THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 11, 2008

OPED PAGE

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES
By Richard Dooling

...In a 1981 documentary called "The Day After Trinity," Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing.

"I have felt it myself," he warned. "The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

...As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth's nervous system (the Internet), it's worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of "Darwin Among the Machines," a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay—"Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?"—begins with a history of "stock," originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates. When funds were transferred, the stick was split into identical halves—with one side going to the depositor and the other to the party safeguarding the money—and represented proof positive that gold had been deposited somewhere to back it up. That was good enough for 600 years, until we decided that we needed more speed and efficiency.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. "The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good," George Dyson writes. "The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments." ...

...

Further Reading on Edge: Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too? By George Dyson [9.24.08]

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal. —Richard Thaler

CLASS 2:
RICHARD THALER & SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN

Jeff Bezos, Nathan Myhrvold, Salar Kamangar, Daniel Kahneman, Danny Hillis, Paul Romer, Elon Musk, Sean Parker

Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 2]

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
October 4, 2008

FEUILLETON

ASSUME THE FETAL POSITION!
By Frank Schirrmacher

The western societies have anticipated many things but not this attack from the inside. It is downright incredibly comprehensive, from the rhetorical preparations for the war with Iraq to the climate policy, the attack on the constitution, the surveillance of all intellectual and scientific endeavours and ending in the implosion of the financial system. The gigantic mountain that is in this system of fear the threat from the outside, emerges as emotional dislocation of fear of the innermost. By now the declaration of war against terror shows the traits of a forceful challenge to the traditional European idea of mankind. ...

...if the world doesn't understand what wounds it has inflicted on itself, it won't advance any more to the optimistic, happiness seeking and in the end even loving ego that slumbers embryonically in the innermost core of our democratic and social ideals. "In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism", John Berger writes. "Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to mean. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang's code-word, stolen from humanity."

...

[ED. NOTE: Frank Schirrmacher is head of the Feuilleton—the arts and science section—of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most influential German newspapers. He has been one of the publishers of FAZ since 1994. In 2000, FAZ published his manifesto "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech", in which he called for Europe to adopt the ideas of the third culture. His program, which involved publication of numerous essays by Edge contributors, was a departure for FAZ. It was covered in the German press and has caused a stir in German intellectual circles, and it played an important role in re-shaping German culture.]

Further Reading on Edge: "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech" By Frank Schirrmacher[7.10.00]

STRATEGY & BUSINES
Autumn 2008

TEA AND EMPATHY WITH DANIEL GOLEMAN
By Lawrence M. Fisher

The author of Emotional Intelligence says business leaders will need greater interpersonal awareness in an era of corporate transparency.

..."The market is out of sync with where medical science is heading in assessing hazards," Goleman adds. He points, for example, to the increasing flow of data about the adverse health consequences of regular exposure to chemicals found in a host of everyday products. "When Oprah Winfrey and 60 Minutes spotlight these dangers, we will see a spike in consumer alarm — successful brands will be tainted — and major market shifts will likely follow."

Gradually, corporate leaders will come to assume that the impact of all their activities — the impact on the planet, on people, and on the economy — will be visible. "It's not just your carbon footprint, it's every resource you use: the extraction, the processing, the consumption of it, and what happens when it is discarded," says Goleman. "Businesses will need to make strategic decisions based on the assumption that people will know the consequences of everything they do."...

...

FINANCIAL TIMES
September 30, 2008

The Short View: Political risk
By John Authers, Investment Editor

At last, we have a black swan. The credit crisis began last year soon after the publication of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's bestselling Black Swan, which tackled the impact of unexpected events, such as the discovery of black swans in Australia by explorers who had thought all swans were white. ...

...Prediction markets, summing the market's wisdom, had it wrong. Last week, the Intrade market put the odds that the Tarp would have passed by now at more than 90 per cent.

Models using market extremes to predict political interventions were also fooled. When volatility rises as high as in the past few weeks, it has in the past been a great bet that the government will do something—which is in part why spikes in volatility tend to be great predictors of a subsequent bounce.

Taleb himself suggested recently that investors should rely least on normal statistical methods when they are in the "fourth quadrant"—when there is a complex range of possible outcomes and where the distribution of responses to those outcomes does not follow a well understood pattern.

Investors were in that quadrant on Monday morning. They were vulnerable to black swans and should not have relied on statistics as a guide.

One prediction for the future does look safe, however: investors will spend much more time making qualitative assessments of political risk.

..

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

NEW SCIENTIST
October 1, 2008

ANYONS: THE BREALTHROUGH QUANTUM COMPUTING NEEDS?
Don Monroe

...Wilczek realised, though, that quantum laws allow another possibility - as long as there are only two dimensions. That restriction arises because swapping positions is equivalent to rotating the particles clockwise or anticlockwise. If you have three dimensions, shifting your perspective - looking from under the table, for instance - can make opposite rotations look identical; only in 2D would they always be distinguishable.

Wilczek reasoned that if you could confine the game - including the watchers - to two dimensions, perhaps a new class of particle, neither fermions nor bosons, but something in between, could retain a topological charge. In the highly artificial scenario of strange new particles that exist only in 2D - Wilczek called them anyons - a quantum trace of the particles' relative motions would remain.

This is the key to "topological quantum computing". We have known for a very long time that knots and braids - which are the result of swapping the relative positions of threads - offer a way to encode numbers: that is how the ancient Incas kept records. Likewise, swapping the relative positions of quantum particles can encode numbers for quantum processing. ...

...

Further Reading on Edge: "A Sice of SciFoo" By Frank Wilczek [9.3.08]

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS [10.1.08]

Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

Richard Thaler		Sendhil Mullainathan		Daniel Kahneman

A year ago, Edge convened its first "Master Class" in Napa, California, in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a 9-hour course: "A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking". The attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture.

This year, to continue the conversation, we invited Richard Thaler, the father of behavioral economics, to organize and lead the class: "A Short Course On Behavioral Economics". Thaler asked Harvard economist and former student Sendhil Mullainathan, as well as Daniel Kahneman, to teach the class with him.

Whereas last year, the focus was on psychology, this year the emphasis shifted to behavioral economics. As Kahneman noted:

...There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!

The Master Class is the most recent iteration of Edge's development, which began its activities under than name "The Reality Club" in 1981. Edge's is different from The Algonquin, The Apostles, The Bloomsbury Group, or The Club, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. The closest resemblances are to The Invisible College and the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

The early seventeenth-century Invisible College was a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another example is the nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, and Benjamin Franklin.

In a similar fashion, Edge's, through its Master Classes, gathers together intellectuals and technology pioneers. In this regard, George Dyson, in his summary (below) of the second day of the proceedings, writes:

Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years.

Indeed, as one distinguished European visitor noted, the weekend, which involved the 2-day Master Class in Sonoma followed by a San Francisco dinner, involved "a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture".

Beginning October 1st, Edge will begin to publish on a weekly basis the text, selected video highlights, and photos of the six classes comprising "A Short Course In Behavioral Economics". Below, please find the Table of Contents; Introduction By Daniel Kahneman; Summary of Day 1 By Nathan Myhrvold; Summary of Day 2 By George Dyson; Link to the Photo Gallery; and Link to Class One.

—John Brockman, Editor

RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page

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

PARTICIPANTS: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc, Marketing Professor; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Tesla Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter.

[...Continue to "A Short Class In Behavioral Economics"]

Further Reading on Edge:
"A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking"
Edge Master Class 2007
Daniel Kahneman
Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA, July 20-22, 2007

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."

— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)

NEW SCIENTIST
September 24, 2008

EDITORIAL: WHEN THE NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP

ONE of the most alarming things about the crisis in the global financial system is that the warning signs have been out there for some time, yet no one heeded them. Exactly 10 years ago a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management failed to convince investors that it could repay its debts, thereby bringing the world to the brink of a similar "liquidity crisis" to the one we now see. Disaster was averted then only because regulators managed to put together a multibillion-dollar bailout package. ...

...Most quants, while acknowledging the shortcomings of their models, tend to argue that approximations are necessary, given the difficulty of modelling extreme events, which are in any case rare.

That may be true, but it is dangerous to assume that the approximations are sound. Sometimes even small modelling deficiencies can have huge consequences. Nassim Taleb, an expert on chance and co-director of the Decision Research Laboratory at the London Business School, argues that all economic activities are subject to extreme events that have complex real-world consequences - and that such events are inherently unpredictable by any conventional tool. If Taleb is right - and his argument will be hotly contested - then we cannot be sure that it is even possible to build risk models capable of making meaningful predictions when they matter most.

...

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

BOSTON GLOBE
October 1, 2008

WHAT ABOUT AUSTERITY?
By Juan Enriquez and Jorge Dominguez

WITHIN THE billions of sentences about the financial bailout there is one word notably absent, austerity. All talk is of payments, supports, subsidies, incurring more debt, stimulus packages. The thesis seems to be: If only we spend more the party can go on. True, only if the financial meltdown is a temporary mismatch and dislocation in housing and credit markets. But suppose there is something fundamentally wrong with the US economy. Then spending more will not fix it. Getting the diagnosis right means getting the treatment right. It may save us a trillion or two. ...

...The United States requires a massive restructuring to address its debt, cutting back on its borrowing, spending, and wars. The bailout package is essential to keep the credit markets open. But absent sentences that include the word austerity all the bailout will accomplish is a temporary postponement. Bailout and stimulus are a stopgap.

A solution requires the country to begin to spend what it earns, reduce its mountainous debt, and address massive liabilities, restructure Social Security, pension deficits, military, and Medicare. No wonder politicians would rather spend more of your money now rather than address these problems. Because we have been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than we earn, a forced restructuring, triggered by a currency collapse, would have the same effect on wages and purchasing power that the housing collapse had on housing prices. So let's learn from our Latin and Asian friends and act before it is too late.

...

ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM [9.24.08]
Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
By George Dyson

George Dyson writes: "Readers of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant may enjoy the following piece on fraud-resistant financial instruments of the 13th century—progenitors of a multitude of derivatives that are plaguing us today." ...

...The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks? ...

...

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 28, 2008

PRIVATE COMPANY LAUNCHES ITS ROCKET INTO ORBIT
By John Schwartz

A privately financed company launched a rocket of its own design successfully into orbit on Sunday night, ushering in what the company's founders hope will be a new era of spaceflight.

It was the fourth launching attempt by the company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, which was founded by Elon Musk, an Internet entrepreneur born in South Africa.

"We've made orbit!" Mr. Musk exclaimed to his employees at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., proclaiming the moment "awesome."

"There were a lot of people who thought we couldn't do it — a lot, actually," he said after thanking his employees. "But, you know, the saying goes, fourth time's the charm."

Mr. Musk, 37, founded SpaceX in 2002 after selling the online payment company he helped found, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion. ...

...

YOU TUBE
September 28, 2008

ELON MUSK'S SPACEX SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHES FALCON 1

...

BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
September 28, 2008

IDEAS (FRONT PAGE)

HIDDEN HISTORIES

'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad' are giving up new secrets about the ancient world

By Jonathan Gottschall

NEARLY 3,000 YEARS after the death of the Greek poet Homer, his epic tales of the war for Troy and its aftermath remain deeply woven into the fabric of our culture. These stories of pride and rage, massacre and homecoming have been translated and republished over millennia. Even people who have never read a word of "The Iliad" or "The Odyssey" know the phrases they have bequeathed to us - the Trojan horse, the Achilles heel, the face that launched a thousand ships.

Today we still turn to Homer's epics not only as sources of ancient wisdom and wrenchingly powerful poetry, but also as genuinely popular entertainments. Recent translations of "The Iliad" and "Odyssey" have shared the best-seller lists with Grisham and King. "The Odyssey" has inspired works from James Joyce's "Ulysses" to a George Clooney movie, and an adaptation of "The Iliad" recently earned more than $100 million in the form of Wolfgang Petersen's "Troy" - a summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as an improbable Achilles. ...

...But thanks to evidence from a range of disciplines, we are in the middle of a massive reappraisal of these foundational works of Western literature. Recent advances in archeology and linguistics offer the strongest support yet that the Trojan War did take place, with evidence coming from the large excavation at the likely site of Troy, as well as new analysis of cuneiform tablets from the dominant empire of the region. Insights from comparative anthropology have transformed studies of the society that created the poems and allowed us to analyze the epics in a new way, suggesting that their particular patterns of violence contain a hidden key to ancient Greek history - though not necessarily the key that Homer's readers once thought they were being given.

"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" are our most precious artifacts of early Greek culture. Aside from the dry and voiceless remains of archeological sites, the poems are the last surviving impressions of the society that created them - what the people hoped for, what they despaired of, and how they managed their social and political lives. The poems are time machines - imperfect, surely - that show us people who were so like us, and so different, too. And they are still revealing new truths about the prehistoric civilization that has exerted such a strong formative influence over the art, the history, and even the psychology of the West.

...

BLOGGING HEADS.TV
September 20, 2008

JOHN HORGAN & GEORGE JOHNSON

JOHNSON: To get back to Taleb again, obviously, this piece on Edge is really food for thought. He mentioned Manderbrot sets and fractals and power laws where you have a rare number of extreme events and a lot of smaller less extreme events but his point underling this is that he didn't believe for a moment that these mathematical models actually explained reality or financial market place reality in any case but they are ways to think about it, ways to get a handle on it, but basically, it's too complex for us to understand.

I found that very rereshing since the thing that strikes me sometimes about the universe when we get to the ultimate questions is that we have these wonderful tools that are very helpful but you can't mistake the map for the reality—that old saw—the map for the territory.

HORGAN: We're all bozos on this bus....

...

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

THE OBSERVER
September 28, 2008

Profile: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

THE NEW SAGE OF WALL STREET

The trader turned author has emerged as the guru of the global financial meltdown. Not only is he riding high in the bestseller lists, his theory of black swan events has become the most seductive guide to our uncertain times

Edward Helmore

...'Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it's only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions.' But, Taleb believes, bankers are not conservative at all. They are just 'phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug'.

In his estimation of the scale of the disaster: 'The banking system, betting against black swans, has lost more than $1 trillion—more than was ever made in the history of banking.'

When it comes to finance, collective wisdom has shown itself to be close to astrology—based on nothing. But according to Taleb, unpredictable events—9/11, the dotcom bubble, the current financial implosion—are much more common than we think. ...

...

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

THE COLBERT REPORT
September 25, 2008

September 25, 2008 GUEST: NICK CARR Sarah Palin is in New York City, and Nick Carr thinks the Internet is superficial.

...

Further Reading on Edge: The Reality Club On "Is Google Making Us Stupid" By Nicholas Carr: W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff, W. Daniel Hillis, David Brin

BLOGGING HEADS.TV
September 20, 2008

SEAN CARROLL & JENIFER OUELLETTE

...

