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Scientific Toolkit Is How to Think About Things in the World Over a Wide Range of Magnitudes and Time Scales

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Scientific Toolkit Is How to Think About Things in the World Over a Wide Range of Magnitudes and Time Scales 226 WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT? The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world. [Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.] 158 CONTRIBUTORS (109,600 words): Richard Thaler, Brian Eno, J. Craig Venter, Martin Rees, Mahzarin Banaji, V.S. Ramachandran, Stefano Boeri, Nigel Goldenfeld, Gary Marcus, Andrew Revkin, Stuart Firestein, Beatrice Golomb, Diane Halpern, Kevin Hand, Barry Smith, Kevin Hand, Garrett Lisi, David Dalrymple, Xeni Jardin, Seth Lloyd, Brian Knutson, Carl Page, Victoria Stodden, David Rowan, Hazel Rose Markus & Alana Conner, Fiery Cushman, David Eagleman, Joan Chiao, Max Tegmark, Tecumseh Fitch, Joshua Greene, Stephon Alexander, Gregory Cochran, Tor Norretranders , Laurence Smith, Carl Zimmer, Roger Highfield, Marcelo Gleiser, Richard Saul Wurman, Anthony Aguirre, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers, Sue Blackmore, Bart Kosko, David Buss, John Tooby, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Paul Bloom, Evgeny Morozov, Mark Pagel, Kathryn Schulz, Ernst Pöppel, Tania Lombrozo, Paul Saffo, Jay Rosen, Timothy Taylor, Jonah Lehrer, Marco Iacoboni, Dave Winer, George Church, Kai Krause, Gloria Origgi, Tom Standage, Vinod Khosla, Dan Sperber, Geoffrey Miller, Satyajit Das, Alun Anderson, Eric Topol, Amanda Gefter, Scott D. Sampson, John McWhorter, Jon Kleinberg, Christine Finn, Nick Bostrom, Robert Sapolsky, Adam Alter, Ross Anderson, Paul Kedrosky, Mark Henderson, Thomas A. Bass, Gerald Smallberg, James Croak, Greg Paul, Susan Fiske, Marti Hearst, Keith Devlin, Gerd Gigerenzer, Matt Ridley, Andrian Kreye, Don Tapscott, David Gelernter, Linda Stone, Matthew Ritchie, Joel Gold, Helen Fisher, Giulio Boccaletti, Daniel Goleman, Donald Hoffman, Richard Foreman, Lee Smolin, Thomas Metzinger, Lawrence Krauss, William Calvin, Nicholas Christakis, Alison Gopnik, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Andy Clark, Neil Gershenfeld, Jonathan Haidt, Marcel Kinsbourne, Douglas Rushkoff, Lisa Randall, Frank Wilczek, Jaron Lanier, Jennifer Jacquet, Daniel Dennett, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Carlo Rovelli, Juan Enriquez, Terrence Sejnowski, Irene Pepperberg, Michael Shermer, Samuel Arbesman, Douglas Kenrick, James O'Donnell, David G. Myers, Rob Kurzban, Richard Nisbett, Samuel Barondes, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Carr, Emanuel Derman, Aubrey De Grey, Nassim Taleb, Rebecca Goldstein, Clifford Pickover, Charles Seife, Rudy Rucker, Sean Carroll, Gino Segre, Jason Zweig, Dylan Evans, Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, Gerald Holton, Robert Provine, Roger Schank, George Dyson, Milford Wolpoff, George Lakoff, Nicholas Humphrey, Christian Keysers, Haim Harari, W. Daniel Hillis, John Allen Paulos, Bruce Hood, Howard Gardner 1 HOWARD GARDNER Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, Truth, Beauty, And Goodness Reframed: Educating For The Virtues In The 21St Century "How Would You Disprove Your Viewpoint?!" Thanks to Karl Popper, we have a simple and powerful tool: the phrase "How Would You Disprove Your Viewpoint?!" In a democratic and demotic society like ours, the biggest challenge to scientific thinking is the tendency to embrace views on the basis of faith or of ideology. A majority of Americans doubt evolution because it goes against their religious teachings; and at least a sizeable minority are skeptical about global warming — or more precisely, the human contributions to global change — because efforts to counter climate change would tamper with the 'free market'. Popper popularized the notion that a claim is scientific only to the extent that it can be disproved — and that science works through perpetual efforts to disprove claims. If American citizens, or, for that matter, citizens anywhere were motivated to decribe the conditions under which they would relinquish their beliefs, they would begin to think scientifically. And if they admitted that empirical evidence would not change their minds, then at least they'd have indicated that their views have a religious or an ideological, rather than a scientific basis. BRUCE HOOD Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol; Author, Supersense Haecceity Understanding the concept of haecceity would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit because it succinctly captures most people's intuitions about authenticity that are increasingly threatened by the development of new technologies. Cloning, genetic modification and even digital reproduction are some examples of new innovations that alarm many members of the public because they appear to violate a belief in the integrity of objects Haecceity is originally a metaphysical concept that is both totally obscure and yet very familiar to all of us. It is the psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. All objects may be categorized into groups on the basis of some shared property but an object within a category is unique by virtual of its haecceity. It is haecceity that makes your wedding ring authentic and your spouse irreplaceable, even though such things could be copied exactly in a futuristic science fiction world where matter duplication had been solved. 2 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. Haecceity is an intellectually challenging concept attributable to the medieval Scottish philosopher, John Duns Scotus, who ironically is also the origin of the term for the intellectually challenged, "dunces." Duns Scotus coined haecceity to address the confusion in Greek metaphysics between the invisible property that defines the individual, as opposed to "quiddity" which is the unique property that defines the group. 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. By reintroducing haecceity as a scientific concept, albeit one that captures a psychological construct, we can avoid the confusion over using the less constrained term of essentialism that is applied to hidden properties that define both the group and the individual identity. It also provides a term for that gut feeling that many of us have when the identity and integrity of objects we value are threatened and we can't find the word for describing our concerns. JOHN ALLEN PAULOS Professor of Mathematics, Temple University, Philadelphia; Author, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments ofr God Just Don't Add Up A Probability Distribution The notion of a probability distribution would, I think, be a most useful addition to the intellectual toolkits of most people. Most quantities of interest, most projections, most numerical assessments are not point estimates. Rather they are rough distributions — not always normal, sometimes bi-modal, sometimes exponential, sometimes something else. Related ideas of mean, median, and variance are also important, of course, but the 3 simple notion of a distribution implicitly suggests these and weans people from the illusion that certainty and precise numerical answers are always attainable. W. DANIEL HILLIS Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone Possibility Spaces: Thinking Beyond Cause and Effect One of the most widely-useful (but not widely-understood) scientific concepts is that of a possibility space. This is a way of thinking precisely about complex situations. Possibility spaces can be difficult to get your head around, but once you learn how to use them, they are a very powerful way to reason, because they allow you to sidestep thinking about causes and effects. As an example of how a possibility space can help answer questions, I will use "the Monty Hall problem," which many people find confusing using our normal tools of thought. Here is the setup: A game-show host presents a guest with a choice of items hidden behind three curtains. Behind one is a valuable prize; behind the other two
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