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Edge can
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The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out
pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas
and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For
example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the markets to equilibrium", because
the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak
of "restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state."
In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan
project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know
a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in
other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge,
to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and
modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.
CAN SCIENCE HELP SOLVE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS?
By Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin
MIKE BROWN is Past Chairman of The Nasdaq Stock Market Board of Directors, past
governor of the National Association of Securities Dealers, and past CFO of
Microsoft Corporation, currently a director of EMC Corporation, VMware,
Administaff Inc., Pipeline Financial Group Inc., and Thomas Weisel Partners.
STUART KAUFFMAN is Professor of biology, physics and astronomy and head of the
Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary , also
emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a
MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations and Reinventing
the Sacred.
ZOE-VONNA PALMROSE is PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor of Auditing and
Accounting, University of Southern California. Formerly served as Deputy Chief
Accountant for Professional Practice in the Office of the Chief Accountant at
the Securities and Exchange Commission. Co-author, with Mike Brown, of Thog's
Guide to Quantum Economics.
LEE SMOLIN is Founding and senior faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical
Physics. Author of Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The
Trouble with Physics.
... |
JOHN MARKOFF TO JOIN SCIENCE
"A small anarchic community of wireheads and hackers made the mistake of giving fire to the masses. Nobody is going to give it back. It is paradise lost. This wonderful community is not a community anymore. It's a society. It is a city on the Net, and in the back alleys of this electronic city, people are getting rolled. It is no different than being in New York. Let me be a couch potato if this is what Internet activity is about."
[Announcement from The New York Times:]
John Markoff, whose trailblazing work for The Times is a virtual history of the computer age, is taking an exciting new assignment. John is switching from Business Day to Science, where he will write widely and deeply about the impact of computer science in every modern endeavor.
One of the more alarming areas John will explore — you don’t even want to know — is cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. He will cover, too, advances in computational science that are transforming the pursuit of other kinds of science. And he will peer into the future of computing to tell us how our everyday lives may change.
Another important part of his portfolio will be national science and technology policy, as the Obama administration gears up for a new era of government investment in research and development. To the extent that this push is tied to hopes for economic recovery and American competitiveness, John will often find himself in the thick of the news.
For more than three decades John has been the pre-eminent chronicler of Silicon Valley, having started as a defense and technology writer for Pacific News Service in 1977. He joined The Times in 1988, and has since been regaling and informing readers about this fascinating and increasingly important part of our world. ... And he was the first to write about the ever-evolving World Wide Web.
Further Reading on Edge: "The Scibe" in Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite
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SOCIAL
NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS
By Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler
We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.
NICHOLAS
A. CHRISTAKIS, a physician and sociologist, is a Professor at
Harvard University with joint appointments in the Departments
of Health Care Policy, Sociology, and Medicine. JAMES H. FOWLER is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
...
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These findings may capture people's imagination—so often, people think there is not much they can do, what I call genetic nihilism. But even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. It just means that you are more likely to be genetically predisposed. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases.
CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION
A
Talk with Dean Ornish
DEAN ORNISH is a clinical professor of medicine at UCSF and the founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine and Research Institute in Sausalito. His most recent book is The Spectrum.
... |
SYNC, AND SWIM TOGETHER
By Daniel Kahneman and Andrew M. Rosenfield
When faced with disaster, the natural response of people — and businesses — is to fight for time and hope for the best. The likely outcome of this strategy would be a succession of failures that would spare no one. We believe that there is a better way: simultaneous bankruptcy filing by all three companies would substantially reduce both the uncertainty and the stigma for each one.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton, received the Nobel in economics in 2002. ANDREW M. ROSENFIELD is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the chairman of an investment advisory firm.
... |
THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY
By Christopher Badcock
FL.jpg)
According to the so-called imprinted brain theory,
the paradoxes can be explained in terms of the expression of genes, and not
simply their inheritance. Imprinted genes are those which are only expressed
when they are inherited from one parent rather than the other. The classic
example is IGF2, a growth factor gene only normally expressed when inherited
from the father, but silent when inherited from the mother. According to the most
widely-accepted theory, genes like IGF2 are silenced by mammalian mothers
because only the mother has to pay the costs associated with gestating and
giving birth to a large offspring. The father, on the other hand, gets all the benefit
of larger offspring, but pays none of the costs. Therefore his copy is activated.
The symbolism of a tug-of-war represents the mother's genetic self-interest in
countering the growth-enhancing demands of the father's genes expressed in the
foetus—the mother, after all, has to gestate and give birth to the baby at
enormous cost to herself.
CHRISTOPHER BADCOCK is a Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of PsychoDarwinism and Evolutionary Psychology: A Clinical Introduction.
... |
OF GENITAL THIEVES
The exploration of economic irrationality
By Andrian Kreye
It was one of those watershed moments in science at which you would like to have been present. Last summer in Sonoma, three generations behavioral economists convened at a Master Class run by the Edge Foundation...If you are interested in getting your head around the current global economic meltdown, read through the transcript of this master class once more this autumn. You may not find direct answers, but you will certainly find elements of an explanation. ...
