Videos by topic: CULTURE
DEEP PRAGMATISM
Imagine the following scenario: You have two different tribes, your collectivist tribe over here—where everything's in common, and your individualist tribe over there. Imagine these tribes not only have different ways of cooperating, but they rally around different gods, different leaders, different holy texts that tell them how they should live—that you're not allowed to sing on Wednesdays in this group, and in this group over here, women are allowed to be herders, but in this group over there, they're not; different ways of life; different ways of organizing society. Imagine these societies existing separately, separated by a forest that burns down. The rains come, and then suddenly you have a nice lovely pasture, and both tribes move in.
Now the question is: How are they going to do this? We have different tribes that are cooperative in different ways. Are they going to be individualistic? Are they going to be collectivists? Are they going to pray to this god? Are they going to pray to that god? Are they going to be allowed to have assault weapons or not allowed to have assault weapons? That's the fundamental problem of the modern world—that basic morality solves the tragedy of the commons, but it doesn't solve what I call the "tragedy of common sense morality." Each moral tribe has its own sense of what's right or wrong—a sense of how people ought to get along with each other and treat each other—but the common senses of the different tribes are different. That's the fundamental and moral problem.
JOSHUA D. GREENE is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University. He studies the psychology and neuroscience of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Joshua D. Greene's Edge Bio Page
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NAPOLEON CHAGNON: BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT
An Edge Special Event
[6.6.13]
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Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 1 - a talk with Steven Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 2 - a discussion with Steven Pinker, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 3 - A talk with Richard Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 4 - A discussion with Richard Wrangham, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett
NAPOLEON CHAGNON: BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT
An Edge Special Event
[6.6.13]
Go to stand-alone video: :
Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 1 - a talk with Steven Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 2 - a discussion with Steven Pinker, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 3 - A talk with Richard Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 4 - A discussion with Richard Wrangham, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett
NAPOLEON CHAGNON: BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT
An Edge Special Event
[6.6.13]
Go to stand-alone video: :
Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 1 - a talk with Steven Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 2 - a discussion with Steven Pinker, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 3 - A talk with Richard Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 4 - A discussion with Richard Wrangham, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett
NAPOLEON CHAGNON: BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT
An Edge Special Event
[6.6.13]
Go to stand-alone video: :
Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 1 - a talk with Steven Pinker, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 2 - a discussion with Steven Pinker, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 3 - A talk with Richard Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument pt 4 - A discussion with Richard Wrangham, David Haig and Daniel C. Dennett
How to Win at Forecasting
The question becomes, is it possible to set up a system for learning from history that's not simply programmed to avoid the most recent mistake in a very simple, mechanistic fashion? Is it possible to set up a system for learning from history that actually learns in our sophisticated way that manages to bring down both false positive and false negatives to some degree? That's a big question mark.
Nobody has really systematically addressed that question until IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, sponsored this particular project, which is very, very ambitious in scale. It's an attempt to address the question of whether you can push political forecasting closer to what philosophers might call an optimal forecasting frontier. That an optimal forecasting frontier is a frontier along which you just can't get any better.
PHILIP E. TETLOCK is Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (School of Arts and Sciences and Wharton School). He is author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Philip Tetlock's Edge Bio Page
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WE CAN'T DO EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY WITHOUT EVIDENCE
Make it easy, make it personal, make it salient. It's not rocket science, it's somewhere between common sense and psychology 101, and that goes a long way.
RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Richard H Thaler's Edge Bio Page
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THE WORLD THROUGH INSTITUTIONAL LENSES
"The issue is that when you look at the world from these sorts of institutional lenses, identifying problems becomes relatively easy. Solving them becomes very hard. It's no mystery how you get economic growth. You need to provide opportunities and incentives. But how do you make that political equilibrium? How do you make it so that everybody in society actually agrees and abides by a system that provides those incentives and opportunities even if it's not in their short-term interests? Those are the real challenges and that's exactly the sorts of issues we're seeing in Europe, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in the United States, it's the sorts of issues we're seeing in Turkey."
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HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION
"Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution."
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WHAT IS VALUE? WHAT IS MONEY?
"We have always had this tension of understanding the world, at small spatial scales or individual scales, and large macro scales. In the past when we looked at macro scales, at least when it comes to many social phenomena, we aggregated everything. Our idea of macro is, by an accident of history, a synonym of aggregate, a mass in which everything is added up and in which individuality is lost. What data at high spatial resolution, temporal resolution and typological resolution is allowing us to do, is to see the big picture without losing the individuality inside it."
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