Two: to begin work on a consensus document on the state of moral psychology to be published on Edge in the near future.

We are pleased to make the entire 10-hours of talks and discussions available to the Edge community. Over the next month we will serialize the conference by rolling out one or two of 45-minute sessions as an Edge Edition. This will include HD video of the 25-minute talk (with complete text), the 20-minute discussion, and a doublowdable audio MP3 of the talk. We will end the series with the last two ninety-minute discussions on "The New Science of Morality".

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
July 28, 2010
FEUILLETON

Moral reasoning

SOLEMN HIGH MASS IN THE TEMPLE OF REASON

How do you train a moral muscle? American researchers take their first steps on
the path to a science of morality without God hypothesis. The last word should
have the reason.

By Jordan Mejias

[Google translation:]

28th July 2010 One was missing and had he turned up, the illustrious company would have had nothing more to discuss and think. Even John Brockman, literary agent, and guru of the third culture, it could not move, stop by in his salon, which he every summer from the virtuality of the Internet, click on edge.org moved, in a New England idyl. There, in the green countryside of Washington, Connecticut, it was time to morality as a new science. When new it was announced, because their devoted not philosophers and theologians, but psychologists, biologists, neurologists, and at most such philosophers, based on experiments and the insights of brain research. They all had to admit, even to be on the search, but they missed not one who lacked the authority in matters of morality: God.

The secular science dominated the conference. As it should come to an end, however, a consensus first, were the conclusions apart properly. Even on the question of whether religion should be regarded as part of evolution, remained out of the clear answer. Agreement, the participants were at least that is to renounce God. Him, the unanimous result of her certainly has not been completed or not may be locked investigations, did not owe the man morality. That it is innate in him, but did so categorically not allege any. Only on the findings that morality is a natural phenomenon, there was agreement, even if only to a certain degree. For, should be understood not only the surely. Besides nature makes itself in morality and the culture just noticeable, and where the effect of one ends and the other begins, is anything but settled.

Better be nice

In a baby science, as Elizabeth Phelps, a neuroscientist at New York University, called the moral psychology may by way of surprise not much groping. How about some with free will, will still remain for the foreseeable future a mystery. Moral instincts was, after all, with some certainty Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist at Florida State University, are not built into us. We are only given the ability to acquire systems of morality. Gives us to be altruistic, we are selfish by nature, benefits. It is moral to be compared with a muscle, the fatigue, but can also be strengthened through regular training. What sounds easier than is done, if not clear what is to train as well. A moral center that we can selectively edit points, our brain does not occur.

But amazingly, with all that we are nice to each other are forced reproduction, and Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, is noticed. Obviously, we have realized that our lives more comfortable when others do not fight us. Factors of Nettigkeitswachstums Bloom also recognizes in capitalism that will work better with nice people, and world religions, which act in large groups and their dynamics as it used to strangers to meet each other favorably. The fact that we have developed over the millennia morally beneficial, holds not only he has been proved. Even the neurologist Sam Harris, author of "The Moral Landscape. How Science Can Determine Human Values "(Free Press), wants to make this progress not immoral monsters like Hitler and Stalin spoil. ...

[...Continue: German language original | Google translation]

ANDREW SULLIVAN — THE DAILY DISH
25 JUL 2010

FACTS INFUSED WITH MORALITY

Edge held a seminar on morality. Here's Joshua Knobe:

Over the past few years, a series of recent experimental studies have reexamined the ways in which people answer seemingly ordinary questions about human behavior. Did this person act intentionally? What did her actions cause? Did she make people happy or unhappy? It had long been assumed that people's answers to these questions somehow preceded all moral thinking, but the latest research has been moving in a radically different direction. It is beginning to appear that people's whole way of making sense of the world might be suffused with moral judgment, so that people's moral beliefs can actually transform their most basic understanding of what is happening in a situation.

David Brooks' illuminating column on this topic covered the same ground:

...

...Advantage Locke over Hobbes.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 23, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST

THE MORAL NATURALISTS
Scientific research is showing that we are born with an innate moral sense.

By DAVID BROOKS

Washington, Conn.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have merged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don't rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it. ...

