This collection documents the events in Northern Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011. Content includes blogs, social media and news sites about Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Sudan and other countries. Countries separated by site groups (scroll down the page to see all of them). Archived content is in Arabic, English, and French.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110202003520/http://www.edge.org/
Every year since 1998, EDGE, the quintessential arbiter of all things cool and compelling in the world of science and technology, has been asking some of the brightest thinkers and doers across the cultural spectrum to answer one big question about the future of science, technology and society at large. The answers are then published in an annual edition, which serves as a fascinating and illuminating timecapsule of the intelligencia's collective conscience that year.
This week marks the release of Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future — the fantastic compendium of responses to last year's question, featuring greats like Chris Anderson, Esther Dyson, Howard Gardner, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno and 167 more.
Here are the past 12 editions, a home library must-have for anyone interested in how technology is changing the way we think, do and live:
1998: What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?
1999: What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past 2000 Years… And Why?
2000: What Is Today's Most Important Unreported Story
2001: What Now?
2002: What's Your Question?
2003: What Are The Pressing Scientific Issues for the Nation and the World, and What Is Your Advice on How I Can Begin to Deal With Them?
2004: What's Your Law?
2005: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It? (book)
2006: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (book)
2007: What Are You Optimistic About (book)
2008: What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why? (book)
2009: What Will Change Everything? (book)
2010: How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? (book)
This year's question is perhaps most important of all — because it has to do with improving the very wiring of our existence, human cognition: What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?, with the thoughtful disclaimer that "scientific" is used in the broadest sense possible, referring to the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything from spirituality to history to human genome. So important was the question, in fact, that Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral economics, declared it his favorite question yet. "You will get responses and actually move the culture forward." ...
...A handful of the annual questions are available in book form, we couldn't recommend them more.
The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World, by Evgeny Morozov, Allen Lane, RRP£14.99, 432 pages
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, Basic Books, RRP£16.99, 384 pages
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future, edited by John Brockman, Harper Perennial, RRP£9.45, 448 pages
The internet has come a long way since Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, turned on the first web server in Geneva on Christmas day 1990. Today, 2bn people are online; 800m of them are on Facebook. Every minute, 24 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube. Google, a company founded only 15 years ago, has a market capitalisation just short of $200bn and a mission statement that it intends "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" – something no one thinks unlikely or even remarkable. We now bank, shop, communicate, work and date through the internet. The internet has come of age. It is as defining an achievement for humanity as the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution.
But as the web's youthful potential and teenage brashness give way to a more grown-up, complicated and multifaceted personality, our reaction to it has also changed. Our enthusiasm is tempered by a realisation that it is not simply an exciting force for good, as it was first seen. This year's opening salvo of books about the internet does not laud web entrepreneurs or predict jetpacks and digital utopia. Instead, Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion and John Brockman's collection of essays all soberly assess the current state of the internet and ask: are the changes the internet brings to our society and our human nature actually beneficial? ...
...In his new book, editor and literary agent John Brockman has collected answers from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Brian Eno to a single question originally posed on his website, Edge.org: "Is the internet changing the way you think?" The 164 contributors are as thoughtful as commentators at the web's imminent 21st birthday ought to be. Hope, that cyberutopian hallmark, spreads throughout this book.
As W Daniel Hillis, the legendary computer scientist, says in his response to the question, when we're faced with a world of unimagined digital complexity, we must admit that: "We have embodied our rationality within our machines and delegated to them many of our choices, and in this process we have created a world that is beyond our own understanding ... We have linked our destinies, not only among ourselves across the globe, but with our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, our own theme is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines." ...
THE ATHEIST DELUSION (Originally published in The Guardian)
'Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,' wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong
...Dennett's atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer's positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same. In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web. ...
[Google Translation:] ...An interesting assembly of 164 influential intellectuals in the magazine's Annual Question Edge.org, which asks each participant an answer to the same question. Last year the question was "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"; a question was published a few weeks ago where, with regard to the Wikileaks affair, the Edge participants were asked "Who gets to keep secrets?"
The annual question this time is "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?". Auhtors included Steven Pinker exploring the brain, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, and answers flowed from Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Brian Eno, George Church, and 160 counterparts to accumulate on a thick book, of short chapters that open the eyes. ...
When I originally came across the new book Is The Internet Changing How You Think? edited by John Brockman, I could not help but chuckle. The title sounds about as ridiculously out of date as Al Gore's famous description of the Internet itself: "The Information Super-Highway."
The question was posed as something of a "Well duh…" type of query. What Brockman was looking for was a wide variety of opinions on the subject. By posing this open-ended thought to 150 people, and asking for approximately 1,000 words in response, he got his answer. Rather, he got quite a number of answers, and wound up with an incredibly absorbing collection of essays. ...
...Although I enjoyed every one of the essays, it was Brian Eno's "What I Notice" that most made me sit up and (pun intended) take notice. The piece has a rhythmic flow, each thought beginning with the words "I notice…" But he hit upon an amazing piece of truth with this one: "I notice that everything the Net displaces reappears somewhere else in a modified form... Bookstores with staff who know about books, and record stores with staff who know about music are becoming more common."
Those are just two of the great opinions collected in Is The Internet Changing How You Think? While Brockman solicited numerous sources, some of the other recognizable names include Douglas Coupland, Jonas Mekas, Stewart Brand, and (believe it or not) Alan Alda. ...
...I was shocked at how much these bite-sized essays made me think. And yes, I oftentimes read them sitting down. Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? is the ultimate bathroom book for pseudo-intellectuals like myself. But honestly, there is nothing intellectual about it at all. The collection reads very much like a conversation with a trusted friend.
If everybody could learn to deal better with the unknown, then it would improve not only their individual cognitive toolkit (to be placed in a slot right next to the ability to operate a remote control, perhaps), but the chances for humanity as a whole. ...
Any citizen who wants to vote responsibly needs to have a sense of proportion and be able to weigh the choices our democratic government is making quickly and easily.
Look at the total dollars to be spent and compare it the total number of people who might benefit to get a cost per person.
