Edge in the News

The multimedia artist, publisher, representative, American John Brockman has the most expensive "address book" in the world. Edge was established in 1996 as a foundation to both the humanities, science, art, business, and he was recruited throughout his outstretched connections. Special lectures, annual dinners and the conversations convey a world where knowledge is produced. Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman are some of the members of the Foundation.

Of the 'Best of Edge Series' by Edge Foundation, CULTURE is the second volume. By several intellectuals, it introduces the key issues and trends in the field....

KUALA LUMPUR, (Bernama)—The Maylasian government, pushing for the adoption of the English language throughout the country and the imporvement of English proficiency, has implemented MUET, "The Malaysian University English Test", which is being administered to all university students. 

To test reading comprehension,  the  material chosen includes "adaptations from the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, and a book entitled This Will Change Everything, [edited] by John Brockman" [i.e. Edge].

He spent the 2012 and the world did not end: now what? That same uncertainty overflew the site Edge.org when called on its members to respond, as every year, the same question. That's how some of the scientific minds, brightest artistic and journalistic research centered on the world faced the big question after the apocalypse that was not: "Why should we fear in the coming years?". As it has done every year, selected and translated Radar best (and most terrifying) answer: the end of the individual and the technology transfer to the mysteries of the mind and the risks of living too. …

But they do like to talk about beauty, a lot, at least when mass media are listening. Edge.org, a gathering point for celebrity scientists and public intellectuals, spent the whole of 2012 mulling over a question proposed by Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker: “What is your favourite elegant, deep or beautiful explanation?” The 194 submissions, which included quantum theory and Einstein’s explanation of gravity, were recently published by Harper Perennial under the title This Explains Everything. 

However, Tetlock found two distinguishable groups of thinkers among the experts: hedgehogs and foxes.

...These findings taught Tetlock, the author of Expert Political Judgment, a few lessons about pundits. They "were hard pressed to do better than chance, were overconfident, and were reluctant to change their minds in response to new evidence. That combination doesn't exactly make for a flattering portrait of the punditocracy," he recently told Edge.org. 

We sometimes tend to think of ideas and feelings that our intuition shooting, intrinsically superior to feelings that are based on reason and logic. Intuition - the 'underbelly' - is deified as the noble savage of mind, those intrepid short shrift to the pedantry of reason.

Especially artists, who often operate intuitively, are prone to this belief. By a number of experiences I have become skeptical.

This piece is taken from the book "This explains everything. John Brockman, founder of the website edge.org , prepares an annual demand of a selection of the most interesting scientists and artists in the world.

For every successful “Big Data”  case study listed in Harvard Business Review, Fortune or the like, there are thousands of many failures. It’s a problem of cherry-picking “success stories,” or assuming that most companies are harvesting extreme insights from Big Data Analytics projects, when in fact there is a figurative graveyard of big data failures that we never see.

“Big Data” is a hot topic. There are blogs, articles, analyst briefs and practitioner guides on how to do “Big Data Analytics” correctly. And case studies produced by academics and vendors alike seem to portray that everyone is having success with Big Data analytics (i.e. uncovering insights and making lots of money).

In an Edge.org article, author and trader Nassim Taleb highlights the problem of observation bias or cherry-picking success stories while ignoring the “graveyard” of failures. It’s easy to pick out the attributes of so-called “winners," while ignoring that failures likely shared similar traits. ...

Edge.org, the online soapbox for scientists and other intellectuals, has published the answers to its latest annual question - What should we be worried about?  …
At the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore believes we should be concerned about the effect of environmental factors on the development of the adolescent brain, something she says we know little about. She highlighted the possible adverse effects of excessive gaming and social networking, and the UNICEF estimate that 40 per cent of teenagers worldwide lack access to secondary education. 'Adolescence represents a time of brain development when teaching and training should be particularly beneficial. I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world's teenagers access to education,' she said.

Computer scientist David Gelernter answering the 2013 annual question of Edge.org, "What should we be worried about?"

If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word's value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society's ability to communicate in writing decays. ...