Edge editions: 2008

Friday, December 12, 2008

Edge 269: Can Science Help Solve The Economic Crisis?

Edge 269 - December 11, 2008
(13,000 words)

http://www.edge.org/

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge269.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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JOHN MARKOFF TO JOIN SCIENCE

[Announcement from The New York Times:]

John Markoff, whose trailblazing work for The Times is a virtual history of the computer age, is taking an exciting new assignment. John is switching from Business Day to Science, where he will write widely and deeply about the impact of computer science in every modern endeavor.

One of the more alarming areas John will explore — you don't even want to know — is cyberwarfare and cybersecurity. He will cover, too, advances in computational science that are transforming the pursuit of other kinds of science. And he will peer into the future of computing to tell us how our everyday lives may change.

Another important part of his portfolio will be national science and technology policy, as the Obama administration gears up for a new era of government investment in research and development. To the extent that this push is tied to hopes for economic recovery and American competitiveness, John will often find himself in the thick of the news. ...

For more than three decades John has been the pre-eminent chronicler of Silicon Valley, having started as a defense and technology writer for Pacific News Service in 1977. He joined The Times in 1988, and has since been regaling and informing readers about this fascinating and increasingly important part of our world. ... And he was the first to write about the ever-evolving World Wide Web.

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CAN SCIENCE HELP SOLVE THE ECONOMIC CRISIS?
By Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of "restoring the markets to equilibrium", because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of "restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state."
In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an "economic Manhattan project". This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge, to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.

MIKE BROWN is Past Chairman of The Nasdaq Stock Market Board of Directors, past governor of the National Association of Securities Dealers, and past CFO of Microsoft Corporation, currently a director of EMC Corporation, VMware, Administaff Inc., Pipeline Financial Group Inc., and Thomas Weisel Partners. Mike Brown's Edge Bio Page.

STUART KAUFFMAN is Professor of biology, physics and astronomy and head of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary , also emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations and Reinventing the Sacred. Stuart Kauffman's Edge Bio Page.

ZOE-VONNA PALMROSE is PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor of Auditing and Accounting, University of Southern California. Formerly served as Deputy Chief Accountant for Professional Practice in the Office of the Chief Accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Co-author, with Mike Brown, of Thog's Guide to Quantum Economics. Zoe-Vonna Palmrose's Edge Bio Page.

LEE SMOLIN is Founding and senior faculty, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Author of Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble with Physics. Lee Smolin's Edge Bio Page.

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THE REALITY CLUB
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Sanger, Mike Brown, George Dyson, Emanuel Derman. Michael Shermer, Paul Romer, Tor Nørretranders
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NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB: I urge you all scientists to go take your "science" where it may work—and leave us in the real world without more problems. Please, please, enough of this "science". We have enough problems without you. ...

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The greatest danger of this compromised and arbitrary "scientific-style" approach to economics is that it implies an equivalence of the economy with nature. The sense is that the economy is really an ecology in which the laws of physics and nature actually apply. Sure they apply, but only as much as they apply to any utterly synthetic and manufactured environment. ...

MIKE BROWN: I think the main thing science has to offer in this crisis right now is a little dose of its traditional empirical humility, and when things have gotten pretty screwed up, that is usually a good place to start, if only just for good form. It would also, of course, be wise to remain skeptically mindful of where science may have contributed to the mess. ...

LARY SANGER: Any scientific project to take on economics and boldly transform it into a hard science will run into that problem of a complexity that is not amenable to rigorous scientific model-building. The other trouble with an "economic Manhattan project" suggestion is the fact that work in the social sciences is inherently ideological. I suppose that the title of the article's section 4, "What is to be done?" was chosen ironically—being the title of Lenin's most famous tract and all. ...

GOERGE DYSON: "Ten years ago I started a company based on the assumption that people are basically good," argued E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar (at the Santa Fe Institute) in 2004. "And now I have the data to prove it." Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new financial system, not another model). ...

EMANUEL DERMAN: This is a noble proposal, but I remain a bit of a skeptic with respect to the ability of a cohort of scientists and economists to find a scientific solution to the problems of our economy. Economies are living organisms, about as old as the oldest profession, and rebuilding the economic system from scratch is a problem in engineering and social engineering, not in science. Human's and scientists don't have a good history as regards social engineering. ...

MICHAEL SHERMER: Expand the problem by many orders of magnitude and we get a sense of the breathtaking inanity of trying to control an entire economy, no matter how smart the experts in our hypothetical economic Manhattan Project may be. The economy is a product of human action, not of human design. Trying to redesign something that was never designed in the first place is futile. I vote no on an economic Manhattan Project. ...

PAUL ROMER: To be successful, a Capital Markets Safety Board (CMSB) would require both funding and careful attention to incentives. Like the NTSB, a CMSB should be truly independent from the government agencies that are responsible for crisis prevention and crisis management. It should also be protected from influence by firms in the financial sector. In its data collection efforts, it should not rely on university researchers who are themselves susceptible to influence by the interested government agencies or the private sector players. Nor should it use academics who have a personal or professional stake in any particular view about what caused a crisis. It's the soft corruption of lobbying and regulatory capture that should worry us, not ideology. Institutionalized transparency is the best antidote. ...

TOR NØRRETRANDERS: We now know from experimental economics, game theory and the anthropology of gift giving that this creature exists only in the mind of economists, not in the real world. Humans (and other primates) treat each other with empathy and a striving for fair play (often through the punishment of free riders). Therefore the laudable new discussion of models of the economic system fail to discuss the real issue: Our model of human beings. And it fails to discuss the crucial externality to the economic process: Sometimes we decide to do great things that will lift each and everyone up where we belong. ...

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look
By David Carr

...With unemployment, auto sales, home foreclosures and consumer confidence all benchmarking historic levels of distress, news outlets are hardly making it up. But the machinery of the economy began to freeze in place far more quickly than it has in the past, in part because so much scary data is circulating so much faster than it used to. This recession got deeper faster because we knew more bad stuff quickly.

"Our collective hive-mind gets into a tizzy over other things that suddenly zoom into focus," said Xeni Jardin, one of the editors of the blog Boing Boing. "It's a hurricane! OMG, salmonella in the hamburgers! Wait, we're all fat! There is an escalation of attention that feeds itself, because this recession is appearing throughout all forms of digital human expression. And unlike any of those other topics, this affects everyone."...

