Things to Hang on Your Mental Mug Tree
[7.10.17]
I don't think there's any huge amount of intelligence required to look at the world through different lenses. The difficulty lies in that you have to abandon four or five assumptions about the world simultaneously. That's what probably makes it difficult.
RORY SUTHERLAND is Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy London; Columnist, The Spectator. Rory Sutherland's Edge Bio page
Where Avant-Garde Thinking Reflects The Present
[6.30.17]20 years: Online platform Edge.org
Where Avant-Garde Thinking Reflects The Present
By Tobias Sedlmaier 6.30.2017
The online platform Edge has been looking for the big questions for twenty years - and for the even bigger answers of life. A critical appraisal.
Internet Presence of Edge (photo: screenshot)
In the beginning is the question. Born out of restless nights and ingenious inspirations, it is examined in cold daylight, perhaps focused more precisely, and sent out by its ingenious creators into the ignorant world.
What sounds like a diffusely romantic myth of origin is in fact the recurrent practice of finding Edge’s Annual Question. On this online platform, major contemporary (mostly American) scientists and a selection of trendsetters have been formulating answers to more or less urgent questions of our time for twenty years.
How does the world work?
These can be very vague, for example: What Now? Or they can be leading questions: What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement? Almost always the notion of big ideas—either brilliant or dangerous ones—resonates here; and of course, life, the internet, and all the other themes come in.
The answers, which are first published on the website, later in book form, can be long essays with examples and formulas that run five print pages. Or they are as aphoristic as Brian Eno's response about the value of the Internet: "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway.“
Master of Ceremonies of this sophisticated debate forum is John Brockman, author and literary agent, who is called a giant by some. The industrious intellectual impresario has himself written a handful of books, edited around fifty more and performed in an inter-disciplinary program of avant-garde events with John Cage and Jorge Luis Borges in New York. He was also a Godfather for the think tanks "Reality Club" as well as Edge.
At a moment in history when borders are erected more quickly than torn down, you can imagine the larger than life Brockman with his characteristic wide-brimmed hat as an iconoclastic breaker of barriers. He is equally at home in the role of the business-minded entrepreneur as in the role of the theorist well aware of the sensitive changes in the Zeitgeist, oscillating between Andy Warhol and Norbert Wiener, at the intersection of art and cybernetics.
Compassionate Systems
[6.22.17]Curtains For Us All?
[5.31.17]The Threat
[5.8.17]Soul of a Molecular Machine
[5.1.17]We're now accumulating data at an incredible rate. I mentioned electron microscopy to study the ribosome—each experiment generates several terabytes of data, which is then massaged, analyzed, and reduced, and finally you get a structure. At least in this data analysis, we believe we know what's happening. We know what the programs are doing, we know what the algorithms are, we know how they come up with the result, and so we feel that intellectually we understand the result. What is now happening in a lot of fields is that you have machine learning, where computers are essentially taught to recognize patterns with deep neural networks. They're formulating rules based on patterns. There are are statistical algorithms that allow them to give weights to various things, and eventually they come up with conclusions.
Urban Evolution
How Species Adapt, or Don't, to City Living [3.31.17]KNOW THIS - On Sale Now!
Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments [2.15.17]CONTENTS: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond on the best way to understand complex problems * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Carlo Rovelli on the mystery of black holes * Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress * TED Talks curator Chris J. Anderson on the growth of the global brain * Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries * Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on why the twenty-first century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter * philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on the underestimation of female genius * music legend Peter Gabriel on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality * Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson on the surprising ability of small (and cheap) upstarts to compete with billion-dollar projects. Plus Nobel laureate John C. Mather, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, psychologist Alison Gopnik, Genome author Matt Ridley, Harvard geneticist George Church, Why Does the World Exist? author Jim Holt, anthropologist Helen Fisher, and more.
Edgy Summer Reads
[6.14.17]A Crack in Creation by Jennifer Doudna | Behave by Robert Sapolsky | |
Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman (Avail. 9.5.17) | Angel by Jason Calacanis (Avail. 7.18.17) | The Evolution of Beauty by Richard Prum |
The Berlin Project by Gregory Benford | The Great Unknown by Marcus du Sautoy | Finding Fibonacci by Keith Devlin |
American Kingpin by Nick Bilton | Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark (Avail. 8.29.17) | Improbable Destinies by Jonathan B. Losos (Avail. 8.8.17) |
Scale by Geoffrey West | Science in the Soul by Richard Dawkins | Why? by Mario Livio (Avail. 7.11.17) |