Edge in the News

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

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gave way to Einstein’s, many of these ideas were once on the cutting edge, but have since been revealed as incomplete, outdated and bland.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.

Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That's what John Brockman expects of himself and others. Arguably, the planet's most important literary agent, Brockman brings its cyber elite together in his Internet salon "Edge." We paid a visit to the man from the Third Culture.

At the age of three John Brockman announced: "I want to go to New York!" For decades he has been a leading light behind the scenes in the city's intellectual life.  Foto wowe

...Like the idea of the Internet—which was slowly acquiring contours during these rambling 1960s discussions—the idea of Edge, the Internet salon around which Brockman's life now revolves, was also taking shape. Edge is the meeting place for the cyber elite, the most illustrious minds who are shaping the emergence of the latest developments in the natural and social sciences, whether they be digital, genetic, psychological, cosmological or neurological. Digerati from the computer universe of Silicon Valley aren't alone in giving voice to their ideas in Brockman's salon. They are joined in equal measure by other eminent experts, including the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Martin Rees, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the economist, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and the social theorist Anthony Giddens. Ranging from the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to the decoder of genomes Craig Venter, his guest list is almost unparalleled even in the boundless realm of the Internet. Even the actor Alan Alda and writer Ian McEwan can be found in his forum. 

The bridge of the third culture

A question is sent out to all salon members at the start of every year. This year it is: "What scientific idea ready to be retired?" The "editorial marching orders," written by Brockman, reveal the heart of Edge: "Go deeper than the news. Tell me something I don't know. You are writing for your fellow Edgies, a sophisticated bunch, and not the general public. Stick to ideas, theories, systems of thought, disciplines, not people. Come up with something new, be exciting, inspiring, compelling. Tell us a great story. Amaze, delight, surprise us!" ...

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NOTE: Chrome auto-translate re-translates the English version on the FAZ webstie into a machine language translation.]

Pre-Publication Serialization:

Every year, the American literary agent John Brockman asks the Cyber-Elite year the Edge question. Read a selection of the most exciting and surprising answers.

In the 90s, John Brockman sought to promote a range of activities and meetings to set the "third culture" that spoke CP Snow in his book The Two Cultures, back in the '60s, in which he expressed his hopes for a new culture to cover the gap between scientists and intellectuals. Since then, it has been developing and expanding group of researchers looking for the meeting of disciplines.

But, as said Brockman and against what one might expect, the bridges towards a comprehensive knowledge and integrity are not being stretched from shore humanistic as Snow thought, but from the scientific side. Here that which humanists discuss enclose themselves and then complain that the world suffers from "scientistic" is true, but do not do anything about it, much less to offer reasons to defend the claim that Brockman, against intellectual inbreeding of academic humanists, closed in themselves and in defense of ideas alien to all empiricism, scientists are more open:

Maybe their egos are so colossal as the iconic representatives of the academic humanities, but his way of dealing with that hubris is very different.Anytime an argument can sift, because they work in an empirical world of facts, reality-based world.They have fixed, immovable stances, they are both creators and critics of the company held in common. Ideas come from them, and it is they who call into question the respective ideas. Through the process of creativity, criticism and debate, decide which ideas must be eradicated and which become part of the consensus that leads to the next level of discovery. Unlike the humanities academicians who speak about about others, scientists speak of the universe.

(Brockman,  The New Humanism )

...Two cultures so. But "two" is it in itself a problem? Not really if you agree with the direction of Edgar Morin , who sees a Gordian knot to avoid slicing. Between subject and object, between nature and culture, between science and philosophy, we must distinguish without separating, he said.

This tension experienced between science and the humanities comes in scientific culture and culture "tout court" (as kidnapped by the Arts and Humanities), the parallel life is reflected even in their institutionalization. One brood is by the "Ministry of Culture" and the other by the "Ministry of Research." Here, again, it would be possible to distinguish, but without dissociating.

Why reassociate?

But before thinking about how, see why it would recombine these two cultures, one of which is concerned with "how it works" and the other "how we live" (that is less clear, although Sure, but this division seems useful to me).

First, because these two approaches, equally necessary as the other, are necessary to each other. Rationality and morality. Cognitive and emotional. Observation and action. Statistics and policy decisions.

Because the philosophy, history, ethics, literature, etc.. allow to give meaning to the objective data and organize sharing.

Because the great mass of knowledge accumulated by the scientific approach must exit the wardrobe to participate in the grand narrative of the world, this story told to little ones who want to know if they are born in cabbages. That most people are more familiar with the story concocted by the monotheistic religions that the history of our universe, our planet and our species, we say that there is somewhere something important that we failed to communicate - probably because it is still considered asides .