...There is a kind of emotional contagion afoot. James H. Fowler, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, recently co-wrote a study looking at how happiness can be spread among friends. The opposite is true as well.

"There are studies on bank runs, and it shows that people who know others who have taken their money out of the bank are much more likely to do it as well," he said. "We always overshoot the upside and, because of the same contagious effects, we overshoot the downside. Everything is fine, and then all of the sudden we are looking for water and supplies to ride out the coming storm."...

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FINANCIAL TIMES
Bystanders to this financial crime were many
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pablo Triana

On March 13 1964, Catherine Genovese was murdered in the Queens borough of New York City. She was about to enter her apartment building at about 3am when she was stabbed and later raped by Winston Moseley. Moseley stole $50 from Genovese's wallet and left her to die in the hallway.

...Not surprisingly, the Genovese case earned the interest of social psychologists, who developed the theory of the "bystander effect". This claimed to show how the apathy of the masses can prevent the salvation of a victim. Psychologists concluded that, for a variety of reasons, the larger the number of observing bystanders, the lower the chances that the crime may be averted.

We have just witnessed a similar phenomenon in the financial markets. A crime has been committed. Yes, we insist, a crime. There is a victim (the helpless retirees, taxpayers funding losses, perhaps even capitalism and free society). There were plenty of bystanders. And there was a robbery (overcompensated bankers who got fat bonuses hiding risks; overpaid quantitative risk managers selling patently bogus methods). ....

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CHARLIE ROSE
A conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb about his book The Black Swan

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
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PRE-ORDER NOW:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Contributors include: STEVEN PINKER on the future of human evolution * RICHARD DAWKINS on the mysteries of courtship * SAM HARRIS on why Mother Nature is not our friend * NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB on the irrelevance of probability * ALUN ANDERSON on the reality of global warming * ALAN ALDA considers, reconsiders, and re-reconsiders God * LISA RANDALL on the secrets of the Sun * RAY KURZWEIL on the possibility of extraterrestrial life * BRIAN ENO on what it means to be a "revolutionary" * HELEN FISHER on love, fidelity, and the viability of marriage ,,, and many others.

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"The splendidly enlightened Edge website (www.edge.org) has rounded off each year of inter-disciplinary debate by asking its heavy-hitting contributors to answer one question. I strongly recommend a visit." THE INDEPENDENT

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"They are the intellectual elite, the brains the rest of us rely on to make sense of the universe and answer the big questions. But in a refreshing show of new year humility, the world's best thinkers have admitted that from time to time even they are forced to change their minds." THE GUARDIAN

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

The world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove. ... Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"A jolt of fresh thinking...The answers address a fabulous array of issues. This is the intellectual equivalent of a New Year's dip in the lake - bracing, possibly shriek-inducing, and bound to wake you up." THE GLOBE & MAIL

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

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This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge269.html
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Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

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EDGE Newsbytes: http://www.edge.org/newsbytes.html
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Edge 267: La Tercera Cultura En Espana; Kahneman & Rosenfield on The Big Three Bankruptcy

"The third culture is a very powerful idea." -- Stephen Jay Gould

Edge 267 - November 25, 2008
(4,500 words)

http://www.edge.org/

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge267.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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SYNC, AND SWIM TOGETHER
By Daniel Kahneman and Andrew M. Rosenfield

"When faced with disaster, the natural response of people -- and businesses -- is to fight for time and hope for the best. The likely outcome of this strategy would be a succession of failures that would spare no one. We believe that there is a better way: simultaneous bankruptcy filing by all three companies would substantially reduce both the uncertainty and the stigma for each one."

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THE THIRD CULTURE IN SPAIN

"The purpose of this initiative is to establish a movement in Spain based on this new way of perceiving culture, and promote it as a vehicle for development of critical opinion in our country. More and more people willing to educate themselves and get rid of superstitions and dogmas which reduces your field of personal and social action. Democracy works with people armed with critical thinking. A society of illiterates in the hands of scoundrels (Perez Reverte), can never be democratic." -- Arcadi Espada

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PRESENTACION TERCERA CULTURA
Slide Show

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PRESENTACION PLATAFORMA CULTURA 3.0
Tercera cultura en Madrid

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YOU TUBE
Cultura 3.0 en Madrid

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EL MUNDO por dentro
Hoy Si Que Esta El Periodico En El Filo (Edge) De La Noticia
Arcadi Espada

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EL MUNDO
Nace La Plataforma Tercera Cultura
(Birth of the Third Culture)
Rosa M. Tristan

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EL MUNDO por dentro
La Tercera Cultura En Espana
Arcadi Espada

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LA REVOLUCION NATURALISTA
Presentacion De Cultura 3.0

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Polly Wanna Cracker? Squawk! Do Better, That's So Bush League
By Michiko Kakutani

When Alex the African gray parrot died in 2007, the world mourned. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe ran articles reviewing his life achievements. The Economist devoted its obituary for the week of Sept. 22, 2007, to Alex. (Earlier weeks had featured Luciano Pavarotti and Ingmar Bergman.) ABC News, CNN and National Public Radio did segments about his lifetime collaboration with the scientist Irene M. Pepperberg. And an Internet condolence book (remembering-alex.org) was set up so that fans could grieve in public. ...

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YOUTUBE
Missionary Linguist Loses Faith

Daniel Everett on the Piraha language and culture. ...

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NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Becoming Screen Literate
By Kevin Kelly

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places -- like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity. ...

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INTELLIGENT LIFE
The Rise of the Journo-Gurus

..The Gladwell of the new economy is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. (For the record: Anderson used to work at The Economist and shared an office with this author.) In "The Long Tail" he argued that the internet is shifting the focus of the economy from producing a small number of big hits to satisfying a legion of niche markets. Amazon and iTunes can stock virtually everything. And the falling cost of distribution means that every niche consumer can get their hands on what they want. ...

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SALON
Good Enough
By Steve Paulson

We should see the ceaseless creativity of nature as sacred, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman, despite what Richard Dawkins might say.. ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

A third issue is that the DNA of living cells can be modified only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time. Dr. Schuster said he had been in discussion with George Church, a well-known genome technologist at Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time. ...