[...Continue]

Jonathan Haidt


Discussion

Sam Harris

[SAM HARRIS:] ...I think we should differentiate three projects that seem to me to be easily conflated, but which are distinct and independently worthy endeavors. The first project is to understand what people do in the name of "morality." We can look at the world, witnessing all of the diverse behaviors, rules, cultural artifacts, and morally salient emotions like empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things play out in human communities, both in our time and throughout history. We can examine all these phenomena in as nonjudgmental a way as possible and seek to understand them. We can understand them in evolutionary terms, and we can understand them in psychological and neurobiological terms, as they arise in the present. And we can call the resulting data and the entire effort a "science of morality". This would be a purely descriptive science of the sort that I hear Jonathan Haidt advocating. ... [...continue to complete text] MP3 Audio Download — Sam Harris Talk

Roy Baumeister

[ROY BAUMEISTER:] And so that said, in terms of trying to understand human nature, well, and morality too, nature and culture certainly combine in some ways to do this, and I'd put these together in a slightly different way, it's not nature's over here and culture's over there and they're both pulling us in different directions. Rather, nature made us for culture. I'm convinced that the distinctively human aspects of psychology, the human aspects of evolution were adaptations to enable us to have this new and better kind of social life, namely culture. Culture is our biological strategy. It's a new and better way of relating to each other, based on shared information and division of labor, interlocking roles and things like that. And it's worked. It's how we solve the problems of survival and reproduction, and it's worked pretty well for us in that regard. And so the distinctively human traits are ones often there to make this new kind of social life work. Now, where does this leave us with morality?  ... [...continue to complete text] MP3 Audio Download — Roy Baumeister Talk

Paul Bloom

[PAUL BLOOM:] What I want to do today is talk about some ideas I've been exploring concerning the origin of human kindness. And I'll begin with a story that Sarah Hrdy tells at the beginning of her excellent new book, "Mothers And Others."  She describes herself flying on an airplane. It’s a crowded airplane, and she's flying coach. She's waits in line to get to her seat; later in the flight, food is going around, but she's not the first person to be served; other people are getting their meals ahead of her. And there's a crying baby. The mother's soothing the baby, the person next to them is trying to hide his annoyance, other people are coo-cooing the baby, and so on.                 As Hrdy points out, this is entirely unexceptional. Billions of people fly each year, and this is how most flights are. But she then imagines what would happen if every individual on the plane was transformed into a chimp. Chaos would reign. By the time the plane landed, there'd be body parts all over the aisles, and the baby would be lucky to make it out alive.                 The point here is that people are nicer than chimps. ... [...continue to complete text] MP3 Audio Download — Paul Bloom

---

David Pizarro

[DAVID PIZARRO:] What I want to talk about is piggybacking off of the end of Paul's talk, where he started to speak a little bit about the debate that we've had in moral psychology and in philosophy, on the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment. I'm going to keep my claim simple, but I want to argue against a view that probably nobody here has, (because we're all very sophisticated), but it's often spoken of emotion and reason as being at odds with each other — in a sense that to the extent that emotion is active, reason is not active, and to the extent that reason is active, emotion is not active. (By emotion here, I mean, broadly speaking, affective influences). I think that this view is mistaken (although it is certainly the case sometimes). The interaction between these two is much more interesting.  So I'm going to talk a bit about some studies that we've done. Some of them have been published, and a couple of them haven't (because they're probably too inappropriate to publish anywhere, but not too inappropriate to speak to this audience). They are on the role of emotive forces in shaping our moral judgment. I use the term "emotive," because they are about motivation and how motivation affects the reasoning process when it comes to moral judgment. ... [...continue to complete text] MP3 Audio Download — David Pizarro Talk

[...Continue to "The New Science of Morality"]

STRAITS TIMES SINGAPORE
July 31, 2010

HAS THE NET STALLED OUR THINKING?
By Andy Ho

EVERY year, a United States-based non-profit group called The Edge Foundation poses a big question to renowned thought leaders.

This year, 172 individuals were asked to talk about the Internet. Here is a sample of the most interesting responses just posted on its read-only website.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) quantum scientist Seth Lloyd finds 'most statements in purely scientific reference articles on Wikipedia to be 99.44 per cent correct. It's that last 0.56 per cent that gets you'. The only way to be dead sure, he thinks, is to trudge to the brick-and-mortar library and locate the authoritative hard copy.

These have been scrupulously edited by 'meticulously trained editors of our newspapers, journals and publishing houses'. By contrast, stuff on the Internet is simply less edited. Unfortunately, such material will continue to occupy real estate on the Internet as long as memory space keeps doubling every year or two. When this eventually ends, editing to prune the overgrowth will come in.

Until then, however, the deluge also worries MIT architect Neri Oxman. She is reminded of how a map in Jorge Luis Borges' On Exactitude In Science becomes so precise that it enlarges to exactly the size of the territory itself. When a model becomes the reality it supposedly models, no reality is left to be modelled. ...

BELIEF NET
7.17.2010

INFORMATION, THE BASIS OF REALITY

Dr. Zeilinger — aside from being the man who recently, at a New York gathering of the Foundation, shared with me the happy news that a Dreher from Vienna did humankind a great service by inventing a kind of lager beer -- is the scientist whose Viennese team succeeded in carrying out the first example of quantum teleportation -- has written the following about the information-as-the-basis-of-reality. Excerpt: ...

