AMERICAN SCIENTIST
March-April, 2009

Short takes on three books

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything. Edited by John Brockman. Harper Perennial, $14.95, paper.

...Last year's question, "What have you changed your mind about?," brought a typically brilliant array of brief essays, by turns provocative, playful and profound. Last year's question, "What have you changed your mind about?," brought a typically brilliant array of brief essays, by turns provocative, playful and profound. Brockman has collected them into a volume with the question as its title.

In one of the essays, MIT quantum-mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd describes how his students have given him a new appreciation of technology. In another, mathematician Keith Devlin explains his growing conviction that human mathematics is peculiar to the human mind. Nature news editor Oliver Morton has abandoned his support for human spaceflight. And journalist Charles Seife, who once assumed that democracy and science shared the same ideals, now believes that the egalitarian and the skeptic are natural opponents.

These contributions are typically only two or three pages long, which makes them compulsively readable. The only disappointment is that there's no discussion among the participants—but that's what the Web site is for.—Greg Ross

GAZETEPORT.COM — Turkey
February 24, 2009

Google Translation

H/PD — Germany
February 20, 2009

Die Neuen Atheisten

ES IS ALLES WAHR

Sind Wissenschaft und Religion miteinander vereinbar? Nein, sagte der Evolutionsbiologe Jerry Coyne und argumentierte für diese Haltung ausführlich bei Edge.org. Daraufhin entbrannte eine Debatte zwischen amerikanischen Intellektuellen um diese Frage. Der "Neue Atheist" Sam Harris beantwortet sie im folgenden Essay und geht dabei satirisch auf seine Mitdiskutanten ein.

Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft
Es ist schade, dass Leute wie Jerry Coyne und Daniel Dennett nicht erkennen, wie einfach man Religion und Wissenschaft miteinander vereinbaren kann. Ich verstehe, wie sie ihre fundamentalistische Vernunft geblendet und von tieferen Wahrheiten abgehalten hat. Ich möchte diesen beiden Männern schon lange sagen: "Einige Dinge stehen über der Vernunft. Weit darüber!" Zum Glück hat George Dyson das für mich in einem genialen Essay auf dieser Website getan. Er zerstört die intellektuellen Anmaßungen von militanten Atheisten wie Coyne und Dennett auf die eleganteste Art und Weise, die man sich nur vorstellen kann: Indem er einfach den Titel einer Arbeit aus dem 17. Jahrhundert des großen Robert Boyle zitiert. Als ich ein militanter Neo-Rationalist war, hatte ich den tiefgehenden Eindruck, dass sich meine Kollegen und ich in Bezug auf das Design-Argument nicht genügend mit Boyle befasst hatten und darum öffentliche Demütigung riskierten. Nun ist es passiert...

Google Translation

OHMY NEWS — Korea
February 18, 2009

Everything Will Change
Our likely future described by 151 world-class experts

This collection of answers, which, as did its most recent predecessors, will surely find its way to printed publication in a few months, not only serves as a precise sketch of the current state-of-the-art in future studies; above all, its separate viewpoints and differing emphases converge to weave a consistent panorama of what the near future will very probably look like. ...

...Not everything needs to turn out so well. Catastrophe was another common theme in this series of essays. It may be a hurt nature taking its revenge, or a critical increase in our already unsustainable population, or an accidental nuclear detonation that sparks the next great war. The potential collapse of our industrial civilization is a real possibility we have to live with, and the authors who decided to treat this subject would prefer us not to forget it in the midst of our optimism.

Everything is changing. Or has already changed. Or won't. Or it doesn't matter. Change, as another group of authors pointed out, is in the eye of the beholder, and what "changing everything" means depends as much on our concept of "change" as on our concept of "everything." The next radical change to come may imply a redressing of the same old trends and values, or a complete reengineering of our way of life; and "everything" can mean the cultural climate of our time as well as the very fabric of existence. Change is natural, and is always occurring. And the selection made by the Edge Foundation for this year is an excellent and absorbing anthology of the best informed judgments on what is to come.