[...MORE]

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BOOKS FROM EDGE
----------------------------------------------------
PRE-ORDER NOW:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge267.html

----------------------------------------------------
Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@googlemail.com

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Friday, November 21, 2008

Edge 266 Christopher Badcock: The Imprinted Brain Theory

Edge 266 - November 20, 2008
(5,000 words)

http://www.edge.org/

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge266.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY
By Christopher Badcock

According to a recent New York Times Science Times article ("In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition" by Benedict Carey, November 10, 2008) Christopher Badcock and Bernard Crespi have presented a new theory that purports to resolve some long-standing contradictions in explaining mental illness.

Edge wrote to Badcock, an early member of the Edge community, to ask him for a summary of his new theory for our readers.

"At first sight," he wrote back in an email, "it would seem that no single theory could explain these seemingly contradictory facts-and certainly not an evolutionary or genetic one-but an attempt is underway to do exactly that which has just passed its first major test. In 2006 Bernard Crespi (Killam Research Professor in the Department of Biosciences, Simon Fraser University) and I published a paper in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology setting out the theory in relation to autism. Earlier this year Behavioral and Brain Sciences published a second paper along with 23 expert commentaries and the authors' replies which extends the idea to psychoses like schizophrenia. More recently still, Nature has published our essay on the theory ("Battle of Sexes May Set The Brain", 28 August 2008)."

Read on.

- John Brockman

CHRISTOPHER BADCOCK is a Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of PsychoDarwinism and Evolutionary Psychology: A Clinical Introduction.

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THE REALITY CLUB
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Arnold Trehub on Alva Noë's "The Problem With Consciousness"

What Alva Noe and others with similar views about consciousness seemingly fail to understand is that the very world with which we are dynamically interacting is both a real and a phenomenal world. It is the real world in which our actions must be adaptive and creative, but-and this is the key point-our consciously initiated actions can only be governed by the features of our phenomenal world. It is the phenomenal world that poses the essential problem of conscious experience. ...

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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ARTS & LETTERS DAILY
Essays and Opinion

Witch hunters in Africa lynch "thieves" who rob men of their masculinity. Many people's grasp of economics is at the same level. The Edge economics course is an curative... more» ... Class no. 1 ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
SCIENCE TIMES
In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents' Genes Are in Competition"
By Benedict Carey

Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.

At a time when the search for the genetic glitches behind brain disorders has become mired in uncertain and complex findings, the new idea provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is grounded in work at the forefront of science. The two researchers - Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, who are both outsiders to the field of behavior genetics - have spelled out their theory in a series of recent journal articles. ...

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NATURE
ESSAY
Battle of the sexes may set the brain

A tug-of-war between the mother's and father's genes in the developing brain could explain a spectrum of mental disorders from autism to schizophrenia, suggest Christopher Badcock and Bernard Crespi. ...

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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
(COVER STORY)

ENCELADUS: SECRETS OF SATURN'S STRANGEST MOON

Wrinkled landscapes and spouting jets on Saturn's sixth-largest moon hint at underground waters

By Carolyn Porco

On the Saturnian moon Enceladus, jets of powdery snow and water vapor, laden with organic compounds, vent from the "tiger stripes," warm gashes in the surface. How can a body just over 500 kilometers across sustain such vigorous activity?

The answer may be the presence of underground fluids, perhaps a sea, which would increase the efficiency of heating by tidal effects. Support for this idea has come from recent flybys.

If Enceladus has liquid water, it joins Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa as one of the prime places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. ...

[...MORE]

"A thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

EDGE Presents...

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT
TODAY'S LEADING MINDS RETHINK EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO

Forthcoming, Harper Perennial, January 6, 2009

Praise for WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

"A great event in the Anglo-Saxon culture." EL MUNDS

"As fascinating and weighty as one would imagine." THE INDEPENDENT

"Even the world's best brains have to admit to being wrong sometimes: here, leading scientists respond to a new year challenge." THE TIMES

"Provocative ideas put forward today by leading figures." THE TELEGRAPH

"As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity." THE NEWS & OBSERVER

"Answers ring like scientific odes to uncertainty, humility and doubt; passionate pleas for critical thought in a world threatened by blind convictions." THE TORONTO STAR

"For an exceptionally high quotient of interesting ideas to words, this is hard to beat. ...What a feast of egg-head opinionating!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge266.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-3225375-17333020.06691da9c6d471dcdf1278a10377548a@sand.lyris.net
Or, you can use the web form at the following URL: http://www.edge.org/subscribe.html

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Edge 265: Andrian Kreye on Genital Thieves, Alva Noe on Consciousness

Edge 265 - November 14, 2008

http://www.edge.org
(9,500 words)

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge265.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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OF GENITAL THIEVES
The exploration of economic irrationality
Andrian Kreye

It was one of those watershed moments in science at which you would like to have been present. Last summer in Sonoma, three generations behavioral economists convened at a Master Class run by the Edge Foundation. Behavioral economics is a field of science that analyzes market dynamics from the consumers' perspective. The three prominent lecturers were Daniel Kahneman, currently a professor of psychology at Princeton, also a Nobel laureate in Economics for his pioneering work in "behavioral economics"; his younger collaborator Richard Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics at Chicago, widely considered to be the "father of behavioral economics"; as well as Thaler's highly-regarded former student Sendhil Mullainathan, now a professor of economics at Harvard, who has applied behavioral economics and psychology to the phenomena of poverty.

Still more prominent were the students of the class itself, above all because Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google co-founder Salar Kamangar, Blogger founder and Twitter CEO Evan Williams, PayPal founder Elon Musk, former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, and Facebook cofounder and founding president Sean Parker, represented just four of the minds present who have shaped the successful part of the new economy. If you are interested in getting your head around the current global economic meltdown, read through the transcript of this master class once more this autumn. You may not find direct answers, but you will certainly find elements of an explanation. ....

ANDRIAN KREYE is the editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He is also an Edge contributor.

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THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Talk with Alva Noe

EDGE VIDEO

The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.

A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world. ...

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HOW KEVIN BACON CURED CANCER
Steven Strogatz & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

VIDEO: A new documentary from ABC Television im Australia featuring the work of Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

We've all heard of 'six degrees of separation', the idea that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. But what if those steps don't just relate to people but also to viruses, neurons, proteins and even to fashion trends? What if this 'six degrees of separation' allowed us an insight into something at the core of Nature?...

..Whether natural or man-made, vast diverse networks share a common blueprint, a structure that describes their strengths and weaknesses. In the near future network science will fundamentally change how we control epidemics; power failures; fight wars; save endangered species; prevent crime and disease.

