Edge in the News: 2013
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BESTSELLER LIST (PAPERBACK NONFICTION)
San Francisco Chronicle
[2.3.13]
6. THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
John Brockman (Harper Perennial; $15.99). [ED. NOTE: Sales Week Ending February 3, 2013]
https://www.edge.org/
THEORIES OF EVERYTHING
de Volkskrant
[2.2.13]
Every year Edge produces a profound question a treasure trove of ideas. ... deep, comprehensive questions that challenge authors's to respond with a sharp and interesting answer. This year's question is simple: what is your favorite theory about how the world works, preferably one that is deep, beautiful and maybe even elegant too.
Brockman's authors, including regulars such as Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Max Tegmark, Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, have struggled visibly to stay out of each other's waters. Darwin and Einstein: almost everybody refers to them, and then decided that there must be a more qualified differences to address.
That does not mean this year's question is wrong. On the contrary. More than in other years, it pushed authors to come up with truly original answers.
This yields a treasure trove of ideas and observations. Psychologist Mahzarin Banji example, who sees limits to our mind. Richard Thaler notes that our ability to concentrate is the key to everything. Dawkins points out the universal role of pattern recognition. Chance as creative power, says John McWorther. Conflict as a creative force, says Steven Pinker. The ability of the human brain to create and manipulate abstractions, writes mathematician Keith Devlin.
Each one is a beautiful and instructive reflection, which encourages thinking and reading.
If you, without any reference, enter Edge inadvertently, you might think that you have come upon a useful digital magazine. It will be a mistake. Edge is not a magazine but a conversation, probably the most useful space at the moment for anyone who wants to peer into the flowering of the most advanced human thought. In Edge, there is no stable of contributors who write eye-catching articles on different topics that have come to be called culture; There is a surprising territory where one finds, in rigorous disarray, the vanguard of scientific knowledge, at this technological and humanistic moment.
That which has come to be called the third culture.
....Edge is the opposite of Twitter: there is only room for those who have something to say, things that say they are solidly argued and, of course, there is no way to synthesize anything in 140 characters.
Stop by there....Edge is an online salon that has preserved millions of words that trace the most fascinating cultural conversation of the last fifteen years. Cultural, of course, in the best sense of the word. The seventeen Edge Questions formulated as of today have resulted in a total of over two thousand responses, and provide one of the most complete ready-to-wear knowledge bases, ideal for incorporation into the wardrobe of our particular wisdom.
It's not useful nor does it make sense to summarize. You have to go and read it daily, to have intellectual food for a few months because each of these reflections is a micro-essay on a specific topic that opens doors to reflection and study in all fields of human knowledge.
Edge.org is a website that is definitely worth reading, and rightly enjoys being known as "The world's smartest website." It has a great form of online debate in which world experts, the most meritorious scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, are invited to answer a question. The get the year off to a good start, Edge asked the question: "What *Should* We Be Worried About". The answers are often quite abstract, drifting in the direction of loose discussion of broader, long-term problems. Some, however, relate to current problem that sooner or later will catch up to us.
…A long, but extremely nutritious and useful reading, which I recommend to all.
...for the polemical technology author Evgeny Morozov, the best answer was the word "smart" itself. ... All this smart awesomeness will make our environment more plastic and more programmable," Morozov argued. ... In this, Morozov’s critique overlaps with a second significant contemporary word: "fragility." As Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in his 2012 book Antifragile, a "fragile" system is easily broken by unexpected shocks or irregularities. Global finance was one such system at the time of the 2008 crisis, with its locked-in assumptions about risk and cascading series of bad debts. Antifragility ... describes a system that is able to thrive on uncertainty, and that will not be brought crashing down by circumstances its designers did not anticipate.
Two eerie story collections and two comic novels are part of this month’s crop, along with an anthology that has science writers aiming to explain, well, everything.
THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
411 pages. Harper Perennial. $15.99.
Mr. Brockman, the editor and publisher of Edge.org, asked the thinkers in his online science community to share their favorite “deep, elegant or beautiful” explanation. . . . a handy collection of 150 shortcuts to understanding how the world works. Elegance in this context means, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes, the “power to explain much while assuming little.” . . . Among the things this book will teach you? How much you don’t know.
For tens of thousands of people the Internet magazine edge.org's annual question is a traditional event awaited just as the expected New Year's celebrations. Wish complex ritual interesting, short and broad scope aspects. Participants include 150 intellectuals and researchers who are among the most important and original in the world. The collection of responses creates a bridge of bright, attractive, sharp and precise thinking between the world of scientific work and the world of humanism and the idea ofman and society.
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"A COLLECTION of essays by big thinkers answering big questions may never be a page-turner, but should still be deeply satisfying. And This Explains Everything delivers."
Of course it is not the technology that makes us dumber, it is we ourselves. To counteract this, you can read a text by Jaron Lanier — a virtual reality pioneer who become nätskeptiker - on edge.org (short link is.gd / jlanier). I would also recommend Eli Parisers book "The Filter Bubble", Evgeny Morozovs "The net delusion" and — most relevant to a discussion of e-books and changing reading habits - Nicholas Carr's "The shallows".
EDITORIAL
What should we worry about? Scan the headlines, and the answers seem obvious. We should worry about Congress and the debt ceiling, about gun violence and climate change, about terrorism, the euro, schools, taxes, entitlement programs and Kim Kardashian's sunburn.
But how confident are we that we're worried about the right things? History shows that our concerns are often misguided or conditioned on outdated assumptions. Ask 100 motorists the colors of a "yield" sign, and most will say yellow and black, even though they've been red and white since 1971. But if we still believe in yellow and black despite all evidence to the contrary, what other assumptions will lead us astray? Our endless fretting over Y2K didn't stop terrorists armed with box cutters.