PÁGINA 12 — RADAR SUPPLEMENT — Spain
Sunday, February 15, 2009

VEO VEO

Every year, the site Edge.org has asked a question of its members and friends, the best of the forefront of science today. The year it was the following: "What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" And, as every year, Radar ran a selection of those responses — enthusiastic, hopeful, murky, skeptical, encouraging, original from more than 150 physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers, biologists, chemists and mathematicians, among others. Go ahead: you know what awaits us.

By Carlos Silber

Observe, quantify, predict, compare. Science develops and is maintained by these four pillars in balance with the deduction of the scientific method. It was Galileo 400 years ago who finally, after so much blind faith in Aristotle and validity of the argument of authority, one day left his house with these four keys to enter fully into the nature and understand it in its tracks.

If Darwin abused and wore the act of observing (and write in their journals hiperdetallistas), Einstein won his fame in 1919 when their predictions (encapsulated in the Theory of General Relativity) coincided with the facts: the comments made during a total eclipse Sun had shown that the light is diverted to pass near a massive body.

Prediction is often seen as the most valued scientific tool, able to quell that uncertainty and allow the moment to act with foresight. Many use it with restraint and other abuse it. ...

Scientists hate the hard but closely admire his vision extended. So when John Brockman, editor and head of the U.S. site of the agora Edge.org, on the forefront of science, found the question with which every year since 1998, takes the temperature to contemporary thought, biologists, physicists, chemists and all kinds of intellectuals of the "third culture" was flooded with mail box, a resounding "yes, and give you my answer."

"What Will Change Everything: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?", asked Brockman this time, who received 151 bright, optimistic, pessimistic, short, long, cryptic, theoretical as well as surprisingresponses — which in this custom-Radar, are condensed below:

[...continue]

[ED. NOTE: Feature article features the following contributors: Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, Freeman Dyson, Ian McEwan, George Dyson, Karl Sabbagh, Richard Dawkins, Zeilinger, Douglas Rushkoff, David Eagleman, Steve Nadis, Brian Eno, Craig Venter, Sherry Turkle, Marcel Kinsbourne] ...

[Spanish language original]

VRIJ NEDERLAND — Netherlands
February 14, 2009

The 50 best blogs and sites;
Web / VN Favorites

edited Forest and Kim Maurits Martijn

Edge

Fantastic online the biggest breeding ground where the spirits of the U.S. on anything discussed. Editor, society and intellectual impresario John Brockman beast Each year a question to a variety of scientists and thinkers—the Edge annual question '- and their answers are also published in book form, as warm rolls over the fly.

THE HUFFINGTON POST
February 6, 2009

Gabbing with Gates: We Talk Meltdown, Malaria, Mosquitoes, and How Not Getting Enough Sleep Lowers His IQ
Our likely future described by 151 world-class experts

...He has clearly been leading by example in changing both the business world and the world of philanthropy. But when it comes to sleep, all I can say is that when I left a dinner given by EDGE's John Brockman after midnight last night, Gates was still there talking away with X Prize's Peter Diamandis about providing big rewards for scientific breakthroughs.

SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN
February 6, 2009

Matthias Horx antwortet

Als Antwort auf diese Systemkrise der Wissenschaft haben sich in den angelsächsischen Ländern, teilweise auch in Skandinavien und Frankreich, neue Wege intellektueller Produktion entwickelt. Wissenschaftler in den USA werden zunehmend zu Autoren populärer Bücher, ihre Erkenntnisse werden auch daran gemessen, ob sie sich erzählen lassen. Und Publizisten wagen den Weg in die Wissenschaft. Neue Welt-Erkenntnis blüht in den Schnittstellen von Wissenschaft und Publizistik. Autoren wie Alain de Botton und Malcolm Gladwell schreiben hochkomplexe Bestseller über Themen wie Ästhetik, Intuition oder Erfolg ("Tipping Point", "Die Überflieger"). Und das legendäre Internetportal TED versammelt die Botschafter der "Dritten Kultur", jener Wissenschaft(en), die nach neuen Synthesen des Welt-Verstehens suchen.