ANDRIAN KREYE is the editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He is also an Edge contributor.
Andrian Kreye's Edge Bio Page
... |
The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.
A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.
THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A
Talk with Alva Noë
ALVA NOË is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works principally on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with special interest in the theory of perception, and is also interested in the philosophy of art, the history of analytic philosophy, Phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.
Alva Noë's Edge Bio Page
THE REALITY CLUB: Arnold Trehub
... |
HOW KEVIN BACON CURED CANCER
 A new documentary by director Annamaria Talas from ABC Television in Australia featuring the work of Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz and Albert-László Barabási.
We've all heard of 'six degrees of separation', the idea that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. But what if those steps don't just relate to people but also to viruses, neurons, proteins and even to fashion trends? What if this 'six degrees of separation' allowed us an insight into something at the core of Nature?...
...Whether natural or man-made, vast diverse networks share a common blueprint, a structure that describes their strengths and weaknesses. In the near future network science will fundamentally change how we control epidemics; power failures; fight wars; save endangered species; prevent crime and disease.
(To watch the entire docmentary, click on the play button under the eye in the upper left corner.)
...
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THE DOUBLE HELIX MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH [11.6.08]
James D. Watson & J. Craig Venter
At the Cold Spring Harbor Board of Director's Dinner in New York City, James Watson and Craig Venter were co-recipients of the Double Helix Medal for Scientific Research. |
PUTTING PSYCHOLOGY INTO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
RICHARD THALER: Behavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.
SENDHIL MULLAINAITHAN: A lot of what makes behavioral economics interesting is psychology, it is about what happens inside the mind. These phenomena are taking things that are happening inside the mind and interfacing them with things happening in the world, the environment, and getting feedback or getting interesting responses from that.
We happen to call the word economics. But it's not economics. You could be talking about crime, you could be talking about many things, in the social domain, the entire spectrum of human behavior. Anyone who is interested in the broader world should be interested in something we currently call "behavioral economics".
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important.
Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, Paul Romer, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson, France LeClerc
Class 6
A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL
ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
[...Continue to Class 6] |
| Once again, real life is not a casino with simple bets. This is the error that helps the banking system go bust with an astonishing regularity.
REAL LIFE IS NOT A CASINO
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Introduction
 On New Years day I received a a prescient essay from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as his response to the 2008 Edge Question: "What Have You Change Your Mind About?" In "Real Life Is Not A Casino", he wrote:
I've shown that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans—such as banks and some classes of insurance ventures—have almost never been profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mortgage mess is not so much that the "quants" and other pseudo-experts in bank risk-management were wrong about the probabilities (they were) but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes.
Taleb had changed his mind about his belief "in the centrality of probability in life, and advocating that we should express everything in terms of degrees of credence, with unitary probabilities as a special case for total certainties and null for total implausibility".
Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields.
The essay is one of more than one hundred that have been edited for a new Edge book What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (forthcoming, Harper Collins, January 9th). See below.
—John Brockman
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edge Bio page
Further reading on Edge: The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08] |
In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)
SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE
By Jerry Coyne
Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.
JERRY
COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution
at the University of Chicago, where he
works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics. He is the author
(with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation, and Why Evolution Is True.
Jerry
Coyne's Edge Bio
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____
Enough already. I bit my tongue when I heard that Sarah Palin believed that dinosaurs and humans once lived side by side and that she and John McCain wanted creationism taught in the public schools.
And I just shook my head when McCain derided proposed funding for a sophisticated planetarium projection machine as wasteful spending on an "overhead projector."
But the Republican ticket's war on science has finally gone too far. Last week, Sarah Palin dissed research on fruit flies.
In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)
As a geneticist, I've worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about fruit flies.
...
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I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions.
THE IRONY OF POVERTY
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan
CLASS 5:
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
Daniel Kahneman, Paul Romer, Richard Thaler, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar
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
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
[...Continue to Class 5] |
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!
TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman
CLASS 4:
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Danny Hillis, Richard Thaler, Nathan Myhrvold, Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker
DANIEL KAHNEMAN, a psychologist at Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics 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.
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
[...Continue to Class 4]
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WHAT'S NEXT? [10.15.08]
By Frank Schirrmacher
Why do we live in a society that, having ruined its natural environment, is now about to knowingly ruin its social environment and the lives of an entire generation? In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond specified the causes that encourage elites to destroy their societies."They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals."
FRANK SCHIRRMACHER is a German journalist, essayist, writer, and since 1994 co-publisher of the leading national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). He is one of Germanys leading journalists.
...
Further Reading on Edge: "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech" By Frank Schirrmacher[7.10.00]
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A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL
ECONOMICS
Let's put aside poverty alleviation for a second, and let's ask, "Is there something intrinsic to poverty that has value and that is worth studying in and of itself?" One of the reasons that is the case is that, purely aside from magic bullets, we need to understand are there unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question.
CLASS 3:
SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, France LeClerc, Danny Hillis, Paul Romer, George Dyson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker
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
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
[...Continue to Class 3] |
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]
|
A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL
ECONOMICS
If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way. —Richard Thaler
CLASS 1:
RICHARD THALER
Danny Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Jeff Bezos, Sendhil Mullainathan
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil
Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma,
CA, July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
[...Continue to Class 1] |
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
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Richard Thaler |
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Sendhil Mullainathan |
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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 |
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? ...