Gerd Gigerenzer - Risk Literacy Statistical thinking is the ability to understand and critically evaluate uncertainties and risks. Yet 76 percent of U.S. adults and 54 percent of Germans do not know how to express a 1 in 1,000 chance as a percentage (0.1%). Schools spend most of their time teaching children the mathematics of certainty — geometry, trigonometry — and spend little if any time on the mathematics of uncertainty. If taught at all, it is mostly in the form of coin and dice problems that tend to bore young students to death. But statistical thinking could be taught as the art of real-world problem solving, i.e. the risks of drinking, AIDS, pregnancy, horseback riding, and other dangerous things. Out of all mathematical disciplines, statistical thinking connects most directly to a teenager's world.
One hundred sixty leading thinkers bent on how the Internet we think, act and live has changed.As versatile as the Internet is as varied opinions.Some see a better future with better people, others nostalgic for the good old book learning. ...
Following the Wikileaks exposures there is public debate around the question of the worldwide distribution of secrets kept by a few and hidden to the rest of the citizens of the world. Leading intellectuals have surpising answers to the question of whether it is moral and right to kepp secrets from us.
[Google Translation:] ...A case in point is the Wikileaks leaks site and Julian Asange, and whether the site helps democracy or terrorism sparked renewed discussion of the issue of secrets and justification exposure. This discussion came to a group of smart people in the world: the intellectual authors of the online magazine Edge.org.
Site Edge.org question from time to time publish the same, and directs it to people like the father of behavioral psychology Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, we present economic crisis and author of "Black Swan" Nassim Taleb, former chairman of the World Web Consortium former Esther Dyson, the inventor of blogging and RSS Dave Winer, and many other writers, philosophers and key figures in the history of the Internet. Sometimes the answers are published as a series of articles, and sometimes, such as this one, in a rabbinical manner, in a fascinating dialogue.
This one is a loaded question, presented this time by Dnny Hillis, former Disney executive VP, and cofounder of the large patent firm Applied Minds, is short and to the point: Who is entitled to keep a secret? By extension — when is it allowed to reveal secrets and when is it required to disclose them? How do you know if the exposure is a mitzvah, or betrayal?
What Hillis did not have to write is that so much of our lives, economic situation, personal security and stability depend on the mechanisms and arrangements that maintain the secrecy of certain information. But on the other hand, science and enlightenment, the press, education and repairing injustices require openness, knowledge and limiting the right to confidentiality. ...
[Google Translation] ... For Internet poisoned the brain, the human superficial point of view, network researchers have different views.
Secretary-General of Chinese Academy of Social Research Center of Information, "Internet Week" honorary editor of Jiang Qiping said the "shallow" is different from the degradation of the cognitive domain, he would understand it to "return to the present time the thing itself."
In an interview with the "Outlook" Newsweek interview, Jiang Qiping this state their point of view: "deep read by me, sir, I think that disturb well, fantastic." He pointed out that the phenomenon of industrialized way of thinking is to see through the nature of the light into the deep; information way of thinking is to see through the essence of the phenomenon, by the depth shallow, shallow, higher than the deep state.
"The Internet in the end of our brain do? The brain in adapting to the Internet, or the Internet to change the brain?" 2010 U.S. edge.org site "annual issue" - "The Internet has changed our minds? "Trigger hot, 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and scholars in other fields to participate.
"The Internet does not change our way of thinking." Harvard University neuroscientist (JoshuaGreene) that the Internet "provides us with unprecedented access to information channels, but did not change (our brain) process information . "
"Electronic media will not rebuild the mechanism of the brain to process information." Harvard University cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (StevenPinker) that message, surfing the Internet, the use of Twitter who have not trained your brain to "parallel multiple channels, the new information. "
"The deep reading, you'll pull the network cable, computer off, you need to light when shallow." CITIC Publishing House of Jiang Yongjun prefer being out of the network, but we should look at every five minutes e-mail him, it was a difficult decision. ...
In the eyes of the curious, the world is an endlessly fascinating place.
There is a well-nigh inexhaustible stream of ideas, events and phenomena worth pondering — and profiting from.
It is in this spirit that the Edge Foundation does what it does. Every year, Edge.org's World Question Center poses a new question to be answered by a group of luminary thinkers — philosophers, scientists, historians and the like.
As one might expect, the utility of the answers hinges on the quality of the inquiry. Some years the question is too sanctimonious or navel-gazing to be of much use.
But with the 2011 question, they hit the jackpot:
"What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
For traders, this is an absolutely brilliant question, which, in terms of practical response value, could effectively be rephrased as:
"What are some key high level concepts for improving trading results?" ...
"Deliciously creative...the variety astonishes...intellectual skyrockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge is doing. It's the greatest virtual research university in the world." —Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.
The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.
[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.]
