,1,Why 'upgrading' humanity is a transhumanist myth
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Though computer engineers claim to know what human consciousness is, many neuroscientists say that we're nowhere close to understanding what it is, or its source. Scientists are currently trying to upload human minds to silicon chips, or re-create consciousness with algorithms, but this may be hubristic because we still know so little about what it means to be human. Is transhumanism a journey forward or an escape from reality?
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DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF:
Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and a professor of digital economics at CUNY/Queens. He is also the author of a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and Team Human, the last of which is his latest work.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Douglas Rushkoff: I think we still know so little about what it means to be human that the confidence with which we think we can upload ourselves to silicon or recreate ourselves with algorithms is shocking to me. The only ones out there who think they know what human consciousness is are computer engineers. If you talk to actual brain researchers and neuroscientists, they say, we're nowhere close. We don't even know for sure what goes on in a single square centimeter of soil. We're still trying to teach agriculture companies that the soil is alive, that it's not just dirt that you can put chemicals on. It's a living matrix. If we don't even know what a single centimeter of soil is, how do we know what the human brain is? We don't. We don't know what the source of consciousness is. We don't know where we come from. We don't even know if there's a meaning to this universe or not. Yet, we think that we can make a simulation that's as valid as this? Every simulation we make misses something. Think about the difference between being in a jazz club and listening to a great CD. There's a difference, you know. And some of those differences, we understand, and some of them, we don't.
So when I see people rushing off to upload consciousness to a chip, it feels more like escape from humanity than it is a journey forward. And I get it. Life is scary. I mean, women, real-life women, are scary. You know, the people are scary. The moisture is scary. Death is scary. Babies are scary. Other people who don't speak the same language or have the same customs, they're scary. All sorts of stuff is scary. And I understand the idea of this kind of having a Sim City perfected simulation that I can go into and not have to worry about all that stuff I don't know, where everything is discrete, everything is a yes/no, this/that, all the choices have been made. There's a certain attractiveness to that, but that's dead. It's not alive. There's no wonder. There's no awe. There's nothing strange and liminal and ambiguous about it.
I was on a panel with a famous transhumanist, and he was arguing that it's time that human beings come to accept that we will have to pass the torch of evolution to our digital successors. And that once computers have the singularity and they're really thinking and better than us, then we should really only stick around as long as the computers need us, you know, to keep the lights on and oil their little circuits or whatever we have to do. And then, after that, fade into oblivion. And I said, hey, no, wait a minute. Human beings are still special. We're weird. We're quirky. We've got David Lynch movies and weird yoga positions and stuff we don't understand, and we're ambiguous and weird and quirky. You know, we deserve a place in the digital future. And he said, oh, Rushkoff, you're just saying that because you're human. As if it's hubris, right? Oh, I'm just defending my little team. And that's where I got the idea, all right, fine, I'm a human. I'm on Team Human. And it's not Team Human against the algorithms or against anything other than those who want to get rid of the humans. I think humans deserve a place.
Certainly, until we understand what it is we are, we shouldn't get rid of us. And as far as I'm concerned, we're cool. We're still weird and funny and wonderful. And yeah, we destroyed the environment. We did really nasty things. But I would argue we do those things when we're less than human. We do those things when we can dehumanize others. You can't have slaves if you're thinking of those as people. You can only have slaves if you're thinking of them...
For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/douglas-rushkoff-critiques-transhumanism
,1,How to build an A.I. brain that can surpass human intelligence
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Artificial intelligence has the capability to far surpass our intelligence in a relatively short period of time. But AI expert Ben Goertzel knows that the foundation has to be strong for that artificial brain power to grow exponentially. It's all good to be super-intelligent, he argues, but if you don't have rationality and empathy to match it the results will be wasted and we could just end up with an incredible number-cruncher. In this illuminating chat, he makes the case for thinking bigger. Ben Goertzel's most recent book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.
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BEN GOERTZEL:
Ben Goertzel is CEO and chief scientist at SingularityNET, a project dedicated to creating benevolent decentralized artificial general intelligence. He is also chief scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation.His latest book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ben Goertzel: If you think much about physics and cognition and intelligence it’s pretty obvious the human mind is not the smartest possible general intelligence any more than humans are the highest jumpers or the fastest runners. We’re not going to be the smartest thinkers.