...If you completely understood that, you are ahead of me. Here is a newspaper interview (trans. into English) with Dr. Zeilinger. Here's his page on Edge.org, which includes several articles on him and his work. Here is a 2001 article from New Scientist that makes Dr. Z's basic insights more intelligible for non-specialists like me, though it's still a stretch to wrap one's mind around the ideas here. The practical application of this idea, Dr. Z. has explained, is not so much that we'll be able to teleport objects -- he said that's a thousand years away -- but that we can create "quantum computers" which will be able to work vastly faster than current computers.

[...]

THE HILLIS KNOWLEDGE WEB
An Idea Whose Time Has Come [7.19.10]

In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

W. Daniel ("Danny") Hillis

In May, 2004, Edge published W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis's essay "'Aristotle': The Knowledge Web" , in which he noted:

...humanity's accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.

In his essay, Hillis asked the Edge community to begin a conversation and a number of people who think deeply about such matters participated: Douglas Rushkoff, Marc D. Hauser, Stewart Brand, Jim O'Donnell, Jaron Lanier, Bruce Sterling, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Howard Gardner, Seymour Papert, Freeman Dyson, Esther Dyson, Kai Krause, ans Pamela McCorduck.

In 2005, George Dyson noted in his prescient essay Turing's Cathedral:

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

In March, 2007, Hillis announced a new company called "Metaweb", and the free database, Freebase.com, and he wrote second Edge essay: "Addendum to 'Aristotle' (The Knowledge Web)." He wrote:

In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them.  The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.

One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer.

Danny Hillis at SciFoo at the Googleplex, July 2007

On July 17th, buried in the news on a summer Friday afternoon, was the announcement that Google had acquired Metaweb.

It all began with the technological breakthroughs in the realm of massively parallel computers and their associated algorithms. Credit for this goes to Hillis who is primarily responsible for having broken through the von Neumann bottleneck of the serial computer.

At MIT in the late seventies, Hillis built his "connection machine," a computer that makes use of integrated circuits and, in its parallel operations, closely reflects the workings of the human mind. In 1983, he spun off a computer company called Thinking Machines, which built the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture.

Hillis's computers, which were fast enough to simulate the process of evolution itself, showed that programs of random instructions can, by competing, produce new generations of programs — an approach that led to the creation of his Knowledge Web. Hillis's work demonstrates that when systems are not engineered but instead allowed to evolve — to build themselves — then the resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simple entities working together produce some complex thing that transcends them; the implications for biology, engineering, and physics have been, and will increasingly be, enormous.

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett noted that with the idea of a massively parallel architecture, which would be capable of exploring a different part of the space of possible computations, Hillis opened up a vast area:

What the British mathematician Alan Turing did, with the concept of the Turing machine, was to provide a succinct definition of the entire space of all possible computations. The machine developed by John von Neumann was a mechanical realization of Turing's idea. A von Neumann machine is the computer on your desk — the standard serial computer. In principle, the von Neumann machine — which is, for all practical purposes, a universal Turing machine — can compute any computable function; but if you don't have a billion years to wait around, you can't actually explore interesting parts of that space. The actual space explorable by any one architecture is quite limited. It sends this vanishingly thin thread out into this huge multidimensional space. To explore other parts of that space, you have got to invent other kinds of architecture. Massive parallel architectures are everybody's first, second, and third choices.

What Danny did was to create if not the first then one of the first really practical, really massive, parallel computers. It precipitated a gold rush. We had a new exploration vehicle, which was looking at portions of design space that had never been looked at before. Danny was very good at selling that idea to people in different scientific fields and demonstrating, with some of the early applications, just how powerful and exciting this vehicle was.

Two years ago this month, Hillis instigated an interesting Edge Reality Club conversation cross-referenced with a discussion on the Encyclopedia Britannica website on Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (now expanded into Carr's book The Shallows). Hillis wrote:

We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat.

As an optimist, I assume that we will eventually invent our way out of our peril, perhaps by building new technologies that make us smarter, or by building new societies that better fit our limitations. In the meantime, we will have to struggle. Herman Melville, as might be expected, put it better: "well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown."

We create tools and then we mold ourselves in their image. With The Hillis Knowledge Web he has proposed something new, something different. I can make a case that his "Aristotle" (The Knowledge Web) essay is the kind of seminal document, such as Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and MuCulloch et al's What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain that appears a few times in a century. But now, with the Google announcement, we will all find in Internet time, how his ideas play out in the real world.

("'Aristotle': The Knowledge Web"), the ensuing Reality Club conversation, and his 2007 "Addendum to 'Aristotle'", and have a conversation about where we are today regarding what I am taking the liberty of calling "The Hillis Knowledge Web".