THE ECONOMIC TIMES
September 24, 2008

ENLIGHTENED PURSUIT OF PLEASURE
By Vithal C Nadkarni

The moral of the story is pretty stark: don't be fooled by the past, or even the present: for that's not the way to live in a world that one does not understand very well, says noted risk analyst and author of Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb in a recent essay.

Taleb was commenting on the current subprime crisis and on the limits of statistically-driven claims. By his take, when it comes to anticipating that comparatively rare event which can massively disrupt the predictable monotony of our lives, we humans seem to be as clueless about the future as ‘little' Tom Turkey! Buddhists have extended that insight into the Doctrine of Anitya, which can also be partly summarised by the well-known adage - in life nothing is certain except death and taxes.

So how does one conduct oneself in a world that has death as the one great certainty which ‘cures' the disease called life? Start by avoiding false attributions: which means we must not mistake what is essentially unstable and impermanent as something everlasting or perennial.

...

On "THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS"
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

JARON LANIER: This is a superb piece and I hope it is widely read and taken to heart in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington. All these centers of power and creativity are drowning in illusions brought about by thunderous misuses of statistics that have become implacably seductive only with the recent availability of vast, connected computer resources.

Edge.org has become the most dramatic point of contact between the critics and supporters of the fallacies Taleb elucidates. ...

GEORGE DYSON: ...What to do now? I'd prefer less Paulson, and more Newton. In the 17th century, English coinage had become widely debased, much as our system of financial instruments has become debased today. In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, with authority to prosecute counterfeiters, who were not only hung, but drawn and quartered. This, accompanied by a systematic recoinage, worked.

...

THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS [9.15.08]
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

An Edge Original Essay

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

REALITY CLUB: Jaron Lanier, George Dyson

BLOGWATCH

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GAWKER
September 19, 2008

WHAT WE NEED MORE OF IS SCIENCE
SCIENTISTS EXPLAIN WHY PEOPLE VOTE FOR REPUBLICANS

Every election season, commentators trot out the old statistics about how more education makes people more likely to support Democrats, more studies are published on how liberal Daily Show viewers are so well-informed, and various smart people try to explain why anyone would ever vote for a Republican, against their "self-interest." This month has seen three alarming and remarkable scientific investigations into Americans' inexplicable habit of voting for George Bush and John McCain. Which means: trend! Hooray! Let's take a look at what America's top scienticians say about fucking idiot flyover losers and their stupid voting: ...

...Conservatives Have An Entirely Different Moral Code

This should bring you down, a little bit. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, wrote a lengthy anthropological investigation into why people vote for Republicans. It's not the Thomas Frank "they are distracted by bullshit" explanation, though it is related: they have different cultural standards of ethics and morality! Liberals and college students define morality as "how we treat each other," conservatives attach more significance to "supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way." Liberals recognize fairness and care as important moral virtues, conservatives add to that loyalty, respect for authority, and duty. The educated moral relativism worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the way like 50% of America thinks, and stereotypes about out-of-touch elitist coastal democrats are basically correct. Sigh.

So What Have We Learned?

Conservatives respond instinctually, not rationally, to scary images, "facts," and institutions. Whether this is innate and biological or cultural seems still up in the air. Democrats can't with with logical arguments or even appeals to the innate rightness of concepts like "diversity" and "tolerance," because those aren't considered essentially good and important by the voters they're trying to appeal to. This does suggest that an appeal to old New Deal institutional concepts like the Welfare State might actually be effective, if they're wrapped in the flag and a sense of duty. Also scientists still consider the majority of Americans to be like a fascinating exotic backwards tribe and the fucking country is doomed.

...

SEEKING ALPHA
September 18, 2008

MANAGING RISK: A PROBABILITY MODEL

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the widely discussed The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness, is out with a new paper. "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" pursues a thesis very familiar to his readers, namely that economists and finance professionals put society at risk by offering false comfort in the form of statistical models.

Risk Does Not Equal Volatility

The novel effort here is Taleb's attempt to map out which kinds of risks and events are more-or-less adequately captured by statistics, and which ones fall into the unquantifiable "black swan" category. Events that fall into this unanalyzable fourth quadrant (click to enlarge chart, below) are characterized first by what logicians would call multivalent truth-conditions: they are not all-or-nothing, true or false occurrences, but rather may have varying degrees of realization. Second, the "payoffs" or impacts of such events may be nonlinear.

After categorizing some examples, Taleb concludes with nine practical rules for dealing with the existence of this fourth quadrant. We won't list them all here, but we found one rule particularly notable:

8) Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risks. Recall how conventional metrics of using volatility as an indicator of stability have fooled Bernanke—as well as the banking system.

...

DESERET NEWS — SALT LAKE CITY
September 11, 2008

GPS units, Internet helping little dogies get along

Q. Laboratory rats listening to the music of Mozart and Schoenberg? What were social scientists trying to prove with this one?

A. Oddly, the rats that had been brought up listening to Mozart came to prefer Mozart and the Schoenberg rats preferred Schoenberg, says Richard E. Nisbett in "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?," edited by John Brockman. The researchers placed trip-switches on either side of the cages, enabling the rats to move freely to the side where their preferred composer could be heard.

The point of the experiment was to show that rats — like people — are susceptible to the "familiarity effect," where familiarity breeds liking or at least acceptance for a wide variety of stimuli. ...

...

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
September 21, 2008

Cutting Edge: New ideas / Sharp opinions
Compiled by Greg Victor

Hardwired conservatives

Jonathan Haidt at Edge says science now suggests that "conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer 'moral clarity' -- a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep-seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world."

(edge.org)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 20, 2008

PING
TECHNOLOGY DOESN'T DUMB US DOWN. IT FREES OUR MINDS.
By Damon Darlin

EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr.

To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks):

Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains' wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.

If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.

With Twitter, people subscribe to your "tweets." Those who can make life's mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers.

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Further Reading—The Reality Club On "Is Google Making Us Stupid" By Nicholas Carr: W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Larry Sanger, George Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff, W. Daniel Hillis, David Brin

THE ECONOMIST
September 18, 2008

USER-GENERATED SCIENCE
Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change the shape of scientific debate

IN PRE-INTERNET times, peer-reviewed journals were the best way to disseminate research to a broad audience. Even today, editors and reviewers cherry-pick papers deemed the most revelatory and dispatch them to interested subscribers worldwide. The process is cumbersome and expensive, but it has allowed experts to keep track of the most prominent developments in their respective fields.

Peer-review possesses other merits, the foremost being the ability to filter out dross. But alacrity is not its strong suit. With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, especially in nascent fields where new discoveries abound. When a paper does get published, the easiest way to debate it is to submit another paper, with all the tedium that entails.

Now change is afoot. Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. Such discussions, the internet-era equivalent of the journal club, have hitherto been strewn across the web, making them hard to find, navigate and follow. The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online.

Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac, it may prove to be a path to speedier scientific advancement. According to Adam Bly, Seed's founder, internet-aided interdisciplinarity and globalisation, coupled with a generational shift, portend a great revolution. His optimism stems in large part from the fact that the new technologies are no mere newfangled gimmicks, but spring from a desire for timely peer review. ...

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THE GUARDIAN
September 18, 2008

Turkish court bans Richard Dawkins website
Riazat Butt, religious affairs correspondent

A Turkish court has banned internet users from viewing the official Richard Dawkins website after a Muslim creationist claimed its contents were defamatory and blasphemous.

Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name of Harun Yahya, complained that Dawkins, a fierce critic of creationism and intelligent design, had insulted him in comments made on forums and blogs.

According to Oktar's office, Istanbul's second criminal court of peace banned the site earlier this month on the grounds that it "violated" Oktar's personality.

His press assistant, Seda Aral, said: "We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people.

"We found the comments hurtful. It was not a scientific discussion. There was a line and the limit has been passed.

"We have used all the legal means to stop this site. We asked them to remove the comments but they did not."

Oktar, a household name in Turkey, has used hundreds of books, pamphlets and DVDS to contest Darwin's theory of evolution.

In 2006 his publishers sent out 10,000 copies of the Atlas of Creation, a lavish 800-page rejection of evolution.

Dawkins, one of the recipients, described the book as "preposterous". On his website the British biologist and popular science writer said he was at "a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the 'breathtaking inanity' of the content."

It is the third time Oktar and his associates have succeeded in blocking sites in Turkey. ...

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NEWSWEEK
September 22, 2008

Is Morality Natural?
Science is tracing the biological roots of our intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong.
By Marc D. Hauser

On Jan. 2, 2007, a large woman entered the Cango caves of South Africa and wedged herself into the only exit, trapping 22 tourists behind her. Digging her out appeared not to be an option, which left a terrible moral dilemma: take the woman's life to free the 22, or leave her to die along with her fellow tourists? It is a dilemma because it pushes us to decide between saving many and using someone else's life as a means to this end.

A new science of morality is beginning to uncover how people in different cultures judge such dilemmas, identifying the factors that influence judgment and the actions that follow. These studies suggest that nature provides a universal moral grammar, designed to generate fast, intuitive and universally held judgments of right and wrong.

Consider yourself a subject in an experiment on the Moral Sense Test (moral .wjh.harvard.edu), a site presenting dilemmas such as these: Would you drive your boat faster to save the lives of five drowning people knowing that a person in your boat will fall off and drown? Would you fail to give a drug to a terminally ill patient knowing that he will die without it but his organs could be used to save three other patients? Would you suffocate your screaming baby if it would prevent enemy soldiers from finding and killing you both, along with the eight others hiding out with you?

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FLORIDA TREND
September 1, 2008

DARWIN, EINSTEIN, AND FIVE CHALLENGES FOR FLORIDA
Florida does many things well, but it has to adapt, adopt and evolve -- rapidly.
By Juan Enriquez

Next year marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein. It is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. You may not see how Florida's future is connected with either man, but let me explain why I believe Darwin offers a better example for Florida to follow than Einstein.

In their time, both men advanced theories that were radical. Today, however, the enduring image of Einstein is that of a beloved old grandfather, while Darwin remains a boogeyman for many; some schools, community leaders and politicians continuously try to banish his name and works from impressionable young minds.

Objectively, it should be the other way around; Einstein messed up our notions of the entire universe, space and time while birthing atomic energy and weapons. Darwin simply said all living things, including humanoids, gradually change. And in the process of change most do not survive if they do not evolve. ...

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DER SPIEGEL
September 10, 2008

"Was halten Sie für wahr, ohne es beweisen zu können?"
("What We Believe But Cannot Prove?")

Google Translation

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 11, 2008

DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES
Judith Warner

No Laughing Matter

..."Palin Power" isn't just about making hockey moms feel important. It's not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It's also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can't tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, "What Makes People Vote Republican?", that it's liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. "Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger," he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that's why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals' skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

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FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
September 15, 2008

Amazons Lesegerät Kindle
Das Buch, das aus dem Äther kam
Von Hubert Spiegel

...Viele Beobachter glauben, dass sich das e-book vor allem im Bereich des Sachbuchs rasch Terrain erobern könnte. John Brockman und seine Frau Katinka Matson gehören zu den einflussreichsten Akteuren der amerikanischen Verlagswelt. Die Literaturagenten, die sich auf wissenschaftliche Publikationen und populäre Sachbücher spezialisiert haben, sagen der neuen Technologie eine große Zukunft voraus. Sie selbst lese zwar nach wie vor lieber in einem Buch, sagt Katinka Matson, aber der Kindle sei nun mal "viel praktischer, ein wirklich cooles Gerät: Ich kann im Bett liegen und mir jedes Buch aus dem Netz herunterladen." Brockman und seine Frau sind davon überzeugt, dass der Kindle unsere Lesegewohnheiten revolutionieren werde. "Aber Bücher müssen deshalb nicht anders geschrieben werden, und Autoren sollten den Kindle auch nicht bei der Konzeption ihrer Werke berücksichtigen." ...

Google Translation

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NATIONAL REVIEW
September 12, 2008

THE CORNER

What Makes People Vote Republican [John Derbyshire]
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a long piece titled "What Makes People Vote Republican" on Edge.org. Don't be put off by the whiffs of liberal-intellectual snobbery in Haidt's opening remarks. He has interesting things to say; and the follow-up discussion is very good. Snobbery-wise, Roger Schank takes the palm at the end of those follow-ups:

The Haidt article is interesting, as are the responses to it, but these pieces are written by intellectuals who live in an environment where reasoned argument is prized. I live in Florida.

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THE GUARDIAN
September 9, 2008

OLIVER BURKEMAN'S CAMPAIGN DIARY BLOG

Tuesday memo: The road to the bridge to nowhere that wasn't there
Fun with expenses, Alaska-style; why do people vote Republican?; Obama calls in the cavalry

There's unanimity that Palin's statements about the Bridge to Nowhere are... what do you call that thing where something's not true and you know it? Ah, yes. She also supported building a road to the Bridge to Nowhere, even though the bridge wasn't built: a road to a bridge to nowhere that wasn't even there itself. [Newsweek, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal]

No issue's off the table, ABC News insists, for Charlie Gibson's exclusive Sarah Palin interview, to be broadcast on Thursday and Friday, although obviously questioning her suitability for the role would be sexist. [Associated Press]

Why do people vote Republican? A psychologist investigates. [Edge.org]

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THE MALTA INDEPENDENT
September 13, 2008

J'accuse: The meaning of life
by Jacques René Zammit

...That leads me to the other big issue for me this week. Admittedly it has not been in the news but my meanderings on the net led me to an extremely interesting article by Jonathan Haidt – a researcher on psychology and emotion. In his article "What makes people vote Republican?", Haidt examines the divide between liberals and conservatives and the values they hold to heart. It is an eye-opener for righteous liberals like myself who tend to believe that a conservative position is rooted in narrow-minded blindness.

What Haidt concludes is that the value structure of liberals is radically different from that of conservatives (duh!). In essence, conservatives value norms because they provide stability. Whether those norms emanate from socially developed values or from belief systems, the inherent stability they provide when everybody adheres to the system make them something worth fighting for.

For millennia, the guiding light for a large number of societies has been the same source such as religious belief. This leads to society being seen as an entity in itself that values its very integrity and identity of the collective. Look back at ancient norms – just open your Bible at Leviticus and you will find rules about menstruation, who can eat what and who can have sex with whom. Oftentimes rationality is not the basis of these laws but they provide comfort and a set of guidelines to live "safely". ...

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LAS VEGAS SUN
September 14, 2008

POLITICAL MEMO:
It's not the issues that likely make up many minds
Experts say uninformed voters have power

By J. Patrick Coolican

...Within this context of "character," how do voters make up their minds?

There are many theories, none conclusive.

"Why People Vote Republican," a recent essay by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, offers some clues, tying "why" to the origins of morality.

