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Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, and artist Ólafur Elíasson, was a two-fold project that expands the idea of experimentation and display. It comprised an exhibition and a public event, which brought together leading international artists, writers and scientists to form a ‘laboratory of experiences’.
For this event, Obrist reprised the Edge World Question Center – Formulae for the 21st Century — which he first presented at the Serpentine Gallery in London last October.
As was the case in London, the event featured live presentations of "table-top" experiments from numerous artists and scientists. One of the presenters was Avant-garde film-maker, writer, visionary Jonas Mekas who was, and is, the organizing force behind Film-Makers Cinematheque. I hadn't seen or talked to him in 43 years. In 1965, Mekas hired me to manage the Cinematheque. I was 24-years old at the time. One day he handed me a piece of paper with a list of about 50 artists, poets, dancers, film-makers, laid out hia vision for a "new cinema" festival, wished me luck, and left the country, leaving me to produce "The Expanded Cinema Festival" which took place in Novermber, 1965. The Festival included events/performances by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, USCO, Carolee Schneemann (also at Reykjavik), Kenneth Dewey & Terry Riley, and Jack Smith. (See The Nation, 12.27,1967, second page.)
Hans Ulrich Obrist and I have been interviewing each other for years. As recently as last month I presented an Edge feature on his ideas about running an exhibition. (See "A Rule of the Game".) One event at the Reykjavik Festival was a conversation between us on my experiences in the art world and the intersections with science. I received a transcription of the 20-minute event which I was prepared to publish on Edge when until I realized that ten years ago, we sat together for the better art of a day covered much of the same ground much more extensively. The Q&A was published in Art Orbit and is available online. Click on the image.
—JB
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Now Available! Originally published in hardcover as The New Humanists, this revised and updated paperback edition features additional conversations, as well as a new introduction written especially for this edition.
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"Unseld Edition" Now, in 2008, Suhrkamp Verlag is entering the game, and has launched, with their "Unseld edition", a new publishing series, which also campaigns for a "third culture". The series will also be home to a search for ways out of the "blind alleys of the 19th century". Unlike Brockman and his Edge Foundation, whose intermediary work is restricted to making science papers intelligible to all, Suhrkamp promises to resurrect the lost conversation thread between the "two cultures". But are the humanities still a serious interlocutor following the global triumph of the naturalistic worldview model? |
FINDINGS Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight. Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources |
Dark, Perhaps Forever This fall, NASA and the Department of Energy plan to invite proposals for a $600 million satellite mission devoted to dark energy. But some scientists fear that might not be enough. When astronomers and physicists gathered at the Space Telescope Science Institute recently to take stock of the revolution, their despair of getting to the bottom of the dark energy mystery anytime soon, if ever, was palpable, even as they anticipate a flood of new data from the sky in coming years. When it came time for one physicist to discuss new ideas about dark energy, he showed a blank screen. The institute’s director, Matt Mountain, said that dark energy had given this generation of astronomers a rare opportunity, and he admonished them to use it wisely. “We are placing a large bet,” Dr. Mountain said, “using our credibility as collateral, that we as a community know what we are doing.” But many stressed that it was going to be a long march with no clear end in sight. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University told them, “In spite of the fact that you are liable to spend the rest of your lives measuring stuff that won’t tell us what we want to know, you should keep doing it.” |
ESSAY That was the World Science Festival in New York City this past weekend: 46 shows, debates, demonstrations and parties spread over five days and 22 sites between Harlem and Greenwich Village, organized by Dr. Greene, the Columbia physicist and author, and his wife, Ms. Day, a former ABC-TV producer. Jugglers and philosophers, magicians and biologists, musicians and dancers — a feast one couldn’t hope to sample fairly. ... ...Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts, argued that humans are free, which he defined as the capacity to be moved by reasons. But weren’t those reasons just part of the environment? Dr. Dennett responded that we have to build the environment so that people will do the right thing. Morality is the elephant in the room, said Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, suggesting that humans seem to have an inbred sense of right and wrong from God. The day before, he had won huge applause for maintaining that he did not have to choose between Darwin and God. A scientist could be religious. But this time he was hammered for failing to consider that evolution could instill such values if they proved adaptive. “Why do you prefer God to me?” asked Marvin Minsky, a computer science professor at M.I.T. and a founder of the field of artificial intelligence. “Do you really want to know?” Dr. Collins responded. |