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IN THE NEWS
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EL PAIS
Internet cambia la forma de leer... ?y de pensar?
Abel Grau

..Uno de los mas recientes en plantear el debate ha sido el ensayista estadounidense Nicholas G. Carr, experto en Tecnologias de la Informacion y la Comunicacion (TIC), y asesor de la Enciclopedia britanica. Asegura que ya no piensa como antes. ...

..El planteamiento de Carr ha suscitado cierto debate en foros especializados, como en la revista cientifica online Edge.org, y de hecho no es descabellado. Los neurologos sostienen que todas las actividades mentales influyen a un nivel biologico en el cerebro; es decir, en el establecimiento de las conexiones neuronales, la compleja red electrica en la que se forman los pensamientos. " ....
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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Oppenheimer the Opera:
A review of Doctor Atomic
Michael Shermer

There are certain characters in science who stand out for their larger-than-science characteristics: Galileo and his conflicts with Papal authorities; Albert Einstein and his political dabblings and pacifist overtures; Richard Feynman and his safecracking, storytelling antics; Stephen Hawking and his ethereal brain trapped in a frozen body. Biographies, documentaries, films, and even plays have attempted to capture the essence of these giants (see QED, for example, the play starring Alan Alda as Feynman). But to my knowledge, none have had an opera produced in their likeness.

Enter Doctor Atomic, a look at the meaning behind the making of the atomic bomb from the perspective of its paterfamilias J. Robert Oppenheimer and his disparate struggles: with nature to reveal her secrets, with his conscious to ease his guilt. He also struggles with General Leslie R. Groves, the titular military head of the Manhattan Project, and with fellow physicist and future father of the H-Bomb, Edward Teller. ...

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THE TIMES
Ben Macintyre on a people with no history, no fiction and no sense of left or right

In 1980, Daniel Everett, an American missionary and linguist, set off into the heart of the Amazon to track down some of the norld's most elusive words: the language of the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil.

For the next 20 years Everett, the son of a California cowboy, tried to hack his way through this impenetrable language, coming across verbs that grew into the most contorted shapes, sentences without subordinate clauses and forests of nouns that seemed to change without reason or pattern. ...

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THE GUARDIAN
The Power of Speech
Patrick Barkham

When Daniel Everett first went to live with the Amazonian Piraha tribe in the late 70s, his intention was to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he learned to speak their unique language - and ended up rejecting his faith, losing his family and picking a fight with Noam Chomsky. Patrick Barkham meets him

Daniel Everett looks and talks very much like the middle-aged American academic he is - until he drops a strange word into the conversation. An exceptionally melodic noise tumbles from his mouth. It doesn't sound like speaking at all. Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici river in the Amazon basin who can speak Piraha. ...

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WALL STREET JOURNAL
A New Dawn
Bjorn Lomborg, Ian McEwan

A NEW DAWN
ESSAY
The benefits of climate-change policies are limited and costly. Instead, the president-elect needs to coolly evaluate competing priorities, says Bjorn Lomborg. ...

ESSAY
As Barack Obama shifts from a waking dream to the real world, he faces the near-virtual reality of climate change. He has to move decisively, Ian McEwan writes. ...

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HARVARD MAGAZINE
What Makes the Human Mind?
By Ashley Pettus

What Makes the Human Mind?
By Ashley Pettus

During the past few decades, a mounting body of evidence has shown that animals possess a number of cognitive traits once thought to be uniquely human. Bees "talk" through complex dances and sounds; birds act as "social tutors," teaching song repertoires to their young; monkeys use tools and can sort abstract symbols into categories. Yet the more scientists learn about the similarities between human and animal thought, the greater the need to explain the dramatic divide. Are the human faculties associated with language simply an advanced version of capacities that are found in animals, or do they represent something that is qualitatively new?

This puzzle has drawn the attention of professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology Marc Hauser, who has written widely on human and animal cognition. Drawing on a range of recent studies that link the fields of linguistics, biology, and psychology, Hauser has attempted to isolate the aspects of human thought that account for what he terms "humaniqueness." He maintains that even though human brains have inherited many of the raw abilities observed in nonhuman animal species, a divergence arises from the ways in which multiple capacities interact in humans, allowing them to convert information into myriad forms to serve infinitely diverse ends. ...

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LOS ANGELES TIMES
McCain's science earmark error
By Lawrence M. Krauss

OPINION

McCain's science earmark error
Millions to study grizzly bear DNA is 'a waste of money,' McCain says. Wrong.

By Lawrence M. Krauss
..Fruit flies can be made to seem like a silly thing to spend money on. But Palin was referring to research at a lab in France supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The subject is the olive fruit fly, which threatens the California olive industry. The U.S. is working with France because that nation has dealt with an olive fruit fly infestation for decades, far longer than California.

Maybe Palin also should have been told that a University of North Carolina fruit fly study last year demonstrated that a protein called neurexin is required for nerve-cell connections to form and function correctly. That discovery may lead to advances in understanding, among other things, autism, one of the childhood disorders that has been stressed by the McCain-Palin campaign.

It is easy to attack what you don't understand. But politicians would be wiser to attempt to better appreciate how science affects the issues central to our political priorities before rushing to use scientific research and education as a scapegoat in their campaigns.

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SLATE
Does Religion Make You Nice?
By Paul Bloom

.Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. ...

..It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes-probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. ...

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This online EDGE edition with links and EDGE Video is available at:
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Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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EDGE

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Saturday, November 8, 2008

Edge 264: Putting Psychology Into Behavioral Economics - Thaler, Mullainathan, Kahneman

Edge 264 — November 7, 2008

(16,450 words)

http://www.edge.org

This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge264.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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THE DOUBLE HELIX MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
James D. Watson & J. Craig Venter

At the Cold Spring Harbor Board of Director's Dinner in New York City, James Watson and Craig Venter were co-recipients of the Double Helix Medal for Scientific Research.

[...MORE]

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SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE
By Jerry Coyne

Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects ó†they really don't make a whole lot of sense ó†and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

JERRY COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, where he works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics. He is the author (with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation, and Why Evolution Is True.

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Once again, real life is not a casino with simple bets. This is the error that helps the banking system go bust with an astonishing regularity.

REAL LIFE IS NOT A CASINO
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

On New Years day I received a a prescient essay from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as his response to the 2008 Edge Question: "What Have You Change Your Mind About?" In "Real Life Is Not A Casino", he wrote:

"I've shown that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans—such as banks and some classes of insurance ventures—have almost never been profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mortgage mess is not so much that the "quants" and other pseudo-experts in bank risk-management were wrong about the probabilities (they were) but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes."

