Evolutionary psychologists have long lamented our Pleistocene brains, developed over millennia hunting on the east African savannah. They delight in explaining its shortcomings and revel in highlighting its incompatibility with modern civilisation, thus explaining much of today's existential malaise. Light is shed on all manner of social ills: why are uncomfortable in crowded urban areas, why we play office politics, how confirmation bias leads to bad decision-making, how status anxiety drives much of our behaviour including conspicuous consumption, why men and women have different strategies of sexual opportunism, why we crave fat & sugar even in sedentary lifestyles, why we delight in gossip, why we're superstitious, why we have trouble learning maths and statistics, why can't grasp the quantum world, why our number of Facebook friends are typically in the 100-150 range, and why we possess an innate tribalism that divides the world into in-group and out-groups. There are many more, summarised in various new titles.
This year, John Brockman's EDGE website invites public intellectuals from around the world an opportunity to respond to this dysfunction. It poses a question: 'what scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive tooklit?'
An annual question is posited every January on the site, and then a book is published later with all the responses. All of John Brockman's regulars are there: Dawkins, Pinker, Ramachandran, Harris, etc.
If there's a general take-home message, it's that the scientific method should be applied to all decision-making, particularly in politics. Science waits for evidence, theories are subject to falsification, and the scientific method is the antithesis to ideology. At present, the way the mainstream media and the two-party political system operate, any indecisiveness is interpreted as 'lacking conviction' or 'flip-flopping'. Leaders must gaze thoughtfully and have an unswerving vision. He must be a statesman, stand tall, and lead from the front. The very idea that a political party can have its doctrine determined a priori e.g. social democrat or free market, rather than as a result of experiment, observation and experiment reveals a fundamental contradiction between our political system and the scientific method. Conviction is deemed a positive political trait, but in the sciences, it is the start of a slippery slope into dogma and closed-mindedness.
Reading through the paragraph-long responses of Edge's annual question is a superb way to be introduced to a variety of interesting ideas from some of the sharpest minds in a short time. Too often an interesting idea is padded into any entire book. In a way, Edge's annual question is a summary of over 100 books in the space of just one. I've done my own summary-of-a-summary below, copied in from a WORD document, so the formatting may not be 100% compatible.
Overall summary:
Scientific reasoning should be applied to everything (evidence, replicability, seeking out falsifiability, etc) including politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, etc.
Scientism: everything is ultimately a scientific question. The downside is that we'd be living in an 'autistic world' with no art, fiction, fantasy, or religion as they're all frivolous without any underlying evidence and liable to muddy our thinking.
Decisions: difficult to make decisions as each choice has to be run through a whole lot of new filters to ensure it’s untainted by bias, cognitive dissonance, inconsistency, political & economic ideology, religion, groupthink, etc. Be careful to neutralise arguments from authority and tradition, and other residual cognitive dysfunctions of our Pleistocene brains.
Politics: inconsistency with the media image (deemed necessary) of having vision, decisiveness, leadership, values, etc. Incompatible with ‘wait & see where the evidence takes us'.
Statistical illiteracy: one of the problems undermining decision-making
Other cognitive tools: don’t just describe what something is, also be clear what it is not. Otherwise the description is too foggy, vague, obscure
Edge Annual Question 2011
This year, John Brockman's EDGE website invites public intellectuals from around the world an opportunity to respond to this dysfunction. It poses a question: 'what scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive tooklit?'
An annual question is posited every January on the site, and then a book is published later with all the responses. All of John Brockman's regulars are there: Dawkins, Pinker, Ramachandran, Harris, etc.
If there's a general take-home message, it's that the scientific method should be applied to all decision-making, particularly in politics. Science waits for evidence, theories are subject to falsification, and the scientific method is the antithesis to ideology. At present, the way the mainstream media and the two-party political system operate, any indecisiveness is interpreted as 'lacking conviction' or 'flip-flopping'. Leaders must gaze thoughtfully and have an unswerving vision. He must be a statesman, stand tall, and lead from the front. The very idea that a political party can have its doctrine determined a priori e.g. social democrat or free market, rather than as a result of experiment, observation and experiment reveals a fundamental contradiction between our political system and the scientific method. Conviction is deemed a positive political trait, but in the sciences, it is the start of a slippery slope into dogma and closed-mindedness.
Reading through the paragraph-long responses of Edge's annual question is a superb way to be introduced to a variety of interesting ideas from some of the sharpest minds in a short time. Too often an interesting idea is padded into any entire book. In a way, Edge's annual question is a summary of over 100 books in the space of just one. I've done my own summary-of-a-summary below, copied in from a WORD document, so the formatting may not be 100% compatible.
Overall summary:
Scientific reasoning should be applied to everything (evidence, replicability, seeking out falsifiability, etc) including politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, etc.
Scientism: everything is ultimately a scientific question. The downside is that we'd be living in an 'autistic world' with no art, fiction, fantasy, or religion as they're all frivolous without any underlying evidence and liable to muddy our thinking.
Decisions: difficult to make decisions as each choice has to be run through a whole lot of new filters to ensure it’s untainted by bias, cognitive dissonance, inconsistency, political & economic ideology, religion, groupthink, etc. Be careful to neutralise arguments from authority and tradition, and other residual cognitive dysfunctions of our Pleistocene brains.
Politics: inconsistency with the media image (deemed necessary) of having vision, decisiveness, leadership, values, etc. Incompatible with ‘wait & see where the evidence takes us'.