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions. And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future. These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters. But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences. See "Einstein: An Edge Symposium" [9.17.07] |
Taleb is now the hottest thinker in the world. ... He gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists, traders, even to Nasa, the US Fire Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But he doesn't tell them what to do – he doesn't know. He just tells them how the world is. "I'm not a guru. I'm just describing a problem and saying, 'You deal with it.'" ... Taleb's top life tips See "Learning to Expect the Unexpected" by Nassim Taleb [4.19.04] |
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson have been discussing the nature of collaboration and art for more than a decade. They met in the early 1990s and soon began visiting Iceland each summer with a contingent of other artists and thinkers to explore the landscape and share ideas, in the hope of spurring creativity. Their latest project, part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival, is a more formal version of the gatherings. Called the Experiment Marathon Reykjavik, it brought together more than 50 artists, architects, filmmakers and academics to demonstrate the intersection between art and science. |
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Column: Muse Of course, logarithms remain central to any advanced study of mathematics. But as they are no longer a practical arithmetic tool, one can't now assume general familiarity with them. And so, countless popular science books contain potted guides to using exponential notation and interpreting logarithmic axes on graphs. Why do they need to do this? Because logarithmic scaling is the natural system for magnitudes of quantities in the sciences. That's why a new claim that logarithmic mapping of numbers is the natural, intuitive scheme for humans rings true. Stanislas Dehaene of the Federative Institute of Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and his co-workers report in Science 1 (#B1) that both adults and children of an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu, who have had almost no exposure to the linear counting scale of the industrialized world, judge magnitudes on a logarithmic basis. See: "What Are Numbers, Really? A Cerebral Basis For Number Sense" By Stanislas Dehaene [10.27.97] |
By Freeman Dyson See: "Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society" By Freeman Dyson [8.8.07] |
Conservative bioethics' latest, most dangerous ploy This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called "therapeutic cloning" that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council? Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long effort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suffering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it affronted human dignity. ... See: "A Biological Understanding of Human Nature: A Talk with Steven Pinker" (9.9.02) |
The future historians of the nerd ascendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digital economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired economic credibility, the seedbed of social prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls — Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on. ... ...They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In "The Laws of Cool," Alan Liu writes: "Cool is a feeling for information." When someone has that dexterity, you know it. See: "Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture" By Fred Turner" [10.3.06] |
By Gina Kolata For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision. Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit. The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends. See: "Social Networks are Like The Eye" A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis [2.25.08] |
Neurobiologists, philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars are probing the nature of human MORALITY using a variety of experimental techniques and moral challenges ... In another version of the experiment, a nearby trash can doused with novelty fart spray had a similar effect. The findings, in press at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, demonstrate that emotions such as disgust exert a powerful influence on moral judgments, even when they are triggered by something unrelated to the moral issue, says study co-author Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Haidt is one of a growing number of researchers taking an experimental approach to investigating the nature of human morality. The field has drawn practitioners from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. They don't always see eye to eye, but they are united in their belief that the scientific method will yield fresh insights into questions that have vexed philosophers for centuries. ... ...The Koenigs study contains hints that emotions aren't the entire story, however, says coauthor Marc Hauser, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University. He points out that the lesion patients still made normal judgments in many situations, particularly regarding dilemmas that didn't tug at the emotions and "easier" ones that are emotionally charged but elicit strong consensus among healthy subjects--that it's wrong, for example, to earn money to feed your family