Taleb had changed his mind about his belief "in the centrality of probability in life, and advocating that we should express everything in terms of degrees of credence, with unitary probabilities as a special case for total certainties and null for total implausibility".

"Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields."

The essay is one of more than one hundred that have been edited for a new book What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (forthcoming, Harper Collins, January 9th).

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

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PUTTING PSYCHOLOGY INTO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
A Talk By Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Sendhil Mullainathan

Class 6: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, Paul Romer, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson, France LeClerc

RICHARD THALER: ehavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.

SENDHIL MULLAINAITHAN: A lot of what makes behavioral economics interesting is psychology, it is about what happens inside the mind. These phenomena are taking things that are happening inside the mind and interfacing them with things happening in the world, the environment, and getting feedback or getting interesting responses from that.

We happen to call the word economics. But it's not economics. You could be talking about crime, you could be talking about many things, in the social domain, the entire spectrum of human behavior. Anyone who is interested in the broader world should be interested in something we currently call "behavioral economics".

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important.

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ARTICLES OF NOTE
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FINANCIAL TIMES
Obama's technology czar: the betting begins
By Richard Waters

Obama's technology czar: the betting begins
By Richard Waters

Barack Obama's promise to appoint the first chief technology officer for the US has had Silicon Valley buzzing all year. Now the election is over, it's time for the real horse race to begin.

John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins got things going this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Asked who should get the job, the always-outspoken Doerr didn't hesitate.

His first pick was Sun co-founder, Kleiner partner and all-round brainiac Bill Joy (pictured above left.)

As an alternative he suggested Danny Hillis (above right), a supercomputer pioneer and leading exponent of artificial intelligence.
Both men would certainly be a good fit for Doerr's personal job description for the first US CTO: someone to lead a new, much-needed focus on fundamental research, the sort of work that will bring new breakthroughs as significant as the birth of the internet (a product of DARPA.) ...

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NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Science: The Coming Century
By Martin Rees

...Science is the only truly global culture: protons, proteins, and Pythagoras' theorem are the same from China to Peru. Research is international, highly networked, and collaborative. And most science-linked policy issues are international, even global—that's certainly true of those I've addressed here.

It is worth mentioning that the United States and Britain have been until now the most successful in creating and sustaining world-class research universities. These institutions are magnets for talent—both faculty and students—from all over the world, and are in most cases embedded in a "cluster" of high-tech companies, to symbiotic benefit.

By 2050, China and India should at least gain parity with Europe and the US—they will surely become the "center of gravity" of the world's intellectual power. We will need to aim high if we are to sustain our competitive advantage in offering cutting-edge "value added." ...

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
A Conversatrion with Stuart L. Pimm
By Claudia Dreyfus

'I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?'

For a man whose scholarly specialty is one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — Stuart L. Pimm is remarkably chipper. On a recent morning, while visiting New York City, Dr. Pimm, a 59-year-old zoologist, was full of warm stories about the many places he travels: South Africa, Madagascar and even South Florida, which he visits as part of an effort to save the endangered Florida panther. Fewer than 100 survive in the wild. In 2006, Dr. Pimm, who holds the Doris Duke professorship of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, won the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, the Nobel of the ecology world. ...

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SCIENCE
THE GONZO SCIENTIST
Flunking Spore
John Bohannon

...So over the past month, I've been playing Spore with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution, Spore failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn't just that Spore dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong--it's meant to be a game, after all--but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong. I also tracked down the scientists who appeared on television in what seemed like an endorsement of Spore's scientific content on the National Geographic channel. They said they had been led to believe that the interviews were for a straight documentary about "developmental evolutionary" science rather than a video promoting a computer game (see the news story in Science's 24 October issue). "I was used," says Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who worries that science has been "hijacked" to promote a product. How did things go so wrong for a game that seemed so good? ...

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THE BOSTON GLOBE
U Tube
Want a free education? A brief guide to the burgeoning world of online video lectures.
By Jeffrey MacIntyre

Graduate Studies: Edge.org

For those seeking substance over sheen, the occasional videos released at Edge.org hit the mark. The Edge Foundation community is a circle, mainly scientists but also other academics, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures, brought together by the literary agent John Brockman.

Edge's long-form interview videos are a deep-dive into the daily lives and passions of its subjects, and their passions are presented without primers or apologies. It is presently streaming excerpts from a private lecture, including a thoughtful question and answer session, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman to Edge colleagues on the importance of behavioral economics.

It won't run to everyone's tastes. Unvarnished speakers like Sendhil Mullainathan, a MacArthur recipient with intriguing insights on poverty, are filmed in casual lecture, his thoughts unspooling in the mode of someone not preoccupied with clarity or economy of expression. The text transcripts are helpful in this context.
Regardless, the decidedly noncommercial nature of Edge's offerings, and the egghead imprimatur of the Edge community, lend its videos a refreshing air, making one wonder if broadcast television will ever offer half the off-kilter sparkle of their salon chatter. ...

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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Edited by John Brockman. Harper Perennial, $14.95 paper (384p)

In this wide-ranging assortment of 150 brief essays, well-known figures from every conceivable field demonstrate why it's a prerogative of all thoughtful people to change their mind once in a while. Technologist Ray Kurzweil says he now shares Enrico Fermi's question: if other intelligent civilizations exist, then where are they? Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) reveals that he has lost faith in probability as a guiding light for making decisions. Oliver Morton (Mapping Mars) confesses that he has lost his childlike faith in the value of manned space flight to distant worlds. J. Craig Venter, celebrated for his work on the human genome, has ceased to believe that nature can absorb any abuses that we subject it to, and that world governments must move quickly to prevent global disaster. Alan Alda says, "So far, I've changed my mind twice about God," going from believer to atheist to agnostic. Brockman, editor of Edge.org and numerous anthologies, has pulled together a thought-provoking collection of focused and tightly argued pieces demonstrating the courage to change strongly held convictions. (Jan.)

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HUFFINGTON POST
Man Versus Machine
Thomas B. Edsall

...Jaron Lanier takes on the debate about the role and power of computers in shaping human finances, behavior and prospects from a radically different vantage point faulting -- in an article published on the Edge web site -- "cybernetic totalists" who, absolve from responsibility for "whatever happens" the individual people who do specific things. I think that treating technology as if it were autonomous is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility. . . .There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore's law fetishizing, and the rest of the package will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times.

