Videos in: 2011
The Evolution of Cooperation Edge Master Class 2011
"Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity?"
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE MARVELS AND THE FLAWS OF INTUITIVE THINKING: Edge Master Class 2011
"The power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking, all of those are a major change in psychology. I can't think of a bigger change in my lifetime. You were asking what's exciting? That's exciting, to me."
Go to stand-alone video: :
Sci Foo 2011
Googleplex, Mountain View, California — August 12-14, 2011
[9.11.11]
"Ask the question you are asking yourself. You have one minute."
Go to stand-alone video: :
The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect"
"If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"
Go to stand-alone video: :
THE BOOK OF REVELATION: PROPHECY AND POLITICS EDGE MASTER CLASS 2011
"Why is religion still alive? Why are people still engaged in old folk takes and mythological stories — even those without rational and ethical foundations."
Go to stand-alone video: :
NEUROSCIENCE AND JUSTICE EDGE MASTER CLASS 2011
"Asking the fundamental question of modern life. In an enlightened world of scientific understandings of first causes, we must ask: are we free, morally responsible agents or are we just along for the ride?"
Go to stand-alone video: :
Insight
"Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn't involve explicit knowledge. It doesn't involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can't explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn't magical, it's really a consequence of the experience we've built up."
Go to stand-alone video: :
The Social Psychological Narrative, or, What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?
"One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way."
Go to stand-alone video: :
WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER
"The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy?"
Go to stand-alone video: :
The Argumentative Theory
"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."
Go to stand-alone video: :