Statistical illiteracy: one of the problems undermining decision-making
Other cognitive tools: don’t just describe what something is, also be clear what it is not. Otherwise the description is too foggy, vague, obscure
Edge Annual Question 2011
What would improve the cognitive toolkit?
1. Howard Gardner – Harvard
“how would you disprove what you say” Falsification.
2. Bruce Hood – Bristol
Haecceity - psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. Essentialism.
Replace every atom of an object with new parts and it’s the same object
Quiddity: some abstract property that defines a group
Essentialism (Platonic) an impediment to appreciating evolution
Irrational to pay for a perfect copy of art, or to creep out over killer’s stuff
3. John Paulos – Philadelphia
Probability distribution to predictions, rather than precise numbers
It’ll increase the acceptance of inherent uncertainty
4. W Daniel Hillis – Applied Minds Inc
Possibility Space – to better think about probabilities
5. Haim Harari – Weizmann Institute of Science
Only extremist messages can be conveyed in one sentence
Culture of information-overload and time pressures facilitate extremism
Extremism in either direction (left, right, libertarian, authoritarian) – same
Popularity of Fox’s blowhards and radio’s shockjocks and mad mullahs?
6. Christian Keysers – Neuroimaging
Mirror fallacy – assuming others are like yourself
Robots feel pain when attacked, dolphins smiling, masochist in pain
7. Nicholas Humphrey – LSE
Multiverse – at least one universe where we’re immortal
8. George Lakoff – Berkeley
Conceptual metaphors – thinking in metaphors in embedded in brain’s structure
Innate differences in conservative v liberal brains in metaphor processing
Agency attribution metaphor: events with Causal Effects Are Actions by a Person
Conceptual metaphors helps us understand counter-intuitive abstractions
Need to be aware of metaphorical thinking to avoid dissonances, fallacies, pitfalls
9. Milford Wolpoff – Michigan anthropology
GIGO – Garbage in, garbage out
Often impossible to separate conclusions from assumptions
10. George Dyson
Analog computing – better in a continuous world (not discrete world)
11. Roger Schank
Difficult to apply experimental thinking (strictly controlled conditions with double-blind conditions, controls, repeatability, etc) to everyday life as there are too many variables. If we properly understand the rigour of the experiment, we could make better decisions in everyday life.
12. Robert Provine - Michigan
There’s no free lunch (always hidden costs)
Conservation is a common concept in physics, but should also be in economics
13. Gerald Holton - Harvard
Sceptical empiricism not dogma/ideology
14. Martin Seligman – Uni of Pennsylvania
More thinking goes into dystopias (predictions of doom) and not enough into analysing the conditions of well-being. P.E.R.M.A.:
P Positive Emotion, E Engagement, R Positive Relationships, M Meaning & Purpose, A Accomplishment
15. Steven Pinker – Harvard
Positive-sum games have precedence over zero-sum games
16. Dylan Evans – Cork
Law of comparative advantage – always beneficial to trade
Naleb rails against this due to potato famine, mono-cultures)
17. Jason Zweig – WSJ
Structured Serendipity – devoting time to other fields could enhance creativity
18. Gingo Segre – Pennsylvania
Gedankenexperiment – Galileo’s two different masses fall at same velocity
19. Sean Carroll – Caltech
Pointless universe – overcoming innate teleological thinking
All questions (but why) come back to the laws of physics & constants & just is
20. Rudy Rucker
Unpredictability – need to overcome deterministic thinking
21. Charles Seife - NYU
Randomness – 3 laws
1. There is randomness – not karma, destiny, agency, teleology
2. Prediction is impossible
3. En Masse, aggregate randomness can be predictable
22. Clifford Pickover
Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine: Simultaneous discoveries – due to luck, one gets the credit, while the other doesn’t..
August Möbius & Johann Benedict Listing discover the Mobius strip in 1858
Newton & Leibniz: Calculus in 1670s. Darwin & Wallace. Electrolytic process for refining aluminium 1886. Hyperbolic Geometry also had two discoverers.
AG Bell & Elisha Grey: telephone
Harriott & Galileo: telescopic astronomy
23. Rebecca Goldstein – Boston
Inference - Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted
24. Nassim Taleb
Antifragility – anything that benefits from variability
Convexity: benefits more than it loses from variations
Evolution: benefits from variations by selection fittest
25. Emanuel Derman – Columbia
Pragmamorphism – attribution of inanimate objects to humans (opposite to anthropomorphism).
A warning against pragmamorphism e.g. equating PET scans with emotion
1D measure of human faculties e.g. IQ
26. Nicholas Carr - Shallows
Cognitive load - tiny capacity of our working memory
George Miller – our RAM can hold 7 pieces of information, but may be only 3-4
Overloaded working memory leads to increased distractedness, inattentiveness
Get more done by pruning inputs, blackouts, turn internet off, down time, etc
27. Samuel Barondes – UCSF
Each Of Us Is Ordinary, And Yet One Of A Kind
Reconciling human sameness with uniqueness
Variation within limits
28. Richard Nisbett – Michigan
Shorthand Abstractions (SHAs):
sunk-costs, judgement of veterans over first-hand impressions, etc
29. Rob Kurzban – Pennsylvania
Externalities – uncompensated effects (costs / benefits) e.g. pollution
30. David Myers – Social Psychologist
Awareness of self-serving bias:
Fortunate things attributed to own attributes, unfortunate due to back luck
Accept more responsibility for success than failure, for good deeds than bad.
