To be sure, in politics and daily life, on some topics decisions have to be made very rapidly on few or conflicting data. Yet precisely for that reason, it will be wise also to launch a more considerate program of skeptical empiricism on the same topic, if only to be better prepared for the consequences, intended or not, that followed from the quick decision.
Open Systems
Thomas A. Bass
Professor of English, State University of New York–Albany; author, The Spy Who Loved Us
This year, Edge is asking us to identify a scientific concept that “would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit.” Not clever enough to invent a concept of my own, I am voting for a winning candidate. It might be called the Swiss Army knife of scientific concepts, a term containing a remarkable number of useful tools for exploring cognitive conundrums. I am thinking of open systems, an idea that passes through thermodynamics and physics before heading into anthropology, linguistics, history, philosophy, and sociology, until arriving, finally, into the world of computers, where it branches into other ideas, such as open source and open standards.
Open standards allow knowledgeable outsiders access to the design of computer systems, to improve, interact with, or otherwise extend them. These standards are public, transparent, widely accessible, and royalty-free for developers and users. Open standards have driven innovation on the Web and allowed it to flourish as both a creative and commercial space.
Unfortunately, the ideal of an open Web is not embraced by companies that prefer walled gardens, silos, proprietary systems, apps, tiered levels of access, and other metered methods for turning citizens into consumers. Their happy-face Web contains tracking systems useful for making money, but these systems are also appreciated by the police states of the world, for they, too, have a vested interest in surveillance and closed systems.
Now that the Web has frothed through twenty years of chaotic inventiveness, we have to push back against the forces that would close it down. A similar push should be applied to other systems veering toward closure. “Citoyens, citoyennes, arm yourselves with the concept of openness.”
Non-Inherent Inheritance
George Church
Professor, Harvard University; director, Personal Genome Project
The names Lysenko and Lamarck are nearly synonymous with bad science—worse than merely mediocre science because of the huge political and economical consequences.
From 1927 to 1964, Trofim Lysenko managed to keep the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics while dogmatically directing Soviet agriculture and science. Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet physicists finally provoked the fall of this cabal in the 1960s, blaming it for the “shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular . . . defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.”
At the opposite (yet equally discredited) end of the genetic-theory spectrum was the Galtonian eugenics movement, which from 1883 onward grew in popularity in many countries until the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“the most translated document in the world”) stated that “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.” Nevertheless, forced sterilizations persisted into the 1970s. The “shorthand abstraction” is that Lysenkoism overestimated the impact of environment and eugenics overestimated the role of genetics.
One form of scientific blindness occurs, as above, when a theory displays exceptional political or religious appeal. But another source of blindness arises when we rebound from catastrophic failures of pseudoscience (or science). We might conclude from the two aforementioned genetic disasters that we need only to police abuses of our human germ line inheritance. Combining the above with the ever-simmering debate on Darwin, we might develop a bias that human evolution has stopped or that “design” has no role. But we are well into an unprecedented new phase of evolution, in which we must generalize beyond our DNA-centric worldview. We now inherit acquired characteristics. We always have, but now this feature is dominant and exponential. We apply eugenics at the individual family level (where it is a right), not the governmental level (where it is a wrong). Moreover, we might aim for the same misguided targets that eugenics chose (i.e., uniformity around “ideal” traits), via training and medications.
Evolution has accelerated from geologic speed to Internet speed—still employing random mutation and selection but also using nonrandom intelligent design, which makes it even faster. We are losing species not just by extinction but by merger. There are no longer species barriers between humans, bacteria, and plants—or even between humans and machines.
Shorthand abstractions are only one device we employ to construct the “Flynn effect”—the worldwide increase in average scores on intelligence tests. How many of us noticed the minor milestone when the SAT tests first permitted calculators? How many of us have participated in conversations semi-discreetly augmented by Google or text messaging? Even without invoking artificial intelligence, how far are we from commonplace augmentation of our decision making, the way we have augmented our math, memory, and muscles?
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
Paul Kedrosky
Editor, Infectious Greed; senior fellow, Kauffman Foundation
When John Cabot came to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in 1497, he was astonished at what he saw. Fish, so many fish—fish in numbers he could hardly comprehend. According to Farley Mowat, Cabot wrote that the waters were so “swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down and [weighted] with a stone.” The fisheries boomed for five hundred years, but by 1992 it was all over. The Grand Banks cod fishery was destroyed, and the Canadian government was forced to close it entirely, putting thirty thousand fishers out of work. It has never recovered.