Dieser "Dritten Kultur" (eine Wortschöpfung von John Brockman) fühle ich mich verpflichtet. Dem interdisziplinären Ansatz hat sich auch die Zeppelin-Universität in Friedrichshafen verschrieben, eine Hochschule "zwischen Kultur, Ökonomie, und Politik", in der ungewohnte Wege des Akademischen gegangen werden, an denen ich teilhaben darf. In den Aufnahme-Audits dieser Uni werden den Studenten typische "delphische Fragen" gestellt:

- Gibt es heute einen ähnlich großen Irrtum gibt wie die Vorstellung der Welt als Scheibe?
- Wird es etwas nach dem Kapitalismus geben?
- Warum gibt es so wenig fröhliche Wissenschaftler?

Google Translation

BUSINESS DAY — South Africa
February 6, 2009

PREDICTING THE FUTURE IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT
By Michel Pireu

THE future is radically unpredictable. It’s unpredictable because we can only track change. We can’t predict futures. Humans can do a little better than other species in predicting futures, but because of the rate of change of technology in human society, constantly throwing out new problems because of the complexity of the social changes that are occurring, then predicting the future becomes extremely hard.

"That is why I say in many respects it’s radically unpredictable. What I do insist is that we have the freedom to make choices about it … but we don’t have infinite flexibility in making those choices …we are constrained by our evolutionary past, by our biological givens — none of us can walk on water, any more than we can grow wings." Steven Rose in The two Steves debate

"Towards the end of the 19th century, the famous physicist William Thomson, more commonly known as Lord Kelvin, proclaimed the end of physics. Despite the silliness of declaring a field moribund, particularly one that had been subject to so many important developments not so long before Thomson’s ill-fated pronouncement, you can’t really fault the poor devil for not foreseeing quantum mechanics and relativity and the revolutionary impact they would have. Seriously, how could anyone, even someone as smart as Lord Kelvin, have predicted quantum mechanics?" Lisa Randall, Physicist, Harvard University

"I used to think you could … In Profiles of the Future, Arthur C Clarke made it seem so easy. "

And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted ‘human equivalence in 10 years’, the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within 15 years, and so on.

"Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space colonies, flying cars in everyone’s garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of ageing. (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)

"But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the entire business of making predictions.

"And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch between confident forecast and actual result. The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today).

"There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out.

"Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it. Nowadays I just roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page." Ed Regis, Science Writer, from an article at www.edge.org

LA STAMPA — Italy
January 31, 2009

Piero Bianucci

BOOKS, AND REVIEWS

"What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?"

Do scientists believe or know? Perhaps you must be able to know before you believe. Faith, though not religious, would be the engine of science. The paradox of the theory is that it is true but I do not believe it (Title stolen from a comedy of Peppino De Filippo), a book that collects the views of a hundred of the most brilliant physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists and psychologists, but also writers, artists, advisers and directors, who meet in the virtual living room of the agent John Brockman, publisher of the Edge website (www.edge.org).

We are on the jagged edge of research separates the known dall'ignoto, where it is permissible to make wild assumptions and outrageous scientific claims. To attract the big brains of his club on such a slippery slope Brockman launched the following Edge provocation: "Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?." A widespread unproven belief about the existence of other life forms in the universe. With different nuances. Martin Rees, cosmologist at Trinity College in Cambridge, thinks that even if our civilization is the only one, we will expand to colonize the universe and make it "intelligent". To the point that our distant descendants will even "give rise to new universes" obedient to physical laws which they laid, ie universes genetically modified. Paul Davies believes instead that life is already ubiquitous, in full agreement with Craig Venter, the geneticist-entrepreneur who has mapped the human genome. The biologist Richard Dawkins is convinced that Darwinian selection is acting also on alien species: tesi not harmless because it assumes that the evolution before the Project, and not vice versa. It would be interesting to have Pope Ratzinger comment on this. More modestly, the physicist Kenneth Ford thinks that "wherever in our galaxy there is microbial life "(the paradise for the multinationals of antibiotics). There are the obvious: "I believe that nothing is true until is not shown "(Maria Spiropulu, experimentala physicist at CERN in Geneva). The sectarian: Philip Anderson, Nobel Laureate in physics, believes that string theory is empty and creative intelligence to evade research more important. The Sophists: "I believe" (Tor Norretranders, writer). The Romantics: "I believe in true love ", David Buss, a psychologist, University of Texas. Aesthetes: Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, believes in the beauty of symmetry, and if the symmetry is violated, it opens the way for a higher order beauty. The obvious: the environmentalist Schneider (Stanford University) believes in global warming. The minimalist: Freeman Dyson, renowned theoretical physicist, is convinced, but can not prove it, than ever the opposite of a power of 2 is a power of 5.