by allowing your young daughter to appear in a pornographic film, even in hard times. "That rules out the strong version of the hypothesis that emotions are causally necessary for making [all] moral judgments," Hauser says. "That just can't be right." Don't get all emotional In a 2001 Science paper, Greene, then a postdoc with Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University, and colleagues reported that the medial frontal gyrus and other brain regions linked to emotion become more active when people contemplate "personal" moral dilemmas--such as shoving the man onto the trolley tracks or removing a man's organs against his will to save five transplant recipients--compared with when they weigh impersonal moral dilemmas--such as flipping a switch to save the workers or declaring bogus business expenses on a tax return. These impersonal dilemmas preferentially activate a different set of brain regions thought to contribute to abstract reasoning and problem solving, Greene and colleagues reported in a follow-up study, published in 2004 in Neuron. See: Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, and Marc D. Hauser, in "Formulae for the 21st Century: What Is Your Formula? Uor Equation? our Algorithm?" [10.13.07] |
By Gina Kolata For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision. Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit. The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends. See: "Social Networks are Like The Eye" A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis [2.25.08] |
...What about the undeserving rich? Research shows that it's better to be middle class than poor. Things get complicated as you move further out on the "swinishly wealthy" axis, because $100 million doesn't buy a hundred times the pleasure of $1 million. Best-selling happiness monger ("Stumbling on Happiness") Daniel Gilbert compares accumulating wealth to eating pancakes. "The first one is delicious, the second one is good, the third OK," he told Harvard magazine. "By the fifth pancake you're at a point when an infinite number more pancakes will not satisfy you to any degree. But no one stops earning money or striving for more money." The hedonometricians even came up with the notion of a "hedonic set point," or baseline. This is like the body weight set point, meaning that if you weigh 175 pounds now, you will probably weigh about that much for the rest of your life. Hedonically speaking: This is about as happy as you will ever be. Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff has asserted that this happiness baseline notion is wrong: "Personality is much less stable than body weight, and happiness levels are even less stable than personality." So, there is an upside: A certain number of people can become more happy. But wait! "For every person who shows a substantial lasting increase in happiness, two people show a decrease," Etcoff wrote on a website called edge.org. ... See: "The Hedonic Set Point Can Be Raised" by Nancy Etcoff (1.1.07) "The Science of Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert (5.22.06) |
May 1995 ...Wired: Talking to Kevin in 1995 you also suggested the future wouldn't be "interactive" music, but products that are "permanently unfinished." Since 1995, due to remix culture and the further democratization of tools, many consumers now view all products as unfinished, regardless of artistic intention. On some level, is such inevitable deconstruction enough to prove your prediction came true? See: "Constellations" by Brian Eno" [2.2.07] |
Eno has been the thinking person's producer since he collaborated with David Bowie and reinvented U2 By Nick Hasted The quietest revolutionary in rock is 60. Elvis, Dylan, James Brown, even Oasis, have set more souls alight. But, by working for Microsoft (he wrote the Windows start-up theme), Bowie, U2 and Talking Heads, Brian Eno has parlayed outlandish musical ideas into a ubiquitous and lucrative career. Coldplay, with their new album Viva La Vida, are the latest to request his patented production philosophies of misdirection and subtle reinvention. ... Eno's musical foils ...David Bowie One of his first pop collaborations was with Bowie in 1977, and his production work on the Berlin Trilogy helped re-categorised the star's work. ... Talking Heads Responsible for the overall new wave sound of early Talking Heads. Working closely with David Byrne and the band he co-wrote their critically acclaimed 1980 album Remain in Light. ... U2 Eno agreed to produce U2's album The Unforgettable Fire with Daniel Lanois in 1984 and since the pair produced some of the band's most famous works including The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. Paul Simon Aged 64, Simon's long and highly-anticipated first collaboration with Eno was realised in the 11-track album Surprise in 2006. Coldplay The latest band to get Eno's production on upcoming album Viva la Vida. See: "A Big Theory Of Culture: A Talk With Brian Eno" [4.1.97] |
Zeeya Merali The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics creates several paradoxes that still make some physicists uncomfortable, says Valentini. For instance, quantum theory uses probability to describe the properties of a particle. These properties obtain definitive values only when they are measured, which means that you cannot predict a particle's position or momentum, for instance, with certainty. These premises troubled Albert Einstein. He believed that particles contain extra properties — or 'hidden variables' — that determine their behaviour completely. If only we knew what these hidden variables were, we could predict the fate of particles and the outcome of measurements with certainty. Bohmian mechanics is one of a suite of 'hidden variables' theories — many now discredited — formulated to tackle this problem. ... |
