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THE WORLD QUESTION
CENTER - 2005 [1.4.05]
"WHAT
DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT
PROVE IT?"
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?
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YOU
CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL
[1.19.05]
A Talk with Philip Zimbardo
When
you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors
together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody
in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon
and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of
a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional
analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among
many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's
the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels
that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi
prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic
forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that
'little shop of horrors.' |
THE WORLD QUESTION
CENTER - 2005 [3.8.05]
"WHAT
DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT
PROVE IT?"
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?
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ERNST
MAYR: A REMEMBRANCE - 1904-2005 [2.8.05]
Robert
Trivers
Ernst
Mayr is dead at a hundred years of age, as lordly
a cedar as ever stood in evolutionary biology
and life more generally. He was full of vigor
right up to the end. A stronger phenotype I never
saw, personal quality matched to intellectual
power. Everyone needs a moral compass in life
and for a time in my life Ernst was exactly that,
integrity, honesty, and a life based on sound
moral principles — a standard to which
one could turn for self-criticism and inspiration.
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THE
PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, "THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD"
[3.8.05]
Richard Foreman
But
today, I see within us all (myself included) the
replacement of complex inner density with a new
kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information
overload and the technology of the "instantly
available". A new self that needs to contain
less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural
inheritance—as we all become "pancake
people"—spread wide and thin as we connect
with that vast network of information accessed
by the mere touch of a button. |
THE
GÖDEL-TO-GOOGLE NET
[3.8.05]
George Dyson
As Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, we've been pounded into instantly-available
pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the
whole Gödel-to-Google net. Does the resulting mind (as Richardson would
have it) belong to us? Or does it belong to something else?
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THE
NATURE OF NORMAL HUMAN VARIETY [3.15.05]
A Talk with Armand Leroi
Of course, there will be people who object. There will
be people who will say that this is a revival of racial
science. Perhaps so. I would argue, however, that even
if this is a revival of racial science, we should
engage in it for it does not follow that it is a revival
of racist science. Indeed, I would argue, that
it is just the opposite.
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THE
ASSORTATIVE MATING THEORY [4.4.05]
A Talk with Simon Baron-Cohen
My
thesis with regard to sex differences is quite moderate,
in that I do not discount environmental factors; I'm just
saying, don't forget about biology. To me that sounds
very moderate. But for some people in the field of gender
studies, even that is too extreme. They want it to be
all environment and no biology. You can understand that
politically that was an important position in the 1960s,
in an effort to try to change society. But is it a true
description, scientifically, of what goes on? It's time
to distinguish politics and science, and just look at
the evidence. |
THE
MATHEMATICS OF LOVE [4.14.05]
A Talk with John Gottman
We
were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations
for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception.
These equations provided parameters, that allowed us to
predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going
to happen to a relationship over a three-year period.
The main advantage of the math modeling was that using
these parameters, we are not only be able to predict,
but now understand what people are doing when
they affected one another. And through the equations we
were now really able to build theory. That theory allows
us to understand how to intervene and how to change things.
And how to know what it is we're affecting, and why the
interventions are effective. This is the mathematics of
love.
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THE
SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE — PINKER VS. SPELKE
— A DEBATE
[5.10.05]
...on
the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be
relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including
the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired
difference between the sexes.
Harvard
University • Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative
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GÖDEL
AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTH [6.8.05]
A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein
Gödel
mistrusted our ability to communicate. Natural language,
he thought, was imprecise, and we usually don't understand
each other. Gödel wanted to prove a mathematical
theorem that would have all the precision of mathematics—the
only language with any claims to precision—but with
the sweep of philosophy. He wanted a mathematical theorem
that would speak to the issues of meta-mathematics. And
two extraordinary things happened. One is that he actually
did produce such a theorem. The other is that it was interpreted
by the jazzier parts of the intellectual culture as saying,
philosophically exactly the opposite of what he had been
intending to say with it.
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