(11,000 words)
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge248.html
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THE THIRD CULTURE
THE END OF THEORY
Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?
By Chris Anderson
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
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THE REALITY CLUB
George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand respond to "The End of Theory"
GEORGE DYSON: Just as we may eventually take the brain apart, neuron by neuron, and never find the model, we may discover that true AI came into existence without anyone ever developing a coherent model of reality or an unambiguous theory of intelligence. Reality, with all its ambiguities, does the job just fine. It may be that our true destiny as a species is to build an intelligence that proves highly successful, whether we understand how it works or not. ... [MORE]
KEVIN KELLY: My guess is that this emerging method will be one additional tool in the evolution of the scientific method. It will not replace any current methods (sorry, no end of science!) but will compliment established theory-driven science. Let's call this data intensive approach to problem solving Correlative Analytics. I think Chris squanders a unique opportunity by titling his thesis "The End of Theory" because this is a negation, the absence of something. Rather it is the beginning of something, and this is when you have a chance to accelerate that birth by giving it a positive name. ... [MORE]
STEWART BRAND: Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We'll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it's good for.
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IN THE NEWS
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DER TAGESSPIEGEL
A NEW HUMANISM
("EIN NEUER HUMANISMUS")
By Kai Kupferschmidt
...as early as 1959 the physicist and writer Charles Percy Snow lamented that the humanities and natural sciences were adrift. Snow coined the phrase "two cultures". At the same time, he said saw a need for a "third culture" that would require a common culture of humanities and natural scientists.
The mid-nineties saw the American literary agent John Brockman present his idea of the third culture. It was different than the one imagined by Snow. Brockman noted that natural scientists such as the biologist Richard Dawkins or the physicist Roger Penrose had taken over the function which had previously been played by literary scholars by by writing books that explained science to the public. Brockman that this was the third culture.
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THE NEW REPUBLIC
Hedonic Man
By Alan Wolfe
The collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky produced one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late twentieth century: a series of ingeniously designed experiments that raised uncomfortable questions about "utility maximization," which was the major assumption of microeconomics.
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
How The Rich Spend their Time: Stressed
By Robert Frank
According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, "being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed."
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THE NEW YORKER
The Itch
By Atul Gawande
The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm.
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THE NEW YORKER
What Was I Thinking
By Elizabeth Kolbert
As an academic discipline, Ariely's field—behavioral economics—is roughly twenty-five years old. It emerged largely in response to work done in the nineteen-seventies by the Israeli-American psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Ariely, too, grew up in Israel.) When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics."
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WALL STREET JOURNAL
Free To Choose, But Often Wrong
By David A. Shaywitz
...When psychologists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky conducted an experimental survey in the early 1980s asking people to answer this simple question, they discovered, to their surprise, that most respondents picked "b," even though this was the narrower choice and hence the less likely one. It seems that saliency – in this case, Linda's passionate political profile – trumps logic.
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WASHIINGTON POST
How Rich People Spend Their Time
Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman has found, however, that being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things, and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed. ...
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This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge248.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
Copyright (c) 2008 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
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