IdeaFestival

Eyjafjallajökull means

Author of This Will Change Everything and Edge Foundation president John Brockman invited Edge community members, who span the range of intellectual pursuit, to react to the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano and to tell him, in 250 words or less, something he "didn't already know and wasn't going to read in the newspapers."

Futurist and business strategist Peter Schwartz, and mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein pointed out that no forecasts for large scale disruption of air travel because of volcanic ash clouds had been made, and so Eyjafjallajökull was a true Black Swan event.

Emanuel Derman simply said, "more efficient, more vulnerable."

But there was one very human point to be made.

Lessons from Frankenstein: Bad metaphors make for lousy science

Humans are metaphor machines, constantly seeking to understand one thing in terms of another.

Ever since Dr. Frankenstein gave his monster a brain, science fiction has dealt with how the mind might work in the future. But will mind control and mental telepathy ever become historical fact? In a recent article Clarkesworld Magazine took a largely skeptical view, pointing out that these prominent sci-fi tropes lean on some metaphors that have outlived their usefulness to science.

The brain, for example, is not just a series neuronal connections, or a computer-like structure, but a chemical vat as well. Precisely mapping the hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections in our wetware won't recreate the brain. The would-be Dr. Frankenstein would have to account as well for the emotions produced by those brain states, and that deductive roadblock is a notoriously hard problem known more widely to philosophers of science than to its practitioners.

Similarly, our bodies are not just transportation for our heads, but a crucial environment in which thought and emotion are situated. This embodied thinking has an epistimal corollary: We know more than we can tell. It's a fact that any experienced and skilled craftsperson can confirm.

Our walking-around bodies are doing some of the "computing," and yet few think of the human body in those terms.

Or take the idea of memories. They are not "film-like," but something really quite different. Clarkesworld Magazine:

However, as research has revealed in recent years, our memories don't work like video cameras at all. Instead, our brains identify the most novel or important elements of what we perceive and store those elements in locations scattered throughout the brain, while everything else is discarded. Even a momentary image we retain isn't stored as one piece. In his book Brain Rules, developmental molecular biologist John Medina says: 'If you look at a complex picture, for example, your brain immediately extracts the diagonal lines from the vertical lines and stores them in separate areas. Same with color. If the picture is moving, the fact of its motion will be extracted and stored in a place separate than if the picture were static.'

If that's the case, you might well wonder why you can vividly remember every detail of playing Monopoly with your cousin when you were twelve, or a toast at a wedding you went to last week. The answer, disturbingly, is that our brains make up details to complete the picture. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert puts it this way in his book Stumbling on Happiness : '... information acquired after an event alters memory of the event ... First, the act of remembering involves filling in details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously.'

One - ahem - novel solution to this impoverished metaphorical condition might come from artists, who are constantly playing with new metaphors in the search for a descriptive match between churning thought and outcome. When it comes to the human brain, former IdeaFestival presenter Jonah Lehrer's book, "Proust was Neuroscientist," describes the many different ways this restlessness - and often poorly received art - has strongly hinted at discoveries later confirmed by science. Artists often ask better questions.

Better questions will be on tap at the 2010 festival. The lineup of creative people like Jon Landau, who co-produced the Oscar winning film, "Avatar," or Sapphire, who wrote the book "Push" - on which the similarly awarded film "Precious" was based - might just surprise you with their insight into the human condition. Come prepared, in other words, to replace your worn out metaphors. Insight may follow.

Wayne

"There are endless ways to be irrational"

What would highways look like if they were designed by economists?

First of all, there would be no shoulder at the side of the road, because why would you ever pave something where nobody is supposed to drive anyway? And those raised ‘bubble lines’ that indicate to a driver that he is leaving his lane? Why would you need those either, because people know they are supposed to drive within the lines. Indeed, we might not have any lanes or speed limits, because why restrict people like that? What I am describing is a situation in which you assume that people are perfectly rational beings who know what they are doing, so you build-in no room for error. While this is an extreme example, this is the basic idea of perfect economic rationality.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the book, Predictably Irrational, contrasts the role of rationality in economic theory with real-world decision-making in the Forbes India piece linked above.