Numerous tests: intelligence, looks, health, unbiased, driving, getting on, etc
Advantages of favourable self-delusion: protects against depression, stress, etc
Disadvantages: marital discord, bargaining impasses, prejudice, war, etc
31. James O’Donnell – classicist
Change is constant. Stability & consistency are illusions. If we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.
32. Douglas Kendrick – Arizona
Subselves – not a single you, but many ‘you’s
Selective attention – otherwise too much info to deal with
State-dependant memory - categorizing new info according to context
We only achieve anything by allowing one ‘self’ to drive at any one time
Herman’s Head aka functional modularity
Helps explain irrationalities and inconsistencies
33. Samuel Arbesman – Harvard mathematician
Copernican principle – in time, space, size, etc. Middle World.
34. Michael Shermer
Bottom up, not top down – avoids over-attribution of agency/design/teleology
35. Irene Pepperberg – Harvard
Aware of fixed-action patterns (as with animal instincts) that have evolved in response to stimuli (called releasers)
36. Terrence Sejnowski – Salk Institute
Powers of 10 – appreciating logarithmic scales (e.g. Richter, Decibel)
37. Juan Enriquez
Life code – manipulating genomes/genes for materials science, solving energy & problems, etc
38. Carlo Rovelli – France
Scientifically proven. Nearly an oxymoron. No such thing as certainty.
39. Stephen Kosslyn – Stanford
Constraint satisfaction - A "constraint" = condition that must be taken into account when solving a problem. There are only a few ways to satisfy a full set of constraints simultaneously. The more constraints, the fewer options. Acceptance that there are no perfect or ideal/optimised solutions.
40. Daniel Dennett – Tufts
Cycles e.g. spinning at all (spatial & temporal) scales all through the cosmos
Krebs cycle, like the Otto/Diesel combustion engine – restores to position #1
Cycles promote efficiency & predictability and do the ‘heavy lifting’.
41. Jennifer Jacquet – Uni of British Columbia
Overconsumption ruins the commons (usually thought to be by all).
Keystone species i.e. remove them and entire ecosystem collapses
Keystone consumers – a few (Asian buyers of endangered species) can ruin all
Rich western world uses far beyond the average resources, unsustainably
42. Jaron Lanier
Cumulative error, as in Chinese whispers. Imperfect transmission of info
43. Frank Wilczek - MIT
Hidden layers – learning something new - it eventually becomes second nature
Solves how humans see from a 2D surface, interpreting it to a 3D topography. Still, AI can’t achieve this in robot vision. Emergence via hidden layers.
44. Lisa Randall - Harvard
Science – effective theory, evidence, testability, falsifiability, etc
45. Douglas Rushkoff
Technologies Have Biases
e.g. cars bias distance, commuting, suburbs, energy consumption
psychotherapy set up (cough, pad) will cause treatable pathologies to arise
bit like Scientology’s e-meter personality test
46. Marc Kinsbourne
Expanding in-group – at expense of cultural homogenisation
Genetic fitness – offset against births later in life, due to globalisation and expanding circle allowing different groups to mix. Hybrid vigour in offspring (aka heterozygote advantage).
47. Jonathan Haidt – Virginia
Contingent superorganism - our freakish love of melding ourselves (temporarily, contingently) into something larger than ourselves. Can be both noble & fascist. Humans are the ‘giraffes’ of altruism.
48. Nick Gershenfeld - MIT
Science is about testing models, not finding Truth.
The succession of models about the solar system from Ptolemy to Einstein differed in their assumptions, accuracy, and applicability
49. Andy Clark – Edinburgh
Predictive coding – the brain is an engine of predictive modelling
Errors feedback into correcting the model and making newer predictions
50. Clay Shirky – NYU
Pareto Principle – aka 80/20 rule, winner-take-all, power law rule, etc
Non-linear distribution of resources – most content produced by a few, most wealth owned by a few, most health care resources allocated to a few patients
Average does not equal median (aka middle), therefore most are below average
As opposed to Gaussian distribution aka bell curve: average = medium
51. Kevin Kelly - Wired
Virtue of negative results – can be just as useful as positive ones
Failure should be embraced as a virtuous, not weak
52. Alison Gopnik – Berkeley
Turing’s Rational Unconscious – not Freud’s irrational unconscious
We know even young children can make very competent, rational decisions unconsciously that elude our best AI.
53. Nicholas Christakis – Harvard
Holism (aka emergence) – the whole is greater than sum of parts
Natural emergence – CHON + Fe, Ph, S, etc = life with new properties
Complexity rises much faster than the number of its parts
Bit like the area/volume phenomenon
Social networks, neural wiring
100X increase in parts leads to 10,000X increase in connections
Antithesis to reductionism – Cartesian method of discovery
54. William Calvin - Seattle
Compare & contrast
Discover the cognitive framing of an argument, (aka the angle, schtick)
Discover what is left out of the argument due to cognitive biases
55. Lawrence Krauss – Arizona
Relative uncertainty – different levels depending on knowledge, tools, & need
56. Lee Smolin – Perimeter
Thinking in time v thinking outside time i.e. thinking outside time presumes that discoveries are already out there in some Platonic realm.
57. Richard Foreman
Accepting negative capability i.e. accepting lack of facts/reasons
58. Donald Hoffman – UC Irvine
Sensory desktop – metaphor of the computer graphical desktop
Icons stand for attributes of the files/programs – symbols, adaptive
Difference between utility & truth e.g. vision doesn’t give us truth
Evolution as arms race between different senses e.g. mimicry, camo
59. Daniel Goleman –
Anthropocene Thinking - Anthropocene as a geological age
Judging products/services/behaviours by their impact on the Earth.