[Also: Nathan Myhrvold, George Dyson, Ray Kurzweil]

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WALL STREET JOURNAL
October Pain Was 'Black Swan' Gain
Scott Patterson

For most of October, it seemed nearly everything that could go wrong with the markets did. But the rout turned into a jackpot for author and investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Mr. Taleb last year published "The Black Swan," a best-selling book about the impact of extreme events on the world and the financial markets. He also helped start a hedge fund, Universa Investments L.P., which bases many of its strategies on themes in the book, including how to reap big rewards in a sharp market downturn. Like October's. ...

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PROSPECT
The emerging moral psychology
Dan Jones

Long thought to be a topic of enquiry within the humanities, the nature of human morality is increasingly being scrutinised by the natural sciences. This shift is now beginning to provide impressive intellectual returns on investment. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, primatologists and anthropologists, all borrowing liberally from each others' insights, are putting together a novel picture of morality—a trend that University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt has described as the "new synthesis in moral psychology." The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human "moral faculty."...

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THE RECORD (WATERLOO)
This is the column that changed the world
Bill Bean

I was watching a PBS production the other day entitled Dogs That Changed the World, and wondered about our contemporary fascination with things "That Changed the World."

The Machine That Changed the World (a 1991 book about automotive mass production). Cod: A Biography of The Fish That Changed the World (a 1998 book about, well, cod). The Map That Changed The World (2002 book about geologist William Smith). 100 Photographs That Changed the World (Life, 2003). Bridges That Changed the World (book, 2005). The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World (book, 2005). How William Shatner Changed the World (documentary, 2006). Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Changed the World (book on brilliant people with autism, 2007). The Book That Changed the World (2008 article in the Guardian, about The Origin of Species).

This "Changed the World" stuff is getting to be a bit tedious, isn't it? Now that we have Dogs That Changed the World, can Cats That Changed the World be far behind? ...

...Bill Bean notes that there is already a place to read about People Who Changed the World and Then Changed Their Minds. Every year, the people at the Edge Foundation ask writers, thinkers, psychologists, historians and others what major ideas they have changed their minds about. Go to www.edge.org. It's good reading.

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FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
The Turkey Was Amazed
By Frank Schirrmacher

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk research, had already described the process of the financial crisis, when Ben Bernanke believed we were already in an "era of security". His new book could become to the standard work of a society, that is experiencing the destruction of its life security. ..

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Your Comments On The Economy Column
By Nicholas Kristof

...Yet I also think that it's important to keep the economy in perspective. During the boom years, we tended to equate wealth with happiness, and if there's some reordering of our national value system, that would be a good thing. Over the last year, I've become interested in the work of social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt who have conducted research on happiness. And the evidence is pretty strong that the things that we believe will make us happy, such as winning the lottery, won't do that except in the short term. In the long term, the way to be happy is to have friends and spend time with them, and to connect to a cause larger than yourself that gives you a sense of meaning.

As my column suggested, I'm influenced by the work of Alan Krueger at Princeton. He believes that networks are truly important for happiness and fulfillment — and the cost of a lay-off or foreclosure is that it tears people out of their networks. So he thinks that falling incomes aren't so bad as we may think, but that layoffs and evictions are worse, and that makes sense to me. ...

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ATLANTIC ONLINE
Too Soon To Tell
Ross Douthat

I've written before about Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity) - and I've argued before with Will Wilkinson about whether it's possible to envision a successful society in which the liberal impulses dominate completely, and the conservative impulses are stigmatized and/or essentially disappear. Haidt, for his part, thinks that it probably isn't; here's Will arguing with him:

?Frankly, I find this extremely unconvincing, and I daresay even pernicious ... What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect ... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest-that is, the most imbalanced-are by and large the best places for human beings to live."...

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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
By Simson L. Garfinkel

... In a May 2006 essay on the technology and culture website Edge.org, futurist Jaron Lanier called Wikipedia an example of "digital Maoism"--the closest humanity has come to a functioning mob rule. ...

.. Lanier's complaints when his Wikipedia page claimed that he was a film director couldn't be taken seriously by Wikipedia's "contributors" until Lanier persuaded the editors at Edge to print his article bemoaning the claim. This Edge article by Lanier was enough to convince the Wikipedians that the Wikipedia article about Lanier was incorrect--after all, there was a clickable link! Presumably the editors at Edge did their fact checking, so the wikiworld could now be corrected. ...

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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Moving Freely between Virtual Worlds
By Erica Naone

...But the issue goes deeper than virtual cars and shopping malls. Jaron Lanier, interdisciplinary scholar in residence at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a virtual-reality pioneer, says that the search for a 3-D Internet is important for humanity. "Human cognition was designed to function in 3-D, and our computation eventually has to have a 3-D interface to maximize the matchup with the human brain as it evolved," he says. People will need to find a way to combine a concrete, 3-D spatial understanding with the connective power of the 2-D Internet, Lanier says. ...

... Lanier, who notes that he has many professional connections to people involved with virtual worlds, says that while he very much wants the 3-D Internet to succeed, he is skeptical about whether it will be possible for developers to agree on a set of standards. "There's a virtual land rush of people who want to come in and grab the standard," he says, noting that the history of IBM and Microsoft provides some indication of the money that can be made by establishing a standard. But Lanier thinks a successful standard for the 3-D Internet is unlikely to develop the same way that HTML did--that is, as an abstract definition that people then adopted. He thinks it is more likely that a well-designed package will become a standard, similar to the way that Adobe Flash is becoming standard for rich Internet applications.

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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Immortalizing a Piece of Yourself
By Emily Singer

Church won't be alone in distributing his cells. The scientist aims to create hundreds or thousands of cell lines over the next few years as part of the Personal Genome Project, an effort that he launched two years ago to capitalize on advances in gene-sequencing technologies. So far, the project has enrolled 10 volunteers--and garnered headlines, mainly for its genomic-era exhibitionism. Volunteers, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and entrepreneur Ester Dyson, released their medical records and preliminary genetic analyses on the Web earlier this month. But media attention has mostly ignored that fact that they've also given something that may be even more personal. Each has undergone a skin biopsy, which will be used to generate stem-cell lines.