164 CONTRIBUTORS (115,000 words):Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, V.S. Ramachandran, Richard Thaler, Brian Eno, J. Craig Venter, Martin Rees, Mahzarin Banaji, Stewart Brand, Stefano Boeri, Nigel Goldenfeld, Dimitar Sasselov, Gary Marcus, Eric Weinstein, Neri Oxman, David Pizarro, Andrew Revkin, Stuart Firestein, Beatrice Golomb, Diane Halpern, Kevin Hand, Barry Smith, Kevin Hand, Garrett Lisi, David Dalrymple, Xeni Jardin, Seth Lloyd, Brian Knutson, Carl Page, Victoria Stodden, David Rowan, Hazel Rose Markus & Alana Conner, Fiery Cushman, David Eagleman, Joan Chiao, Max Tegmark, Tecumseh Fitch, Joshua Greene, Stephon Alexander, Gregory Cochran, Tor Norretranders , Laurence Smith, Carl Zimmer, Roger Highfield, Marcelo Gleiser, Richard Saul Wurman, Anthony Aguirre, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers, Sue Blackmore, Bart Kosko, David Buss, John Tooby, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Paul Bloom, Evgeny Morozov, Mark Pagel, Kathryn Schulz, Ernst Pöppel, Tania Lombrozo, Paul Saffo, Jay Rosen, Timothy Taylor, Jonah Lehrer, Marco Iacoboni, Dave Winer, George Church, Kai Krause, Gloria Origgi, Tom Standage, Vinod Khosla, Dan Sperber, Geoffrey Miller, Satyajit Das, Alun Anderson, Eric Topol, Amanda Gefter, Scott D. Sampson, John McWhorter, Jon Kleinberg, Christine Finn, Nick Bostrom, Robert Sapolsky, Adam Alter, Ross Anderson, Paul Kedrosky, Mark Henderson, Thomas A. Bass, Gerald Smallberg, James Croak, Greg Paul, Susan Fiske, Marti Hearst, Keith Devlin, Gerd Gigerenzer, Matt Ridley, Andrian Kreye, Don Tapscott, David Gelernter, Linda Stone, Matthew Ritchie, Joel Gold, Helen Fisher, Giulio Boccaletti, Daniel Goleman, Donald Hoffman, Richard Foreman, Lee Smolin, Thomas Metzinger, Lawrence Krauss, William Calvin, Nicholas Christakis, Alison Gopnik, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Andy Clark, Neil Gershenfeld, Jonathan Haidt, Marcel Kinsbourne, Douglas Rushkoff, Lisa Randall, Frank Wilczek, Jaron Lanier, Jennifer Jacquet, Daniel Dennett, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Carlo Rovelli, Juan Enriquez, Terrence Sejnowski, Irene Pepperberg, Michael Shermer, Samuel Arbesman, Douglas Kenrick, James O'Donnell, David G. Myers, Rob Kurzban, Richard Nisbett, Samuel Barondes, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Carr, Emanuel Derman, Aubrey De Grey, Nassim Taleb, Rebecca Goldstein, Clifford Pickover, Charles Seife, Rudy Rucker, Sean Carroll, Gino Segre, Jason Zweig, Dylan Evans, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, Gerald Holton, Robert Provine, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Milford Wolpoff, George Lakoff, Nicholas Humphrey, Christian Keysers, Haim Harari, W. Daniel Hillis, John Allen Paulos, Bruce Hood, Howard Gardner
It's ever more delectable that the Edge Foundation— the network of prominent scientists and intellectuals founded by literary agent John Brockman in New York — has worked against the reciprocal ignorance of literary cultures and sciences of each other. Successfully. If you take the algorithms developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which measure the value of links, Edge's website ranks seven on a global scale of ten. The New York Times ranks nine, eBay at eight. — Sueddeutche Zeitung
EL MUNDO
January 23, 2011
COSMIC DE VENTER BET
Paul Jáuregui
[Google translation:] As every year since 1998, the online magazine Edge (www.edge.org) has once again raised a great question to the best minds on the planet. And once again, this virtual forum of debate offers us all a wonderful opportunity to savor the thoughts of many top scientists and thinkers of the world.
This year, the question posed by Edge was: "What scientific concept improve our cognitive tools?". I ask readers of Eureka to take away everything they can from the 164 replies received. They will find many pearls of wisdom in this ocean of knowledge.
Among the illustrious figures who have participated in this high caliber survey, which has increased in prestige every year, the highlight is the biggest superstar of modern science, Craig Venter. ...
... Your response, like almost everything the father of the human genome and artificial life, says and does, not leave anyone indifferent: "We are not alone in the Universe." Venter believes that any discovery would have greater impact on mankind than the discovery of life outside our Solar System: "If we find that there are many, perhaps millions of origins of life, and therefore that life is present throughout the universe This will profoundly affect all humans." ...
...Edge has again shown that there is nothing like a asking a good question to the best brains.
We all know the world of Professional Wrestling is low brow and can appeal to the lowest common denominator. Each time Wrasslin' gets brought up in discussing MMA I can almost hear Luke Thomas doing his best mocking yokel impression while chastising people for making continual connections between the two before feeling the need to inform us of his penchant for The Classics as his preferred means of recreational entertainment. Something like that.
So it may come as some surprise that a clear cut example of Pro Wrestling terminology finds itself the centre of a recently published scientific essay. In this instance I'm referring to the term 'Kayfabe' which coincidentally enough I used in the headline of a recent article. ....
...With that out of the way, here's the Science part.Edge Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit virtual think tank and claims its informal membership to include "some of the most interesting minds of the world" and has been featured and referenced by the likes of American Scientist, New Scientist, The BBC, The Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Wired. Each year Edge poses a question in an attempt to get various thinkers from various backgrounds around the world to chime in with their own answers and interpretations. Questions have varied from philosophical ("What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" 2005), technological ("What is the most important invention in the last two thousand years ... and why?" - 1999) and cultural ("How is the Internet changing the way you think?" - 2010).
This year's question is psychological with "What Scientific Concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"....
...And as I alluded to, 'Kayfabe' formed the basis of one of the responses.
Eric Weinstein - Mathematician and Economist (PhD Mathematics at Harvard) and Principal of the Natron Group in Manhattan - writes:
The sophisticated "scientific concept" with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling. ...
[Google translation]..."Truth is only a model", writes Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist. He finds that you should write down all the behind the ears, and lay people. In everyday life are shaped too much controversy about politics or lifestyle of the conviction to be right. Since one wishes for the humility of the researcher who knows he does not produce truth, but only models of reality that can quickly be back passé. "What scientific concept is in everyone's mental tool box?", had asked the thinker Club Edge.org. As suggested before Gershenfeld skepticism about truth.
The Italian physicist Carlo Rovell said even more pointedly that certainty was "useless, indeed dangerous." Uncertainty whether that will take us forward. What praise of the reflected half-knowledge!
Human psychology can work against investors trying to make the best financial decisions, notes Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx.
In a commentary this morning, he suggests that clients consider ways to "sharpen the rational part" of their investment psychology. Colas writes:
"Human nature, as it turns out, is a veritable minefield of biases and distortions that push rational thought through emotional screens to the point where clearheaded thinking can mutate into irrational outcomes."
One of the most cited mantras of investing is to "think and think differently," the piece adds. Along those lines, Colas points to early investors who were insightful enough to put money into such companies as IBM (IBM) and Apple (AAPL) before they became giants of technology.
He believes investors should ask themselves: What scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit?
Colas notes that's a question which has also been raised by the Edge Foundation, a think-tank run by John Brockman. Members of the foundation range from music producer Brian Eno to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Nicholas Taleb, author of the "The Black Swan."
