Dangerous Minds

Yesterday Slashdot led my to a nice collection of essays published by edge.org, which asked their annual question and over a hundred great minds responded. This years Question was "What is your dangerous idea?". All essays together comprise about 75k words and I have read most of them. I planned to write earlier about this, but it took me one whole day to read all the articles. Unlike that bloke who posted about this on Slashdot I won't just give you a few names, but a list of interesting essays, so you get a picture of what will await you. Twelve rather unsorted pages full of text can be quite overwhelming. :) You will spot the names Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein and Freud quite often while reading through the pages. I suppose the following essays are interesting for other nerds:

• "The Greatest Story Ever Told" by Carolyn Porco, science as a religion and has some very funny idead about how scientific religous could look like (NOT scientology)


• "Myths and fairy tales are not true" by Todd E. Feinberg, why it is dangerous to proof that Santa Claus does not exist


• "Cyber-disinhibition" by Daniel Goleman, giving some insight on childish behaviour on the net


• "After several generations of living in the computer culture, simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of another time." by Sherry Turkle, robots could replace living things in the future


• "When will the Internet become aware of itself?" by Terrence Sejnowski, the net (all computers connected to it) shares roughly the same bandwidth and storage capacity as the human brain


• "Let's all stop beating Basil's car" by Richard Dawkins, the human psyche can be fixed like a car


• "Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox" by Geoffrey Miller, aliens have much better things to do than visit us


• "Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account." by Clay Shirky, what marketings executives always knew


• "A 24-hour period of absolute solitude" by Leo Chalupa, how to not get a dull zombie playing WoW all day long


• "A Science of the Divine?" by Stephen M. Kosslyn, how god could be descriped in a scientific way is you presume his existence


• "Science as just another Religion" by Jordan Pollack, a more serious take on science as a religion


• "Government is the problem not the solution" by Matt Ridley, wouldn't a state governed by Vogonsbe horrible? :)


• "Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors" by Marco Iacaboni, violence in games and movies could cause real violence if his findings are correct


• "The Evolution of Evil" by David Buss, everyone is a potential killer