— JB

For background reading on Hillis and his Knowledge Web, see:

• Part V: "Something Beyond Ourselves" in The Third Culture: Beyond The Cybernetic Revolution (1995)
• "The Genius" in Digerati: Encounters With The Cyber Elite (1996)

W. DANIEL (Danny) HILLIS is an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and intellectual He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 100 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. He is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock. ...

W. Daniel Hillis's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

THE TECHNIUM
July , 2010

PREDICTING THE PRESENT, FIRST FIVE YEARS OF WIRED
Kevin Kelly

I was digging through some files the other day and found this document from 1997. It gathers a set of quotes from issues of Wired magazine in its first five years. I don't recall why I created this (or even if I did compile all of them), but I suspect it was for our fifth anniversary issue. I don't think we ever ran any of it. Reading it now it is clear that all predictions of the future are really just predictions of the present.

...

We as a culture are deeply, hopelessly, insanely in love with gadgetry. And you can't fight love and win.
Jaron Lanier, Wired 1.02, May/June 1993, p. 80

I expect that within the next five years more than one in ten people will wear head-mounted computer displays while traveling in buses, trains, and planes.
Nicholas Negroponte, Wired 1.06, Dec 1993, p. 136

Pretty soon you'll have no more idea of what computer you're using than you have an idea of where your electricity is generated.
Danny Hillis, Wired 2.01, Jan 1994, p. 103

If we're ever going to make a thinking machine, we're going to have to face the problem of being able to build things that are more complex than we can understand.
Danny Hillis, Wired 2.01, Jan 1994, p. 104

The scarce resource will not be stuff, but point of view.
Paul Saffo, Wired 2.03, Mar 1994, p. 73

Roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network.
Alan Kay, Wired 2.05, May 1994, p. 77

Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled.
Kevin Kelly, Wired 2.07, Jul 1994, p. 93

It's hard to predict this stuff. Say you'd been around in 1980, trying to predict the PC revolution. You never would've come and seen me.
Bill Gates, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 166

In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things.
Brian Eno, Wired 3.05, May 1995, p. 150

We're using tools with unprecedented power, and in the process, we're becoming those tools.
John Brockman, Wired 3.08, Aug 1995, p. 119

If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars.
Nathan Myrhvold, Wired 3.09, Sep 1995, p. 154

Isn't it odd how parents grieve if their child spends six hours a day on the Net but delight if those same hours are spent reading books?
Nicholas Negroponte, Wired 3.09, Sep 1995, p. 206

Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real.
Sherry Turkle, Wired 4.01, Jan 1996, p. 199

We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much -- if at all.
Steve Jobs, Wired 4.02, Feb 1996, p. 106-107 ...

[...]

SALON
July 7, 2010

CAN THE INTERNET SAVE THE BOOK?
Online luminary Clay Shirky explains the new digital literary revolution -- and how the Web will change reading

By Andrew Keen, Barnes & Noble Review

(With additional questions from James Mustich, editor in chief of the Barnes & Noble Review).

According to media columnist Michael Wolff, the name Clay Shirky is "now uttered in technology circles with the kind of reverence with which left-wingers used to say, 'Herbert Marcuse'." Wolff is right. Shirky has emerged as a luminary of the new digital intelligentsia, a daringly eclectic thinker as comfortable discussing 15th-century publishing technology as he is making political sense of 21st-century social media.

n his 2008 book, "Here Comes Everybody," Shirky imagined a world without traditional economic or political organizations. Two years later and Shirky has a new book, "Cognitive Surplus," which imagines something even more daring — a world without television. To celebrate the appearance of the revered futurist's latest volume, we're delighted to share a February discussion between Shirky, Barnes & Noble Review editor in chief James Mustich, and BNR contributor Andrew Keen. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation about the future of the book, of the reader and the writer, and, most intriguingly, the future of intimacy.

James Mustich: Clay, I was very taken with that post you wrote about the early days of the Gutenberg revolution.

Clay Shirky: Oh, yes. Eisenstein's book.

JM: Right. It had a very insightful historical perspective that's generally lacking in conversations about today's publishing turmoil. You also had an interesting piece at edge.org recently, about how publishing is the new literacy. You said, "It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race -- a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity."

Andrew Keen: This idea of publishing as "the new literacy" sounds like a sexy, kind of Twitter remark, but what actually does that mean?

CS: We have this whole complex of words, "publish," "publisher," "publicity," "publicist," that all refer to either jobs or the work of making things public. Because it used to be incredibly difficult, complicated, and expensive to simply put material into the public sphere, and now it's not. So I'm comparing it to literacy -- literacy used to be reserved for a specialist class prior to the printing press, and, much more importantly, prior to the spread of publishers and the rise of a real publishing industry. ...

[...]