The founder of edge.org John Brockman tells us how they dreamed up the idea of picking the brains of the world's leading thinkers, and one of the brains, social media expert Clay Shirky, explains his answer to this year's question.
The founder of edge.org John Brockman tells us how they dreamed up the idea of picking the brains of the world's leading thinkers, and one of the brains. ...
Each year, the Edge Foundation asks dozens of big-picture thinkers to answer a single question, in a short essay. This year’s question, proposed by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Or, to paraphrase, how might people alter the way they interpret the information they take in about the world, to better comprehend it?
A great question, as usual. But interestingly ambiguous: Who, exactly, is is the “everybody” in the phrase “everybody’s toolkit”?
Every January the cognoscenti know to look out for the annual question posed by literary agent and self-styled intellectual impresario John Brockman on his Edge "salon" website. The trick, of course, is to get the question just right so that the great and good - and the wannabes - feel compelled to play what is often the smartest game in town.
One of my favourites was the deceptively simple tease: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" (2005), which provided diverse snapshots of individual intellectuals at work and of emerging trends.
With this year's question, though, Brockman gets really tricksy: "What scientific concept would improve everyone's cognitive toolkit?"
The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.
Paul Kedrosky has a wonderful piece for the deep-thinking site Edge.org about shifting baseline syndrome. It explains precisely why thinking that we're living in some anomalous "new normal" is a little silly. We're always living in a new normal, and the cognitive challenge is to remember that things haven't always been this way, nor will they remain this way.
In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined a phrase for this troubling ecological obliviousness -- he called it "shifting baseline syndrome". Here is how Pauly first described the syndrome: "Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species..."
It is blindness, stupidity, intergeneration data obliviousness. Most scientific disciplines have long timelines of data, but many ecological disciplines don't. We are forced to rely on second-hand and anecdotal information -- we don't have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.
This year, Brockman asked: "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" He took as his starting point James Flynn's notion of "shorthand abstractions" -- "concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ('market', 'placebo', 'random sample', 'naturalistic fallacy', are a few of his examples)". If we have a shorthand linguistic means of expressing the notion, Flynn suggested, we can use it as an element in thinking and debate. "This is the most challenging question we've put forth to date," Brockman said. Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural economics, said: "It is my favourite question ever. You will get great responses and actually move the culture forward."
On Saturday Brockman published this year's submissions, more than 150 answers from the likes of Craig Venter, Brian Eno and Steven Pinker (mostly men, it has to be said, with contributors such as Alison Gopnik and Lisa Randall making up a small female minority). A number of Wired contributors have sent in answers this year, writers such as Jonah Lehrer, David Eagleman and Matt Ridley. Some journalists and editors were also invited to add their thoughts, which is how I submitted a proposal for "personal data mining" as part of the symposium.
So what concepts did the contributors suggest that we need? The answers included:
In the meantime, there’s a rich discussion of aspects of this question on Edge.org, a forum for all manner of minds, curated by the agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman. Once or twice a year since 1998, Edge has tossed provocative questions to variegated batches of scientists, writers, artists and innovators.
You can read my Edge contribution, centering on a concept I call anthropophilia, below, with links to relevant context added (the Edge format is straight text).
I’m in the early stages of reading the other contributions. There’s much to chew on and enjoy. Here are a few highlights: ...
DIE ILLUSION DER REINEN INFORMATION Im Internetmagazin 'Edge' stellen sich Wissenschaftler und Intellektuelle der Frage des Jahres - was verbessert unsere Fähigkeit der Erkenntnis?
THE ILLUSION OF PURE INFORMATION On The Internet Magazine "Edge", Scientists And Intellectuals Are Presented With The Question Of The Year — What Improves Our Ability To Achieve Enlightenment?
Ralf Bont
... In the Anglo-Saxon culture things are different, and science certainly has continued in its global appeal. Thus, early English modern naturalism, founded by Humphry Davy, had a reputation not only for spectacular discoveries, they also for paying attention to public communication. The goal was the transfer of knowledge into the auditorium. This is clever, because science has, as much as any other movement since the French Revolution, changed the lives of everyone on the planet and it has by no means lost this position of leadership.
On the contrary. Today when more and more people assume that the death penalty does not have a deterrent effect, it's not a new belief in a higher justice. Rather, it is the triumph of that thinking that the tools of rationality — language logic and statistics — are being used to make a statement that contradicts the common assumptions.
It is, however, necessary to acquire language logic, statistics and other skills. Do not give a claim to power with a fath-based knowledge, but also mediate what knowledge is. This is not only an honorable task — it pplaces scientific researchers in the realm of medical doctors who take the Hippocratic oath. Knowledge is vital, and — this is the flip side — knwoledge can be abused: the great anti-human ideologies of the 20th Century were themselves scientific. The science community needs to communicate better.
It's ever more delectable that the Edge Foundation— the network of prominent scientists and intellectuals founded by literary agent John Brockman in New York — has worked against the reciprocal ignorance of literary cultures and sciences of each other. Successfully. If you take the algorithms developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which measure the value of links, Edge's website ranks seven on a global scale of ten. The New York Times ranks nine, eBay at eight.
A highlight of the Edge's activities in each January, the answers to the question of the year. In 2010 there were more than 130 short essays on how the Internet is changing the way we think. The question now presented by Edge: What scientific concept woud improve everyone's cognitive tookiit? ...
“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” That may have been fine advice for the 20th century, but to survive in 2011 and beyond we need to step it up—a lot. We need to, say, embrace the concepts that many mental illnesses are just extremes of personality traits, that humans tend to accept credit for their successes but not blame for their failures, and that “wholes have properties not present in the parts,” as sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University writes on the online salon Edge (edge.org).