There are also dreamers. The biologist Stuart Kaufman hopes that a "fourth law of thermodynamics" is responsible for the creation of our universe like so many biospheres, the information technologust Ray Kurzweil is confident that we will overcome the limit of transmitting information at speed light, many do not give up the idea that there is some form of existence beyond death. The neuroscientists, as is right, are obsessed by relationship between the physical brain and the intangible mind. But then comes Alun Anderson, formerly Director of New Scientist to demystify: "I believe that cockroaches have a conscience." In short, take a step beyond the "edge", and we find ourselves at the sports bar. But the book put together by Brockman, although it the runs the risk of gossip, has the great merit of making us reflect n very concrete ways on the dialectic between intuition, theory and experiment. It reminds us that science is made ofimaginative questions and answers, rather than arid rationality.

The author John Brockman (photo above) is the founder of www.edge.org, a site that compares the assumptions research scientists and intellectuals. Hence the book (left. Illustration of Doriano Solinas, on the cover).

[Italian language original]

LA REPUBBLICA
January 29, 2009

TUTTO MILANO
I CERVELLI DI EDGE EL A "FEDE"
Franco Bolelli

Non posso non tornare — a distanza di pochissirno tempo - su John Brockman e sul suo progetto Edge, perche II Saggiatore pubbliea Non evera rna ci credo, dove la domanda"in che cosa credi ancbe se non puoi provado?" si rivela un assist irresistibile per un ceutinaio di scienziati, filosofi, biologi, antropo10gi, psicologi cognitivi, ecosivla, per slanciarsi mente&cuore a trattare di intelligenza aliena, coscienza degli anirnali, risorse aneom inesplorate della nostra mente, modelli eognitivi dei bambini, inutilita delle scienze sociali e storiche, e anehe del vero amore. Un Iibro cosi - lussureggiante, brillante, energetico rivela una volta di pili quanta abbondanza c'il nei mondi evolutivi (e implicitamente quanto spenta il la cullura accademica tradizionale).

EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA — Spain
January 29, 2009

Two Victorian gentleman, back in 1875, engaged in an entertaining polemic about the superiority of science or the humanities. TH Huxley disregard the study of the classics as Matthew Arnold was mofaba of evolutionary theory, both with similar intellectual occlusion. The rifirrafe was repeated in the late fifties when CP Snow, a physicist and novelist, denounced the chasm separating the "two cultures", the scientific and literary, and ran a way of understanding something of an unequal alliance of civilizations among scientists that are moving steadily towards the future and some intellectuals that carry the weight of the past. That alliance was hot air and Snow is to step out of an angry guardian letters FR Leavis who encouraged the cotarro.

Now things are clearer and Leavis draws the wrath of nostalgic sympathy for the old junk. The narrow plume of people with scientific knowledge has been hard to crack, so that even in the nineties, John Brockman returned to the burden by advocating a "third culture", resulting from the reconciliation of science and letters. But this third culture, such as the Edge of Brockman have slipped on the thick skin of the writers alone, and has been echoed in the scientific community, increasingly concerned by spreading its activities.

All this brings me to remember the neuroscientist R. Douglas Hofstadter, who became famous in 1980 when he won with a fascinating book, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Pulitzer and the American Book Award. Hofstadter proposed that arises from our individual self-functioning of the mind. Although this sounds thick, the scientist who plays the piano and has translated the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, it has a stunning clarity that leads to deception of the reader feel smarter. Intellectual joy that can be tested in his latest book, I am a strange loop. Nostalgia with the return of the third culture in which a scientist pampers his writings as would a poet (Hofstadter does) and a passionate writer metabolize fabulous trompicones of science.