DIE PRESSE
July 10, 2010

MARGINALIE

DA VERDREHEN WISSENSCHAFTLER DIE AUGEN [AS SCIENTISTS ROLL THEIR EYES]
Anne-Catherine Simon

... Now these arguments are again being discussed in the U.S., for Carr, has expanded his article into a book: "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains". And he cites the psychiatrist Gary Small, whose research indicates that the use of new media "amplifies progressive new neural pathways in our brain and weakens the old. Through the Internet, the brain was re-wired so that it's practically new.

So what? In cognitive neuroscients roll their eyes at such talk, says the Canadian pschologist Steven Pinker who now teaches at Harvard. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it's not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience. In fact, the brain re-wiring in any new experience or ability, the information is not stored in the pancreas after all, he wrote in The New York Times "("Mind Over Mass Media"— a German translation of the article was published on Monday in the Süddeutsche Zeitung).

But experience does not revamp the basic information-processing capacities of the brain. "It is true that speed-reading programs long made claims for itself, they would just do it. Speed-reading programs have long claimed to do just that, but the verdict was rendered by Woody Allen after he read "War and Peace" in one sitting: 'It was about Russia.' Genuine multitasking, too, has been exposed as a myth, not just by laboratory studies but by the familiar sight of an S.U.V. undulating between lanes as the driver cuts deals on his cellphone."

However, it was not a scientist that carried on the debate this year about the cognitive impact of the Internet, but a literary agent. John Brockman, who represents authors such as Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond asked: "How has the Internet changed the way you think?" The more than 100 responses from well-known scientists, artists and thinkers published on www.edge.org show above all that nobody has the answer.

German Language Original | Google Translation

BOING BOING
July 8, 2010

Why We Talk to Terrorists: response to Supreme Court ruling on "material support" of foreign terrorist groups
Xeni Jardin

In John Brockman's Edge newsletter, an essay by Scott Atran (left) and Robert Axelrod (right), two social scientists who study and interact with violent groups "to find ways out of intractable conflicts." The piece is a response to a recent Supreme Court decision that amounts to a real "chilling effect" for anyone working for peace and reconciliation through dialogue with foreign groups that have a history of armed conflict. Before the ruling, we knew that sending money or guns to any of the four dozen groups currently designated by the secretary of state as terrorist organizations was punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But now the law has been clarified to show that, say, holding conflict resolution workshops with them, or even interviewing one of their officers for an op-ed piece, could merit the same penalty. This NPR News analysis is a good place to start for real-world examples. ...

[...]

MEDGADGET
June 14, 2010

HOW TOXOPLASMA AFFECTS HUMAN AND ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

The Economist has recently featured an interesting article on the behavioral effects that parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii has on its mammalian hosts. Many of these effects have been recognized for years, and some of us here at Medgadget been privy to Toxoplasma news, thanks to a friend at Stanford who works with Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a leading researcher in the field. First of all, there is strong evidence that urine from cats infected with Toxoplasma is sexually attractive to rats. Then there seems to be a connection between Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia, lack of interest in the novelties of life, and a noted correlation with people getting into more car accidents. It seems that the nature of this parasite's life cycle has created a strange symbiotic, psychological relationship between it and its typical feline and rodent hosts. The Economist provides a handy overview of the latest knowledge around this topic.

If an alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing....

One reason to suspect [that some people have their behaviour permanently changed] is that a country's level of Toxoplasma infection seems to be related to the level of neuroticism displayed by its population. Another is that those infected seem to have poor reaction times and are more likely to be involved in road accidents. A third is that they have short attention spans and little interest in seeking out novelty. A fourth, possibly the most worrying, is that those who suffer from schizophrenia are more likely than those who do not to have been exposed to Toxoplasma.

Nor is any of this truly surprising. For, besides humans, Toxoplasma has two normal hosts: rodents and cats. And what it does to rodents is very odd indeed.

Here's a must watch video interview of Sapolsky with Edge.org:

Key quote:

Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to male rodents...

Read on at The Economist: A game of cat and mouse

Edge: TOXO - A Conversation With Robert Sapolsky...

[...]

COMPUTING
March 4, 2010

THE DANGERS AND DELIGHTS OF THE WEB
By Tom Young

(Having spent many a column espousing the wonders of the internet, my final column will sound a warning on the dangers.)

The first is anonymity. This can be a curse and a blessing online. Sites such as Wikileaks - which desperately needs funding to stay open - provide a valuable place where information can be put into the public domain anonymously. ...

...But the internet carries an arguably more pervasive and long-term danger than the provision of anonymity and that is the way that it changes and shapes thinking and the way people interact with information.

The online forum edge.org recently tackled this problem. It asked leading scientists, technologists and thinkers: How is the internet changing the way you think? A number of people, including American writer Nicholas Carr and science historian George Dyson, outlined fears that the web is at risk of reducing serious thought rather than promoting it. ...

