Edge in the News

...Immature

It seems that it is too early to seek a definitive answer in the research. But it does not make the question of how the web affects thinking less interesting. Thought Network Edge collects ones in various fields to reflect on a single question every year. It has this year resulted in a book titled "Is the Internet changing the way you think?" , where names such as Steven Pinker, Clay Shirky, Richard Dawkins and 140 other smart projections are trying to answer the question in their own personal way.

The answers vary in all directions. Some people think our mindset changed completely, others say flatly no. Strikingly, many of these gifted, intense Internet users compare the network's power with candy for the brain.

Fool the internet works, it's infantiliserende (childish-making). Yet only a few of them set themselves on one or another form of digital diet. Most people do not manage without the web when they should perform. Undoubtedly, a paradox of the skeptics....

The Opinion Pages
More Tools for Thinking
David Brooks, March 29, 2011

In Tuesday’s column I describe a symposium over at Edge.org on what scientific concepts everyone’s cognitive toolbox should hold. There were many superb entries in that symposium, and I only had space to highlight a few, so I’d like to mention a few more here.

Before I do, let me just recommend that symposium for the following reasons. First, it will give you a good survey of what many leading scientists, especially those who study the mind and society, are thinking about right now. You’ll also be struck by the tone. There is an acute awareness, in entry after entry, of how little we know and how complicated things are. You’ll come away with a favorable impression of the epistemological climate in this subculture.

Here though, are a few more concepts worth using in everyday life:

Clay Shirky nominates the Pareto Principle. We have the idea in our heads that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle). But this is not how the world is organized in sphere after sphere. The top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent of the wealth. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers in any company will produce a disproportionate share of the value. Shirkey points out that these distributions are regarded as anomalies. They are not.

Jonathan Haidt writes that “humans are the giraffes of altruism.” We think of evolution as a contest for survival among the fittest. Too often, “any human or animal act that appears altruistic has been explained away as selfishness in disguise.” But evolution operates on multiple levels. We survive because we struggle to be the fittest and also because we are really good at cooperation.

A few of the physicists mention the concept of duality, the idea that it is possible to describe the same phenomenon truthfully from two different perspectives. The most famous duality in physics is the wave-particle duality. This one states that matter has both wave-like and particle-like properties. Stephon Alexander of Haverford says that these sorts of dualities are more common than you think, beyond, say the world of quantum physics.

Douglas T. Kenrick nominates “subselves.” This is the idea that we are not just one personality, but we have many subselves that get aroused by different cues. We use very different mental processes to learn different things and, I’d add, we have many different learning styles that change minute by minute.

Helen Fisher, the great researcher into love and romance, has a provocative entry on “temperament dimensions.” She writes that we have four broad temperament constellations. One, built around the dopamine system, regulates enthusiasm for risk. A second, structured around the serotonin system, regulates sociability. A third, organized around the prenatal testosterone system, regulates attention to detail and aggressiveness. A fourth, organized around the estrogen and oxytocin systems, regulates empathy and verbal fluency.

This is an interesting schema to explain temperament. It would be interesting to see others in the field evaluate whether this is the best way to organize our thinking about our permanent natures.

Finally, Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation nominates “Shifting Baseline Syndrome.” This one hit home for me because I was just at a McDonald’s and guiltily ordered a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. I remember when these sandwiches were first introduced and they looked huge at the time. A quarter pound of meat on one sandwich seemed gargantuan. But when my burger arrived and I opened the box, the thing looked puny. That’s because all the other sandwiches on the menu were things like double quarter pounders. My baseline of a normal burger had shifted.  Kedrosky shows how these shifts distort our perceptions in all sorts of spheres.

There are interesting stray sentences throughout the Edge symposium. For example, one writer notes, “Who would be crazy enough to forecast in 2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would have access to cell phones than latrines?”

[Originally published March 29, 2011 in The New York Times.]

Opinion | OP-ED Columnist
Tools for Thinking

David Brooks, March 28, 2011

A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?

The good folks at Edge.org organized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.

Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories, McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from using the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s, language became less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is regarded as an eccentric.

Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.

Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has a brilliant entry on Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).

Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are taking over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new discoveries about the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive sciences even as they supervene them.

If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.

I’d also nominate the distinction between emotion and arousal. There’s a general assumption that emotional people are always flying off the handle. That’s not true. We would also say that Emily Dickinson was emotionally astute. As far as I know, she did not go around screaming all the time. It would be useful if we could distinguish between the emotionality of Dickinson and the arousal of the talk-show jock.

Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.

We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.

Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.

Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently.

We’d certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once.

[Originally published March 28, 2011 in The New York Times.]

[Google Translation:] ...In Milan on Tuesday, Matt Ridley will inaugurate an exhibition on art and science, a combination that is also a good strategy to try to overcome the old division between the "two cultures", the scientific and the humanistic. "The science is, from my point of view, one of the arts. The creation of knowledge through research that takes place is able to generate some of the most beautiful things, moving and fascinating: the theory of natural selection, the double helix of DNA; relativity. For me a great scientific idea is as exciting as it is a great work of literature or music. Science is not mere cataloging of facts: it is an exploration of what we know and the mystery that is inherent. Yes, I think it is vital to overcome the division between art and science. Both are part of the culture. "

Edge.org the founder of the New York literary agent John Brockman (who also is the author of What Are Your Optimistic About?), in this context refers to a "third culture".Brought together under this sign authors of scientific texts, such as Dawkins, Greene, Pinker, Dyson and many others, who know their views, interesting and deep, directly addressing a very wide audience, fueling debates that do not stop in the narrow circle of scientists, but are able to engage a non-specialist. Matt Ridley, of course, is one of them.

"I'm very lucky — says Ridley. That people want to read my books means that I can be paid time and energy spent in the exploration of ideas and scientific discoveries!I'm just a writer — not a real scientist — but good writing is useful for transferring ideas into life. Richard Dawkins makes him so extraordinary. It changed a whole field of science, that of evolutionary biology, giving it a perspective from the viewpoint of the gene. Dawkins has a talent for understanding what people do not know, and then nell'esporlo and explain it to everyone. Which is rare among scientists, who often fail to enter the mind of man of the street. "

Knowing full well that in Italy — but not only — there are many educated people who even hate science, Ridley I ask what are the best strategies for providing the people the perception that science is an integral part of culture. The answer is very laconic: "Give good science!"

John Brockman, a pioneer and tireless curator of the Third Culture, which links the digital world with natural science and social networks, is now 70

[Google Translation:] Brockman celebrates with his celebrity guests and friends in the New York restaurant Le Cirque, including Nobel laureates, Internet millionaires, best-selling authors and thinkers of our time threshold. ...

... As a globally successful book agent got Brockman for his mission, which many science writers such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscience researcher Steven Pinker, or Internet sociologists Clay Shirky bestsellers and thus made to agenda setters. The critical thinkers organized intellectual salons, where he brings together about the Google and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, CEO of its authors, publishes books and operates edge.org the dominant medium of the digital elite, and the New Enlightenment. ...

...The Third Culture has announced the sovereignty debate, as Brockman wanted taken, but much more. It shapes and renews our reality in politics, economy, and for each individual — Wikileaks and the Twitter revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, the billions of reviews of Google and Facebook and the related debate about transparency and privacy rights, the opportunities for bio-research for cancer therapies or energy supply. Thus it has become the culture of our time and those who create it.John Brockman is its most important agent.