He posits that liberal-leaning Americans tend to subscribe to social contract ethics: You and I agree we're equals, and we won't get in each other's way. The basic values: fairness, reciprocity and helping those in need. ...

Other theories:

University of California, Berkeley, linguist George Lakoff thinks conservatives are more aware of the importance of metaphor and language, and thus frame political debates to their advantage. So, for example, President Bush proposed "tax relief," which made the current tax structure seem like an affliction. Who could oppose that? Examples are endless. ...

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WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt

...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer.

THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Everett, Howard Gardner, Michael Shermer, Scott Atran, James Fowler, Alison Gopnik, Sam Harris, James O'Donnell, Roger Schank

BLOGWATCH

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A SLICE OF SCIFOO [9.3..07]
By Frank Wilczek

SciFoo is a conference like no other. It brings together a mad mix from the worlds of science, technology, and other branches of the ineffable Third Culture at the Google campus in Mountain View. Improvised, loose, massively parallel—it's a happening. If you're not overwhelmed by the rush of ideas then you're not paying attention.

REALITY CLUB: Lee Smolin, Betsy Devine, George Dyson

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Sep 15, 2008 • 6:30 PM

UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE: AN EVENING WITH FRANK WILCZEK

Location: The New York Academy of Sciences, 7 World Trade Center, 250 Greenwich St. at Barclay St., 40th fl.

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics winner explains the universe, synthesizes the Grand Unification of Forces, and shares his vision of a new Golden Age in physics—all for the layperson in an event celebrating the publication of his new book, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.

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ON "GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS: A Talk by Clay Shirky"

NEW David Brin
Physicist; Technical Consultant; Science Fiction Writer; Author, The Transparent Society

Tell me about the sites where really bad assertions go to die—the way phlogiston and witch-burnings died—a well-deserved death that ought to follow the most noxious assertions across our culture, so that truly disproved nonsense can actually go away, making way for new ideas. If you dismiss this as impossible, then I think your hopes for the web are far too timid, since the allegory should be a vivid human mind—and complex human beings, sane ones, can actually drop a bad idea, from time to time. ...

NEW James O'Donnell
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (forthcoming)

Shirky's piece gives more context for our transition away from words that matter. I don't mean we don't speak and write and that words aren't highly functional tools, but the exact framing of sentences and the precise structure of the verbal argument are less and less important. Bullet points on a powerpoint get the conversation going and the group working together gets to the result that matters. The "writer" is less important than he has been since, oh, Herodotus. ...

NEW Chris Anderson
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine; Author, The Long Tail

To use a computer science rather than economic analogy, what Shirky is talking about is what I call the "awesome power of spare cycles"—the human potential that isn't tapped by our jobs, which for most of us is a lot of it. People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free. Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they'd rather not be. The guy playing Solitaire on his laptop at the airport? Spare cycles. Multiply it times a million. ...

Nicholas Carr
Information Technology Analyst; Blogger, Rough Type; Author, The Big Switch

...It's worth remembering that Gilligan's Island originally ran on television from late 1964 to late 1967, a period noteworthy not for its social passivity but for its social activism. These were years not only of great cultural and artistic exploration and inventiveness (it was the first great age of the garage band, for one thing) but also of widespread protest, when people organized into very large—and very real—groups within the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, the folk movement, the psychedelic movement, and all sorts of other movements. People weren't in their basements; they were in the streets.

If everyone was so enervated by Gilligan's Island, how exactly do you explain 1968? The answer is: you don't, and you can't.

Indeed, once you begin contrasting 1968 with 2008, you might even find yourself thinking that, on balance, the Web is not an engine for social activism but an engine for social passivity. You might even suggest that the Web funnels our urges for "participation" and "sharing" into politically and commercially acceptable channels—that it turns us into play-actors, make-believe elves in make-believe clans. ...

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GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS [8.21.08]
A Talk by Clay Shirky ()

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

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NEW YORK TIMES — SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
August 25, 2008

The Theory That Ate the World
By George Johnson

Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, is one of the wiliest. Three years ago in "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," he spun a tale of a multitude of different universes — nooks and crannies of a transcendent multiverse, or "landscape," each ruled by a different physics. This is probably the most controversial interpretation of superstring theory (some of Susskind's colleagues absolutely hate the idea), but it has its appeal. With so many universes out there, the fact of our own existence need not inspire worship and awe. We just happen to occupy one of the niches where the laws are favorable to carbon-based life.

In his new book, "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind's cosmos gets even weirder. Black holes already seemed scary enough, with their ability to swallow everything, including light. For a while, we learn, physicists were faced with the possibility that these cosmic vortexes might also be eaters of order, sucking up and destroying information. Like the Echthroi, the evil demons of entropy in Madeleine L'Engle's novel "A Wind in the Door," black holes might be chomping their way through the universe, ploughing sense into nonsense.

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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
August 20, 2008

Campaign observers: Time is ripe for Obama to step up his game
Carla Marinucci

It's not panic time - yet - but some Democrats watching Barack Obama say his campaign should have gotten a wake-up call this week, not only from his appearance alongside John McCain at the Saddleback Church but from a major poll suggesting he no longer leads his GOP opponent.

At the Saddleback forum with Pastor Rick Warren on Saturday in San Diego, the Republican presidential candidate delivered on-the-money messages and answers so effective they were "scary to me," said George Lakoff, a renowned author and UC Berkeley linguistics professor who has studied how the human brain absorbs and processes messages.

Lakoff, whose work has helped shaped numerous Democratic candidates' campaigns in the past, said that "right through the motivational campaign theme, they were doing everything right."

By contrast, Obama was "overconfident ... and certainly not prepared" before the evangelical audience with definitive answers to clearly explain to voters his world view, values and vision, Lakoff said. ...

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ABC NEWS
August 17, 2008

Party Time: From Dreams And Delusions To Wars And Wiretapping
John Allen Paulos

The "word cloud" containing the words "dreams" and "delusions" doesn't contain the words "wars" and "wiretapping," but perhaps it should.

Thinking about the genesis and consequences of the Iraq War and the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that authorizes wholesale wiretapping, I recalled a relevant party game I once wrote about. The game, described by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained," is a variant of the familiar childhood game requiring that one try to determine by means of Yes or No questions a secretly chosen number between one and one million.

The Game

In Dennett's more interesting and suggestive game, one person, the subject, is selected from a group of people at a party and asked to leave the room. He is told that in his absence one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the other party attendees. The person selected then returns to the party and, through a sequence of Yes or No questions about the dream, attempts to accomplish two things: reconstruct the dream and identify whose dream it was.

The punch line is that no one has related any dream. ...

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SCIENCE & SPIRIT

Daniel Dennett's Darwinian Mind: An Interview with a 'Dangerous' Man

The outspoken philosopher of science distills his rigorous conceptions of consciousness, and aims withering fire at the dialogue between science and religion.

Chris Floyd

In matters of the mind—the exploration of consciousness, its correlation with the body, its evolutionary foundations, and the possibilities of its creation through computer technology—few voices today speak as boldly as that of philosopher Daniel Dennett. His best-selling works—among them Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea—have provoked fierce debates with their rigorous arguments, eloquent polemic and witty, no-holds-barred approach to intellectual combat. He is often ranked alongside Richard Dawkins as one of the most powerful—and, in some circles, feared—proponents of thorough-going Darwinism.

