This Idea Is Brilliant

 

This Idea Is Brilliant 

Detailed TOC


Preface

Scientia as a Meme — John Brockman
Frames the 2017 Edge Annual Question: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? This Idea Is Brilliant - John B…

I. Survival, evolution, Earth, and long-term systems

  1. The Longevity Factor — Yuri Milner
  2. The Illusion of Explanatory Depth — Adam Waytz
  3. Synaptic Transfer — David Rowan
  4. The Genetic Book of the Dead — Richard Dawkins
  5. Exaptation — W. Tecumseh Fitch
  6. The Virial Theorem — Seth Lloyd
  7. The Second Law of Thermodynamics — Steven Pinker
  8. Emergence — Antony Garrett Lisi
  9. Natural Selection — Jonathan B. Losos
  10. DNA — George Church
  11. Genetic Rescue — Stewart Brand
  12. Positive Feedbacks in Climate Change — Bruce Parker
  13. The Anthropocene — Jennifer Jacquet
  14. The Noösphere — David Christian
  15. The Gaia Hypothesis — Hans Ulrich Obrist
  16. Ocean Acidification — Laurence C. Smith
  17. Intertemporal Choice — David DeSteno
  18. Future Self-Continuity — Brian Knutson
  19. The Climate System — Giulio Boccaletti

II. Computation, information, adaptation, and heredity

  1. The Universe of Algorithms — Terrence J. Sejnowski
  2. Babylonian Lottery — Coco Krumme
  3. Class Breaks — Bruce Schneier
  4. Recursion — Read Montague
  5. Referential Opacity — Nicholas Humphrey
  6. Adaptive Preference — Steve Fuller
  7. Antagonistic Pleiotropy — Gregory Benford
  8. Maladaptation — Aubrey de Grey
  9. Epigenetics — Leo M. Chalupa
  10. The Transcriptome — André Roemer
  11. Polygenic Scores — Robert Plomin
  12. Replicator Power — Susan Blackmore

III. Epistemology, error, bias, and belief

  1. Fallibilism — Oliver Scott Curry
  2. Intellectual Honesty — Sam Harris
  3. Epsilon — Victoria Stodden
  4. Systemic Bias — Richard Muller
  5. Confirmation Bias — Brian Eno
  6. Negativity Bias — Michael Shermer
  7. Positive Illusions — Helen Fisher
  8. Russell Conjugation — Eric R. Weinstein
  9. Empathic Concern — Daniel Goleman
  10. Naïve Realism — Matthew D. Lieberman
  11. Motivated Reasoning — David Pizarro
  12. Spatial Agency Bias — Simone Schnall

IV. Quantification, scale, regulation, and complex systems

  1. Counting — Peter Norvig
  2. On Average — Kai Krause
  3. Number Sense — Keith Devlin
  4. Fermi Problems — Seth Shostak
  5. Exponential — Bruno Giussani
  6. Impedance Matching — W. Daniel Hillis
  7. Homeostasis — Martin Lercher
  8. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety — John Naughton
  9. Variety — Lee Smolin
  10. Allostasis — Tor Nørretranders
  11. The Brainstem — Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán

V. Fundamental physics and cosmology

  1. The Principle of Least Action — Janna Levin
  2. “The Big Bang” — John C. Mather
  3. Multiverse — Martin Rees
  4. Gravitational Radiation — Gino Segrè
  5. The Non-Returnable Universe — Andrei Linde
  6. The Big Bounce — Paul J. Steinhardt
  7. Affordances — Daniel C. Dennett
  8. Enactivism — Amanda Gefter
  9. Paleoneurology — Juan Enriquez
  10. Complementarity — Frank Wilczek
  11. The Schnitt — Michael Gazzaniga
  12. Matter — Hans Halvorson
  13. Substrate Independence — Max Tegmark
  14. PT Symmetry — Daniel Hook
  15. Gravitational Lensing — Priyamvada Natarajan
  16. The Cosmological Constant, or Vacuum Energy — Raphael Bousso
  17. Invariance — Jim Holt
  18. Unruh Radiation — Jeremy Bernstein
  19. Determinism — Jerry A. Coyne
  20. State — Scott Aaronson
  21. Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics — Frank Tipler
  22. The Copernican Principle — Mario Livio
  23. Rheology — Matthew Putman

VI. Decisions, social behavior, information, and engineering

  1. The Premortem — Richard H. Thaler
  2. It’s About Time — Dustin Yellin
  3. Maxwell’s Demon — Jimena Canales
  4. Included Middle — Melanie Swan
  5. Relative Deprivation — Kurt Gray
  6. Antisocial Preferences — Steven R. Quartz
  7. Reciprocal Altruism — Margaret Levi
  8. Isolation Mismatch — David C. Queller
  9. Mysterianism — Nicholas G. Carr
  10. Relative Information — Carlo Rovelli
  11. Time Window — Ernst Pöppel
  12. Effective Theory — Lisa Randall
  13. Coarse-Graining — Jessica Flack
  14. Common Sense — Jared Diamond
  15. “Evolve” As Metaphor — Victoria Wyatt
  16. The Reynolds Number — George Dyson
  17. Metamaterials — John Markoff
  18. Stigler’s Law of Eponymy — William Poundstone
  19. Comparative Advantage — Robert Kurzban
  20. Premature Optimization — Kevin Kelly
  21. Simulated Annealing — Emanuel Derman