We still have Holocene brains – ill adapted for the Anthropocene
60. Giulio Boccaletti
Linear v non-linearity.
Non-linearity: real world. Outputs cannot be expressed in terms of sum of inputs
Computation of non-linearity more difficult
Most of our thinking and modelling is in linear terms
Scale analysis is a tool to translate non-linear to linear
61. Helen Fischer – Rutgers
Temperament dimensions: different styles of thinking / behaving
Personality = character (experiences) + temperament (innate, genes)
Temperament: 40 – 60% of variation in personality due to temperament
Heritable, stable over lifetime, due to hormones & neurotransmitters
Unique arrangements of dopamine, serotonin, testosterone & estrogen/oxytocin pathways
Dopamine: exploratory, risk-taking, creativity, flexibility, boredom
Serotonin: sociability , extroversion, religiosity, conformity, conscientiousness
Testosterone (pre-natal): focus, narrow interests,
Testosterone: aggressive, emotional flooding, heightened spatial acumen
Estrogen/oxytocin: verbal fluency, language, empathy, nursing
Acting out of character is tiring
Need to acknowledge temperament dimensions when hiring, co-habiting, etc
62. Joel Gold – NYU
ARISE: Adaptive Regression In the Service of the Ego (Ego aka Self)
Reality testing, stimulus regulation, defensive function & synthetic integration.
Psychoanalytical term: regression can be adaptive (not always maladaptive)
e.g. daydream to mine creativity
63. Matthew Ritchie
Systemic Equilibrium
Acknowledgement of death (personal mortality) & 2nd law of thermodynamics
Most of us don’t think about it or, worse, make up fantasies that circumvent it
64. Linda Stone
Projective thinking i.e. generative in new ideas, suspension of disbelief, ignoring received wisdom. We can be blind to seeing the means for a new paradigm shift by the very paradigm.
65. David Gelernter
Recursive structure - if the shape of the whole recurs in the shape of the parts
Mandelbrot set – keep zooming for the same patterns
66. Don Tapscott
Designing minds to cope with the cognitive load of the internet, distractions
Today’s teens the first generation to be experts at something adults aren’t
67. Andrian Kreye
Free Jazz – no rules, free association
Unconscious creativity: John Coltrane’s Free Jazz
Album: Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation
68. Matt Ridley
Collective intelligence – key to human achievement via language, books, etc
Wisdom of the crowds more effective than the brilliance of one genius
Neanderthals had bigger brains, but humans networked more
Top-down utopias haven’t work (right or left)
69. Gerd Gigerenzer – Max Planck Berlin
Risk literacy – important to understand risk for health, money, policies, etc
Statistics should be compulsorily taught in schools, not Euclidian geometry
Ben Goldacre: not even medical professionals, journalists understand stats
Stat literacy will lead to more mature attitude to uncertainty and paternalism
70. Keith Devlin - Stanford
Base rate - likelihood of an event calculated in terms of relative incidence
First determine what the incidence is without the new effect you’re measuring
71. Marti Hearst – UC Berkeley
Findex (n): Degree to which a desired piece of information can be found online.
Find anything within seconds/minutes, still good despite data smog
The key is ‘search tools’ that cut through the crap
Clearer thinking away from computer
72. Susan Fiske – Princeton
Assertion = empirical question, settled by evidence
Interactions by conversations, without access to information
What’s the point of having a political discussion if the ability to inject relevant information (country comparisons) disrupts favoured mode of communication
73. Gregory Paul
Conversation is antithetical to analysis. Should be regarded as entertainment
Scientists/experts should be more forthright about not knowing or tentative
74. James Croak – artist
Bricoleur: culture / art cannibalising itself to generate new forms
End of grand narratives, ‘-isms’
75. Gerald Smallberg - NYC
It’s okay to have biases in seeking out information, so long as the biases adapt to new information
76. Thomas Bass – Albany
Open Systems – allowing all users access to the design to modify
Another variation of wisdom of the crowds
77. Mark Henderson – Times
Applying science methodology to non-science areas
e.g. politics, economics, medial trials & publication, government policies, etc.
78. Paul Kedrosky – Kauffman Foundation
Shifting Baseline Syndrome e.g. Canadian fisheries
Baselines for comparisons are too recent, and kept getting renewed
79. Ross Anderson – Cambridge
Science v theatre
Security theatre – designed to reassure not protect e.g. British Library bag check
80. Adam Alter – NYU
Cognitive iceberg – we are only aware of conscious processes
Much more is happening underneath the surface e.g. colour processing
81. Nick Bostrum – Oxford
Game of Life (John Conway) – studying this can reveal…
Emergent complexity
Basic dynamics concepts — distinction between laws & initial conditions.
Levels of explanation — patterns arise that can be efficiently described in higher-level terms e.g. gliders
Supervenience — Relation between different sciences e.g. does chemistry supervene on physics? Biology on chemistry? The mind on the brain?
Concept formation – how & why we recognise certain patterns and name them
Turing - it's possible to build a pattern that acts like a universal Turing machine
82. Robert Sapolsky - Stanford
Emergence – failure of reductionism. AKA synergy, interdisciplinary
Genetic vulnerability – as distinct from genetic determinism i.e. one needs the gene and the particular environment. Only then is one psychiatrically ill
Anecdotalism – good way to start a news article is a story about a victim. However in science, a good way to REFUTE a scientific finding is to recall the exception i.e. my uncle smoked till age 98.
Statistics of variations & probability are more accurate than vivid anecdotes, yet we’re hardwired to respond to anecdotes.
