Edge in the News: 2014

Events and reading matter at the intersection of science and culture.

BOOKS

“What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night” by John Brockman. 

Last year,the literary agent John Brockman asked scientists about their concerns for the future, and this book, which collects their responses, reads like an atlas of fear. Health is an issue: The genomicist Craig Venter worries that “the unvaccinated ... could take humanity back to the pre-antibiotic era.” But the most common concerns are about the Internet. Some lament a near-future where “everyone is only pretending to pay attention” while they check email on Google Glass, while others, like the philosopher Daniel Dennett, worry that if the Internet were to go down, by error or terror, we wouldn’t have much of a backup plan. After hundreds of pages of worst-case scenarios, the psychologist Gary Klein admits to some anxiety fatigue, blaming the “science/media complex” for overplaying mild threats. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker seems to agree, writing that while it is natural to worry about “physical stuff like weaponry and resources” the real threats are “psychological stuff like ideologies and norms.” But the shortest and calmest of the responses is from the filmmaker Terry Gilliam, who writes: “I’ve given up worrying. I merely float on a tsunami of acceptance... and marvel stupidly.”

These scientific ideas will drive you crazy

Much has been made of this year's question at John Brockman's Edge, generally described as an online salon. Brockman asked for recommendations about which scientific ideas should be retired, and some 170 salonists replied. Dennis Overbye plucked up a few proposed discards for consideration at Out There, concluding, "No matter who you are, you are bound to find something that will drive you crazy."

The 2014 Edge Annual Question (EAQ) is out. This year, the question posed to the contributors is: What scientific idea is ready for retirement?

As usual with the EAQ, it provokes thought and promotes discussion. I have only read through a fraction of the responses so far, but I think it is important to highlight a few Edge contributors who answered with a common, and in my opinion a very important and timely, theme. The responses that initially caught my attention came from Laurence Smith (UCLA), Gavin Schmidt (NASA), Guilio Boccaletti (The Nature Conservancy) and Danny Hillis (Applied Minds). If I were to have been asked this question, my contribution for idea retirement would likely align most closely with these four responses: Smith and Boccaletti  want to see same idea disappear — stationarity; Schmidt’s response focused on the abolition of simple answers; and Hillis wants to do away with cause-and-effect.

The latest assault on our uniqueness comes from Edge.org, which asked the world’s supposedly most “brilliant minds” to come up with ideas that should be retired in science. 

We must accelerate the pace at which science corrects itself. Because science can remain reliable. For this is as the strategic question that arises Edge this year, the community of researchers led by John Brockman: what scientific theories are ripe for retirement? Over 130 scholars - including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Aubrey de Grey, Sherry Turkle, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly - responded. Surprises abound. The findings are published edge.org .

What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Read responses to that inquiry from the likes of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, Max Tegmark, Freeman Dyson, June Gruber, and many other brilliant people over at Edge.org, legendary book agent John Brockman's hub for really smart scientists and other big thinkers to share ideas with each other and the public. From the intro:

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?

Unlike rock stars, scientific ideas do not usually burn out. They fade away and outlast their usefulness.

This is what motivated a new survey of 166 scientists and intellectuals, asking which ideas ought to be “retired” from science, not quite because they are wrong, but because they are old and ineffective, like nature versus nurture, left-brain versus right-brain, or carbon footprints.

As with Newton’s law of gravity, which gave way to Einstein’s, many of these ideas were once on the cutting edge, but have since been revealed as incomplete, outdated and bland. So the survey, released Tuesday by U.S. literary agent John Brockman, founder of the web salon Edge.org, is like spring cleaning for science. The point is to clear away junk, but sometimes you rediscover something useful under the couch.

Each year, the magazine Edge.org poses a question to the brightest minds on the planet. On this occasion, the editor John Brockman and his team has raised the following question: What scientific idea is time to retire? In the prestigious intellectual survey involved scientists from the likes of British biologist Richard Dawkins and the novelist Ian McEwan.

As explained in the Brockman own The Observer , Edge.org was founded in 1996 as the online version of The Reality Club, an informal meeting of intellectuals between 1981 and this year were cited in Chinese restaurants, artist studios , investment banks, dance halls, museums, halls and other places. "

Although events have moved into cyberspace, the spirit of Reality Club remains in the lively discussions back and forth on topical today pivots on intellectual debate issues, "says Brockman.

"The online salon Edge.org is hosted on a living document of the millions of words he produced conversation Edge in the last 15 years. Available for free to all Internet users."

To summarize the vision that inspires the draft annual Edge question, Brockman quotes a sentence of James Lee Byars: "To achieve great things, you have to look for extraordinary people."

"Through the years, Edge.org has had a very simple criterion for choosing their partners. Sought people whose creative work has expanded our understanding of what and who we are. Some are best selling authors and celebrities of mass culture. Most do not. preferstimulate work on the cutting edge of culture and research ideas that are not usually exposed. interested in us' think smart ', not the topics of' received wisdom, "Brockman says.

Here are some of the best answers to the Edge.org annual question, assigned to the online edition of THE WORLD through an agreement with the digital magazine. The responses of all participants in this project can be read in English here .

This year, I was invited to contribute to the Edge Foundation’s Annual Question. Other contributor include Helen Fisher, Irene Pepperberg, Alan Alda, Nina Jablonski, Jay Rosen, and, well 150 others: http://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement

The question was, “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”

My contribution: The Way We Produce And Advance Science