[...]

DEUTSCHLANDRADIO KULTUR
July 1, 2010

NACHWUCHWISSENSCHAFTLER DISKUTIEREN IHRE FORSCHUNG
[LEADING YOUNG SCIENTISTS DISCUSS THEIR RESEARCH]

[Audio: click here]

Max Brockman (ed.): "The Future Makers. The Nobel Prize Winners of Tomorrow Reveal What They Are Researching," S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, 270 pages

18 young scientists show which issues the company must confront in the future. The focus is the question of the nature of man.

[ROUGH TRANSLATION] "What's Next? In the past these matters would be left to future researchers, but in this new book, the editor Max Brockman, "brings together 18 young scientists on this issue which he defines as "dispatches on the future of science."  

More than a few are aiming their basic research old and not-asked recently, dusty-looking question of the nature of man. They want to help "to redefine who and what we are."

Seemingly harmless academic research questions often turn out to be explosive devices. For example, the question of the temporal processing of various components of an everyday experience. Auditory, visual, tactile and other stimuli are both processed by different brain areas and that do not work simultaneously. 

So how does our brain coordinate the different components, so that the stimuli are perceived as an event, interpreted and assessed its relevance, that they be compared with other memory contents and stored as a model for future action? 

Could it be that certain disorders — dyslexia, for example, the limited reading skills to go back — not on defects of speech, but in time to impaired processing? The neurologist David Eagleman suspects that acoustic and visual representations of coordinates may not occur simultaneously.

Another example: linguist Lera Boroditsky emphasizes that differences in language can be responsible for changes in our thought patterns. Language is not only an expression of content, it defines. Similarly, control of cultural values and concepts have different evolutionary patterns, shows the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. 

And anthropologists have long since demonstrated that, conversely, can give rise to various biological, genetic patterns turn around each other cultural and social value preferences. 

The fact that Buddhism and Confucianism in the east to fix, and Christianity in the West: This was no accident, claims the neuropsychologist Matthew Lieberman — but a kind of bio-cognitive consistency, increased evolutionary, genetic, hormonal controlled by the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Surprisingly, many researchers claim — given the growing opportunities to intervene in nature — a conscious control of evolution. Experiments on animals show that people can make changes only by a living environment in a few generations of genetic changes, even without directly intervening in the genetic material, said the biologist Brian Hare. Desirable types of people are already bred a long time: education is nothing but an attempt at such an evolutionary control.

THE SCIENTIST
July 1, 2010

EAVESDROPPINGS
Science Quotations of the Month

"From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery...It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life."

—Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

"The price we will pay for this huge amplification of our technological prowess is probably an equal and opposite vulnerability. Welcome to the fast lane, humanity."

—Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University philosopher on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

DIE WELT
26.06.10

EASYGOING INTO SPACE (LEICHTFÜSSIG INS WELTALL)
Four Science Books Explain Very Simply How Life Works
By Alan Posener

Children are born scientists. They are curious. Ask questions. They want to know how things work and why things are so and not otherwise. Better to go to the zoo than an art gallery. But at some point — or more precisely in puberty — this is this mostly lost. If you are still interested in the natural sciences, you become the pimply nerd, while the others are the cool teens. In the battle of cultures, the arts always have the upper hand in this regard. One does not win the prize by knowing how the Internet works, but you can make money with a book describing its adverse effects on your own concentration. Scientific skepticism is hip, scientific knowledge is disturbing. Where have all the curious children gone? ...

...If there is one man who has done more to popularize the natural sciences despite our feuilletonistic preferences, it is literary agent John Brockman, whose roster includes stars like the aforementioned Jared Diamond or the enfant terrible of evolutionary biology, and critic of religion, Richard Dawkins. Every year Brockman poses a question in his Internet magazine "Edge", to which Brockman's alarmingly widecast network of corresponding scientists responds. In 2005, for example, the question was What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?; In 2006 it was What Is Your Dangerous Idea?. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag now has taken up the commendable task of translating the responses to the annual question into German. A perfect read for a brief flight: after an hour you feel pleasantly stimulated and smarter than your fellow passengers.

Brockman's son Max now has stepped into the shoes (and the company) of his father and in Die Zukunfstmacher assembles essays from 18 young scientists about their respective fields of research. They deal with the multiverse, with dark matter, mirror neurons and the evolution of morality, with phantasy, the spread of good thoughts and the relation of scientific thought and reality — which is where we come back to [Natalie] Angier's starting point. You don't have to be a pimply nerd to get excited about natural sciences. To become childlike again, just read these books.