Christakis is one of scores of contributors to an annual exercise in which Edge, run by literary agent and author John Brockman, poses a question to scientists, technology gurus, philosophers, and other thinkers. Last year’s query was about how the Internet is changing the way we think, while 2008’s asked what the scholars had changed their mind about and why. This year’s: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Technology scholar Douglas Rushkoff nominates the concept that technologies have an “embedded bias” rather than being blank slates from which any outcome can arise. Cars have an embedded bias toward suburban sprawl; guns, an embedded bias toward killing people. By adding this concept to our cognitive toolkit, Rushkoff argues, we will have a better chance of using technologies “consciously and purposefully” and of resisting that bias. The embedded bias of the keyboardless iPad, for example, is toward passive consumption rather than active creation. To resist, get the add-on keyboard. ...
Each year, the Scientific Club "The Edge" poses a question. 2011 will be explored that is lacking in people to the knowledge nor
If the theory of the "multiverse" is true, then it is at least one universe in which we do not die. Because the concept assumes that each possible universe has to actually occur - including universes, which have already defeated the doctors in our lifetimes the death. That we die in our universe is indeed annoying, but not the end of the world. This is the response of the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey on this year's "Edge" question: "What scientific concept would improve the cognitive abilities of all people?"...
... In a time when economic studies that scientifically "prove" that certain groups of people are smarter than others (Thilo Sarrazin keeps Muslim immigrants for less intelligent than German, while other studies show that leftists are smarter than right), like Conservatives and multicultural friends feel encouraged by Matt Ridley's statement that the individual intelligence or the intelligence of sub-groups for the welfare of a society are relatively unimportant. The decisive point is the "collective intelligence", says Ridley, which is not simply the sum of the individual intelligence quotient, but a function of networking, of labor and openness of a society.
Adam Smith and Karl Popper already knew this. Too bad that we do not inhabit the parallel universe in which they live.
Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.
The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
The magazine called for "shorthand abstractions" – a way of encapsulating an idea or scientific concept into a short description that could be used as a component of bigger questions. The responses were published online today.
Many responses pointed out that the public often misunderstands the scientific process and the nature of scientific doubt. This can fuel public rows over the significance of disagreements between scientists about controversial issues such as climate change and vaccine safety. ...
Qual será o conceito científico que, se toda a gente o dominasse, poderia representar um salto imenso na capacidade que as pessoas têm de perceber e participar activamente nos assuntos do mundo?
This is, in essence, the question that John Brockman, the American literary agent and director of the site edge.org, presented in late December to a constellation of world famous scientists. The results were published online this morning.
The question was formulated more precisely as follows: "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?"
Since this question is not as direct and explicit as some of its predecessors (the question last year, for example, was "How the Internet is changing the way we think?") Edge is quick to contextualize it.
The point is that, according to James Flynn, an expert on human intelligence from the University of Otago, New Zealand, there are words and short phrases — such as "market", "natural selection", etc.. — Which constitute "conceptual abbreviations" (shorthand abstractions, or SHA) that actually represent a constellation of such abstract concepts as complex and that "although extremely brief, have immense utility to perceive the world."
The idea is that the SHA, according to Flynn, "penetrated the cognitive repertoire of educated people, expanding their intellectual capabilities to become available in the form of cognitive units that can be used as elements of reasoning and debate." In other words, an economist, when he speaks of "market" or a biomedical specialist when he thinks of a "control group" or a statistician when he speaks of "random sample", knows very well that there's no need to lose time to reprocess these concepts each time you use them.
By Friday evening 115 people, scientists from various fields of knowledge, had already responded to the challenge. Some answers are extensive and very complex. Others do not respond exactly the question. But there are, as always, approaches to suit all tastes and most are interesting enough to make it worth going to have a look.
"Deliciously creative...the variety astonishes...intellectual skyrockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge is doing. It's the greatest virtual research university in the world."Arts & Letters Daily • "Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question." BBC Radio 4 • "Big, deep and ambitious questions... breathtaking in scope." New Scientist • "Brilliant ... captivating ... overwhelming." Seed • "Bold, often thrilling, sometimes chilling, answers." News-Observer • "The fascinating breadth of their visions of the future is revealed today by the discussion website edge.org, which has asked some of the world's finest mind the question: 'What will change everything?'" The Times • "A stellar cast of intellectuals ... a stunning array of responses." New Scientist • "Edge: brilliant, essential and addictive. It interprets, it interrogates, it provokes."Publico (Lisbon) Cover Story, Sunday Magazine • "The world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now." San Francisco Chronicle • "The splendidly enlightened Edge website (www.edge.org) has rounded off each year of inter-disciplinary debate by asking its heavy-hitting contributors to answer one question. I strongly recommend a visit."The Independent • "A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." El Mundo • "As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine."The Independent • "They are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions."The Guardian • "Praised by everyone from the Guardian, ProspectWired,The New York Times and BBC Radio 4, Edge is an online collective of deep thinkers. Their contributors aren't on the frontier, they are the frontier." The Scotsman • "A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age." Sunday Herald • "Uplifting ...enthralling." The Mail on Sunday • "If you think the web is full of trivial rubbish, you will find the intellectual badinage of edge.org to be a blessed counterpoint." The Times • "...fascinating and provocative reading." The Guardian • "...reads like an intriguing dinner party conversation among great minds in science." Discover • "Danger brilliant minds at work... exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling."Evening Standard • "Wonderful reading." The Times • "Strangely addictive."The Telegraph • "The greatest virtual research university in the world."Arts & Letters Daily • "Audacious and stimulating." La Vanguardia • "Brilliant! Stimulating reading for anyone seeking a glimpse into the next decade." The Sunday Times • "A running fire of a provocative and fascinating thesis." La Stampa
Contributors include STEVEN PINKER on how the mind adapts to new technologies • NASSIM N TALEB on the destruction of precise knowledge • RICHARD DAWKINS on the consequences of infinite information • NICHOLAS CARR in the future of deep thought • HELEN FISHER on finding love and romance thought the Net • Wikipedia cofounder LARRY SANGER on the promise and pitfalls of the "hive mind" • SAM HARRIS on the wired brain • BRIAN ENO on finding authenticity in a world of endless reproduction
Other thinkers include tech theorists TIM O'REILLY, CLAY SHIRKY. DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, and EVGENY MOROZOV; founding Wired editor KEVIN KELLY; Google Executive MARISSA MAYER; computer scientists JARON LANIER; Philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT; physicists FRANK WILCZEK, MARTIN REES, LISA RANDALL, LEE SMOLIN; psychologist MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI; geneticist GEORGE CHURCH; novelists TOM McCARTHY and DOUGLAS COUPLAND; actor ALAN ALDA; artists MARINA ABRAMAMOVIC and AI WEIWIE; X Prize founder PETER H. DIAMANDIS; science historian GEORGE DYSON; and TED Conferences curator CHRIS ANDERSON.