¿TERCERA CULTURA? [Spanish original]

IL SOLE 24 ORE
January 18, 2009

SCIENZA: VERO PER INSUFFICIENZA DI PROVE
La scienza «procede per funerali», infatti rivede continuamente le proprieposizioni Per questo é cosi affidabile

Sistemi di pensiero

«In cosa credi che non puoi dimostrare?»: da questa domanda del sito «Edge» é nato un libro che raccoglie le risposte di scienziati e intellettuali, da Weinberg a Wilson. Ne discute lo scrittore inglese Ian McEwan, partendo da Otello e lago

Sarà in libreria da giovedi il libro a cura di John Brockman, Non è vero ma ci credo. Intuizioni non provate, future verità (Il Saggiatore, Milano, pagg. 266 € is 00). II libro riprende le risposte giunte al sito www.edge.org alla domanda «In cosa credi anche se non puoi provarlo?». Le risposte sono firmate da un centinaio tra i più autorevoli filosofi, scrittori, psicologi e intellettuali contemporanei. L'intervento di IanMcEwan che pubblichiamo a fianco è scritto appositamente e non è compreso nel volume.

_________

di Ian McEwan

...Il lettore troverà qui un'espressione collettiva di meraviglia nei confronti del mondo vivente e inanimato che non ha equivalenti nel campo, per esempio, delle discipline culturali. In arte, forse un felice parallelo potrebbe essere rappresentato dalla poesia lirica. Un'altra caratteristica interessante è la prevalenza, qui, di ciò che E. O. Wilson chiama «l'armonia meravigliosa». I confini tra diverse specializzazioni hanno cominciato a sfaldarsi quando gli scienziati hanno scoperto di aver bisogno di basarsi su giudizi o procedure relativi a campi di studio simili o utili al loro. L'antico sogno dell'Illuminismo, un corpo di conoscenze unico, diventa un po' più vicino quando biologi ed economi si ispirano gli uni alle idee degli altri; i neuroscienziati hanno bisogno dei matematici, i biologi molecolari sconfinano nei territori poco presidiati dei chimici e dei fisici. Anche i cosmologi si sono ispirati alla teoria evolutiva. E tutti, naturalmente, hanno bisogno di computer molto sofisticati. Per parlarsi attraverso le rispettive discipline, gli scienziati sono stati costretti ad abbandonare i loro vocabolari specifici e ad adottare una lingua franca, l'inglese standard. Il casuale beneficiario, naturalmente, è il lettore comune, che non ha bisogno di familiarizzare con strani gerghi per seguire le discussioni. Una conseguenza - e forse un simbolo - di questa sintesi emergente nella comunità scientifica sono il sito web di Edge e la sua peculiare ed elettrizzante cultura intellettuale. Queste pagine rappresentano solo una piccola parte di un colloquio affascinante, ancora in corso, e aperto a tutti. La scienza «procede per funerali», infatti rivede continuamente le proprieposizioni Per questo é cosi affidabile.

THE SUNDAY HERALD-SUN (MELBOURNE)
January 18, 2008

We are drowning in information, discoveries, competing ideologies and values and personal options. Our psyches and souls are shaped by the explosion of technology and information that renders almost everything we learn almost immediately obsolete. Nothing seems permanent.

Anyone who watches Oprah or Jerry Springer knows the culture - long on openness, but short on trust.

We are a world suffering allergies. About a third of us are allergic to cat fur, peanuts, dust mites, seafood, selected chemicals or something else. There's a lot to fear.

The Edge, a website that regularly poses big questions, recently asked a select group of thinkers: What will change everything?

The scientists, philosophers and writers came up with some interesting answers.

Some argued that everything would change with the invention of cheap and powerful artificial intelligence that would improve itself.

Others opted for advances in molecular technology, discovery of intelligent life elsewhere, an end to war and human misery, mastering death, accidental nuclear war, a web-powered revolution, the breakdown of all computers and the invention of a laptop quantum computer.

A playwright suggested nothing needed to happen to bring about change; real changes, he said, had always happened, and always would.

Actor Alan Alda said: "I find it hard to believe that anything will change everything. The only exception might be if we suddenly learned how to live with one another. But, does anyone think that will come about in a foreseeable lifetime?

"Even if we were visited by weird little people from another planet and were forced to band together, I doubt if it would be long before we'd find ways to break into factions again, identifying those among us who are not quite people."

