What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#2How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#3The first one is the one I had when I followed the links, and you can phrase it even more concisely: Always be looking for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right.
Works for engineering, too.
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#4That climate change is occurring is falsifiable. Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it: not falsifiable. That's what a climate skeptic really cares about.
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#5How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.
for i in {1..17}; do curl http://edge.org/q2011/q11_$i.html >> edge.html; done
Courtesy of sivers / qcassidy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126642
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#6OK, my reading for self improvement for today (or this week) is done, this is so good.
A quick look at the first page reveals gems like the concept of haecceity (my Firefox dictionary doesn't have this) and Haim Harrari's wonderful analog of extremism and the "edge of a circle", although as you would expect, there is lesser stuff like Lakoff's blarney.
I was surprised to see people mention probability as an important concept. Totally right. I would add a favorite quote (more for the cognitive toolkit of grad EEs): "A random variable is neither random nor a variable."
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#7"Haecceity also explains why you can gradually replace every atom in an object so that it not longer contains any of the original material and yet psychologically, we consider it to be the same object."
This is why sports fanaticism is very hard for me to relate to.
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#8How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.
for i in {1..17}; do curl http://edge.org/q2011/q11_$i.html >> edge.html; done Courtesy of sivers / qcassidy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126642
very useful, thanks! worked like a charm ...
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#9Is it just my imagination or is everybody who ventured an opinion there a guy?
Anyhow If I had to pick just one concept, I'd probably go with either standpoint epistemology or situated knowledges. Oppression theory, intersectionality, and gender theory would all be high on my list too. For those who have read the whole article, did anybody mention any of these?
Re: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
#10How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.
John Brockman often combines these into book form and sells them later. Look for it in a little while.
Here's previous edge question compilations:
What Is Your Dangerous Idea: http://amzn.to/fTgjYk
And others: http://amzn.to/fkoFdv
(yes, affiliate links) I have essys in two of them. :-)