[...MORE]

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TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki
The founders of startup 23andMe want to know your genome.
By Emily Singer

[...MORE]

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This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge264.html

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Edge 263: Sendhil Mullainathan - "The Irony of Poverty"

Edge 263 - October 30, 2008

(16,460 words)

http://www.edge.org

This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge263.html

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions.

THE IRONY OF POVERTY
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University.

Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/mullainathan.html

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Romer, Richard Thaler, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson

Class 5: A Short Course In Behavioral Economics
Edge Video

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SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: I told you there was a bunch of pieces to the puzzle to the poor, and I wanted to finish that argument because I got out the first piece of the puzzle, but there are two other pieces that are important and I want to kind of walk through those pieces. I'll walk through the other piece of the puzzle, and then I'll close on a slide about mental models. I realized in trying to write that up, everything can be shown in this one slide, and it's kind of a stunning fact.

To recap: The first piece of the puzzle is that scarcity buys a broader frame, the need for a broader frame. And one implication of a lot of this which is worth keeping in the back of your mind and that what should resonate for a lot of you is that even positive expenditures are tainted by the trade-offs.

If you're poor and you spend money on a luxury good, you're always at least partly thinking during the moment of consumption about what you're giving up to buy that good. If you are time scarce and you're spending time on a leisure good, you're at least partly thinking about what you're not doing during that time. That's an interesting hedonic aspect of things, which could turn out to be important.

The problem of a broader frame isn't just a planning problem, there's also a hedonic problem that it induces, which is the inability to not think about trade-offs during the consumption. That's an interesting indication. I won't talk more about it because I'm not talking that much about hedonics. But it's important.

Here's the second piece of the puzzle. And this is related to the question of, what is causing, what's preventing the vendors from saving up? Here's a little thought experiment. Eve and Ben both pass by a clothing store. A summer suit draws their eye and in a moment of weakness both make an ill-advised purchase.

Eve goes home and thinks, what a bad purchase. Ben goes home and thinks, what a bad purchase; now I won't have the money to repair my car. Why is this example is useful? It's that temptations have consequences. If you have slack, the consequences are that you've now used up some of your slack on this pointless purchase. And you may feel bad because it was a pointless purchase and it was in the spur of the moment. Of course, we're tempted by certain consumption acts. The poor are tempted by certain consumption acts. Here's an interesting observation. Suppose that the goods that tempt us, so say I make ten times as much as somebody else, suppose the goods that tempt me are ten times as expensive as the goods that tempt the other person. Then we both face the same structural problem. We've taken one problem and scaled it up.

It's like an exchange rate. Just multiply it by ten, but everything else is still the same, so nothing has changed. If, on the other hand, the things that tempt me are only twice as expensive or three times as expensive it's interesting that now I face the fundamentally easier problem than the poorer person. Does that make sense to everybody?

What that means is now that if I cave in, I'm caving in. The psychological experience is the same. I'm giving into something I don't want to give in to, but the monetary consequence is very different. It's going to be in proportion to my slack, my income it's one tenth as big. ...

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IN THE NEWS
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMN
THE BEHAVIORAL REVOLUTION
By David Brooks

...Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely.

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what's happening, he saw it coming. His popular books "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Back Swan" were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.

In "The Black Swan," Taleb wrote, "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup." Globalization, he noted, "creates interlocking fragility." He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse - "when one fails, they all fail."

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we've actually benefited from dumb luck. ...

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THIS IS MONEY
NASSIM TALEB AND THE SECRET OF THE BLACK SWAN
Bill Condie, Evening Standard

Options trader turned author and philosopher Nassim Taleb has delivered returns of 50% - in some cases 110% - for investors he advises this year despite the market meltdown, thanks to his non-conformist view on managing risk. The Evening Standard investigates...

Lebanese-born Taleb is scathing of traditional risk-managers and says they should be jailed for the pain they have caused.
'We would like society to lock up quantitative risk managers before they cause more damage,' he says.

Those same risk managers have scoffed at Taleb's theories but may have to think again after his extraordinary returns over the past months.

'I am very sad to be vindicated,' Taleb says.

'I don't care about the money. We're proud we protected our investors.'

Taleb wrote last year at length about the market risks that have come home to roost lately. 'The financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks - when one fails, they all fall,'

Taleb wrote in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, published last year. He warned specifically of the dangers from mortgage finance giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

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THE TELEGRAPH
DEAN KAMEN: PART MAN, PART MACHINE

Some see Dean Kamen as a Willy Wonka character whose most famous invention - the Segway personal transporter - is still the butt of jokes. Others compare him to Henry Ford. His next project, after perfecting an electric car, is to 'to fix the world' - using a 200-year-old engine nobody else thinks can work. By Adam Higginbotham

Ten years ago, on the summit of a hill in the verdant New England countryside, at the highest point he could find between Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, Dean Kamen designed and built the sprawling, hexagonal house he called Westwind. Filled with gadgets, tools and curios - including a 25-ton tugboat steam engine that once belonged to Henry Ford and an elevator featured in The Sting - and furnished with a 50,000 watt wind turbine to generate electricity and a floodlit baseball field to entertain his employees, it lies just seven miles from the headquarters of his research and development company, Deka.

Now 57, Kamen has a variety of ways of covering this distance: at the wheel of his gleaming black Humvee, or perhaps his Porsche coupé, the journey takes some 20 minutes; often, he chooses to pilot his helicopter, a two-seat, jet-powered Enstrom 480, which he keeps in a hangar beneath the house, and will put the inventor on the roof of his office in about three -and-a-half minutes. ...

...Kamen is now regarded as one of the most accomplished electro-mechanical engineers in the world - 'He's extraordinary,' says Bob Tuttle, who has worked with him since 1976 and is now executive vice-president of Deka, 'the ultimate systems engineer.'

'He's often compared to Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,' says Bill Doyle, who met Kamen while working at Johnson & Johnson in the mid-1990s. 'The comparisons are not without merit.' ...

[...MORE]

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THE GUARDIAN
'PEOPLE SAY I'M STRIDENT'

He sold 1.5m copies of The God Delusion, and this week stumped up £5,500 for atheist adverts. So why does Richard Dawkins think science is losing its war with religion?

By Decca Aitkenhead

...This week, as Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel that the secular, scientific cause to which he has devoted his career is winning. On Tuesday, campaigners announced plans for an atheist advertising campaign to appear on the side of buses with the message: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The campaign, which was launched by TV comedy writer Ariane Sherine, blogging on Commentisfree.co.uk, hoped to raise £5,500 from supporters, which Dawkins had pledged to match with his own money, but by yesterday public donations had already raised more than £96,000.