Because objective knowledge also enchants the world. "From the moment we begin to look at things, the world changes, the world poetizes immediately if you begin to pay attention to the grain of a jacket, the color of a curtain, or a falling drop tap, "says Thomas Clerc said of his Interior . From my side, it moves me deeply to know that there is a billionaire people who live in symbiosis me, and the nuclei of atoms forming the polyester carpet or constituting Miss Kitty (my cat) from the same star. But the poetry of the real world can only emerge from a reassembled culture.

More practically, because these two cultures must work together to "small" problems of our time. We come out a little better if our individual and collective decisions were informed by knowledge and inspired by a moral and ethic of the common good.

How to reassociate?

Thus, once territories distinguished must circulate flows, identify bridges. 

But more than make connections, would not it be more powerful paradigm shift, to draw a new cultural map? A third culture, as advocated by a certain John Brockman. 

Ah, there comes ... but 1000 words later, it is time to pause, and it will therefore follow in the next post.

ART-CULTURE

Each year the website Edge.org, considered by many one of the publications of higher intellectual quality in the world, brings together hundreds of artists, scientists and the most renowned thinkers in the world and asks them a question, creating a kind of itinerant think thank that seeks dialogue and anticipates major issues facing humanity, or sometimes simply celebrates knowledge. This year the question was: "What Should We Be Worried About?", under the argument that "we are concerned because we are able to anticipate the future. Nothing can be done that we no longer worry about, but science can teach us how better care, and when stop worrying."

Some of the answers compiled by Edge.org, are remarkable essays on the most pressing problems of the modern civilization modern; others are simply ironic (of course, predominantly about rational thought and science oriented). Worth taking a tour of this panorma today.

Jonathan Derbyshire on the collapse of the distinction between public and private

What is at work is a powerful vision of a world without inwardness, one in which the external record of a life is the same as our experience of it. He quotes something the science writer John Brockman said about the "collective externalised mind" promised by the internet. For Brockman, that's not dystopia, it's utopia. Yet, as Cohen points out, there's another name for it: "totalitarianism"–the slogan of the Khmer Rouge, for example, was "Destroy the garden of the individual".

Cohen suggests that cognitive behavioural therapy, which has grown dramatically in popularity in recent years, nourishes a similar fantasy of total liberation from the burden of the inner life. What many people find so threatening about psychoanalysis, by contrast, is its insistence that the self is never whole. It tells us that our best hope, as Cohen writes at the end of this unsettling book, lies in accepting that part of us will forever remain in the dark.

[ED. NOTE: The phrase "collective externalised mind"(above) is from the Introduction to DIgerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite, 1996.]

Jonathan Derbyshire on the collapse of the distinction between public and private

In Henry James's 1893 short story "The Private Life", the narrator makes alarming discoveries about two members of his holiday party while holed up in a village in the Swiss Alps. After an evening spent listening to the table-talk of the London playwright Clarence "Clare" Vawdrey, he steals up to Vawdrey's room where he sees, "bent over the table in the attitude of writing", the man he thought he'd left downstairs in the company of his friends. Vawdrey, it seems, is double: there is his public self, which according to the narrator is burdened by "neither moods nor sensibilities", and his private, writing self, which remains hidden.

The effortlessly suave raconteur Lord Mellifont, meanwhile, suffers from the "opposite complaint". He is "all public", the narrator says, he has "no corresponding private life". There's nothing behind the pristine mask of his public self: Mellifont is all performance.

Josh Cohen discusses this story in his elegant and suggestive book. For him, James's tale can be read as a premonitory parable of the modern culture of celebrity, at the centre of which is the public's apparently insatiable demand for celebrities to be "no more or less than they appear" – that, like Lord Mellifont, they show us everything. Celebrities themselves collude in this demand and go to considerable lengths, as Cohen puts it, to "disappear seamlessly" into their public persona. They persuade their acolytes that there's nothing left over, no private remainder that, Vawdrey-like, they keep locked away from prying eyes. ...

There's a moral to be drawn from this about what Cohen calls the "modern malaise". It's not just about entertainment; it's also about our changing attitudes to our inner lives. What is it that connects the neuroscientists at Berkeley who want to map the neural activity of a dreaming person and put it on YouTube with the compulsive tweeter or the obsessive "lifelogger" who records and broadcasts her life, minute by minute?

What is at work is a powerful vision of a world without inwardness, one in which the external record of a life is the same as our experience of it. He quotes something the science writer John Brockman said about the "collective externalised mind" promised by the internet. For Brockman, that's not dystopia, it's utopia. Yet, as Cohen points out, there's another name for it: "totalitarianism" – the slogan of the Khmer Rouge, for example, was "Destroy the garden of the individual”. ...