Dennett has famously called Darwinism a "universal acid," cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought. "The question is," he writes in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, "what does it leave behind? I have tried to show that once it passes through everything, we are left with stronger, sounder versions of our most important ideas. Some of the traditional details perish, and some of these are losses to be regretted, but...what remains is more than enough to build on." ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 17, 2008

MUSIC

TOGETHER AGAIN IN DIFFERENT TIME ZONES
John Parales

HERE'S one way for strong musical personalities to work together amicably: Keep your distance.

David Byrne and Brian Eno were the songwriter and producer on the most radical albums by Talking Heads, and they collaborated on a 1981 album, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts." Now, 27 years later, they have reunited to make their second duo album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." It is being released digitally on Aug. 18 via everythingthathappens.com, a month later on major commercial download sites and, as soon as it can be manufactured and distributed, as a physical CD.

For most of the album's yearlong process the songwriting partners were an ocean apart, Mr. Eno in London and Mr. Byrne in New York City, though both are globe-hoppers. They also kept their jobs separate. By and large, Mr. Eno provided the music, and Mr. Byrne topped it with melodies, words and vocals. ...

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Further Edge Reading: A Big Theory Of Culture: A Talk With Brian Eno [4.1.97]

THE GUARDIAN
August 12, 2008

THE RELIGION OF POLITICS
For some, the notion of an amoral world is not in conflict with hope. But what happens when politics appropriates faith and morality?
Andrew Brown

...It's a commonplace that to call yourself an atheist in the US is to render yourself unelectable. Richard Dawkins' agent, John Brockman, told me once that he would never identify as an atheist, even though he is one. The last 29 years have been terrible for American believers in reason and progress. They have been pushed further and further to the margins of a society where once they could believe themselves the vanguard. The process started with the election of Ronald Reagan, but it was Jimmy Carter before him who made it clear that evangelical Christianity was something that could elect presidents. Carter, a devout, old-fashioned Baptist, believes in the separation of church and state. But his successors as Christians in public life have not been so scrupulous. ...

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WALL STREET JOURNAL
August 13, 2008

REAL TIME ECONOMICS

Secondary Sources: Credit Crisis, Authoritarian Fed, Nudges

More on Nudges: Writing for the Financial Times, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, who wrote a book on nudging people to make better choices, look at political proposals that are backed by their findings. "It is not surprising that policy teams for Barack Obama, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, and David Cameron, the U.K.'s Conservative party leader, have shown an interest in nudge-like solutions to social problems. In dealing with the credit crisis in the U.S., Mr. Obama favours a policy of disclosure and transparency. His mortgage policy is designed not to preclude choices, but to ensure that consumers have a better sense of what they are getting. In dealing with environmental problems and crime, Mr. Cameron seeks to enlist the power of social norms, pricking people's consciences to inspire them to do better. Ideas of this kind suggest the development of an approach we call "libertarian paternalism", by which governments try to move people in good directions without imposing penalties, mandates or bans."

Compiled by Phil Izzo

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Further Edge Reading: A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman [8.12.08]

FINANCIAL TIMES
August 12, 2008

THE DRAMATIC EFFECT OF A FIRM NUDGE
By Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler

In the past three decades, psychologists and behavioural economists have learnt that people's choices can be dramatically affected by subtle features of social situations. For example, inertia turns out to be a powerful force. If people's magazine subscriptions are automatically renewed, they renew a lot more than if they have to send in a renewal form. Moreover, people are influenced by how problems are framed. If told that salami is "90 per cent fat-free" they are far more likely to buy salami than if they are told it is "10 per cent fat".

Social norms matter a lot. If people think others are recycling, or paying their taxes, they are far more likely to recycle and to pay their taxes. The important message is that small details can induce large changes in behaviour.

Findings of this kind suggest that even when people have freedom of choice they are influenced, or nudged, by the context in which their decisions are made. This power gives business and governments opportunities. Automatically enrolling people in a savings plan dramatically increases participation, even though people retain the right to opt out. Informing citizens of how their energy use compares with that of neighbours can nudge energy hogs into adjusting their thermostats. ...

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ON "A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS"

W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman,Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold

Well, I am going to sound like I was primed by the recent X files movie, but Danny, I want to believe!

Nevertheless it is not easy to believe it. Despite your having primed me, I'm just not getting it. So while I believe you that it does work on me, in this particular instance it seems to be failing me. So I have a couple more questions.

Perhaps practicing on me will help your book, but don't feel compelled to answer if you don't have the time. Indeed one reply you give would be "wait for the book.

Daniel Kahneman

Let me postulate a few things:

1. I know my date of birth. Priming will not change my mind about it.
2. I do not believe there is anything anyone could do within the law to make me vote for a Republican this November.

So yes, of course there are limits to priming effects and to all forms of influence. My point was not that priming can make a person do anything at all. It was that priming has much more influence than people think it could have. Furthermore, people are generally not aware of having been influenced.. ...

Nathan Myhrvold

Priming as Danny presents it is quite a strange phenomenon:

• Omnipresent—happening all the time, all around you.

• Impossible to guard against.

• Equally hard to detect—in yourself anyway, but also in others (unless you have a control group and can do the statistics, as one does in an experiment).

• Very important to understanding human perception.

• Also very important in terms of real world impact on thinking and decisions, with large real-world consequences.

I'm pretty sure Danny said each of these, one way or another. Or maybe I was just primed to draw these conclusions myself, but I think they are accurate.

If find that set of characteristics to be fascinating. However, they are also strange, and perhaps a bit alarming if you really take them seriously. It very naturally begs a set of other questions. ...

Daniel Kahneman

If somebody told me "the sun is green", there are two natural reactions I would have. The first would be to be skeptical and discount the assertion, thinking it is either false, exaggerated or occurs in very weird conditions. The second is to accept it provisionally and say "ok, if the sun is green, help me understand and accept that by explaining further how this could it be that I've lived my whole life thinking the opposite". Even if I want to believe, if I get no answer to this second approach, then I surely will be driven back to skepticism. But hey, maybe that's just me. ...

Nathan Myhrvold

But I can't resist one final point. The strangeness of priming is much worse than simply that we are not aware of it—we also don't seem to find its traces afterward.

Psychology is full of unconscious phenomena. So, for example, I can accept that my eyes may dart around and the pupils contract or dilate, betraying my interest in things. That by itself is strange, but easy to reconcile with intuition because you'd never know it without careful observation (with video cameras or the like). Last year Danny told us of the "peak plus end" rule that says people tend to remember the peak and the last bit of an experience (such as pain). Fascinating stuff, but ultimately easy to accept because it is explicitly about what we don't remember. ...

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ON "HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)"
A Talk By Mark Pesche

David Brin

...Pesce goes from one strange assumption to the next: "In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it." He then takes the neo-modern trait that Kevin Kelly and others are so proud of, the proliferation of "the free" and calls this trend a calamity, because a tide of general altruism will now trump the 'virtue of selfishness.'"

So, let's see if I'm following this right. Liberal/Enlightenment society is based not only upon secrecy and ownership, but also upon scarce knowledge, elite control and selfishness. But... weren't these traits of all human cultures? Certainly feudalism had plenty of all five. Indeed, if the Enlightenment emphasized anything, even at the beginning, it was opening the floodgates of knowledge and harnessing selfishness under straps and collars of binding rules. May I insert a passage written by James Madison, during the debates over the Constitution?

"There are two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other,by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests. ...Of the first remedy, it is worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire... But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed." ...

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 13, 2008

GUEST COLUMNIST

OPTIMISM IN EVOLUTION

Olivia Judson

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America's science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It's discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught—indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes—for at least three reasons. ...

...