83. Joe Kleinberg – Cornell
E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one
Cloud computing dispenses with notions of the material
Distributed systems – many invisible components create one system
Redundancy, not fixed in space, borderless
84. John McWhorter – Columbia
Path dependence - Something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice, because once established, external factors discouraged going into reverse to try other alternatives.
e.g. QWERTY keyboard and numerous other examples in language, etc
85. Scott Sampson
Interbeing – clouds lead to paper (via rain and trees)
Eastern thinking (interconnectedness) versus western individualism
Ironic that it’s the East that does most endangered animals importing
86. Amanda Gefter – New Scientist
Duality – different (both valid) ways of looking at something
Five valid string theory solutions, Schrodinger & Heisenberg
Heisenberg and Schrödinger: two sides of same coin
Wave / particle duality
Two opposing arguments don’t necessarily have to mutually exclusive
87. Eric Topol – Scripps
Black Box: We have the capability to hunt down deep explanations when we have medical illnesses but we don’t. High blood pressure = prescription medication without anyone ever bothering with the reason why the blood pressure was high in the first place.
88. Alun Anderson – New Scientist
Homo Dilatus (aka procrastinating ape) – not evolved to worry about long term
e.g. Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun,: nothing ever happens
Usually takes a serious disaster for laws to be changed
Complete melting of the Arctic might spur us into action
89. Satyajit Das
Parallel Errors – we ought to be more aware of parallelism (e.g. different factors in disparate fields can align to influence something)
Art market as good an indicator of impending doom as any economic forecast
Debt: GFC as metaphor for environmental i.e. borrowing from the future
90. Geoffrey Miller – Uni of New Mexico
Personality traits are continuous with mental illness
No clear demarcation between normal and abnormal
OCEAN’s 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness & neuroticism (aka emotional stability)
Each OCEAN:
normally distributed in a bell curve
statistically independent of each other
genetically heritable (40-60%)
stable across the life-course
unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends
found in other species such as chimpanzees
predict behaviour in school, work, marriage, parenting, economics, politics
O: High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy & schizophrenia.
C: too much conscientiousness leads to OCD (too little → drug addiction)
E: Low extraversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders
A: Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder.
N: Low emotional stability: depression, anxiety, bipolar, histrionics
Health insurance policies demand discrete measures of mental illness for prescriptive medicines, cost forecasting, etc.
Office politics: does the competitive nature of capitalism encourage certain off-the-chart psychopaths to prosper if the incentive is all to do with bonuses (function of bottom line) and status is purely a function of wealth.
91. Dan Sperber – Budapest
Cultural attractor: to supplement the notion of a meme
Meme itself is not the same idea when expressed by various people
What we observe is a mix of preservation of the model and of construction of a version that suits the capacities and interests of the transmitter. From one version to the next, the changes may be small, but when they occur at the population scale, their cumulative effect should compromise the stability of cultural items. But — and here lies the puzzle — they don't. What, if not fidelity, explains stability?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had a creature that was articulate. What was added was electricity and inarticulate grunting and a confusion of the creator with the creature.
Cultural attractors keep the meme faithful despite the tendency (Chinese whispers) for variation. These attractors may be round numbers, happy endings, or anything that fits into innate paradigms. Limits of the brain e.g. memory
92. Tom Standage - Economist
Proof: something can be definitely dangerous, but not definitely safe
Can’t prove a negative
93. Gloria Origgi
Kakonomics: preference for low quality outcomes
Slacker world: too much hassle for all, muddle on through is preferable
Preferable to receive low-quality in return as then there is less obligation
If unexpectedly received a high-quality outcome, that’s a ‘breach of trust’
Tacit agreement for a low-quality outcomes for both parties (can also be good)
94. Kai Krause
Keep it simple, but don’t overdo it. As simple as is necessary
Ockham, Einstein, Asimov, etc – many had variations
Copernicus’ simple concentric circles is not how the planets move
95. George Church - Harvard
Non-Inherent Inheritance
Bad Science: Lamarck, Lysenko, Galtonian eugenics
Enormous consequences for people – death/suffering of millions
Lysenkoism overestimated the impact of environment
Eugenics overestimated the role of genetics
Blindness in science:
due to religious doctrine / political ideology
due to the pendulum swinging too far the other way (so as not to tarnished)
Augmentation of decision-making via Google search, etc
96. Marco Iacoboni – UCLA
Entanglement – iconic phenomena of counter-intuitive reality
Same with the double-slit experiment and relativistic travel
Accepting these as truth means we can outgrow our evolutionary psychology
97. Jonah Lehrer
Control your spotlight – distract yourself to avoid distractions
Best to lock fridge or not buy sweets or turn internet off than rely on willpower
4-year old child marshmallow test good predictor of future results
Need to learn to control attention
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
98. Timothy Taylor – Archeology, Bradford
Toolkit – physical tools critical to thinking (feedback loop)
Technology preceded humanity and paved the way for it
99. Jay Rosen - NYU
Wicked problems – difficult to describe the problem
As distinct from tame problems (clearly definable with solutions)
e.g impact of health care reform
100. Paul Saffo - Stanford
Time span of discretion – our own natural time horizon
CEOs have longer time horizons than manual labourers
For content workers, need to match their tasks with natural time span
101. Tania Lombrozo – UC Berkeley
Defeasibility – falsifiability (as distinct from dogma, faith, ideology)
Ideas that remain responsive to the world
102. Ernest Poppel - Munich
Cognitive Toolkit Full Of Garbage: limits of SHA
Monocausalitis: the tendency to explain all events, no matter how complex, with one cause.
