Videos in: 2005
AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS
"How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small-scale local processes I am talking about are, on the one hand, psychological processes that happen inside people's brains, and on the other hand, changes that people bring about in their common environment — for instance the noise they make when they talk or the paths they unconsciously maintain when they walk — and through which they interact."
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BIOCOMPUTATION
"...we're starting to look at the world in terms of gene space instead of genomes and species, and this gets us down to component analysis." -J. Craig Venter
"We just heard some very exciting applications which are in the early stage, moving on from the general project where we essentially collected the machine language of biology and we're now trying to disassemble and reverse engineer it. "- Ray Kurzweil
"What's happening now, though — and Craig mentioned some of this with synthetic biology — is we're starting to move from just analysis of systems into engineering systems. I want to say a few words about engineering in general, and then about what's happening in biological engineering and how it's going to change completely from what people are thinking about right now."-Rodney Brooks
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GODEL AND THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICAL TRUTH
A Talk with
[6.8.05]
"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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The Science of Gender - A Debate
...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.
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THE NATURE OF NORMAL HUMAN VARIETY
"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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YOU CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL
"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."
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