PROSPECT
August 2008

OUT OF MIND

What's wrong with a man buying an oven-ready chicken, having sex with it, then serving it to his friends for dinner? Disgust is the guardian of our souls

Paul Broks

Sunday lunch. it's a family reunion. Across the table, Ebby shoots me a smile and jams a finger into her right nostril. Would I like to see her bogeys? No thanks, I say, but too late. The finger reappears capped in a glob of snot. Such a charmer, my wife says on the drive home. Charming? Nose-picking at the dinner table? Disgusting, surely. Picture Ebby as a dribbling great aunt and there's no question. But she's a pretty two year old, and purity trumps repugnance.

Two year olds are full of emotions like joy, fear and surprise, but have no sense of disgust, which usually emerges around age four or five. Disgust is a late developer in evolutionary terms, too, and may be uniquely human. Infants and animals reject bad tastes, but taste aversion and disgust are not the same. Disgust has more to do with offensiveness. Chocolate tastes good, but shape and texture it like dogshit and most adults are put off. Not so two year olds. That was an experiment devised by pioneer disgust researcher, Paul Rozin. He and a young philosopher called Jonathan Haidt went on to explore disgust and morality. In his 2006 book The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt describes the evolutionary gear shift from "core disgust," which is triggered...

...

Further Edge Reading: Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion By Jonathan Haidt [10.3.07]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 12, 2008

OP-ED COLUMNIST
HARMONY AND THE DREAM

By David Brooks

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They're both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships. ...

...

Further Edge Reading: Telling More Than We Can Know By Richard Nisbett [1.1.06]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 11, 2008

THE MEDIA EQUATION
ALL OF US, ARBITERS OF NEWS

By David Carr

Early on in any journalist's career, the young reporter is besieged by advice from all sides. Flacks, sources and run-of-the-mill busybodies will pound on the phone about why the reporter isn't covering this or that story. And then, a sage editor will appear and counsel the newbie: "We decide what the news is."

That truism still attains; it's just the meaning of the pronoun has changed. Yes, we decide what is news as long as "we" now includes every sentient human with access to a mouse, a remote or a cellphone.

On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.

Consumers have no issue with time-shifting content — in some younger demographics, at least half the programming is consumed on a time-shifted basis — they just want to be the ones doing the programming. Trying to stop foreign broadcasts and leaked clips from being posted on YouTube — NBC's game of "whack-a-mole" as my colleague Brian Stelter described it — was doomed to failure because information not only wants to be free [* See Edge note], its consumers are cunning, connected and will find a workaround on any defense that can be conceived. ...

...

[*Edge note: Credit for coinage of "information wants to be free" goes to Stewart Brand in his talk at the first Hacker's Conference in 1984 (organized by Brand and Kevin Kelly), and in a May 1985 article in Whole Earth Review:" 'Keep designing': How the information economy is being created and shaped by the hacker ethic.". "Information wants to be free" now has it's own page on Wikipedia.]

Further Edge Reading: Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture By Fred Turner [10.3.06].

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 11, 2008

IS GOOGLE A MEDIA COMPANY?.
By Michael Helft

...Knol is not Google's first foray into content hosting. The company has long owned Blogger, one of the most popular blogging services. It is digitizing millions of books, which it makes available through its search service. It owns the archives of Usenet, a popular collection of online discussion forums that predates the Web. Google also carries some news stories from The Associated Press in Google News, and it publishes stock market information through Google Finance. And of course, Google owns YouTube, one of the largest media sites on the Web.

Critics say each new Google initiative in this area casts more doubt on the company's claims that it is not a media company.

"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that relies on editors to create pages on a variety of subjects. "They are competing for talent, for advertisers and for users" with content sites, he said.

Knol has been called a potential rival to Wikipedia and other sites whose content spans a broad range of topics, including Mahalo and About.com, a property of The New York Times Company that uses experts it calls "guides" to write articles on a variety of topics. ...

...

THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
August 15, 2008

WHO FRAMED GEORGE LAKOFF?
A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics

By Evan Goldstein

George P. Lakoff is falling asleep. It is a bright summer afternoon in San Francisco, and Lakoff is nursing a latte at a small table near the entrance of a bustling, sun-dappled cafe. "This is what happens when you are 67," he explains sheepishly after dozing off midsentence. A stocky man with a wide smile and a well-trimmed white beard, Lakoff doesn't seem tired so much as beleaguered.

For years he's been at the center of some of the biggest intellectual disagreements in linguistics (most famously with Noam Chomsky) and has helped create an important interdisciplinary field of study, cognitive linguistics, that is reshaping our understanding of the complex relationship between language and thought. More recently he has been vying for respect among people notoriously hard to persuade about anything — politicians and their financial backers. So this summer he has been on the road promoting his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics With an 18th-Century Brain (Viking), which argues that liberals have clung to the false belief that people think in a conscious, logical, and unemotional manner and that this belief has doomed Democrats' chances with voters.

But transferring scholarly ideas into political practice can be tricky. After a heady few years when he seemed the person Democratic policy makers wanted on the other end of the telephone, Lakoff is finding that what they're asking for — and are willing to put money behind — is not always what he can provide. Lakoff's foray into politics is a story marked by intellectual breakthroughs, the allure of influence, and a fall from great heights. Yet his lifetime work permeates several disciplines and continues to spur cognitive researchers to go off in new directions. ...

...

Further Edge Reading: Philosophy In the Flesh: A Talk with George Lakoff [3.9.99]

NEWSWEEK
AUGUST 9, 2008

NOT QUITE HAL 9000, BUT IT VACUUMS
The inventor of the Roomba describes what's in store for the future of human-robot interaction.

By Katie Baker

MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks helped bring about a paradigm shift in robotics in the late 1980s when he advocated a move away from top-down programming (which required complete control of the robot's environment) toward a biologically inspired model that helped robots navigate dynamic, constantly changing surroundings on their own. His breakthroughs paved the way for Roomba, the vacuuming robot disc that uses multiple sensors to adapt to different floor types and avoid obstalces in its path. (Brooks is chief technology officer and cofounder of Roomba's parent company, iRobot.) Brooks talked to NEWSWEEK's Katie Baker about the challenges involved in creating robots that can interact in social settings. ...

NEWSWEEK: Sociologists talk about the importance of culture and sociability in humans, and why [it should be equally important] in robots. Do roboticists consider things such as culture when thinking about how to integrate robots into human lives?

Rodney Brooks: Some of us certainly do, absolutely. My lab has been working on gaze direction. This is the one thing that you and I don't have right now [over the telephone], but if we were doing some task together, working in the same workspace, we would continuously be looking up at each other's eyes, to see what the other one was paying attention to. Certainly that level of integration with a robot has been of great interest to me. And if you're going to have a robot doing really high-level tasks with a person, I think you will want to know where its eyes are pointing, what it's paying attention to. Dogs do that with us and we do that with dogs, it happens all the time. Somehow cats don't seem to bother. ...

...So are there ethical implications involved when you think about developing sociable robots, in terms of how they might change human behavior?

Well, every technology that we build changes us. There's a great piece on Edge.org by Kevin Kelly, I think it was, talking about how printing changed us, reading changed us. Computers have changed us, and robots will change us, in some way. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

...

