A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING
Edge Master Class 2007

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA, July 20-22, 2007

(click for slideshow)

PARTICIPANTS: Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Sergey Brin, Founder, Google; Stewart Brand, Co-founder, Long Now Foundation, Author, How Buildings Learn; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; Salar Kamangar, Google; Jimmy Wales, Founder, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia); George Smoot, Physicist, Nobel Laureate, Berkeley, Co-author, Wrinkles In Time; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Co-founder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Dean Kamen, Inventor, Deka Research; Peter Diamandis, Space Entrepreneur, Founder, X Prize Foundation; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Katinka Matson, Co-founder, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; Larry Page, Founder, Google; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Seth Lloyd, Quantum Physicist, MIT, Author, Programming The Universe;  Tim O'Reilly, Founder, O'Reilly Media;  Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University.

INTRODUCTION
By John Brockman

Recently, I spent several months working closely with Danny Kahneman, the psychologist who is the co-creator of behavioral economics (with his late collaborator Amos Tversky), for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

My discussions with him inspired a 2-day "Master Class" given by Kahneman for a group of twenty leading American business/Internet/culture innovators—a microcosm of the recently dominant sector of American business—in Napa, California in July. They came to hear him lecture on his ideas and research in diverse fields such as human judgment, decision making and behavioral economics and well-being.

Dean Kamen

Jeff Bezos

Larry Page

While Kahneman has a wide following among people who study risk, decision-making, and other aspects of human judgment, he is not exactly a household name. Yet among many of the top thinkers in psychology, he ranks at the top of the field.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness) writes: "Danny Kahneman is simply the most distinguished living psychologist in the world, bar none. Trying to say something smart about Danny's contributions to science is like trying to say something smart about water: It is everywhere, in everything, and a world without it would be a world unimaginably different than this one." And according to Harvard's Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought): "It's not an exaggeration to say that Kahneman is one of the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has made seminal contributions over a wide range of fields including social psychology, cognitive science, reasoning and thinking, and behavioral economics, a field he and his partner Amos Tversky invented."

Jimmy Wales

Nathan Myhrvold

Stewart Brand

Here are some examples from the national media which illustrate how Kahneman's ideas are reflected in the public conversation:

In the Economist "Happiness & Economics " issue in December, 2006, Kahneman is credited with the new hedonimetry regarding his argument that people are not as mysterious as less nosy economists supposed. "The view that hedonic states cannot be measured because they are private events is widely held but incorrect."

Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, "Quagmire Of The Vanities" (January 8, 2007), asks if the proponents of the "surge" in Iraq are cynical or delusional. He presents Kahneman's view that "the administration's unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one's losses—the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even."

His articles have been picked up by the press and written about extensively. The most recent example is Jim Holt's lede piece in The New York Times Magazine, "You are What You Expect" (January 21, 2007), an article about this year's Edge Annual Question "What Are You Optimistic About?" It was prefaced with a commentary regarding Kahneman's ideas on "optimism bias."

In Jerome Groopman's New Yorker article, "What's the trouble? How Doctors Think" (January 29, 2007), Groopman looks at a medical misdiagnosis through the prism of a heuristic called "availability," which refers to the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. This tendency was first described in 1973, in Kahneman's paper with Amos Tversky when they were psychologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Kahneman's article (with Jonathan Renshon) "Why Hawks Win" was published in Foreign Policy (January/February 2007); Kahneman points out that the answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. The article takes a look at why the tough guys win more than they should. Publication came during the run up to Davis, and the article became a focus of numerous discussions and related articles.

The event was an unqualified success. As one of the attendees later wrote: "Even with the perspective a few weeks, I can still think it is one of the all time best conferences that I have ever attended."

George Smoot

Daniel Kahneman

Sergey Brin

Over a period of two days, Kahneman presided over six sessions lasting about eight hours. The entire event was videotaped as an archive. Edge is pleased to present a sampling from the event consisting of streaming video of the first 10-15 minutes of each session along with the related verbatim transcripts.

—JB

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.

Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize Lecture

As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called "the essential property of language," the essential building block—in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems—then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language—Pirahã—means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions.

DANIEL L. EVERETT, a former evangelical Christian missionary to the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon for more than 20 years, is chair of languages, literatures, and cultures and professor of linguistics and anthropology at Illinois State University. Dan Everett's Edge Bio Page

The Reality Club: Steven Pinker, Dan Everett, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., David Pesetsky, Dan Everett

"...little is known about the psychology of heroism. There’s a scant body of empirical literature, and most of it consists of interviews with people weeks, months, or decades after they have done a heroic deed. Much of the first work on heroism came from interviewing Christians and others who helped Jews during the Holocaust. Nobody asked the question “did anybody help?” until 20 years later. People helped in every country,where the lives of Jews were on the Nazi stake. However, the main response that researchers got during interviews with these people was, “it wasn’t special.” Regardless of what they did, or where they did it, or how they did it, these heroes typically said, “I am not a hero. I did what had to be done. I can’t imagine how anybody in that situation who wouldn’t do it.” Some of these heroes tended to be more religious than not, and tended to have parents who had been active in various kinds of causes. However, many more religious people with socially-politically active parents did nothing to help."

Introduction by Russell Weinberger

In the summer of 1971, Philip Zimbardo and his team of reseachers at Stanford University designed and conducted a landmark psychology experiment that would forever change our understanding of human behavior.  24 volunteer college students were randomly assigned to roles of prisoners or guards in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at the university.  The results were shocking. Within days, the "guards" turned authoritarian and sadistic while the "prisoners" became passive and started to show signs of severe depression.  What was supposed to be a 2 week experiment had to be shut down after only six days.  

Known simply as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo's study is one of the most famous experiments in social psychology and remains, along with Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments, one of the most shocking. But that was just the beginning of the story.

The results of Zimbardo’s study were clear: human nature is malleable and the wrong situation can bring out the worst in most people.  But what of the exception? What of the individual who does not succumb to the influence of environment and fights the powers that be?

Edge sat down with Zimbardo to discuss his latest thinking on the nature of heroism, where it comes from, and how it can be fostered.

— RW

PHILIP ZIMBARDO is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a founder of the National Center for the Psychology of Terrorism, and creator and co-director of The Shyness Clinic.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO's Edge Bio Page

What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self—its recursiveness—that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, a neuroscientist, is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, and coauthor of Phantoms in the Brain. V.S. Ramachandran's Edge Bio Page