Edge in the News
Chances are, you're scared of all the wrong things. This is because you likely suck at dealing with probability. But some people are pretty good at it. A bunch of scientists and mathematicians figured, for example, that a book titled This Will Make You Smarter is likely to attract more buyers than one with the more accurate title of ''A collection of short essays on useful old and new scientific concepts written by world leaders in their fields''. ...
This Will Make You Smarter, edited by John Brockman, Black Swan.
...Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) says it all. The meaning of his "Third Wave" was a rip-tide-undertow that would sweep maladaptive "societies and cultures aside." Toffler soothed the anxiety somewhat with "Society needs people who take care of the elderly, know how to be honest, compassionate, work in hospitals, and all kinds of skills that aren't just cognitive, they're emotional and affectional. You can't run a society on data and computers alone.
John Brockman picked up a thread from C.P. Snow's classic, The Two Cultures (1959) with his book The Third Culture (1996), giving meaning to a new generation of artists and scientists, who collectively sprinted off the blocks, carrying the Internet Revolution with them.
Stanley Kubric's A Space Odyssey (1968) changed the rules of engagement for probable futures. He co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke, who is best known for his visionary milestone Profiles of the Future (1962), which contributors to Wikipedia embarrassingly forgot to include in his writing career. ....
Studies show that money does increase happiness. The latest research shows there’s not even a known satiation point — a higher income makes virtually everyone happier, although each additional dollar delivers less happiness than the one before it.
But we tend to overestimate money’s potential on our happiness by thinking of it out of context. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, writes in the book This Will Make You Smarter:
On average, individuals with high incomes are in a better mood than people with lower income, but the difference is about a third as large as most people expect. When you think of rich and poor people, your thoughts are inevitably focused on circumstances in which income is important. But happiness depends on other factors more than it depends on income.
The editors of intellectual site Edge.org decided to ask some of the most influential thinkers in the world - including physicists, neurologists and mathematicians—and ask them what they think are the most important scientific concepts in the modern era.
The outcome of the exercise is the book "This will make you smarter: New scientific concepts to improve thinking" —a collection of two hundred essays that describe the most important ideas to handle today and explore the world.
Multimedia artist and literary agent American John Brockman, who has "the world's most exclusive address book", founded Edge Foundation in 1996, linking humanities, science, arts, business, and arranging exchanges to produce knowledge in the world. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Nicholas Carr, are among Edge Foundation members.
Culture Shock is the second in the series of "Best of Edge" books. Writer and ciritc Evgeny Morozov notes that the influence of the Internet has been overestimated.
Surprisingly, computer scientists in the book write about the negative influence of the Internet. David Gelernter points to the low quality of information; Jaron Lanier complains about weaknesses in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. ...
Where do cool ideas come from? Every year, the online salon Edge.org poses one question and gets a bunch of smart people to answer it.
The 2011 question was: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? The answers, compiled as a book with the laughably ambitious title, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, has 165 contributions from eminent thinkers on subjects too disparate to be memorable: anthropophilia, cognitive humility, haecceity, and other such abstruse concepts.
Some themes emerge out of this morass of ideas. One that informs this column is called dualism.
During the brief moment that I majored in anthropology in college, I was fascinated by the work of Napoleon A. Chagnon and his seminal 1968 text Yanomamo: The Fierce People. Chagnon's time as a field scientist in the Amazon had a profound impact on the field of anthropology even as his methods (and misunderstandings of his methods) resulted in an academic war on his research and his character. To further explore Chagnon's legacy, and what he really found in the rainforest, BB pal John Brockman of EDGE convened a meeting between Chagnon and big thinkers Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, Daniel C. Dennett, and David Haig. The result is 30,00 words of conversation and hours of video that John says is "one of the most significant events in (Edge's) sixteen year history.
Every year, the Edge.org website, run by a group of scientists and intellectuals in the U.S., presents a provocative question the responses to which are then collected in a book that is invariably instructive and surprising, since the contributions are heavyweights from various fields of academia and the world of the arts. "What is your favorite explanation is that deep, elegant or beautiful?" was the question proposed in 2012. Almost 200 responses are collected in the volume This Explains Everything, launched earlier this year.
One of the texts that particularly caught my attention is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, she remembers that there is in principle no connection between the fact that a theory is beautiful and it is true, and yet we tend to use aesthetic criterion for deciding between competing explanations. ...
1. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin, $20). A monumental achievement. Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, draws on 5,000 years of historical evidence to explain in fascinating detail how violence has declined across human history. More broadly, he shows that human beings have learned to treat each other better in general.
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16). Most "idea books" are bloated essays; this one, from a Nobel Prize–winning economist, is worth reading all the way through. Kahneman offers a fascinating set of ideas about how human beings think and reason, for better and worse.
3. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (Vintage, $16). A brilliant mixture of political philosophy and sociology. According to Haidt, two reasonable people can find themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum based on the relative importance each assigns to just six values. The book explains why we embrace certain ideologies better than any other I've read. . . .
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In order to sharpen our reasoning skills, we must have a good grasp of our own cognitive biases, as well as the basic laws of the universe.
But in a dynamic world, new laws are constantly emerging.
The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most influential thinkers in the world — including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians — what they believe are the most important scientific concepts of the modern era.
The result is "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking," a compilation of nearly 200 essays exploring concepts such as the "shifting baseline syndrome" and a scientific view of "randomness."
Nautilus, a new science magazine whose first issue appeared online April 29, has New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye, one of the beat’s veterans, feeling a bit a nostalgic. In a review on Monday, he wrote:
The audience has fragmented among stalwarts like National Geographic and Scientific American; blogs; and new-media adventures like the TED talks, the World Science Festival and Edge.org, the online salon, and Simons Science News, a new effort by the mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons. ...