... |
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
BLOGWATCH
... |
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
... |
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?
... |
EDGE 08 PHOTO GALLERY
July 25-28, 2008
A
SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master
Class 08
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
July 25-27, 2008
AN EDGE SPECIAL
PROJECT
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; 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, Telsa 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
[ED. NOTE: The proceedings of ths year's Edge Master Class, including streaming video and edited transcripts, will be published later this month. —JB]
SAN FRANCISCO SCIENCE DINNER 08
July 28, 2008
Anne Anderson, former Editor, Nature Genetics; Chris Anderson, Editor, Wired; Author, The Long Tail; W. Brian Arthur, Economist, External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Yves Behar, Industrial Designer, Fuseproject; Lera Boroditsky, Psychologist, Stanford; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Author, How Buildings Learn; Larry Brilliant, Director, Google.org; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist, Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Drew Endy, Genomics Researcher, MIT; Sunnie Evers; Salar Kamangar, Google; Kevin Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy; Heather Kowalski, J. Craig Venter Institute; Brian Knutson, Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist and Musician; George Lakoff, Cognitive Scientist, Rockridge Institute, Berkeley; Author, The Political Mind; John Markoff, Technology Correspondent, New York Times; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Erling Norrby, Virologist, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Larry Page, Cofounder, Googl e; Sean Parker, Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; David Pescovitz, Cofounding Editor, BoingBoing.Net; Ryan Phelan, Founder, DNA Direct; Stanley Prusiner, Neurologist, Biochemist, and Nobel Laureate, UCSF Medical School; Lisa Randall, Theoretical Physicist, Harvard; Author, Warped Passages; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford University; Frank Sulloway, Visiting scholar, Institute of Personality and Social Research, Berkeley, Author, Born to Rebel ;Leonard Susskind, Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Author, The Black Hole War; Karla Taylor, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Chicago; Coauthor, Nudge; J. Craig Venter, Human Genomics Researcher; Founder, Synthetic Genomics; Author, A Life Decoded; Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
[...continue to Edge 08 Photo Gallery] |
HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) [7.29.08]
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.
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Imagine telling Ansel wait for new algorithms, so your pictures can improve. It's a very different world today.
PANORAMAS AND PHOTO TECHNOLOGY FROM ICELAND AND GREENLAND
PHOTO ESSAY BY NATHAN MYHRVOLD [7.21.08]
This feature contains some panoramic shots that are created by stitching together multiple frames into one picture. These were mostly taken during my recent trip to Iceland and Greenland.
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Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.
When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...
ENGINEERS' DREAMS [7.14.08]
By George Dyson
Introduction by Stewart Brand
How does one come to a new understanding? The standard essay or paper makes a discursive argument, decorated with analogies, to persuade the reader to arrive at the new insight.
The same thing can be accomplished—perhaps more agreeably, perhaps more persuasively—with a piece of fiction that shows what would drive a character to come to the new understanding. Tell us a story!
This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.
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THE NEXT RENAISSANCE [7.15.08]
A Tallk By Douglas Rushkoff
Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.
But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.
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HIGHFIELD NAMED EDITOR OF NEW SCIENTIST [7.15.08]
 ROGER HIGHFIELD, award-winning Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, where he worked for more than 20 years, has been named as the next Editor of New Scientist magazine, which is now the world's biggest selling weekly science and technology magazine.
Jeremy Webb, New Scientist's Editor-in-Chief, said: "Roger is a formidable force in science journalism. He has immense knowledge and wisdom and is brimming with new ideas. We are expanding in the US, into new markets in India and elsewhere, and improving our web offering. The magazine is right at the centre of all these efforts and we need a strong, creative editor to lead it. I can't wait to start working with Roger."
Before starting at The Daily Telegraph, Highfield was News Editor of Nuclear Engineering International and clinical reporter for Pulse, the magazine for family doctors. He has an MA and DPhil in chemistry from the University of Oxford and spent time working as a scientist at Unilever and Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, where he became the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. He is the author of six popular science books and an Edge contributor.
Roger Highfield's Edge Bio Page |
[7.7.08]
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THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? [6.30.08]
By Chris Anderson
 Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
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PUT A LITTLE SCIENCE IN YOUR LIFE [5.7.08]
By Brian Greene
...And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there's simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future. ...
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"There is a profound issue lurking here," writes Pinker. "Everyone says that China will be the next scientific and economic power. Is this compatible with their ongoing rejection of open debate and exploration of ideas? Is a technologically advanced society compatible with anti-intellectualism and suppression of debate? ...
Edge has received notice from the publisher that acquired PRC Chinese language rights to What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable that the book "can't be published in China because some content is not accordant to Chinese regulations, for example, some content about religious, soul." [sic]The book, based on an edited selection from The 2006 Edge Question, was published last year in the US (HarperCollins) and the UK (Free Press) as well as a number of foreign-language markets. Steven Pinker, who also wrote the Introduction to the book, posed the Edge Question:
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword.
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