In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident. ... ...The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as "The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world. And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible. Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. See: "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion" "Are Human Brains Unique" By Michael Gazzaniga [4.10.08] "Moral Minds" By Marc D. Hauser in "Darwin Y La Tercera Culture in Barcelona" [11.30.05] |
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has made a career of trafficking in moral ambiguity and complexity. Evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser has pioneered research into the idea of a universal morality grounded in biology. Hauser believes humans possess a moral grammar; Morris isn't so sure. The two met when Morris asked Hauser to be part of his short film for the 2007 Oscars. They kept in touch, exchanged ideas, and Hauser attended an early screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris's film about the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Recently in Boston they debated game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people. See: "Animal Minds: A Talk With Marc D. Hauser" (4.18.99) |
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A REPORTER AT LARGE As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up—twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along with the occasional full-out jungle squawk. The birds, many of them for sale, were displayed in cages just beyond the curtained-off stage, which was inside the main hall of the DuPage County Fairgrounds, in Wheaton, Illinois. Nobody seemed particularly distracted by the commotion. People were too busy pulling out their cell phones and showing one another photographs of their cockatiels back home. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early April, and a woman in the folding metal chair in front of me, who was wearing large parrot earrings, said that she had driven all the way from Florida to see Pepperberg. Indeed, if this were a political rally, the audience would be Pepperberg’s base. Here were admirers who had sent in ten-dollar bills to help support her research with Alex, the African gray parrot that she worked with for thirty years; and here were people who, after Alex died, unexpectedly, of heart arrhythmia, on September 6, 2007, helped form an online community that comes together on the sixth day of every month to reflect about him. __ Wordbird See "That Damn Bird: A Talk with Irene Pepperberg" (9.23.03) |
FEUILLETON ...This is not the first intellectual iconoclasm of a practical science. In the early nineties, the so-called Third Culture arose under the patronage of New York literary agent John Brockman. Since then, in bestsellers and in the online magazine Edge.org, scientists have begun to conquer the realm that traditionally belonged to philosophy and theology. With enormous success, Steven Pinker destroyed the great myths of the Enlightenment with his book The Blank Slate, Daniel Dennett reduced free will to biological processes, and Richard Dawkins supported the core beliefs of millions with his onslaught against religious faith in The God Delusion. ... See: "The Emerging Third Culture" By John Brockman" |
Neurobiologists, philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars are probing the nature of human MORALITY using a variety of experimental techniques and moral challenges ... In another version of the experiment, a nearby trash can doused with novelty fart spray had a similar effect. The findings, in press at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, demonstrate that emotions such as disgust exert a powerful influence on moral judgments, even when they are triggered by something unrelated to the moral issue, says study co-author Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Haidt is one of a growing number of researchers taking an experimental approach to investigating the nature of human morality. The field has drawn practitioners from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. They don't always see eye to eye, but they are united in their belief that the scientific method will yield fresh insights into questions that have vexed philosophers for centuries. ... ...The Koenigs study contains hints that emotions aren't the entire story, however, says coauthor Marc Hauser, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University. He points out that the lesion patients still made normal judgments in many situations, particularly regarding dilemmas that didn't tug at the emotions and "easier" ones that are emotionally charged but elicit strong consensus among healthy subjects--that it's wrong, for example, to earn money to feed your family by allowing your young daughter to appear in a pornographic film, even in hard times. "That rules out the strong version of the hypothesis that emotions are causally necessary for making [all] moral judgments," Hauser says. "That just can't be right." Don't get all emotional In a 2001 Science paper, Greene, then a postdoc with Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University, and colleagues reported that the medial frontal gyrus and other brain regions linked to emotion become more active when people contemplate "personal" moral dilemmas--such as shoving the man onto the trolley tracks or removing a man's organs against his will to save five transplant recipients--compared with when they weigh impersonal moral dilemmas--such as flipping a switch to save the workers or declaring bogus business expenses on a tax return. These impersonal dilemmas preferentially activate a different set of brain regions thought to contribute to abstract reasoning and problem solving, Greene and colleagues reported in a follow-up study, published in 2004 in Neuron. See: Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, and Marc D. Hauser, in "Formulae for the 21st Century: What Is Your Formula? Uor Equation? our Algorithm?" [10.13.07] |