PUBLICO EDIÇÃO LISBOA
15 Jan 2009

Front Page
Future
Ideas That May Even Change The World

Cover Story, Sunday Magazine
Our Dog Will Become Our Cat

By Ana Gerschenfeld

What Will Change Everything?

Beating death
Changing human nature
The advent of telepathy
Nuclear war
The decline of the text
The end of optimism
Miniaturizating humans
The rebirth of Africa
The empire of the phone
Happiness

The question this year received 151 responses. Some were brighter than others, some more practical than others, some very optimistic, others very, very frightening—not surprising, given the open nature of the interrogation. We chose some of the most remarkable excerpts. To read more—go to edge.org.

Click here for PDF

SPIEGEL ONLINE
January 10, 2009

HEUTE IN DEN FEUILLETONS

Das Versagen der Linken im Gaza-Krieg

In der "SZ" erinnert sich Sibylle Lewitscharoff an ihre Zeit bei der Gruppe Spartacus Bolschewiki-Leninisten. Die "NZZ" hat in Detroit in die vielen Gesichter des Nichts gesehen. Und die "FAZ" erkennt in der chinesischen Markenpiraterie die Intelligenz des Volkes.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.01.2009...Weiteres: Wie es aussieht, "wenn die Intelligenz von sich selber träumt", weiß Thomas Thiel seit der Umfrage des Magazins edge.org unter hochdekorierten Naturwissenschaftlern zu der Frage: "Welche Entwicklung könnte könnte zu Ihren Lebzeiten alles ändern?"

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
January 10, 2009

Visionen der Wissenschaft
Wenn die Intelligenz von sich selber träumt
Von Thomas Thiel

[click here]

Man steigt, heißt es, nicht zweimal in denselben Fluss. Aber man hofft doch, als derselbe ans Ufer zurückzukehren. Nur im Horizont dieses Bildes zeigt sich die Radikalität der Frage, die der Literaturagent John Brockman von der Organisation "Edge" (Edge - die Website) der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft vorgelegt hat: „Welche Entwicklung könnte zu Ihren Lebzeiten alles ändern?“ Wie zu jedem Jahreswechsel fordert Brockman mit seiner Frage auf der Website von Edge die Phantasie der Wissenschaftler heraus, den Mut zum großen Gedanken. Es antworten oft hochdekorierte Forscher wie Ian Wilmut, Craig Venter oder Daniel Dennett, die in (Natur-)Wissenschaftlern und Technikern und nicht mehr im Literaten oder Historikern den zeitgemäßen Typus des Intellektuellen sehen.

Fasst man den Grundtenor der mehr als einhundertfünfzig Antworten zusammen, so gehört die Zukunft den Genetikern, Neurobiologen und Informatikern oder jedenfalls solchen Wesen, die sich die Ergebnisse neurobiologischer, informationstechnologischer und genetischer Forschung zunutze machen. Ob sie noch sinnvollerweise Menschen genannt werden sollten, ist dabei eine berechtigte Frage. ...

GOOGLE TRANSLATION

FOCUS ONLINE
January 28, 2009

ARE BANKERS CHARLATANS?
Sind Banker Scharlatane? (German Original)

At blame for the financial crisis is the nature of man, say two renowned scientists: Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and bestselling author Nassim Taleb ( "The Black Swan").

By Ansgar Siemens, FOCUS online editor

Two men sitting on the stage. Left. Daniel Kahneman, 74, bright-eyed, Nobel Prize winner. Right Nassim Taleb, 49, former Wall Street banker, best-selling author. Both speak on the future of Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on the financial crisis, about the beginning--mainly they talk about people. They say it is due to human nature, that the crisis has broken out. And they choose harsh words in discussing the scale of the disaster.

Kahneman explains why there are bubbles in the financial markets, even though everyone knows that they eventually burst. The researchers used the comparison with the weather: If there is little rain for three years, people begin to believe that this is the normal situation. If over the years stocks only increase, people can't imagine a break in this trend.

"Those responsible must go--today and not tomorrow"

Taleb speaks out sharply against the bankers. The people in control of taxpayer's money are spending billions of dollars. "I want those responsible for the crisis gone today, today and not tomorrow," he says, leaning forward vigorously. The risk models of banks are a plague, he says, the bankers are charlatans.