Natalie Angier: Naturwissenschaft. C. Bertelsmann, München. 382 S., 22,95 Euro.
Stefan Klein: Wir alle sind Sternenstaub. S. Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 269 S., 8,95 Euro.
John Brockman (Hg.): Das Wissen von morgen. S. Fischer. 287 S., 9,95 Euro.
Max Brockman (Hg.): Die Zukunfstmacher. S. Fischer, Frankfurt/M. 270 S., 19,95 Euro.

[German Original — Google Translation]

GENTLEMAN'S QUARTERLY (Britain)
July, 2010

TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE. Or, how the annual networking session of America's nerd elite became the world's most important and influential talking shop. MICHAEL WOLFF reports on the technology, entertainment and design conference that's the global power summit for the new super-wealthy, tech-savvy, hyper-connected intelligentsia

...But TED, which launched first in 1984, and then became an annual event from 1990. was always a little different. It was a pageant of nerdiness, in a sense combining the key forms of nerd social life: summer camp, talent show and adult education class. Physicists competed with juggling acts. Magicians with New Yorker writers. Quincy Jones followed Richard Dawkins (who gave one of his first talks about atheism at TED). Cellist Yo-Yo Ma shared a stage with superstring theorist Brian Greene.

Most elementally, it attracted the world's biggest nerds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Yahoo! boys, the Google boys and everybody else who ever made a billion dollars. They, in turn, attracted Hollywood royalty, who in turn attracted the media moguls. TED is where I first went drinking with Rupert Murdoch and first flirted with American television personality Martha Stewart.

If there was a theme at TED, then it was "insider-ism". Everybody present was somebody And everybody knew everybody. (For several dotcom years, TED was the main driver of my social life.) The tech business was the Mafia and TED was the biggest Mafia wedding of the year.

A key feature and sought-after invitation at TED, hosted on the second night by the literary agent John Brockman, is the Billionaires' Dinner — row upon row of the world's most successful (and richest) human beings ...

[See: The Billionaires' Dinner]

Il Sole 24 Ore
July 1, 2010

E SE IL TEMPO FOSSE SOLO LA COSTRUZIONE DEL CERVELLO? (BRAIN TIME)
Giulia Crivelli

By DAVID M. EAGLEMAN

David M. Eagleman has a degree in English and American literature at Oxford and the University of Houston holds a doctorate in neuroscience. The following passage was written by Eagleman for What's Next, edited by Max Brockman and published by Il Saggiatore.

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world? ...

[Italian Original]

[First Published by Edge: Brain Time By David M. Eagleman]

INVESTIMENT E NOTICIAS
July 1, 2010

TECHNOLOGY CHOICE AND THE SEVENTH UNITED
Ruy Guerra de Queiroz Barreto, Associate Professor, Center for Informatics, UFPE

SUEDDEUSTCHE ZEITUNG
June 21, 2010

NEWS FROM THE WEB [NACHRICHTEN AUS DEM NETZ]
Michael Moorstedt

[ROUGH TRANSLATION:] Type only one letter, and I know what you want to know. This is the promise of Google Suggest, the auto-complete function of the search engine. For Nicholas Carr, supplied from a database of the most frequently used search terms are proposals, however, no relief. Instead, the American journalist, feels as if the algorithm is trying to read his thoughts. "n the current issue of the magazine The Atlantic, he describes his unease with the paternalism in the guise of supposed user friendliness. The user moves only on one of programmers prescribed path. The decision, which follows link, was no longer his own.

Carr is one of those network's critics, to express their displeasure, especially in one's own blog. Among his peers he is considered one of the most enduring, he is a man with a mission. Last week he published his book, The Shallows. What the Internet is doing to our brains. The main thesis: on the excessive demands by the real-time network the multitasking-infested brain reacts with a constant distraction. Irreversible is this superficiality, and therefore the knowledge consumer in the form of printed matter the measure of all things the chief culprit. — besides the usual suspects Twitter, Facebook — The users themselves. "We want to be interrupted, because any interruption promises a new piece of information," said Carr. In the current issue of Wired, he turns directly to the person concerned. In it, he proposes, among other things, that news sites and Blogs should put all future URLs to the end of their texts in order not to disturb the flow of reading. The link as a footnote.

The text in the Atlantic Carr is the preliminary conclusion of a debate which he himself initiated, after his acclaimed 2008 essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which he published there. Carr's concerns have hardly changed since. But the once factual debate has long been turned into a religious dispute. Where it is opportune, Carr and his fellow critics promote neurologists and their research in this area. The opposing side of network apologists have countered with its own scientists and studies. Polemic also appears to be an effective tactic. In that sense Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote an OpEd in The New York Times about the Web. After all, there was the fear during all the previous media revolutions, of a decline in knowledge, whether it be from the introduction of newspapers, television or magazines. And yet the production of knowledge has exploded.