What went wrong? Many things, from factory fishing to inadequate oversight, but much of it was aided and abetted by treating each step toward disaster as normal. The entire path, from plenitude to collapse, was taken as the status quo, right up until the fishery was essentially wiped out.
In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined a phrase for this troubling ecological obliviousness; he called it “shifting baseline syndrome.” Here is how Pauly first described the syndrome:
[E]ach generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.
It is blindness, stupidity, intergeneration data obliviousness. Most scientific disciplines have long timelines of data, but many ecological disciplines don’t. We are forced to rely on secondhand and anecdotal information. We don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal.
But it often isn’t normal. Instead, it is a steadily and insidiously shifting baseline, no different from convincing ourselves that winters have always been this warm or this snowy. Or convincing ourselves that there have always been this many deer in the forests of eastern North America. Or that current levels of energy consumption per capita in the developed world are normal. All of these are shifting baselines, where our data inadequacy, whether personal or scientific, provides dangerous cover for missing important longer-term changes in the world around us.
When you understand shifting baseline syndrome, it forces you to continually ask what is normal. Is this? Was that? And, at least as important, it asks how we “know” that it’s normal. Because if it isn’t, we need to stop shifting the baselines and do something about it before it’s too late.
PERMA
Martin Seligman
Zellerbach Family Professor
of Psychology and director of the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; author, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being
Is global well-being possible?
Scientists commonly predict dystopias: nuclear war, overpopulation, energy shortage, dysgenic selection, widespread sound-bite mentality, and the like. You don’t get much attention predicting that the human future will work out. I am not, however, going to predict that a positive human future will in fact occur, but it becomes more likely if we think about it systematically. We can begin by laying out the measurable elements of well-being and then asking how those elements might be achieved. I address only measurement.
Well-being is about what individuals and societies choose for its own sake, that which is north of indifference. The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive. I believe there are five such elements, and they have a handy acronym, PERMA:
P Positive Emotion
E Engagement
R Positive Relationships
M Meaning and Purpose
A Accomplishment
There has been forward movement in the measurement of these over the last decade. Taken together, PERMA forms a more comprehensive index of well-being than “life satisfaction,” and it allows for the combining of objective and subjective indicators. PERMA can index the well-being of individuals, of corporations, of cities. The United Kingdom has now undertaken the measurement of well-being for the nation and as one criterion—in addition to gross domestic product—of the success of its public policy.
PERMA is a shorthand abstraction for the enabling conditions of life.
How do the disabling conditions—such as poverty, disease, depression, aggression, and ignorance—relate to PERMA? The disabling conditions of life obstruct PERMA, but they do not obviate it. Importantly, the correlation of depression to happiness is not minus 1.00, it is only about minus 0.35, and the effect of income on life satisfaction is markedly curvilinear, with increasing income producing less and less life satisfaction the further above the safety net you are.
Science and public policy have traditionally been focused solely on remediating the disabling conditions, but PERMA suggests that this is insufficient. If we want global well-being, we should also measure, and try to build, PERMA. The very same principle seems to be true in your own life: If you wish to flourish personally, getting rid of depression, anxiety, and anger and amassing riches is not enough—you also need to build PERMA directly.
What is known about how PERMA can be built?
Perhaps the Edge Question for 2012 will be “How can science contribute to building global well-being?”
Positive-Sum Games
Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; author, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
A zero-sum game is an interaction in which one party’s gain equals the other party’s loss—the sum of their gains and losses is zero. (More accurately, it is constant across all combinations of their courses of action.) Sports matches are quintessential examples of zero-sum games: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing, and nice guys finish last. A nonzero-sum game is an interaction in which some combinations of actions provide a net gain (positive sum) or loss (negative sum) to the two participants. The trading of surpluses, as when herders and farmers exchange wool and milk for grain and fruit, is a quintessential example, as is the trading of favors, as when people take turns baby-sitting each other’s children.
In a zero-sum game, a rational actor seeking the greatest gain for himself or herself will necessarily be seeking the maximum loss for the other actor. In a positive-sum game, a rational, self-interested actor may benefit the other actor with the same choice that benefits himself or herself. More colloquially, positive-sum games are called win-win situations and are captured in the cliché “Everybody wins.”