So, what really should we worry about? It's the official question John Brockman posed this year to his jury of top intellectuals. Brockman isthe über literary agent, cultural impresario and best friend to the world's smartest people. He runs edge.org, a science/arts salon with lofty ambitions: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together; and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."
These are people who, presumably, don't sweat the small stuff. Brockman's question drew 150 short essays from among the salon's 660 vetted contributors. Concerns about runaway viruses and Chinese eugenics made the cut, as did a handful of glib commentaries about the perils of worrying. But the overarching theme was easy to spot:
We should worry about the interplay between humans and technology. ...
I hereby announce the formation of an international campaign to eliminate all future uses of the phrase, "Work smarter, not harder." ... As the cyber-sceptic Evgeny Morozov pointed out this month, in an article at edge.org, Silicon Valley loves nothing more than proposing "smart" solutions to problems such as crime, voter apathy or climate change. Yet the word blurs a crucial distinction: a smart solution may be ingenious, but it doesn't follow that implementing it will necessarily be for the best. We can persuade people to vote, some techno-reformers argue, using clever incentives, such as shopping discounts or video game-style prizes. But should we, if it risks coarsening democracy, eroding the role of argument and deliberation in persuading people to vote? The answer may be "yes", of course. But Morozov's point is that we fail to ask such questions in the first place.
Edge.org is a website where really smart people write about subjects that make most people's heads hurt. I check it out whenever I need to feel particularly stupid.
...This year's subject was suggested by the technology historian George Dyson: "What should we be worried about?"
Dyson's premise: "[P]eople tend to worry too much about things that it doesn't do any good to worry about, and not to worry enough about things we should be worrying about." This sounded good to me. My hobbies include worrying, moping and brooding. As I previously have confessed, I spend way too much time obsessing about grizzly bear attacks. ... I figured the Edge.org piece could help me spend my leisure hours more effectively.... I figured wrong. ... First off, some 150 really smart people contributed things to worry about. Their essays ran to 168 printed pages. I got through maybe 50 of them before going catatonic. ...
Every year John Brockman, editor of the online salon Edge, puts forth a question that he hopes will inspire fascinating answers from leading scientists and thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and Sherry Turkle. He has done it again. This time he asked, "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" A multiplicity of answers are offered in the compact, accessible essays that form "This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works" (Harper), edited by Brockman. If you want to increase the intellectual heft of your reading while keeping it entertaining, "This Explains Everything" will do nicely.
"The most stimulating English-language reading to be had from anywhere in the world."
Every year the Edge resulting collection of answers/ideas (previous questions tackled have included What Is Your Dangerous Idea? What Are You Optimistic About? and What Have You Changed Your Mind About, And Why?) seems the most stimulating English-language reading to be had from anywhere in the world. ... I mention all this because what's so refreshing about the essays of the Magnificent 155 is that their worries are, mostly, very big worries. ... I commend them as role models for those Canberrans who waste their Letters to the Editor on their teeny-weeny, First World, bourgeois NIMBY worries. What if Summernats makes some noise? What if a new floodlight pylon alters the view we've grown used to? What if we have to pay for plastic shopping bags? What if arrogant cyclists stray, outrageously into our driving lanes? What if the government leaves the grass unmown and untidy? ... Here, at edge.org, entertainingly discussed, are the sorts of worries that really matter, worries about the whole planet, our whole species, about the wider world beyond our suburbs and our narcissistic suburban selves.
This is what editor John Brockman asked some of the world's foremost thinkers. He shares their answers with Veronica Rueckert — representing 150 of the most fascinating theories of how the world works.
All these kinds of pedestrian worries are horrible enough, but the Edge list makes it clear that we haven't considered all the delicious possibilities out there.
I had no idea, for example, that I needed to be worried about "data disenfranchisement," as David Rowen, the editor of Wired UK, suggests, or the end of what Adam Alter calls "hardship inoculation."
I was amazed at how many smart people (psychologist Susan Blackmore, MIT researcher David Dalrymple, roboticist Rodney A. Brooks) were worried about robotics. While I have wasted far too much time worrying about "men," just as biological anthropologist Helen Fisher did in the survey, and "stress," as aggregator Arianna Huffington responded, I don't think we are talking about the same things.
Science salon Edge.org is permeated with a sense of wonder. Maybe that's what lured in the many brainy contributors (Steven Pinker, Brian Eno) to This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, edited by John Brockman ($18, Harper Perennial).
Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming. We have recently learned its logic, which "You can put into mathematics," says physicist Geoffrey West. It shows up with "extraordinary regularity," not just in plants, but in all animals, from slugs to giraffes. Death, it seems, is intimately related to size.
West is a physicist. Big pictures interest him. Small stories don't. He's not the gentlest of beings when criticized, but science has never been a gentle occupation.
But that said, Professor West's paper on quarter power scaling has been cited by other scientists more than 1,500 times since it was published. By any measure, that's a lot. The New York Times called it one of the most "influential papers in modern biology." So while it may irritate, this idea has weight.
As a perennial skeptic of most ideas that involve "uploading our consciousness" or "superhuman artificial intelligence," I'm more than a little doubtful. Author Bruce Sterling, who writes sci-fi and authored the nonfiction classic The Hacker Crackdown, is with me. "It's just not happening," Sterling wrote in his own Edge.org commentary. "All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We're no closer to 'self-aware' machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s 'minds on nonbiological substrates' that might allegedly have the 'computational power of a human brain.' A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there's no there there."
... the one formula that rules it all, from unicellular organisms to whales and sequoias and humans. A math formula that governs our life and tells us when to die.
Even more interesting: the same system scales to other things too, like societies and economies. And it's all bound by one seemingly magic number.
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