It is nonsense to think that we can assess risks and thus protect against a crash. Taleb has become famous with his theory of the black swan described in his eponymous bestsellers described. Black swans, which are events that are not previously seen--not even with the best model. "People will never be able to control a coincidence," he says.

The early warning

"Taleb had an early warning before the crisis. In 2003 he took note of the balance sheet of the U.S. mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae, and he saw "dynamite".

In autumn last year, the U.S. government instituted A dramatic bailout. Taleb said in the "Sunday Times" in 2008: "Bankers are very dangerous." And even now, he sees a scandal: He provocatively asks what have the banks done with the government bailout money. "They have paid out more bonuses, and they have increased their risks." And it was not their own money.

Taleb calls for rigorous changes: nationalize banks--and abolish financial models. Kahneman does not quite agree with him. Certainly, the models are not capable of predicting a collapse. But one should not ignore our human nature. People will always require and use models and get benefit from them--even if they are wrong.

...

LOS ANGELES TIMES
January 12, 2009

Here's a radical idea—getting fit is fun and contagious

By Carole Carson

What is your dangerous idea? This intriguing question is the subject of a collection of essays, edited by John Brockman, by some of the smartest people on the planet. When exposed to the innovative thinking in the essays, I remind myself that ideas considered radical, even heretical, in one century may be widely accepted in the next.

So, what's my dangerously radical idea? ...

DER SPIEGEL January 3, 2009

[ED. NOTE: Last year the German Weekly News Magazine Der Spiegel, ran a multi-part series (see above), featuring excerpts from the Edge Annual Question book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove, published in Germany by S. Fischer. We are pleased to announce that, begnning this week, Der Spiegel will begin publishing an ongoing series based on the Edge 2009 Question, What Wll Change Everything?, which will consist of a mix of responses from Edge contributors and notable German scientists and thinkers.]

...

EL MUNDO
January 3, 2009

Impíos deseos al empezar el año
By Arcadia Espada

Al rito solar del Año Nuevo, el concierto de Viena (me paso las dos horas de valses, fantaseando con el frío de fuera, y la choucroute caliente y morosa que le espera al primer concertino: todo lo que me gusta me da hambre) y los saltos en Garmisch Partenkirchen se ha unido ya la pregunta de Edge. Al despuntar el alba, y con todas las ilusiones intactas, Brockman&Guests sacuden la resaca, preguntan y se responden. Lo hacen desde 1998 y este año proponen: BEl subtítulo lleva una consoladora precisión: se trata de cambios y desarrollos científicos que podamos ver en vida. El resumen de las ideas de Edge, la navajita más afilada de la cultura contemporánea, siempre es complicado. Excepto, claro está, en el caso de los dos o tres artistas que figuran cada año a modo de sansivieras: todas sus respuestas se pueden ignorar. Deberás fiarte, pues, de mi gusto y de mis obsesiones. También de las limitaciones del formato de la carta. Y, principalmente, de mis límites: no entiendo todas las respuestas. En todo caso, aquí tienes el catálogo completo....

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NEWSWEEK
January 3, 2009

On Second Thought...
Scientists are supposed to change their minds when evidence undercuts their views. Dream on.

By Sharon Begley

When politicians do it, they're tarred as flip-floppers. When lovers do it, we complain they're fickle. But scientists are supposed to change their minds. Having adopted their views on scientific questions— What killed the dinosaurs? Is the universe infinite?—based on a dispassionate evaluation of empirical evidence, they are expected to willingly, even eagerly, abandon cherished beliefs when new evidence undercuts them. So it is remarkable that so few of the essays in a new book in which scientists answer the question in the title, "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?", express anything like this ideal.

Many of the changes of mind are just changes of opinion or an evolution of values. One contributor, a past supporter of manned spaceflight, now thinks it's pointless, while another no longer has moral objections to cognitive enhancement through drugs. An anthropologist is now uncomfortable with cultural relativism (as in, study the Inca practice of human sacrifice non-judgmentally). Other changes of mind have to do with busted predictions, such as that computer intelligence would soon rival humans'. ...