Professional Documents
Culture Documents
HOWARD GARDNER
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Truth, Beauty, And
Goodness Reframed: Educating For The Virtues In The 21St Century
Thanks to Karl Popper, we have a simple and powerful tool: the phrase
"How Would You Disprove Your Viewpoint?!"
BRUCE HOOD
Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the
Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol;
Author, Supersense
Haecceity
Haecceity also explains why you can gradually replace every atom in
an object so that it not longer contains any of the original material and
yet psychologically, we consider it to be the same object. That
transformation can be total but so long as it has been gradual, we
consider it to be the same thing. It is haecceity that enables us to accept
restoration of valuable works of art and antiquities as a continuous
process of rejuvenation. Even when we discover that we replace most
of the cellular structures of our bodies every couple of decades,
haecceity enables us to consider the continuity of our own unique self.
Today, both haecceity and quiddity have been subsumed under the
more recognizable term, "essentialism." Richard Dawkins has recently
called essentialism, "the dead hand of Plato," because, as he points out,
a intuitive belief in distinct identities is a major impediment to accepting
the reality that all diverse life forms have a common biological ancestry.
However drawing the distinction within essentialism is important. For
example, it is probably intuitive quiddity that makes some people
unhappy about genetic modification because they see this as a violation
of integrity of the species as a group. On the other hand it is intuitive
haecceity that forms our barrier to cloning, where the authenticity of the
individual is compromised.
A Probability Distribution
W. DANIEL HILLIS
Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author,
The Pattern on the Stone
One of the best ways to generate all the possibilities is to find a set of
independent pieces of information that tell you everything you could
possibly need to know about what could happen. For example, in the
case of the Monty Hall problem, it would be sufficient to know what
choice the guests is going to make, whether the host will reveal the
leftmost or rightmost dud, and where the prize is located. Knowing
these three pieces of information would allow you to predict exactly
what is going to happen. It is also important that these three pieces of
information are completely independent, in the sense that knowing one
of them tells you nothing about any of the others. The possibility space
is constructed by creating every possible combination of these three
unknowns.
Let's assume that the guest already knows what initial choice they are
going to make. In that case they could model the situation as a
two-dimensional possibility space, one representing the location of the
prize, the other representing whether the host will reveal the rightmost
or leftmost dud. In this case, the first dimension indicates which curtain
hides the prize (1, 2 or 3), and the second represents the arbitrary
choice of the host (left dud or right dud), so there are six points in the
space, representing the six possibilities of reality. Another way to say
this is that the guest can deduce that they may be living in one of six
equally-possible worlds. By listing them all, they will see that in four
of these six, it is to their advantage to switch from their initial choice.
After the host makes his revelation, half of these possibilities become
impossible, and the space collapses to three possibilities. It will still be
true that in two out of three of these possible worlds it is to the guest's
advantage to switch. (In fact, this was even true of the original three-
dimensional possibility space, before the guest made their initial
choice.)
HAIM HARARI
Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A
View from the Eye of the Storm
We know that a circle has no edge, and we also know that, when you
travel on a circle far enough to the right or to the left, you reach the
same place. Today's world is gradually moving towards extremism in
almost every area: Politics, law, religion, economics, education, ethics,
you name it. This is probably due to the brevity of messages, the huge
amounts of information flooding us, the time pressure to respond
before you think and the electronic means (Twitter, text messages)
which impose superficiality. Only extremist messages can be fully
conveyed in one sentence.
In this world, it often appears that there are two corners of extremism:
Atheism and religious fanaticism; Far right and far left in politics;
Suffocating bureaucratic detailed regulatory rules or a complete laissez
faire; No ethical restrictions in Biology research and absolute
restrictions imposed by religion; one can continue with dozens of
examples.
But, in reality, the extremists in the two edges always end up in the
same place. Hitler and Stalin both murdered millions, and signed a
friendship pact. Far left secular atheist demonstrators in the western
world, including gays and feminists, support Islamic religious fanatics
who treat women and gays as low animals. It has always been known
that no income tax and 100% income tax yield the same result: no tax
collected at all, as shown by the famous Laffer curve. This is the
ultimate meeting point of the extremist supporters of tax increase and
tax reduction.
So, the edge of the circle is the place where all of these extremists meet,
live and preach. The military doctor who refuses to obey orders
"because Obama was born in Africa" and the army doctor, who
murdered 12 people in Texas, are both at the edge of the circle.
CHRISTIAN KEYSERS
Neuroscientist; Scientific Director, Neuroimaging Center, University
Medical Center Groningen
The world is full of such fallacies: we feel dolphins are happy just
because their face resembles ours while we smile or we attribute pain to
robots in sci-fi movies. We feel an audience is Japan failed to like a
presentation we gave because their poise would be our boredom.
Labeling them, and realizing that the way we interpret the social world
is through projection might help us reappraise these situations and
beware.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, Soul Dust
The "Multiverse"
GEORGE LAKOFF
Cognitive Scientist and Linguist; Richard and Rhoda Goldman
Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, UC
Berkeley; Author, The Political Mind
Conceptual Metaphor
On the number line, numbers are points on a line. "Real" numbers are
defined via the metaphor that infinity is a thing; an infinite decimal like
pi goes on forever, yet it is a single entity — an infinite thing.
Those who believe, and promote the idea, that reason is not
metaphorical —that mathematics is literal and structures the world
independently of human minds —are ignoring conceptual metaphor
and encouraging false literalness, which can be harmful.
Every time you think of paying moral debts, or getting bogged down
on a project, or losing time, or being at a crossroads in a relationship,
you are unconsciously activating a conceptual metaphor circuit in your
brain, reasoning using it, and quite possibly making decisions and
living your life on the basis of your metaphors. And that's just normal.
There's no way around it!
MILFORD H. WOLPOFF
Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist,
Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; Author, Race
and Human Evolution
GIGO
In computer work, garbage results can arise from bad data or from
poorly conceived algorithms applied to analysis — I don't expect that
the results from both of these combined are a different order of garbage
because bad is bad enough. The science I am used to practicing has far
too many examples of mistaken, occasionally fraudulent data and
inappropriate, even illogical analysis, and it is all too often impossible
to separate conclusions from assumptions.
GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines
Analog Computing
Imagine you need to find the midpoint of a stick. You can measure its
length, using a ruler (or making a ruler, using any available increment)
and digitally compute the midpoint. Or, you can use a piece of string as
an analog computer, matching the length of the stick to the string, and
then finding the middle of the string by doubling it back upon itself.
This will correspond, without any loss of accuracy due to rounding off
to the nearest increment, to the midpoint of the stick. If you are willing
to assume that mass scales linearly with length, you can use the stick
itself as an analog computer, finding its midpoint by balancing it against
the Earth's gravitational field.
In the age of all things digital, "Web 2.0" is our code word for the
analog increasingly supervening upon the digital — reversing how
digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. The
fastest-growing computers of 2010 — search engines and social
networks — are analog computers in a big, new, and important way.
Instead of meaningful information being encoded as unambiguous (and
fault-intolerant) digital sequences referenced by precise numerical
addressing, meaningful information is increasingly being encoded (and
operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as
frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what
connects where, with location being increasingly defined by fault-
tolerant template rather than by unforgiving numerical address.