"Edge, the high-minded ideas and tech site. (New York Times Week In Review)
"The answers are remarkable." (Sueddeutsche Zeitung)
"Edge is an organization of deep, visionary thinkers on science and culture." (The Atlantic Wire)
"The German Internet debate is stuck in the nineties. Brockman's question this year sets the chord for questions that take us beyond this set of attitudes. (Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor & Co-Publisher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
"If you have more time and think your attention span is up to it, we recommend you enjoy the whole scope of their length and diversity by visiting edge.org." (Ana Gershenfeld, Publico [Lisbon] Weekend Magazine Cover Story)
(* based On The Edge Question 2010: "How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?")
"Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future" (Harper Perennial, $14.99), edited by John Brockman: If you're interested in answers from 127 experts (count 'em!) to the question in the title of this book, it's a volume that will keep you busy for a while.
PAY ATTENTION, PLEASE The new Darwinian imperative may be 'the survival of the focused.'
By CHRISTINE ROSEN
In the mid-20th century, the French sociologist Jacques Ellul posed 76 "reasonable questions" that he thought we should ask about any new technology. They included moral questions such as "What values does its use foster?" and "What is lost by using it?" and social ones such as "What are its effects on relationships?" Today, as we rush to embrace the latest gadgets and apps, we tend merely to ask: "What does it do?"
Luckily, John Brockman, the founder of the online science-and-technology site Edge.org, decided to pose a bigger question to a varied group of 150 writers, artists, scholars, scientists and pundits: "Is the Internet changing the way you think?" The result is a diffuse but provocative sampling of the ways in which we live with technology today and think about its effects.
Although the sciences are heavily represented among Mr. Brockman's contributors, the volume ranges beyond the usual suspects (e.g., the ubiquitous technology booster Clay Shirky) to include visual artists, architects and musicians whose voices are all too often missing from discussions of technology and contemporary culture.
Whether poets or programmers, the book's contributors write from the perspective not of "digital natives" but of creatures from an earlier age who have had to adapt to the changes wrought by the Internet. As members of a transitional generation, they are poised to address both practical and philosophical themes. ...
Publishers, I was told by an august member of that tribe soon after I first wrote about them, are exactly like farmers. Whatever the weather, whatever the harvest, they just love to moan. Much in the world of books has changed since that moment, but not the propensity to grumble. During 2010, the "we're all doomed" tendency fed us on a bumper crop of of gloomy prognostications. Will almost-free digital distribution drain cash and credit out of the entire book-supply system? Do electronic books as a whole threaten to bankrupt publishers and pauperise authors? Has the spread of new media destroyed an appetite for reading any text tougher than a tweet among the born-digital generation?
Can anybody stop Google (with Amazon and Apple not far behind) seizing control of humanity's written heritage and using it to promote their partisan corporate agendas? Will independent high-street booksellers, well-stocked local libraries and reasonable advances for authors who don't appear on TV fade into the mists of bookish history, along with quill pens and lazy lunches? And can we ever hope to resist the takeover of publishing by celebrity clout when our Christmas chart-topper – Jamie Oliver's Jamie's 30-Minute Meals - comes from an author who cheerily admits that "I've never read a book in my life, ever, apart from my own". Respect to the recipes, though.
So book lovers need to embark on a chapter of hope. Every new year, John Brockman of the online intellectual powerhouse Edge (www.edge.org) asks its virtual community of scientists and social thinkers one question. In 2007, it was this: "What are you optimistic about?" To strike a less than despondent chord this January, I put the same question to a few people in the British book world who are best placed to know. Read their answers on these pages. ...
Does the Internet affect our brains? 170 scientists and artists are trying to answer that question.
Since 1998, John Brockman of The Edge Foundation, an association of scientists and intellectuals, asks his members every year a question which they must answer with a short essay. Examples from recent years include "What do you think is true, but you can not prove?" and "What did you change your mind about? The question last year is also the title of this book. It is of course a very topical issue although the Internet has no really been around long enough to have serious statements about the impact on our brains or our way of thinking, yet in recent years there have been dozens of works published describing the investigated effects.
Here you get 170 scientists and artists, including big names such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennet, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Brian Eno, each of whom has a few pages to explain the advent of the Internet and what it has meant to them.
With so many people are discussed, this is a very diverse book. Optimists like Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, may hold a hymn to the possibilities of the Internet, while several pages later another describes the worldwide web as "the biggest distraction from serious thinking since television was invented." Some authors point to the disastrous consequences that the Internet already has on our brains, while an evolutionary biologistsays that the Internet so far has changed our very little because the information we find there is still viewed through our lenses as hunter-gatherers. That we can not handle this, for example, leads to a greater sense of insecurity.
Nobel Prize Medal: Awarded for research, which has brought humanity the greatest benefit.
Max Brockman (ed.) The Future Makers - The Nobel Prize winners of tomorrow and what they are researching, "S. Fischer
By Ulrich Woelk
The science in the 20th Century revolutionary progress. What awaits us in the 21st Century? In outlining the collection "The Future Makers" young researcher award-winning their respective scientific ambitions, projects and expectations.
Politically, the reputation of the 20th Ruined century: two world wars, totalitarian ideologies numerous, cruel dictatorships, genocide — the list of bloody disaster and wrong this time is long. More surprising that there is a parallel to other equally long list of successes and victories.
Never before namely that science has been so great and revolutionary progress in the past century: relativity and quantum mechanics, the deciphering of the genome, the discovery of the subconscious, the Big Bang theory and incompleteness, penicillin, microelectronics, moon landing. The 20th Century has brought the fulfillment of the Faustian desire for complete knowledge within reach — so, so close that we can ask ourselves: What now? What comes after the century of scientific revolutions and breakthroughs?
