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"For those seeking substance over sheen, the occasional videos released at Edge.org hit the mark. The Edge Foundation community is a circle, mainly scientists but also other academics, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures.
Edge's long-form interview videos are a deep-dive into the daily lives and passions of its subjects, and their passions are presented without primers or apologies. The decidedly noncommercial nature of Edge's offerings, and the egghead imprimatur of the Edge community, lend its videos a refreshing air, making one wonder if broadcast television will ever offer half the off-kilter sparkle of their salon chatter."
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AMAZING BABIES
Alison Gopnik
[8.11.09]
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"We've known for a long time that human children are the best learning machines in the universe. But it has always been like the mystery of the humming birds. We know that they fly, but we don't know how they can possibly do it."
— Alison Gopnik |
A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENOMICS: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
George Church
[7.25.09]
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A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENNOMICS: CONSTRUCTING LIFE FORM CHEMICALS
George Church
[7.25.09]
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A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENOMICS: MULTI-ENZYME, MULTI-DRUG, AND MULTI-VIRUS RESISTANT LIFE
George Church
[7.25.09]
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A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENOMICS: HUMANS 2.0
George Church
[7.25.09]
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A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC
GENOMICS: FROM DARWIN TO NEW FUELS (IN A VERY SHORT TIME)
Craig Venter
[7.25.09]
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A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENOMICS: ENGINEERING HUMANS, PATHOGENS AND EXTINCT SPECIES
George Church
[7.25.09]
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MAPPING THE NEANDERTHAL GENOME
Svante Pääbo
[7.4.09]
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"When I started out in '84/'85, intent on studying the genomes of ancient civilizations, I was, as is often the case in this kind of situation, driven by delusions of grandeur... Then, after some intital success, I realized the real limitations on what I wanted to do."
— Svante Pääbo |
THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW
Gavin Schmidt
[6.29.09]
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"How do you ask questions about expectations in the future? Obviously, you have to have things that are based on the physics that we know."
— Gavin Schmidt |
THE SIMPLIFIER
John A. Bargh
[6.19.09]
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"[H]umans must have had these kinds of mechanistms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness."
— John A. Bargh |
THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY
Yochai Benkler
[4.01.09]
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"The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society."
— Yochai Benkler |
IS THERE A HIGGS?
Brian Cox
[2.24.09]
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"In a very pure sense you build the accelerator you need when you know what the question is."
— Brian Cox |
THE REALITY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION
Denis Dutton
[2.24.09]
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"Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it."
— Denis Dutton |
SONG OF SONGS
Armand Leroi
[1.30.09]
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"Songs can survive hundreds of years of geographical and cultural separation."
— Armand Leroi |
CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION
A
Talk with Dean Ornish
[12.5.08]
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"Even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases."
— Dean Ornish |
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A
Talk with Alva Noë
[11.14.08]
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"The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness."
— Alva Noë |
Class 1: A Talk By Richard Thaler
[10.1.08]
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"If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way."
— Richard Thaler |
Class 2: A Talk By Richard Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan
[10.9.08]
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"At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal."
— Richard Thaler |
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCARCITY
Class 3: A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan
[10.16.08]
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"We need to understand whether there are unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question."
— Sendhil Mullainathan |
THE IRONY OF POVERTY
Class 5: A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan
[10.30.08]
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"On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. "
— Sendhil Mullainathan |
MODELING THE FUTURE
A
Talk with Stephen Schneider
[4.1.08]
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"Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question."
— Stephen Schneider |
ANTS HAVE ALGORITHMS
A
Talk with Iain Couzin
[3.13.08]
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"Another example that we've been investigating are huge swarms of Mormon crickets. If you look at these swarms, all of the individuals are marching in the same direction, and it looks like cooperative behavior. We investigated this collective decision, and what really makes this system work in the case of the Mormon cricket is cannibalism.
— Iain Couzin |
SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE LIKE THE EYE
A
Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis
[2.25.08]
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"It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover."
— Nicholas Christakis |
ENGINEERING
BIOLOGY
A
Talk with Drew Endy
[2.12.08]
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"The only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Biotechnology is 30 years old; it's a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences ."
— Drew Endy |
THE
IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST
A
Talk with Mahzarin
Banaji and Anthony Greenwald
[2.12.08]
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"What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you to be a subject in your own experiment."
Most scientists do not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study in their own research.
— Mahzarin Banaji
"The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect contents of our minds. It may be "an inconvenient truth" that what's there is not what we thought was there or want to be there. But I think it is generally something we can come to grips with."
— Anthony Greenwald |
Session One
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"I'll start with a topic that is called an inside-outside view of the planning fallacy. And it starts with a personal story, which is a true story."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Session Two
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"When you ask who is more likely to take the two million for sure, the one who has one million or the one who has four, it is very clear that it's the one with one, and that the one with four might be much more likely to gamble. When you draw real demand curves, they are kinked where the person is. Where you are turns out to be a fundamentally important parameter."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Session Three
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"People are not good at affective forecasting. We have no problem predicting whether we'll enjoy the soup we're going to have now if it's a familiar soup, but we are not good if it's an unfamiliar experience, or a frequently repeated familiar experience."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Session Four
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"The puzzle of well-being is related to the affective forecasting that most people believe that circumstances like becoming richer will make them happier. It turns out that people's beliefs about what will make them happier are mostly wrong, and they are wrong in a directional way, and they are wrong very predictably. And there is a story here that I think is interesting."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Session Five
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"Life serves us problems one at a time; we're not served with problems where the logic of the comparison is immediately evident so that we'll be spared the mistake. We're served with problems one at a time, and then as a result we answer in ways that do not correspond to logic."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Session Six
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"The question I'd like to raise is something that I'm deeply curious about, which is what should organizations do to improve the quality of their decision-making? And I'll tell you what it looks like, from my point of view."
— Daniel Kahneman |
Freeman Dyson
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"The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. My version of the origin of life is that it started with metabolism only."
— Freeman Dyson |
J. Craig Venter
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"We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet."
— J. Craig Venter |
George Church
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"Many of the people here worry about what life is, but maybe in a slightly more general way, not just ribosomes, but inorganic life. Would we know it if we saw it? It's important as we go and discover other worlds, as we start creating more complicated robots, and so forth, to know, where do we draw the line?"
— George Church |
Robert Shapiro
|
"Suppose you took Scrabble sets containing every language on Earth and you heap them together and you then took a scoop and you scooped into that heap and you flung it out on the lawn there and the letters fell into a line which contained the words “To be or not to be, that is the question,” that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule, given no feedback, appearing on the Earth."
— Robert Shapiro |
Dimitar Sasselov
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"Together with the realization of our changing universe, we are now facing a second, seemingly unrelated realization: there is a new kind of planet out there which have been named super-Earths, that can provide to life all that our little Earth does. And more."
— Dimitar Sasselov |
Seth Lloyd
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"If you program a computer at random, it will start producing other computers, other ways of computing, other more complicated, composite ways of computing. And here is where life shows up."
— Seth Lloyd |
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Rodney Brooks