Further Edge Reading: Better Than Free By Kevin Kelly [2.5.08]; Beyond Computation: A Talk with Rod Brooks [6.5.02]; Biocomputation: A Talk with J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks [6.29.05]

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
July 22, 20008

IS IT TIME TO GIVE UP ON THERAPEUTIC CLONING?
A Q&A with Ian Wilmut

The creator of Dolly the sheep has ended his focus on somatic cell nuclear transfer, or cloning, in favor of another approach to create stem cells

By Sally Lehrman

Ian Wilmut, famed for creating Dolly the cloned sheep, announced recently that he is abandoning the technique to concentrate on a popular new approach: making induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Such cells would get around the ethical and legal issues surrounding embryonic stem cell work, of which cloning, or somatic cell nuclear transfer, has been an integral part. For the Insights story, "No More Cloning Around," in the August 2008 Scientific American, Sally Lehrman asked Wilmut about his change in focus, whether somatic cell nuclear transfer is still relevant, and what lessons he learned in his experience with Dolly. Here is an edited excerpt of that interview. ...

...

Further Edge Reading:

Research in Biology and Medicine Will Provide the First Effective Treatments for Many Diseases By Ian Wilmut [1.1.07]

Remembering Dolly [2.14.03]

NEW SCIENTIST
05 August 2008

INTERVIEW THE COSMIC EXPLORER
Matthew Chalmers

In 1992 George Smoot announced the discovery of something "which, if you're religious, is like looking at God": spots in the radiation from the big bang that were the seeds of galaxies. This won him the 2006 Nobel prize for physics. Matthew Chalmers met him at last month's meeting of Nobel laureates to discuss life after the big prize

What are you working on now?

I'm one of the co-investigators on the Planck probe, which builds on the work of COBE and its successor, WMAP, to make even more detailed measurements of the cosmic background radiation. It will launch early in 2009 - being optimistic. I'm also working on a mission called SNAP that is competing with other projects to study dark energy. As a side project I'm looking at ways to broaden our theoretical perspective - to attempt to do for the standard model of cosmology what Einstein did for Newtonian physics.

We still don't know what 95 per cent of the universe is made of. Doesn't this hint that cosmologists have got something seriously wrong?

To me it looks like an opportunity. When I started working on the cosmic microwave background in the 60s, soon after it was discovered, my colleagues said that people were making it all up - that effectively it wasn't yet science. Now, I can take the simplest models and reproduce the universe I observe to better accuracy than the way your suits fits.

Dark energy, dark matter and inflation are three pieces of new science waiting to be discovered, each of which would be deserving of a Nobel prize. But perhaps something even more spectacular is waiting to be discovered that shows these things are connected at a more fundamental level.

...

Further Edge Reading:

My Einstein's Suspenders By George Smoot [11.10.06]

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE)
A Talk By Mark Pesce

The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

...

Edge 260
October 9, 2008
(14,500 words)

THE THIRD CULTURE

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

CLASS TWO:
RICHARD THALER & SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
[Text & Video]

IN THE NEWS

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
FEULLETON
Assume The Fetal Position!
By Frank Schirrmacher

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Struggle For The Islands
By Freeman Dyson

STRATEGY & BUSINESS
Tea And Empathy With Daniel Goleman
By Lawrence M. Fisher

FINANCIAL TIMES
The Short View: Political risk
By John Authers, Investment Editor

NEW SCIENTIST
Anyons: The Real Breakthrough Quantum Computing Needs?
Don Monroe

THE SUN HERALD (Sydney, Australia)

"150 contributions from an array of Nobel laureates, professors, Pulitzer Prize winners and bestselling authors ... in this impressive book."

PUBLICO ((LISBON) —COVER STORY, SUNDAY MAGAZINE

"Edge: brilliant, essential and addictive. The result of this ambitious venture, for those who have already experienced navigating the web pages of edge.org, is not only brilliant, but addictive. It interprets, it interrogates, it provokes. Each text can be a world in itself."

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG

"In the late summer of 2007 he [Brockman] hosted the now legendary symposium 'Life: What a Concept!' at his farm in Connceticut. This was where six pioneers of science had jointly proclaimed a new era: After the decyphering of the human genome soon whole genomes sequences could be written. That would be the beginning of the age of biology."

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"The optimistic visions of several of Mr. Brockman's Net-savvy essayists seem not just wonderful but plausible."

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG

"'Life: What A Concept' was one of those memorable events that people in years to come will see as a crucial moment in history. After all, it's where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced."

KEVIN KELLY. EDITOR-AT-LARGE, WIRED

"I just read the Life transcript book and it is fantastic. One of the better books I've read in a while. Super rich, high signal to noise, great subject."

FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG

"These are thoughts to make jaws drop...Nobody at Eastover Farm seemed afraid of a eugenic revival. What in German circles would have released violent controversies, here drifts by unopposed under mighty maple trees that gently whisper in the breeze."

THE AGE (MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA)

"Full of fascinating discussion ... deep thinking."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"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."

THE NEWS & OBSERVER — RALEIGH-DURHAM

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to Web site editor John Brockman's impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity."

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

"A jolt of fresh thinking ...The answers address a fabulous array of issues. This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake - bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up."

TORONTO STAR

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions."

NATIONAL REVIEW

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!"

THE TIMES

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge."

THE TELEGRAPH

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures."

THE INDEPENDENT

"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."

IL GIORNALE (MILAN)

"What is the coolest online forum, one where scientists and great minds from all over the world exchange opinions and ideas, and the one that keeps the scientific debate alive? Almost certainly it's edge.org, an American website whose most ardent supporters...are changing the present vision of the universe. This where you'll run into debates that count."

O'REILLY RADAR

"A remarkable feast of the intellect... an amazing group of reflections on science, culture, and the evolution of ideas. Reading the Edge question is like being invited to dinner with some of the most interesting people on the planet."

EL MUNDO

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture."

THE INDEPENDENT

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine...I strongly recommend a visit to anyone who feels browbeaten by fans of that over-rated virtue: mere consistency. "

O. THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

Persuasively upbeat.

THE INDPENDENT

"There is much in many of these brief essays to astonish, to be appalled at, to mull over or to wish for...Most of them are vitally engaging to anyone with an ounce of interest in matters such as being or whatever."

SEED

"Our greatest minds provide nutshell insights on how science will help forge a better world ahead."

THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

"Uplifting ...enthralling."

THE INDPENDENT

"Sparky and provoking...radiates bright ideas."

"If you think the web is full of trivial rubbish, you will find the intellectual badinage of edge.org to be a blessed counterpoint."

"Recommended read to detox a tired mind."

"...reads like an intriguing dinner party conversation among great minds in science. Don't expect to find answers here. Brockman will have you asking more questions than when you started—and may even change your mind about the ideas you've always been convinced are right."

"He (Ian McEwan) loves the spirited playfulness evident in places such as John Brockman's celebrated website Edge, where "neuroscientists might talk to mathematicians, biologists to computer-modelling experts", and in an accessible, discipline-crossing language that lets us all eavesdrop. 'In order to talk to each other, they just have to use plain English. That's where the rest of us benefit.' "

"www.edge.org...has established itself as a major force on the intellectual scene in the US and as required reading for humanities heads who want to keep up to speed with the latest in science and technology."

"Intellectual and creative magnificence."

"Open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful ... an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world ... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium."— Ian McEwan

"Astounding reading."

"...the fascinating website edge.org."

"Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question."

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

"One of the most interesting stopping places on the Web."

"A peerage culture, a peerage that network technology encouraged."

"A stellar cast of thinkers tackles the really big questions facing scientists."

THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT

"It is like having a front-row seat at the ultimate scientific seminar series."

KANSAS CITY.COM

"A fascinating site."