In the same week, immigration minister, Phil Woolas, predicted that constitutional reforms would banish bishops from the House of Lords within the next 50 years, and record numbers of new maths and science undergraduates were reported. Even in America, the religious right seemed to be losing its grip.

But when I ask Dawkins, now 67, if he feels that public understanding of science has improved during his career, he looks doubtful. "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance - but less active opposition [to science]. If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to."

Does he attribute that to lower standards of scientific education, or to the rise of religious fundamentalism? "Oh," he says without hesitation, "I think it's due to greater religious influence."

In Dawkins' view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason, and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants - but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The God Delusion's stated aim was to "convert" readers to atheism - but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed. "Yes," he smiles. "I think that was a bit unrealistic. A worthwhile aim, but unrealistic." ...

[...MORE]

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THE TELEGRAPH
HARRY POTTER FAILS TO CASE SPELL OVER PROFESSOR RICHARD DAWKINS
By Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan

Harry Potter has become the latest target for Professor Richard Dawkins who is planning to find out whether tales of witchdraft and wizardy have a negative effect on children.

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

Prof Dawkins said: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.

"I haven't read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children's author that one might mention and I love his books. I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales."

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards".

"I think it is anti-scientific - whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know," he told More4 News.

"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research." ...

[...MORE]

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TIME
Q & A
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
By Tim Morrison

...You've said that this current market crisis isn't necessarily a black swan event. People did see this coming.

It is a white swan, but very few people saw it coming, I guarantee. Nobody saw the real cost. And let me tell you the problem. The system used to analyze risk is completely defective, and actually could not keep up with the complexity of the financial products that are involved. You have what I call a geometric or exponential increase in risks. For example, if the market drops 10% you lose $100 million. But if the market drops 15%, you don't lose another $50 million, you lose an extra $2 billion. And if the market moves an extra 5% you lose an extra $10 or $15 billion. All the metrics have the effect of underestimating the impact of the possibility of very large deviations. In other words it tells you how uncomfortable the plane ride is going to be, but tells you nothing about the crash.

But how do you get beyond that besides widening your margins of risk?

Eliminating leverage. If you don't have leverage, you don't have that problem. We have a faulty risk management system that underestimated probabilities while giving people the illusion of understanding them. It gave people the illusion of comfort. If I give you a number, you're going to take more risk. Regardless of the confidence you have in the number. It's psychological. If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident. It's kind of like a seatbelt on a plane. It doesn't do anything. ...

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THE VANCOUVER SUN
MOTIVATED BY FEAR
By Peter McKnight

Recent volatility in the markets is largely a result of mob mentality and the herding instinct, with anxiety spreading faster than any virus

By Peter McKnight

...This presents a problem for economists in their attempts to explain what's happening now and to predict what will happen in the future since many economic theories depend on the assumption that investors will act rationally. But what if that assumption is wrong, as seems to be the case right now?

Perhaps it's time to turn to psychology, as many economists have done in recent years. While psychologists and economists didn't have much to do with each other throughout most of the 20th century, the last few decades have seen something of a rapprochement between these two seemingly disparate disciplines, a meeting of minds that has produced the interdisciplinary field of behavioural economics.

The seeds of this rapprochement were sown by famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who in the 1970s demonstrated the phenomenon known as loss aversion. Despite having never taken an economics course, Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work; Tversky unfortunately died in 1996.

As the name of the theory suggests, loss aversion tells us that people are much more concerned with avoiding losses than they are with making gains. ...

[...MORE]

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NATURE
Editorial
A LOOK WITHIN

A series of Essays examines what science has to say about being human.

...The combustibility of the interface between science and society is one major reason for the extraordinary fragmentation of research that tackles human behaviour. In part because of the sociobiology battle, most social scientists still steer clear of using evolutionary hypotheses. And even researchers who do work under the unifying framework of evolution tend to fall into distinct camps such as gene-culture co-evolution or human behavioural ecology - their practitioners divided by differences of opinion on, say, the relative importance of culture versus genes.

Given that humans are such a complicated species, it is no surprise that researchers from fields such as economics, political science, anthropology and biology are driven to pursue similar questions using their own distinct tools and approaches. But the lack of crosstalk between disciplines and subdisciplines means that efforts are too often duplicated, and opportunities to exchange insights lost. Much of the ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers collected by anthropologists, for instance, are largely unknown to modellers interested in the emergence of particular human traits. Similarly, evolutionary biologists constantly accuse social scientists of either ignoring evolution or invoking outdated versions of evolutionary theory.

It doesn't have to be this way. In other domains, such as the study of complex systems, scientists from biological, physical and social sciences are increasingly sharing information. Now is a particularly opportune moment for those studying human behaviour to follow suit. Genomics is beginning to provide a window onto many thousands of years of human history. Advances in mathematical analyses have greatly clarified our picture of the evolutionary process. And, because of the rapid assimilation of nomadic hunter-gatherer populations into modern societies, researchers have collected most of the ethnographic data on these groups they are ever likely to obtain.

In the spirit of fostering dialogue between disparate fields of research, Nature has commissioned a series of Essays that asks how discoveries in psychology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, game theory and network engineering are altering our understanding of particular human characteristics, or of issues that are central to human life. Starting this week with religion (see page 1038), and appearing every two weeks for the next five months, these Essays move from human prehistory to look at how we operate within self-made highly interconnected cities and communication networks. ...

[EDITOR NOTE: Philip Campbell is Editor of Nature]

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NATURE

Essay

BEING HUMAN: RELIGION: BOUND TO BELIEVE?

Pascal Boyer

Pascal Boyer is in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology, Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, USA, and is the author of Religion Explained.

Atheism will always be a harder sell than religion, Pascal Boyer explains, because a slew of cognitive traits predispose us to faith.

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.

Such responses make it difficult to establish why and how religious thought is so pervasive in human societies - an understanding that is especially relevant in the current climate of religious fundamentalism. In asking whether religion is one of the many consequences of having the type of brains we come equipped with, we can shed light on what kinds of religion 'come naturally' to human minds. We can probe the shared assumptions that religions are built on, however disparate, and examine the connection between religion and ethnic conflict. Lastly, we can hazard a guess at what the realistic prospects are for atheism. ...

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