Selection pressure for speed invites to neglect the richness of facts.
103. Kathryn Schulz
Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science
Most of past science (& history, politics, economics, etc) has been wrong
Safe to assume a lot of today’s science will one day be superseded
Knowledge accumulates but it also collapses – need to unlearn as well as learn
Variation on Anthropocentrism fallacy:
The belief that we are living in the best of enlightened times now
We can’t conceive of a more enlightened age, otherwise we’d be there
Therefore it’s a form of geocentrism i.e. we are in a special time
104. Mark Pagel – Santa Fe
Elusive nature of knowledge – uncertainty, provisional, doubt, imprecision
106. Paul Bloom – Yale
Irrationality: unconscious priming, conformity, groupthink, biases
Affects trivial and important aspects of life
107. Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán
Home Sensus Sapiens – ape that feels and thinks
108. John Tooby – UCSB
Many truths unpopular because they clash with self-evident notions of superior selves and ingroups
Ignorance: world is endlessly strange, vast, complex, intricate, & surprising
Blindess: self-inflicted to hide the horror of our actions from ourselves
Simple concepts can have far-reaching consequences beyond the ancient Greeks and a danger to authority: calculus (with its notion of the infinitesimal), the experiment, zero, entropy, Boyle's atom, mathematical proof, natural selection, randomness, particulate inheritance, Dalton's element, distribution, formal logic, meme, Shannon's definition of info, quantum
Cognitive tool: nexus causality, moral warfare & misattribution arbitrage
Nexus causality: things happen due to a range of factors, not just one
Moral warfare:
We like to trace the causal chain back to the actions of a person who intended it – presumption of absolute free will in others
Sins of commission worse than sins of omission
Misattribution arbitrate: in a sea of foggy uncertainty, experts still get paid to deliver expertise no better than chance. Is it better to have an incorrect road map than no road map?
109. David Buss - Texas
Sexual v natural selection: Evolution dependent on reproductive success
Not ‘survival of the fittest’ but outbreeding your competitors
Intrasexual or same-sex competition e.g. Emperor’s harem
Intersexual competition: certain characteristics favoured
May explain why suicide terrorism is so much more prevalent in polygynous cultures that create a greater pool of mateless males?
110. Bart Kosko
Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED) moment
Experiencing proof will undermine faith, ideology
Mathematical proofs are tautologies
Real world proofs are approximations, often with high probabilities
111. Sue Blackmore
Correlation is not a cause
A might occur with B, but both might be symptoms of a hidden C
People who consult psychics live longer (because of women)
112. PZ Myers
Mediocrity Principle – universe is indifferent
Your own psychology makes you (& Earth) special, different, etc
113. Sam Harris
We are lost in thought
Humans continually get lost into a flow of thought, interrupting focus
Root of all problems – ‘forced plunge into unreality’
114. Anthony Aguirre – UC Santa Cruz
Paradoxes – we should seek out paradoxes, not avoid them
Olber, wave – particle duality, different infinities, etc – can lead to new places
115. Richard Wurman
New technologies such as smartphones should have new content
Not just old books, but e-books utilising all the features of the smartphone
116. Marcelo Gleiser – Dartmouth
Intelligent life is rare throughout the universe, perhaps even unique
Exception to the ‘principle of mediocrity’
Stable sun, stabilising moon, Earth’s tectonic plates for O & C cycles, magnetic field for protection, right solar system configuration & location, mix of elements & minerals, temperature thermostat, goldilocks zone, etc.
No guarantee single-cell leads to multicellular life, let alone intelligence
Probably rare: sexual reproduction, animals, mammals, tool manipulation
There may be intelligence, but too far for any practicable interaction
So effectively it’s a safe bet that we’re alone.
Evidence: No SETI results, 3Gy of bacteria, only one e.g. of ↑IQ
117. Roger Highfield – New Scientist
Snuggle for existence – role of cooperation (not just competition)
Isolated societies regress – Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs & Steel
Forces of human evolution: mutation, selection, cooperation
118. Carl Zimmer
So much of life is due to unintended side effects
Examples: feathers for flight, eyes for reading
119. Laurence Smith – UCLA
Innovation – scientists should also innovate in terms of the scientific method
hypothesis-testing, mathematical constraints, data-dependent empiricism
peer-review might be overhauled in the 21st century
120. Tor Nørretranders - Copenhagen
Depth – abstractions should be shorthand for a lot of information
Intellectuals can distinguish between shallow & deep abstractions
121. Gregory Cochran - Utah
Veeck Effect – adjusting the evidence to suit the theory
e.g. anthropologists denying cannibalism to save face for the descendants
122. Stephon Alexander – Haverford
Duality & World Piece
Wave/particle duality, holographic duality (2 ways of describing gravity)
Good to have two or more ways to describe something
123. Joshua Green - Harvard
Supervenience: relationship between two sets of properties, Set A & B. The Set A properties supervene on the Set B properties if and only if no two things can differ in their A properties without also differing in their B properties.
e.g. pixels on a screen depicting an image. Asymmetric. One can change without affecting the other, but not the other way around.
