The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after [...]
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The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
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Continuing the previous discussion of object bias and conceptions of time… As a very rough rule of thumb I like to apply a kind of generalized version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: “the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely…” [via SEP] Applied to social and economic models, [...]
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It’s about preparing for the future. Since we don’t know what the future will bring, we can’t know exactly how to prepare. What we can be sure of is that we’ll need to be creative, nimble, knowledgeable, open, adventurous, experienced… We need to be ready to capitalize on emerging opportunities and challenges (ones that never [...]
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