Hat tip: Putting People First.

Wayne

"Lost:" From Eternity to Here

Alan Boyle asks the question at Cosmic Log, how well does "Lost" treat time travel? And enlisting the aid of Caltech theoretical physicist and author of the book "From Eternity to Here," Sean Carroll, answers "not bad at all." Traversing the logical paradoxes in time travel is tricky business, but Lost manages it without losing touch with the underlying physics of it all. For example, if life is one grand exchange of energy for information, then as Carroll views it, going back in time to change the future violates one binding law.

The way Carroll sees it, the mysteries of time - including the permanence of the past, as well as predestination versus free will in the future - focus on the cosmic concept known as entropy. Entropy is generally defined as the progression from order to disorder, from useful energy to useless energy equilibrium, from an ice cube to a puddle of lukewarm water.

Our universe appears to moving irrevocably from a state of low entropy (the big bang) to high entropy (the Big Chill). That means the past has less entropy than the future ... and that, in turn, means you can't go back and change things. 'The way the laws of physics work, we're never going to experience anything going backward in time from our own point of view,' Carroll said.

Even for time travel, there are rules. Boyle:

Carroll's book isn't so much about the impossibility of time travel as it is about that bigger mystery of entropy. Why does the arrow of time fly in just one direction, and where did that arrow come from, anyway? Does it make sense to talk about what happened before the arrow flew?

Some physicists would say such questions can't be discussed in scientific terms. But Carroll isn't one of those physicists. After explaining in detail what we know about entropy and its relation to the arrow of time, he moves on to the more speculative side of the issue.

The festival has been fortunate in the past few years to host John Barrow, Brian Greene and Michio Kaku among other theoretical physcists. Wouldn't it be cool to have Carroll at the IdeaFestival too?

Wayne

Wikipedia: Arrow of time

Chess intelligence, a 1,000 year song and the "Calculus of Friendship"

Links from my feed reader today:

• Former world champion, Garry Kasperov describes what kind of intelligence it takes to master chess.
• What might your speech intonations be telling the listener? Empathy is like music to the ears.
• "An infinite piece repeating every thousand years," the 1,000 year song by Longplayer has now been making music for over 10 years. You can listen here.
• TierneyLab discusses how monkeys and humans tend to rationalize their choices.
• Inferred only over large cosmological distances, could dark energy be detected in the lab?
• Two of the most supple thinkers about information and networking, Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger, blog Georgetown law professor Julie Cohen's recent presentation to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The video is here.
• It takes "quite a lot of phonological awareness to turn 'l8r' into 'homework' or 'hmwrk'". How does texting affect learning?
• Hunkering down for the planet's winter, has the Martian rover Spirit become a lander after five years?
• The secret to happiness could be an hourly wage.
• What do physicists dream - and worry - about?
• SEED writes about the poignant relationship between math teacher and pupil documented in the new book, "The Calculus of Friendship." You can listen to one exchange in this recording.
• The image above taken by the robotic explorer Cassini is of the Saturn moon Tethys appearing behind Titan. The atmosphere of a very hydrologically active Titan can clearly be seen. Click to enlarge.

Wayne

Image credit: Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA

Civilization survival tool

Is the "speculative fiction" found in Sci-Fi a civilization survival tool?

Wayne

Richard Florida: Creativity, the fundamental business force

Describing how he arrived at the idea of a "creative class" and placing it in economic and historical context, Richard Florida talks about the fundamental economic force reshaping modern economies today - an ability to innovate, or to add creative value based, in part, on mental alacrity and a certain social IQ, but more importantly, in a larger willingness to view people as a potential to be maximized instead of costs to be minimized. Put another way, while it's certainly true that many agricultural or industrial activities can and will continue to provide jobs, today it's human creativity that is adding wealth.

