It's okay to swing

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html [Published: 03-Jan-08 | Permalink | Category: Science seen]

It's that time of year again when the great and the good ponder/pontificate on demand for John Brockman. Last year it was perceived upsides, in 2006 it was the quest for formulae, 2005 soughtunprovably true things, and someone copied the idea to find the best scientific nutshell. This year's Edge question is "What have you changed your mind about?". Standouts this time round for me include:

Joseph Ledoux on the arresting fact that memories are one-time-access only, yes they are
Donald Hoffman on how being fundamentally mistaken about many things is baked into our psychology, has been for thousands of generations
Timothy Taylor on the correct dosage of relativism: you can have not enough, of course, but also too much
Robert Provine on the benefits of the random walk through science, sans hypothesis. Go fish!
Helen Fisher on her idea that serial monogamy with four-yearly itches was the human ancestral mating strategy
Scott Sampson on his early doubts about the extinction of the dinosaurs: 27 years on from the Alvarezes paper the data just keeps backing it up
Daniel Gilbert on the previously unrealised benefits of not being able to change your mind
Stewart Brand claims that old is crap, mostly, while new is mostly not as crap so embrace it
Jonathan Haidt on his baffled acceptance of the benefits of joining clubs and talking sports statistics with your mates
Richard Wrangham on his Road to Damascus moment that, while meat protein might be the power-diet that got our ancestors from Australopithecus to Homo habilis, it must be cooking that gets us from habilis to erectus
Nicholas Christakis on how genes are not the background on which culture is painted but that there is a dialogue or two-way influence going on
Phillip Campbell on how he would now be happy to use cognitive enhancement drugs under certain conditions
Daniel Goleman is now questioning the correlation between mental effort and achievement
Gerd Gigerenzer now thinks that statistical illiteracy in the medical profession, contributing many deaths and even more misunderstandings, is at last on the decline
Esther Dyson now thinks that online privacy is not what people really want
Paul Saffo forecasts that the only valid forecasts will soon come from computers
Alison Gopnik now thinks that science and fiction are facets our outcomes of the same thing
Jesse Bering now rejects all superstition yet, for well-explained psychological reasons, outlines how superstitious he and others can be
Roger Bingham had a crisis of faith in his chosen religion (evolutionary psychology) and so went off and founded his own (which is technically different but looks similar from a distance)
Clay Shirky on his realisation that non-overlapping magisteria are bogus, that one cannot be a religious scientist in all non-dissonant honesty

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