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Does your brain have a mind of its own? Our attempts to pursue our goals are often thwarted by the fact that evolution has built our most sophisticated technologies on top of older technologies -- without working out how to integrate the two. We can plan in advance, using our modern deliberative reasoning systems, but our ancestral reflexive mechanisms, which evolved first, still basically control the steering wheel. When the chips are down, it's those mechanisms that our brains turn to, and that means that our brains frequently wind up relying on machinery that is all about acting first and asking questions later, squandering some of the efforts of our deliberative system. See: "Language, Body, and the Mind: A Talk with Gary Marcus" (1.28.04) |
By Sean Carroll KEY CONCEPTS See: "On Taking Science on Faith" By Sean Carroll [1.1.06] |
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Nassim Taleb's 2007 best-seller on improbable events looks prescient to a Wall Street battered by subprime. Now even NASA wants to pick the former trader's brain for tips on randomness. By Stephanie Baker-Said
In wealth, it's the opposite. "If we sample from the world population and get two people whose net worth totals 14 million pounds, what's the most likely combination?" he asked. "Seven and seven? No, it's £5,000 and £14 million minus £5,000." He gives these two domains different names. The first he calls Mediocristan, where, if you have a large sample, the average of an independent, identical, random set of variables will converge in the middle. In Taleb's other domain, Extremistan, average outcomes have little meaning. If financial markets are governed by extreme movements and unexpected events, we shouldn't be fooled into believing worst-case scenarios, he says. "We need more chutzpah,'' he says. "If someone tried to do stress testing before the stock market crash in '87, they would not have tested for 20 percent down." Taleb likens modern-day financial markets to medicine in the 1800s, when going to a hospital in London or Paris multiplied your risk of death by four times, he says. Similarly, quants increase risk by deploying flawed financial tools designed to reduce it, he argues. For Taleb, the ills besetting financial markets are a vindication of his ideas. Like medicine, though, he isn't offering easy cures. See "Learning to Expect the Unexpected" by Nassim Taleb [4.19.04] |
Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme By Pat Shipman ...In Mr. Dawkins's view, the organisms containing those genes are merely "lumbering robots" or "survival machines" that house and carry genetic information. The implication is that, in these terms, selfishness, even ruthless selfishness, pays off, and altruism does not. Some predicted that this book would be the death knell of the idea of group selection. No longer would evolutionary biologists suggest that natural selection worked to promote the good of the species (group selection) or even the individual and his close relatives who share many of his genes (kin selection, a type of group selection). But prediction is difficult in a contingent world such as ours, where life is complex and accidents and coincidences wield so much power. Has "The Selfish Gene" in fact killed off group selection ideas? Why not? And what effect has the book had instead? Though selfish genes are still fashionable among evolutionary biologists, group selection and kin selection, its subset, are not dead. In 2007, David Sloan Wilson, professor at Binghampton University, and E.O. Wilson (no relation), a professor emeritus at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize winner, proclaimed that Mr. Dawkins had celebrated the death of group selection prematurely. The pair asserted persuasively that altruism and cooperation can be adaptive if they are directed toward relatives who share a suite of one's genes (kin selection) or if relationships can be established within a group in which cooperation is rewarded with future reciprocity. ... See: "The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On" [3.16.06] |
If God Is Dead, Who Gets His House? The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. By Sean McManus It seems unlikely that many of the 850 or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn’t God provide people some solace? asked an audience member. "Isn’t that a little childish?" Dawkins replied. "Just because something is comforting doesn’t mean it’s true." Then someone asked about death, and Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born." The room erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were ever here at all. Dawkins and his colleagues had helped to produce a kind of atheist big bang, a new beginning. But what kind of new structures might evolve? [See: "The Future Looks Bright By Richard Dawkins" (7.23.03)] |
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