Carr responded quickly to Pinker, which this time he published on the science portal edge.org. For the time being, he has the last word. But the feud continues, and knowledge about the actual damage to our brains remains more diffuse. Few commentators show themselves as relaxed as the network optimist Clay Shirky, who has commented recently that the situation of cognitive surplus involves a new form of literacy. This does not depend on the media, but primarily by a more precise adjustment of one's own filter and use of time.

WASHINGTON POST
June 24, 2010

ON SUCCESS

FROM BOOKS TO BOARDROOM
Virginia Bianco-Mathis

Q: We all need advice as we seek success in our careers and lives. What are your five favorite business books, and why? What advice wasn't so helpful?

I believe there are three "must reads" for business. ...

... Last is a quasi-business book entitled "This Will Change Everything" (Brockman, 2010). This book compiles the thoughts of great thinkers of our time from every walk of life, including business, art, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, education, computers, etc. Every business person should read this book in order to maintain the big perspective and to hone one's thinking in strategic and synergistic ways. The best business people are those who can balance several yet seemingly contrasting concepts at once and, like a silver bullet, make the best decisions for overall effectiveness.

Stay away from quick-fix books. They are fun to read on airplanes or when you need to fall asleep. Yet in the complex business world, it takes energy and thought to continually develop and perfect the art of leadership and business success. Read books that challenge and force you to think beyond your daily grind. Or pick up the paper and read Dilbert. Laughing is always good.

[Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with its latest issue, and its focus is the new digital landscape of journalism. There are lots of interesting articles, and we'll be highlighting a few here over the next few days. Here, John Brockman writes about how he came to ask a passel of intellectual luminaries how the Internet is changing how they think. —Josh]

[Keep reading at Nieman Reports »]

A BIG QUESTION: 'HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?'

Edge posed this question; discover how a wide range of thinkers responded.

By John Brockman

MIND OVER MASS MEDIA [6.11.10]
By Steven Pinker

New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. ...

...The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is the author of six books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff

[...continue]

On "Mind Over Mass Media" By Steven Pinker

NICHOLAS CARR
Author, Does IT Matter?; The Big Switch; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Steven Pinker is too quick to dismiss people's concerns over the Internet's influence on their intellectual lives. He asserts that digitalmedia "are the only things that will keep us smart." But the evidence he offers to support the claim consists largely of opinions and anecdotes, plus one Woody Allen joke.

On neuroplasticity, Pinker expresses the skepticism characteristic of evolutionary psychology advocates. When faced with suggestions that "experience can change the brain," he writes, "cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes." But is his opinion really shared so universally? In the reports on the Net's cognitive effects published in the Times last week, scholars like Russell Poldrack, Clifford Nass, Nora Volkow, and Adam Gazzaley offered views that conflict with Pinker's. He may disagree with these views, but to pretend they don't exist is misleading. ...

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Life, Inc.

The main value in Pinker's statement is the implied notion that media technologies cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. Taken alone, neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook profile will diminish one's capacity to think or interact.

But nothing ever happens alone. These media are arising in contexts of business, economics, and other social factors. No one — or at least no one smart — is saying that PowerPoint reduces discourse to bullet points. What they are saying is that combined with the bias of the workplace for tangible metrics and easy slogans over long-term planning and complex solutions, the bias PowerPoint toward bullet points can exacerbate the worst existing tendencies in business. It turns out that PowerPoint is not the best tool for every purpose. ...

EVGENY MOROZOV
Commentator on Internet and politics "Net Effect" blog; Contributing editor, Foreign Policy

...Pinker, I fear, falls into the same conceptual trap as Carr, i.e. he sets to measure the Internet against the printing press, the comic book, and television. However, by viewing the Internet as just another medium, both Carr and Pinker end up significantly downplaying its importance.

But the Internet is not just another medium. Rather, it's a full-blown brand-new dimension to human affairs — and it is poised to profoundly affect all other dimensions. The proper analogy, thus, is not to the newspaper or the telegraph, but to religion and nationalism. However, just like one could not assess the overall impact of religion by looking at the rates of dissemination of religious literature, one cannot assess the impact of the Internet by looking at such a narrow slice of its impact as the consumption of information by its users (and Carr makes that slice even thinner by assuming that the Internet has a "logic" that is not malleable by the social, cultural, and economic environments in which it operates — an assumption I find rather dubious). Just like with religion or nationalism, there is absolutely no guarantee that the vector of social change unleashed by the Internet would be either positive or negative; most certainly, it will be both — so the sooner we find a way to diagnose and minimize its negative effects, the better. ...

...All in all, the debate between Carr and Pinker confirms my long-running suspicion that one can't grapple with the macro-level social implications of the Internet by operating on the micro-level of neuroscience or psychology. These disciplines do provide useful insights — but we need a brand-new Internet-centric social science to make sense of them.

[...continued]

Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.