In outlining the collection "The Future Makers" young researcher award-winning their respective scientific ambitions, projects and expectations. The publisher of this highly informative research anthology is the New York literary agent Max Brockman. He writes of its authors:
"Your employment with bold new ideas and their efforts to the frontiers of knowledge further and further delay, are an inspiration."
And that's true. Even the titles of the essays reveal that the young researchers from the scientific thinking of their fathers and grandfathers have a long way. "Are we inherently moral?" Consider, examine and "The development of the social brain in adolescence" or the "indispensability of the imagination," or ask, "How are people descended from the trees and why they is no one followed ?
Denis Dutton
died this morning in Christchurch, New Zealand following a rapid decline over the last week. He had a private battle with prostate cancer for some time. According to his family, up until one week ago he was still fighting hard, working on
his usual passions, and looking forward to the holidays with his family.
Denis, a philosopher, was founder and editor of the highly regarded Web publication, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). A native of Los Angeles, he taught the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, wrote widely on aesthetics. He was editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.
Denis was a personal friend, a professional colleague, a frequent contributor to these pages, and a great supporter of the third culture and the Edge community. His Arts & Letters Daily, year in and year out, has been everybody's favorite Website. In February, 2009, he came to New York and we sat to to talk about his ideas on art and reality. The conversation appeared on Edge. See: "Art and Human Reality:" A Talk With Denis Dutton; Introduction By Steven Pinker.
Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own
John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge
ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and
Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because
it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first
print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that
philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep
and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that
pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to
thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.
And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that
this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the
future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research
agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Dutton has written the
first draft of this agenda. (...Continue)
This Christmas, a bevy of elegant models are on display. Not just the long-legged female variety (although you can see those at this season’s parties in New York); instead, regulators, bankers and investors have been flaunting their own smart models, as they attempt to predict what 2011 might deliver.
But as this economic catwalk gets underway, it is shot through with irony. When the financial crisis hit, many observers blamed the disaster on the misuse of financial models. Not only had these flashy computer systems failed to forecast behaviour in the sub-prime mortgage world, but they had also seduced bankers and investors to take foolhardy risks or been used to justify some crazy behaviour.
But these days, in spite of all those mis-steps, there is little sign that financiers are falling out of love with those models; on the contrary, if you flick through the recent plethora of reports from the Basel Committees — or look at the 2011 forecasts emanating from investment banks — these remain heavily reliant on ever-more complex forms of modelling.
So what are investors to make of this? One particularly thought-provoking set of ideas can be seen in the current work of Emanuel Derman, a former physicist-turned banker who shot to fame within the banking industry two decades ago by co-developing some ground-breaking financial models, such as the Black-Derman-Toy model (one of the first interest rate models) and the Derman-Kani local volatility model (the first model consistent with the volatility smile). *
At first glance, Derman’s past might suggest he should be a model-lover — or "modeliser" — par excellence. In the banking world, he is often hailed as one of the great, original "quants", who paved the way for the derivatives revolution. Yet in reality, Derman has always been pretty cynical about those models that won him, and other quants, earlier accolades. For while investment bank salesmen might have treated his creations as near infallible, in truth Derman — like many brilliant scientists-turned-quants — has always recognised their flaws. ...
Some of the world’s greatest thinkers came together recently to answer the really big question — what will change the world? Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, reveals their predictions, from crowd-sourced charity to space colonisation and built-in telepathy.
It is not hard to think of examples of wide-eyed predictions that have proved somewhat wide of the mark. Personal jetpacks, holidays on the moon, the paperless office and the age of leisure all underline how futurologists are doomed to fail.
Any predictions should thus be taken with a heap of salt, but that does not mean crystal ball-gazing is worthless: on the contrary, even if it turns out to be bunk, it gives you an intriguing glimpse of current fads and fascinations.
A few weeks ago, a science festival in Genoa, Italy, gathered together some leading lights to discuss the one aspect of futurology that excites us all: cosa farà cambiare tutto — this will change everything.
The event was organised by John Brockman, a master convener, both online and in real life, and founder of the Edge Foundation, a kind of crucible for big new ideas.
With him were two leading lights of contemporary thought: Stewart Brand, the father of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founder of a pioneering online community called The Well and of the Global Business Network; and Clay Shirky, web guru and author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. ...
"I always come back to Edge. In the world of Anglo-Saxon ideas (that still prevail throughout the whole world, or among the elite of the world), there is no smarter guide."
When I received the invitation to write here, there was the question of whether the new columns would have names different than those of their authors. I was thinking about some possibilities. The first idea was to be a "name dropper," the English term for those in the habit of naming names of important people to impress listeners. I even thought about beginning all the texts with some name and gradually forming an idiosyncratic biographical catalogue, which could be useful for adventurous spirits.
The fact that I have not found a good ironic translation for such an expression in English, made me give up the gam in the end. So thought about the title "Frontier". In the background, still thinking in English: I movied towards "the border" in the direction of "edge". The columns would deal with only the cultural production that crossed limits established for the common place, transforming the world or inventing new ways to think about life. My inspiration came from a number of different things such as "Close to the Edge" or Brian Eno's Edge feature "A Big Theory Of Culture". But mostly, I wanted to emulate, in absurdly individual and uselessly pretentious way, the site http://www.edge.org/.
I tracked the trajectory of John Brockman, the man who founded Edge before the Web existed. I bought the first book in his series "The Reality Club" at the time of its launch in 1990. I was impressed with such an interesting gathering of thinkers, coming from different areas such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the biologist Lynn Margulis, or psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I learned that what was published there was only a sample of much greater diversity. The Reality Club’s monthly "invitation only" meetings in New York — which began in 1981 — is a fascinating group that includes the physicist Freeman Dyson to theater director Richard Foreman, almost all of my idols. The motto of the club was ambitious: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."