... It’s easy to sympathize with Overbye. Since the number of science writers and newspaper science sections began to plummet at the end of the ’80s, there has been a sense among the concerned that there is a crisis in science journalism. Thanks to new online ventures like Nautilus, however, that feeling has begun to dissipate. ...
...The Times started its science section in 1978. A year later the same folks who publish Penthouse brought forth Omni, a mix of science and speculation. In rapid succession the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of the journal Science, started Science79; Time Inc. started Discover; and Science Digest expanded to a full-size glossy magazine. The New York Academy of Sciences published The Sciences.
This profusion led to a hiring frenzy for science journalists, who, for a golden while anyway, had a blast producing magazines on scales of time and money that seem unworldly today.
A decade later most were gone or struggling for lack of advertising, despite circulations in the range of half a million and despite the growing importance of science in an age of climate change, energy crises and AIDS. The lone survivor of that golden era, Discover, has been sold four times. A more recent arrival, Seed, noted for its edginess, exists only online.
The audience has fragmented among stalwarts like National Geographic and Scientific American; blogs; and new-media adventures like the TED talks, the World Science Festival and Edge.org, the online salon, and Simons Science News, a new effort by the mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons. ...
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Meet the 'Edge Series' organizer John Brockman
"In asking some of the the most sophisticated thinkers in the world 'What are the questions you are asking yourselves?' I am aware that this is not for everybody. I am aiming at the brightest people and fortunately, there enough people out there interested in the latest knowledge derived from empirical scientific investigations."
...The office window in John Brockman's (age 72) office looks out at the Empire State Building. He is an architect and impresario of 'scientific ideas' and a showman. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works .... these towering books, representative of his interests, go through his hands, both in his professional role as a literary agent and CEO of Brockman, Inc. and in wearing his nonprofit hat as President of Edge Foundation, Inc. and publisher and editor of Edge.
Brockman has taken scientists out of their usual territory, and secured for them a global role as the most highly recognized thinkers in the society of informed intellectuals.
Thus, the focus of the new Edge book This Will Change Everything is concerned with predictions about the future based on empirical scientific evidence. Korean translation by Kim So. Published by Galleon.
Every year, Edge.org, the virtual scientific think tank, a central question. This time the result is a collection full of articles that becoming a simple, non-obvious idea provides an explanation for a complex series of phenomena…
…This explains everything nicely shows that not clear formulated questions can lead. produce excellent insights Precisely because of the different individual interpretations of the question by the contributors is a wonderfully varied trip through the intersection of the worlds of aesthetics and truth become a must for any interested layman.
...IvyConnect membership perks include “preferential table reservations” at the Dream Downtown hotel’s rooftop lounge, according to the group’s website, plus discounts to the Guggenheim Museum and Juice Press, which sells unpasteurized smoothies and cleanses. An online philanthropy page lists “curated social-impact projects,” and its section on ideas features links to NYU journalism professor Clay Shirky’s TED talk and New York Times columnist David Brooks’ foreword to a book titled This Will Make You Smarter.
Edge.org is highly recommendable if you think it's interesting to hear and read interviews about the latest philosophical thinking. . . . It is a gathering of highly skilled minds who are trying to diagnose themselves. There are posts from particular Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Ai Weiwei, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis, Marissa Meyer, Stewart Brand, Howard Gardner, Matt Ridley. Our own Tor Nørretranders is the only Dane in the club.
When Prospect magazine listed Britain's leading public intellectuals in 2004 and invited readers' votes, it was Richard Dawkins who emerged as No 1. Nine years on, the biologist, author and campaigner has bettered that by topping its "world thinkers" rankings, beating four Nobel prize winners (and another contender regarded as certain to receive one soon) in a poll based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel.
Joining him in the top 10 are the psychologists Steven Pinker (3) and Daniel Kahneman (10), the economists Paul Krugman (5) and Amartya Sen (7) and the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (6), who all, like him, figured in the magazine's first list of world-class thinkers in 2005.
Playing a more influential role than editors, referred to as the 'culture conductor' or 'enzymes of knowledge', John Brockman is at the forefront of knowledge with the Edge Foundation, which has more than 700 people contributing...
John Brockman's new book is rich with the latest by cultural studies experts in various fields, such as author and geography scholar Jared Diamond, the popular musician and cultural theorist Brian Eno, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis, famous for his study of social network contagion effect...
Brockman, the rare individual who can comfortably call New York's avant-garde artists and Nobel Prize winners alike, has been a consultant to The White House and to the Pentagon. Every year, he hosts the "Edge Dinner'. among the Internet industry bigwigs who have attended what has become known as "The Billionaires' Dinner ' are Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, as well as Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
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Culture: The 'Best Of Edge' series second book edited by John Brockman presents the extraordinary intelligence of the online salon Edge (www.edge org), in the articles, interviews, lectures of seventeen of its members, including Jared Diamond, Nicholas A. Christakis, Daniel Dennett. ...
https://stage.edge.org/
Now anyone can now have the benefit of the brains of the best contemporary scholars such as Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene.
To put together this 'dangerous' book, John Brockman established Edge (http://www.edge.org/) and asked more than 600 international scholars, among them many famous authors, to share their research and their knowledge.
The conversation concerns the 'edge' of today's state-of-the-art knowledge and discussion about thorny issues. It's an ongoing online conversation in which the words, ideas, and studies of the notable minds of the salon are also stored and archived.
Intrerest for the latest information on the edge in their respective among new users is increasing. In particular, in universities such as Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the latest theories of the professors or experts are now readily available to the public. With the publication of this book in Korea, Edge, so widely known in academia, now will reach the general readers as well.
In addition to Diamond and Dawkins, among the members of Edge whose writing are represented in 'Culture Shock' are Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, and Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, author of Flow.