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Every era has its intellectual hotspots.
If there’s going to be a vibrant intellectual life, somebody has to drag researchers out of their ghettos, and Brockman has done that, through Edge.
Implicitly it gives you an excellent glimpse of what some of the world’s leading thinkers are obsessed with at the moment. You can see their optimism
You’ll also get a sense of the emotional temper of the group.
Most important, they are not coldly deterministic.
to give us better tools to think about the world.
Nicholas Christakis is one of several scholars to emphasize that many things in the world have properties not present in their parts. They cannot be understood simply by taking them apart; you have to observe the interactions of the whole.
Clay Shirky emphasizes that while we often imagine bell curves everywhere, in fact the phenomena of the world are often best described by the Pareto Principle. Things are often skewed radically toward the top of any distribution. Twenty percent of the employees in any company do most of the work, and the top 20 percent within that 20 percent do most of that group’s work.
But most of the essays in the book are about metacognition.
Haidt says wittily that we are the giraffes of altruism.
The Edge Question 2011 What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?
Our sun is less than halfway through its life.
Awareness of the “deep time”
envisage humans as in some sense the culmination of evolution. But no astronomer could believe this; on the contrary, it would be equally plausible to surmise that we are not even at the halfway stage.
This concept must make it clear that we matter.
This smells of biological teleology, the concept that life’s purpose is to create intelligent life, a notion that seduces many people for obvious reasons: It makes us the special outcome of some grand plan. The history of life on Earth doesn’t support this evolution toward intelligence.
prokaryotic to eukaryotic unicellular creatures (and nothing more for 3 billion years!),
The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn’t privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn’t the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for
Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident.
What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence,
The world consists of things, which obey rules.
Theologians sometimes invoke “sustaining the world” as a function of God. But we know better; the world doesn’t need to be sustained, it can simply be.
This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal;
None of which is to say that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Only that these are things we create, not things we discover out there in the fundamental architecture of the world. The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it’s up to us to make sense of it and give it value.
Copernican Principle, which holds that we are not in a special or favorable place of any sort.
there is no reason to believe we are in any way specially located in time.
The paradox of the Copernican Principle is that by properly understanding our place, even if it be humbling, we can only then truly understand our particular circumstances. And when we do, we don’t seem so insignificant after all.
My thesis is that you needn’t actually do double-blind control experiments in order to experience an improvement in your cognitive toolkit.
The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views,
instead of improving, education and adherence to a scientific lifestyle are arguably deteriorating in many countries, including the United States. Why? Clearly because there are powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction, and they are pushing more effectively. Corporations concerned that a better understanding of certain scientific issues would harm their profits have an incentive to muddy the waters, as do fringe religious groups concerned that questioning their pseudoscientific claims would erode their power.
We have the advantage of having the better arguments, but the antiscientific coalition has the advantage of better funding.
We need new science advocacy organizations, which use all the same scientific marketing and fund-raising tools as the antiscientific coalition.
Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today’s theories will eventually prove incorrect as well.
Good scientists understand this. They recognize that they are part of a long process of approximation.
Why don’t schools and universities teach design for thinking? We teach physical fitness, but rather than brain fitness, we emphasize cramming young heads with information and testing their recall. Why not courses that emphasize designing a great brain?
Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor—through trade and specialization—that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity, and knowledge base of the species.