Today, the meeting room has become the website Edge. The transformation has not exactly been democratizing. The club remains as elitist (not a criticism, an observation) as before, maybe even more, since its members have become celebrities (sign of the times: today scientists can be more pop than Mick Jagger) and many of them are incredibly rich. It is not an open site where anyone can contribute, but remains invitation-only, editorially driven. The difference: the general reader can now monitor the selected conversation almost in real time, after a light filter. Brockman still decides who may speak at the forum. Currently he is one of the more powerful literary agents in the world (specialized mainly in science books), managing to convince the major publishing houses to pay millions in advances to his clients. (One of the legends that revolve around his working method is that if a book begins to earn royalties, he says that he's failed — because he didn't get a large enough advance from the publisher). Brockman is the agent of Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Martin Rees and others of the same caliber.
"An invitation to the 2010 dinner was not easy to come by as the figures who were present were the owners of Google, Twitter, Huffington Post, Bill Gates, Benoit Mandelbrot (fractals), Craig Venter (Human Genome Project). Do I need to drop more names? A bomb at dinner and we would lose much of a certain creative intelligence that drives our world and our future, or the future that these people have created for all of us. The nerd on the edge has now became the center of power."
The site has several sections. In one of them, a sort of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" — of the people Edge considers the most interesting and intelligent in the world — is an album of photos of an annual event hosted by Brockman, originally named "The Millionaires' Dinner" which was later upgraded to "The Billionaires' Dinner." An invitation to the 2010 dinner was not easy to come by as the figures who were present were the owners of Google, Twitter, Huffington Post, Bill Gates, Benoit Mandelbrot (fractals), Craig Venter (Human Genome Project). Do I need to drop more names? A bomb at dinner and we would lose much of a certain creative intelligence that drives our world and our future, or the future that these people have created for all of us. The nerd on the edge has now become the center of power.
Another very popular section is the Edge Annual Question. Every year a new question is asked. In November, Richard H. Thaler, the father of "behavioral economics" (the hottest area in economic studies), asked the following question: "Can you name your favorite examples of wrong scientific belief that were held for long periods of time". So far 65 responses have been received, authored by, among others, the physicist Lee Smolin and artist Matthew Ritchie. This week a special question was published. The inquisitor is Danny Hillis, pioneer in super computing, who — under the impact of Wiki-Leaks — wants to know if we can or if we must keep secrets in the age of information.
But this is the festive aspect of the Edge. What makes my neurons burn are the regular features, which are frequently brilliant texts, such as the most recent: "Metaphors, Models and Theories", by Emanuel Derman, one of those physicists in the past decades who has left the university to attempt to discover the laws of financial markets. (I will go deeper into this subject in a future column.) And this is why I always come back to Edge. In the world of Anglo-Saxon ideas (that still prevail throughout the whole world, or among the elite of the world), there is no smarter guide.
___
Hermano Vianna is a Brazilian anthropologist and writer who currently works in television. The original Portugese-language column, published behind O Globo's subscription pay-wall, is available, with an introduction, on Hermano Vianna's blog.
• Edge.org has a solid collection of essays addressing these questions: "When does my right to privacy trump your need for security? Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?"
The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to.
When does my right to privacy trump your need for security?; Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?
I am interested in hearing what the Edge community has to say in this regard that's new and original, and goes beyond the political. Here's my question:
W. DANIEL
(Danny) HILLIS is an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary. Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. He is also
the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.
Presently, he is Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds,
Inc., a research and development company in Los Angeles, creating a range of new products
and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology
security, and mechanical design. The company also provides advanced technology,
creative design, and security and cryptography consulting services to a variety of clients.
As far as morality goes, disgust has received a lot of attention, and there has been a lot of work on it. The flip side of it is cleanliness, or being tidy, proper, clean, pure, which has been considered the absence of disgust, or contamination. But there is actually more to being clean, and having things in order. On some level even cleanliness, or the desire to feel clean and pure has a social origin in the sense that primates show social grooming: Monkeys tend to get really close to each other, they pick insects off each other's fur, and it's not just useful in terms of keeping themselves clean, but it has an important social function in terms of bonding them together.
SIMONE SCHNALL is a social psychologist the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology at in Cambridge.
Contributors include STEVEN PINKER on how the mind adapts to new technologies • NASSIM N TALEB on the destruction of precise knowledge • RICHARD DAWKINS on the consequences of infinite information • NICHOLAS CARR in the future of deep thought • HELEN FISHER on finding love and romance thought the Net • Wikipedia cofounder LARRY SANGER on the promise and pitfalls of the "hive mind" • SAM HARRIS on the wired brain • BRIAN ENO on finding authenticity in a world of endless reproduction
Other thinkers include tech theorists TIM O'REILLY, CLAY SHIRKY. DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, and EVGENY MOROZOV; founding Wired editor KEVIN KELLY; Google Executive MARISSA MAYER; computer scientists JARON LANIER; Philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT; physicists FRANK WILCZEK, MARTIN REES, LISA RANDALL, LEE SMOLIN; psychologist MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI; geneticist GEORGE CHURCH; novelists TOM McCARTHY and DOUGLAS COUPLAND; actor ALAN ALDA; artists MARINA ABRAMAMOVIC and AI WEIWIE; X Prize founder PETER H. DIAMANDIS; science historian GEORGE DYSON; and TED Conferences curator CHRIS ANDERSON.
"Edge, the high-minded ideas and tech site. (New York Times Week In Review)
"The answers are remarkable." (Sueddeutsche Zeitung)
"Edge is an organization of deep, visionary thinkers on science and culture." (The Atlantic Wire)
"The German Internet debate is stuck in the nineties. Brockman's question this year sets the chord for questions that take us beyond this set of attitudes. (Frank Schirrmacher, Feuilleton Editor & Co-Publisher, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
"If you have more time and think your attention span is up to it, we recommend you enjoy the whole scope of their length and diversity by visiting edge.org." (Ana Gershenfeld, Publico [Lisbon] Weekend Magazine Cover Story)
(* based On The Edge Question 2010: "How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?")
"There are certain writers whose thought is so important that it doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not.
— San Francisco Review of Books, cover story
"The most important book since Wittgenstein's Tractatus."
— Alan Watts
[2009]
"Engaging"... "Engrosing" ... "Brilliant"
"A who's who of science's next generation. ... A captivating collection of essays ... a medley of big ideas ... a fascinating foray into the future."
— New Scientist
"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.— Boston Globe
Every year since 1998, 