VII. Behavior, evolution, sex, mind, and perception

  1. Attractors — Kate Jeffery
  2. Anthropomorphism — Diana Reiss
  3. Cognitive Ethology — Irene Pepperberg
  4. Mating Opportunity Costs — David M. Buss
  5. Sex — Helena Cronin
  6. Supernormal Stimuli — Nancy Etcoff
  7. Costly Signaling — Steve Omohundro
  8. Sexual Selection — Rory Sutherland
  9. Phylogeny — Richard Prum
  10. Neoteny — Brian Christian
  11. The Neural Code — John Horgan
  12. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking — Gordon Kane
  13. Regression to the Mean — James J. O’Donnell
  14. Scientific Realism — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
  15. Fundamental Attribution Error — Richard Nisbett
  16. Habituation — Katherine D. Kinzler
  17. General Standardization Theory — Rolf Dobelli
  18. Scaling — Ashvin Chhabra
  19. The Menger Sponge — Clifford Pickover
  20. The Holographic Principle — Donald D. Hoffman

VIII. Scientific reasoning, inference, and uncertainty

  1. The Navier-Stokes Equations — Ian McEwan
  2. The Scientist — Stuart Firestein
  3. Bayes’ Theorem — Sean Carroll
  4. Uncertainty — Lawrence M. Krauss
  5. Equipoise — Nicholas A. Christakis
  6. Ansatz — Neil Gershenfeld
  7. “On The Average” — Robert Sapolsky
  8. Blind Analysis — Sarah Demers
  9. Homophily — Matthew O. Jackson
  10. Social Identity — Ziyad Marar
  11. Reflective Beliefs — Hugo Mercier
  12. Alloparenting — Abigail Marsh
  13. Cumulative Culture — Cristine H. Legare
  14. Life History — Alison Gopnik
  15. Haldane’s Rule of the Right Size — Paul Saffo
  16. Phenotypic Plasticity — Nicolas Baumard
  17. Sleeper Sensitive Periods — Linda Wilbrecht
  18. Zone of Proximal Development — Athena Vouloumanos
  19. Length-Biased Sampling — Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
  20. Construal — Eldar Shafir

IX. Cognition, reasoning, representation, and AI

  1. Double Blind — Scott Draves
  2. The Law of Small Numbers — Adam Alter
  3. Commitment Devices — Michael I. Norton
  4. Illusory Conjunction — Diana Deutsch
  5. Bisociation — James Geary
  6. Conceptual Combination — Lisa Feldman Barrett
  7. Boolean Logic — Simon Baron-Cohen
  8. Neurodiversity — Joichi Ito
  9. Case-Based Reasoning — Roger Schank
  10. Media Richness — Nina Jablonski
  11. Peircean Semiotics — Daniel L. Everett
  12. Historiometrics — Howard Gardner
  13. Population Thinking — Dan Sperber
  14. Bounded Optimality — Tom Griffiths
  15. Satisficing — Michael Hochberg
  16. De-Anonymization — Ross Anderson
  17. Functional Equations — Jason Wilkes
  18. Decentering — Gary A. Klein
  19. Transfer Learning — Peter Lee
  20. The Symbol-Grounding Problem — Joshua Bongard
  21. Abstraction — Ursula Martin

X. Networks, biology, medicine, and pathological systems

  1. Networks — Sheizaf Rafaeli
  2. Morphogenetic Fields — Robert Provine
  3. Herd Immunity — Buddhini Samarasinghe
  4. Somatic Evolution — Itai Yanai
  5. Criticality — César Hidalgo
  6. Information Pathology — Thomas A. Bass
  7. Iatrotropic Stimulus — Gerald Smallberg
  8. Mismatch Conditions — Daniel Lieberman
  9. Actionable Predictions — Roger Highfield
  10. The Texas Sharpshooter — Charles Seife
  11. Digital Representation — Jon Kleinberg
  12. Embodied Thinking — Barbara Tversky
  13. The Trolley Problem — Daniel Rockmore
  14. Mental Emulation — Stephen M. Kosslyn
  15. Prediction Error Minimization — Andy Clark
  16. Impossible — Chiara Marletto
  17. Optimization — Sabine Hossenfelder
  18. The Cancer Seed and Soil Hypothesis — Azra Raza
  19. Simplistic Disease Progression — Eric Topol
  20. Effect Modification — Beatrice Golomb
  21. The Power Law — Luca De Biase

XI. Statistics, ecology, possibility, and limits of knowledge

  1. Type I and Type II Errors — Phil Rosenzweig
  2. The Ideal Free Distribution — Laura Betzig
  3. Chronobiology — Douglas Rushkoff
  4. Deliberate Ignorance — Gerd Gigerenzer
  5. The Need for Closure — Dylan Evans
  6. Polythetic Entitation — Timothy Taylor
  7. Quines — Samuel Arbesman
  8. Verbal Overshadowing — N. J. Enfield
  9. Liminality — Christine Finn
  10. Possibility Space — Ian Bogost
  11. Alternative Possibilities — Tania Lombrozo
  12. Indexical Information — Anthony Aguirre
  13. Emotion Contagion — June Gruber
  14. Negative Evidence — Bart Kosko
  15. Emptiness — Jaeweon Cho
  16. Effect Size — Bruce Hood
  17. Surreal Numbers — Siobhan Roberts
  18. Standard Deviation — S. Abbas Raza
  19. The Breeder’s Equation — Gregory Cochran
  20. Fixpoint — David Dalrymple
  21. Non-Ergodic — Stuart A. Kauffman
  22. Confusion — Maximilian Schich
  23. Coalitional Instincts — John Tooby
  24. The Scientific Method — Nigel Goldenfeld
  25. Humility — Barnaby Marsh

 

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