124. W. Tecumseh Fitch – Vienna
Instinct to learn – both nature & nurture e.g. instinct to learn
125. Max Tegmark – MIT
Scientific concept
Witch-burning still taking place in Haiti (once per month)
Almost half of Americans believe in young earth Creationism
Education needs to be about the future, not the past
126. Joan Chiao – Northwestern Uni
Diversity is universal
Nature can solve the problems of living in an environment in many ways
127. David Eagleman – Baylor
Umwelt – concept introduced by biologist Jakob von Uexküll 1909
Small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect e.g. echolocation
Umgebung - Bigger reality (sum of all subsets)
We all assume our umwelt to be the entire objective reality
Human sense of smell is weak compared to most mammals
128. Fiery Cushman – Harvard
Confabulation – illusion that we know why we do things
Behaviour first, then retrospectively guessed at, and then causality is reversed
In split-brain experiments, scientists induce behaviour in the right hemisphere which is falsely interpreted by the left hemisphere. For the rest of us, we can’t guarantee that our unconscious hasn’t done the same, inducing certain behaviour which is then falsely interpreted.
Harsher moral judgments in foul-smelling rooms
Easier to analysis others’ motivations than our own
129. Hazel Rose Markus & Alana Conner – Stanford
Culture Cycle - iterative, recursive process by which (1) people create the cultures to which they later adapt, (2) cultures shape people so that they act in ways that perpetuate their cultures
Cultures ↔ People: symbiosis of individuals, behaviour, institutions, ideas
Biology ↔ Culture, Genes ↔ Environment, Nature ↔ Nurture
Each academic discipline is like the blind men feeling parts of the elephant
130. David Rowan - Wired
Personal Data Mining – advantages of analysing one’s ‘lifelog’
Accumulated record of all words written, photos, videos, shopping, browsing
Benefits: predictive information that could anticipate mood, improve efficiency, healthier, emotionally intuitive, reveal scholastic weaknesses & my creative strengths. Unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors
Already lots of self-monitering apps and data-tracking devices
Future: a ‘life file’ stored and available to loved ones, descendants, historians
131. Victoria Stodden – Columbia
Phase & Scale Transitions: Conceptualizing unexpected changes due to scale
Material is the same, but changes state eg solid→liquid→gas, hunter →farmer
Suddenly need new tools to describe, analyse, predict
Similar to emergence, butterfly effect, unanticipated consequences, etc
132. Carl Page
Power of 10 – importance of maths literacy to evaluate costs/person in head
Cost of Iraq war is $100,000 per Iraqi
133. Brian Knutson - Stanford
Replicability – importance to evaluate all claims
As distinct from arguments from eye-witness accounts, authority, etc
Human psychology & modern 24-hr news cycle biased for new change
Suggestion: replicability index r=5 if the experiment has verified 5 times
At least as valuable as a citation index
134. Seth Lloyd – MIT
Living is fatal
We fear the unknown, but probability theory can quantity uncertainty
Statistics are counter-intuitive to most of us
Journalists need to do courses in stats
Gov’t requires citizens to buy car insurance, because it figures, rightly, that people systematically underestimate the odds of an accident.
135. Xeni Jardin
Ambient Memory And The Myth Of Neutral Observation
Our memories will be challenged by a live, real-time world
Twitter, Facebook, live-update, life-logs, etc
Memories will compete with life-logs and ephemeral material
136. David Dalrymple – MIT
Information flow – causality explained by flow of information
A can only cause B if there is a flow of info
In the real world, most things are interconnected, so it’s difficult to make any absolute causality statements
137. Timo Hannay
Controlled experiment – can be applied to anything e.g. education policy
138. Garrett Lisi
Uncalculated risk – poor statistical literacy can harm
Stress-related fear can be worse than the source of the fear
Especially vulnerable if contemplating small likelihood of high-impact events
Continual hypocrisy by governments ‘protecting’ ‘its’ population
Will spend trillions in one area, but let them die in another
139. Kevin Hand
Gibbs Landscape – available free energy in an ecosystem
Named after JW Gibbs (1839-1903)
Energy in a biochemical reaction that is available to do work.
Left over energy after producing some waste heat + entropy.
Depends on oxygen, heat, nutrients, minerals, redox coupling, photons, etc
Can calculate likely max size of creatures in Europan Ocean (Saturn)
Identifies untapped potential in many chemical, industrial, biological systems
140. Barry Smith – Uni of London
Senses & Multi-Sensory
>5 senses: motion, where limbs are, pain, temperature, balance, common
Two visual systems – seeing & controlling actions
Flavour: combination smell & sight, sound as well as taste. Can be fooled
Hearing: fooled if seeing different enunciation of syllable
If primed with writing, can ‘hear’ words spoken in gibberish
141. Diane Halpern – Claremont College
Statistically Significant Difference in Understanding the Scientific Process
Another call for statistical literacy to improve all aspects of life
Separation of chance from cause and effect
Hawthorne Effect – short-term increases in productivity due to study/change
142. Beatrice Golomb – UCSD
Dece(i)bo Effect: (portmanteau of Deceive & Placebo)
Facile application of constructs, without unpacking the concept and the assumptions on which it relies, leading reasoning astray
Importance to examine that exact nature of the placebo e.g. sugar? Oil?
143. Stuart Firestein - Columbia
Name Game – to name isn’t necessarily to tame, labelling isn’t explanation
Nominal Fallacy – assuming that once something is named, it’s understood
Once research is made, the meaning of the original word shrinks
e.g. ‘Instinct’ – meaning of the term is reduced the more we understand
144. Andrew Revkin – NYT
Anthropophilia - shorthand for a rigorous and dispassionate kind of self regard, even self appreciation, to be employed when individuals or communities face consequential decisions attended by substantial uncertainty and polarizing disagreement
Woe – doom-mongering is paralytic
Shaming & blaming – divisive, and can be misappropriated along class lines
BP or petrol guzzlers?