This family of concepts—zero-sum, nonzero-sum, positive-sum, negative-sum, constant-sum, and variable-sum games—was introduced by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern when they invented the mathematical theory of games in 1944. The Google Books Ngram tool shows that the terms saw a steady increase in popularity beginning in the 1950s, and their colloquial relative “win-win” began a similar ascent in the 1970s.
Once people are thrown together in an interaction, their choices don’t determine whether they are in a zero- or nonzero-sum game; the game is a part of the world they live in. But by neglecting some of the options on the table, people may perceive that they are in a zero-sum game when in fact they are in a nonzero-sum game. Moreover, they can change the world to make their interaction nonzero-sum. For these reasons, when people become aware of the game-theoretic structure of their interaction (that is, whether it is positive-, negative-, or zero-sum), they can make choices that bring them valuable outcomes—like safety, harmony, or prosperity—without their having to become more virtuous or noble.
Some examples: Squabbling colleagues or relatives agree to swallow their pride, take their losses, or lump it to enjoy the resulting comity rather than absorbing the costs of continual bickering in hopes of prevailing in a battle of wills. Two parties in a negotiation split the difference in their initial bargaining positions to “get to yes.” Divorcing spouses realize they can reframe their negotiations: from each trying to get the better of the other while enriching the lawyers to trying to keep as much money as possible for the two of them and out of the billable hours of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe. Populaces recognize that economic middlemen (particularly ethnic minorities who specialize in that niche, such as Jews, Armenians, overseas Chinese, and expatriate Indians) are not social parasites whose prosperity comes at the expense of their hosts but positive-sum-game creators who enrich everyone at once. Countries recognize that international trade doesn’t benefit their trading partner to their own detriment but benefits them both and turn away from beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism to open economies which (as classical economists noted) make everyone richer and (as political scientists have recently shown) discourage war and genocide. Warring countries lay down their arms and split the peace dividend rather than pursuing Pyrrhic victories.
Granted, some human interactions really are zero-sum; competition for mates is a biologically salient example. And even in positive-sum games, a party may pursue an individual advantage at the expense of joint welfare. But a full realization of the risks and costs of the game-theoretic structure of an interaction (particularly if it is repeated, so that the temptation to pursue an advantage in one round may be penalized when roles reverse in the next) can militate against various forms of short-sighted exploitation.
Has an increasing awareness of the zero- or nonzero-sumness of interactions in the decades since 1950 (whether referred to in those terms or not) actually led to increased peace and prosperity in the world? It’s not implausible. International trade and membership in international organizations has soared in the decades that game-theoretic thinking has infiltrated popular discourse. And perhaps not coincidentally, the developed world has seen both spectacular economic growth and a historically unprecedented decline in several forms of institutionalized violence, such as war between great powers, war between wealthy states, genocides, and deadly ethnic riots. Since the 1990s, these gifts have started to accrue in the developing world as well, in part because those countries have switched their foundational ideologies from ones that glorify zero-sum class and national struggle to ones that glorify positive-sum market cooperation. (All these claims can be documented from the literature in international studies.)
The enriching and pacifying effects of participation in positive-sum games long antedate the contemporary awareness of the concept. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that an evolutionary dynamic that creates positive-sum games drove the major transitions in t
he history of life: the emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexual reproduction, and animal societies. In each transition, biological agents entered into larger wholes in which they specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole. The journalist Robert Wright has sketched a similar arc in his book Nonzero and extended it to the deep history of human societies. An explicit recognition among literate people of the shorthand abstraction “positive-sum game” and its relatives may be extending a process in the world of human choices that has been operating in the natural world for billions of years.
The Snuggle for Existence
Roger Highfield
Editor, New Scientist; coauthor (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
Everyone is familiar with the struggle for existence. In the wake of the revolutionary work by Charles Darwin, we realized that competition is at the very heart of evolution. The fittest win this endless “struggle for life most severe,” as he put it, and all others perish. In consequence, every creature that crawls, swims, and flies today has ancestors that once successfully reproduced more often than their unfortunate competitors.
This is echoed in the way that people see life as competitive. Winners take all. Nice guys finish last. We look after number one. We are motivated by self-interest. Indeed, even our genes are said to be selfish.
Yet competition does not tell the whole story of biology.
I doubt many realize that, paradoxically, one way to win the struggle for existence is to pursue the snuggle for existence: to cooperate.
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