Edge in the News

A cross-disciplinary kaleidoscope of intelligent concerns for the self and the species.

In his famous and wonderfully heartening letter of fatherly advice, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave his young daughter Scottie a list of things to worry and not worry about in life. Among the unworriables, he named popular opinion, the past, the future, triumph, and failure "unless it comes through your own fault." Among the worry-worthy, courage, cleanliness, and efficiency. What Fitzgerald touched on, of course, is the quintessential anxiety of the human condition, which drives us to worry about things big and small, mundane and monumental, often confusing the two classes. It was this "worryability" that young Italo Calvino resolved to shake from his life. A wonderful 1934 book classified all of our worries in five general categories that endure with astounding prescience and precision, but we still struggle to identify the things truly worth worrying about — and, implicitly, working to resolve — versus those that only strain our psychoemotional capacity with thedeathly grip of anxiety.

In What Should We Be Worried About? (public library), intellectual jockey and Edge founder John Brockman tackles this issue with his annual question — which has previously answered such conundrums as the single most elegant theory of how the world works (2012) and the best way to make ourselves smarter (2011) — and asks some of our era’s greatest thinkers in science, psychology, technology, philosophy, and more to each contribute one valid "worry" about our shared future. Rather than alarmist anxiety-slinging, however, the ethos of the project is quite the opposite — to put in perspective the things we worry about but shouldn’t, whether by our own volition or thanks to ample media manipulation, and contrast them with issues of actual concern, at which we ought to aim our collective attention and efforts in order to ensure humanity’s progress and survival. . . .

. . .What Should We Be Worried About? is an awakening read in its entirety. For more of Brockman’s editorial-curatorial mastery, revisit the Edge Questions compendiums from 2013 and 2012, and see Nobel-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and flaws of our intuition.

Responding to the "question of the Year" from the portal Edge.org physics absentia argument, one of them it is time to pension.

Reservations Edge.org annually sets a pressing question to answer in that short essay form invites the world's leading scientists, philosophers, writers and other public intellectuals. Issue last year was "what we should be afraid of?" And almost exactly a year ago, we published an overview of the responses to it. 

It's time a new issue, and it's "What scientific idea or concept it is time to scrap?" . Nearly two hundred public intellectuals sent their essays that expressed the often very bold ideas, for example, to abandon such concepts as culture, race, common sense and economic growth. Special attention is given correspondence discussion between physicists, which are widespread among survey respondents. This implicit argument could not take place, if not physics community was divided into two camps: the romantics and visionaries on the one hand and the pragmatists and advocates strict falsifiable in the sense of science Karl Popper - c the other side.

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.