We should fully consider our nature — both the "divine & felonious"
145. David Pizarro - Cornell
Everyday Apophenia – term coined by German neurologist Klaus Conrad
False positive: when our pattern-detection systems misfire they tend to err in the direction of perceiving patterns where none actually exist.
Not just the mentally ill, but all of us have this tendency
Random shuffle play on iPods are NOT in order to appear to be
146. Neri Oxman –MIT
It Ain't Necessarily So – lots of counter-intuitive solutions
Immunity to disease via a low-dose form of the disease (vaccine)
147. Eric Weinstein
Kayfabe – the deception of WWF federation (choreographed)
Reliable entertainment (a show), safe for participants
‘Working’ to the script, ‘shooting’ (against the script)
Closed system (aka ‘promotion’) – all results pre-arranged
Importance of deception, as opposed to free-flow of information
Sympathetic Magic – all of us pretend
Kayfabe – might be an apt metaphor for the business world (collusion)
Perhaps even human interactions (all pretend)
Two party political system (Lab/Lib, RepDem, etc)
Different ‘rival’ schools of economics – both fail
String v Loop physicists – both alternatives unsuccessful
No more investigative journalists
Kayfabe discovers the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated
People happy to go along with the act (no pretence of a sport anymore)
Is it any wonder why scientists become disengaged with politics
148. Gary Marcus – NYU
Cognitive humility – unlike Hamlet’s soliloquy, our minds not noble / infinite
Faulty memories (unlike PC memory which relies on master memory map)
Human memories subject to context and need clues for retrieval
We’re better at retrieving something when we’re in the context of where we learned it. Harder to apply things learned in school outside of school.
Bias towards remembering evidence consistent with beliefs
Need to force oneself to examine the counter-arguments
149. Dimitar Sasselov – Harvard
The Other - the idea of self will need to redefined in light of genetics
Genomes, haploids, diploids, microbe genomes, interlinked ancestry
Artificial life: Venter’s JCVI-syn1.0
150. Nigel Goldenfeld – Illinois
Because
Intuitions can’t cope with very large, very small, very complex, probable
Complex systems have a multitude of causes, not a single event
Difficult to predict in a multilinear environment with feedback loops, chaotic
Markets work only because two parties have opposite views about a stock
Many diseases might have complex causes (genes, environment, etc)
Flash Crash: 6th May 2010, from 2:42pm – 2:50pm, 600 points
151. Stefano Boeri – Milan
Proxemic of Urban Sexuality – drives much of city P-P interactions
152. Stewart Brand
Microbes – Venter’s 2003 onwards shotgun sequences of many microbes
Revolutionises the field of microbiology
Microbes: 80% of all biomass, 1 million in a spoonful of sea-water
Microbes run the atmosphere and much of the human body
3000 types of bacteria in each human (3m genes), 1trillion in all on and in us
Oldest life, most endurable life, most robust life
Sulphur, methane, cyanide, freezing, boiling, ionising radiation
153. Mahzarin Banaji – Harvard
Signal Detection Theory
When there is low signal:noise ratio, irrationalities increase e.g. false positives
154. Martin Rees – Cambridge
Deep Time & Far Future
Helpful to also took beyond 24-hour news cycle, electoral terms, lifespans
Deep time goes back 13.7Gya, sun will last another 4-5gy.
155. Craig Venter
We are not alone – awareness that the Universe is probably teeming with life
156. Brian Eno
Ecology – we fit into the universe ecology, not a pyramid structure with God
Great Chain of Being: Deity, Angels, Man, Animals, Plants, Minerals
Now it’s a web metaphor, not hierarchical
Used to think of Great Men with Great Ideas, now it’s the circumstances
Genes, environmental, luck, baton-relay, flow of innovation
157. Richard Thaler - Chicago
Aether – old spelling of ether
Ether – needed by theory i.e. light propagates through ether like sound/waves
Caloric, phlogiston, ether: needed to be colourless, odourless, weightless
Should be used in any theory that requires an unknown variable to work
e.g. Higgs Field, String Theory’s 7 extra dimensions, etc
158. VS Ramachandran – UCSD
Chunks with Handles
Max Mueller & Francis Galton debated if thought requires language?
Kuhn: Paradigm v Anomaly (opposites)
Memes are copied with far less fidelity than genes
Like movie stars, scientists give each other awards
Focus on anomalies that have survived repeated attempts to disprove experimentally, but are ignored by the establishment solely because it can’t think of a mechanism
159. Richard Dawkins – Oxford
Double-Blind Control Experiment
Irrationality caused by lack of education and reinforced by media
If education could instil double-blind controlled experiment:
We would learn not to generalise from anecdotes.
How to assess probability that an important effect occurs by chance
How difficult it is to eliminate subjective bias
Subjective bias does not imply dishonesty or corruption of any kind.
Education in scientific reasoning would have addition benefits:
Undermining respect for authority & personal opinion.
Undermining exploitation by homeopaths, quacks and charlatans
Better decision making with consequences for the planet
160. Daniel Kahneman – Princeton
Focusing Illusion – if you focus on something, it seems more important
Income: responsible for just 5% of variation in life dissatisfaction
Education: responsible for just 10% of variation in life dissatisfaction
When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, blind, lottery winner, rich, or resident of California we focus only on the distinctive aspects
Exploited by marketers i.e. SUV car in wilderness
Consumers over-estimated the expected happiness due to a good
Politicians – policy changes
Things always make a smaller difference than what one first thinks
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