A link to a text summary may be found here.
Wayne

Think outside the Thumbtack box

Recently, on his blog The Prefrontal Cortex, 2008 IdeaFestival speaker and author of Proust was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide Jonah Lehrer took the opportunity to provide a rather unusual reason to travel, setting up the issue like this:

Travel... is a basic human desire. We're a migratory species, even if our migrations are powered by jet fuel and Chicken McNuggets. But here's my question: is this collective urge to travel - to put some distance between ourselves and everything we know - still a worthwhile compulsion? Or is it like the taste for saturated fat, one of those instincts we should have left behind in the Pleistocene epoch? Because if travel is just about fun then I think the TSA killed it.

Joking aside, the beneficiaries of the travel compulsion, and in particular people who have spent an extended time abroad, have a higher likelihood of solving particular psychological problem know as the Duncker Candle Problem, which asks participants to find a way to use a box with a few thumbtacks and a book of matches to a attach a waxy candle to a corkboard. Earlier this year, two business schools discovered that students who had lived abroad could think outside the thumbtack box, as it were.

Well, so what?

According to the researchers, the experience of another culture endows us with a valuable openmindedness, making it easier to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings. Consider the act of leaving food on the plate: in China, this is often seen as a compliment, a signal that the host has provided enough to eat. But in America the same act is a subtle insult, an indication that the food wasn't good enough to finish.

Such cultural contrasts mean that seasoned travelers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realize that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This, in turn, allows them to expand the circumference of their 'cognitive inputs,' as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses. After all, maybe they carry candles in thumbtackboxes in China. Maybe there's abetter way to attach a candle to a wall.

As it turns out, those who were able to attach the candle to the wall were able to overcome a functional fixedness and emptied the box of thumbtacks to arrive at a novel solution. Read Lehrer's entire post to find out how.

Wayne

A Journal for Jordan - Dana Canedy

Right before he left for Iraq, Dana Canedy gave First Sergeant Charles King a journal that consumed the remainder of his life, a life, and life lessons, that she writes about in her book a "Journal for Jordan."

Following a resupply mission to exhausted troops who had been in action for an extended picture of time, he was killed by an improvised explosive device.

He had sent the journal home just days before, believing that he had said all he had to say. And Canedy, driven to do something with her grief, and wanting her child to know everything that there was to know about his father, began to write. 

With total transparency as a goal, she saw it as "our last project together". 

Reconstructing the last day of his life was an excruciating experience. 

Reading from his letters, she recounts how he wrote home about losing the first soldier, a young man, and how the platoon had remembered him later on the night he died.

On another occassion Sgt. King wrote about how he had scolded his soldiers for not attending a memorial for another soilder, saying that staying away for any reason was selfish. Sgt. King wrote about the 

Power of prayer

How to choose a wife, "all the big questions." During the writing of the book, Ms. Canedy interviewed soldiers who reported seeing a light under the door to a room in which Sgt. King would write.

He wrote further

To respect woman, to value differences, to be reserved and to repay loud people with quite resolve. Pausing for emphasis she adds, "Imagine of all the young men who never hear these words from their father." 

"I fell in love with him all over again."

As for her, she said she learned to lean on her faith, to lean into her grief on days when it all seems too much and to seek help when necessary. And this: "There is nothing that will put a smile on your face more than a letting a child help you." 

Get "out of your head" and do something for somebody else, she said. Be sure to laugh.

In the follow up Q&A she described her views on the future of journalism and newspapers, how she purposely kept her thoughts of the Iraq war out of the book - "I am only an expert on one man" - and how the life would bring a young immature woman occupied with her own career - her words - to this person and place. 

Wayne 

Need a good book? Bob Berman recommends

When asked for a book he might recommend to blog readers, Bob Berman, who will be speaking at the IdeaFestival on "biocentrism," suggested four: 

• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Albert (1992, Harvard University Press)
• The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz (Harper, 1956)
• The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

A respected astronomer, Berman is also the "Strange Universe" columnist for Astronomy magazine.

These and all other speaker-recommended books may be found in the "books" category on the blog.

Wayne