If you are going to work toward AGI rather than focusing on some narrow application there’s a number of different approaches that you might take. And I’ve spent some time just surveying the AGI field as a whole and organizing an annual conference on the AGI. And then I’ve spent a bunch more time on the specific AGI approach which is based on the OpenCog, open source software platform. In the big picture one way to approach AGI is to try to emulate the human brain at some level of precision. And this is the approach I see, for example, Google Deep Mind is taking. They’ve taken deep neural networks which in their common form are mostly a model of visual and auditory processing in the human brain. And now in their recent work such as the DNC, differential neural computer, they’re taking these deep networks that model visual or auditory processing and they’re coupling that with a memory matrix which models some aspect of what the hippocampus does, which is the part of the brain that deals with working memory, short-term memory among other things. So this illustrates an approach where you take neural networks emulating different parts of the brain and maybe you take more and more neural networks emulating different parts of the human brain. You try to get them to all work together not necessarily doing computational neuroscience but trying to emulate the way different parts of the brain are doing processing and the way they’re talking to each other.
A totally different approach is being taken by a guy named Marcus Hutter in Australia National University. He wrote a beautiful book on universal AI in which he showed how to write a superhuman infinitely intelligence thinking machine in like 50 lines of code. The problem is it would take more computing power than there is in the entire universe to run. So it’s not practically useful but they’re then trying to scale down from this theoretical AGI to find something that will really work.
Now the approach we’re taking in the OpenCog project is different than either of those. We’re attempting to emulate at a very high level the way the human mind seems to work as an embodied social generally intelligent agent which is coming to grips with hard problems in the context of coming to grips with itself and its life in the world. We’re not trying to model the way the brain works at the level of neurons or neural networks. We’re looking at the human mind more from a high-level cognitive point of view. What kinds of memory are there? Well, there’s semantic memory about abstract knowledge or concrete facts. There’s episodic memory of our autobiographical history. There’s sensory-motor memory. There’s associative memory of things that have been related to us in our lives. There’s procedural memory of how to do things.
Read the full transcript on: https://bigthink.com/videos/ben-goertzel-how-to-build-an-ai-brain-that-can-surpass-human-intelligence
,1,Why religion is literally false and metaphorically true
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Where do your beliefs come from? There's a school of thought that sees religion as a mind virus that wastes the time and effort of human beings, but evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein offers a more reasonable explanation: "belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved," he says. Religious people are evolutionarily fitter than non-believers, not because they are protected by a deity but rather because religion is a form of adaptive evolution. Religion is so widespread because it has massive survival advantages beneath the supernatural elements—that's what Weinstein refers to as "literally false and metaphorically true". For example, believing in heaven is literally false—there is no such place—but believing in it keeps your descendants in good standing in the religious community after you're gone, thus setting your lineage up to continue. The thought itself may be untrue, but the result of the thought is evolutionarily effective. "Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have," Weinstein says. For more from Bret Weinstein, visit bretweinstein.net.
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BRET WEINSTEIN:
Professor Bret Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology with a focus on adaptive trade-offs. He has made important discoveries regarding the evolution of cancer and senescence as well as the adaptive significance of moral self-sacrifice.
He applies his evolutionary lens to human behavior in order to sketch a path through the many crises we face as a species. By confronting emerging authoritarianism, and abandoning the archaic distinction between political right and left, we can discover a new model of governance that frees humanity to seek a just, sustainable and abundant future.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Bret Weinstein: We have minds that are programmed by culture that can be completely at odds with our genomes. And it leads to misunderstandings of evolution, like the idea that religious belief is a mind virus, that effectively these beliefs structures are parasitizing human beings and they are wasting the time and effort that those human beings are spending on that endeavor rather than the more reasonable interpretation, which is that these belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.
Our belief systems are built around evolutionary success and they certainly contain human benevolence, which is appropriate to phases of history when there is abundance and people can afford to be good to each other. The problem is if you have grown up in a period in which abundance has been the standard state you don’t anticipate the way people change in the face of austerity. And so what we are currently seeing is messages that we have all agreed are unacceptable reemerging because the signals that we have reached the end of the boom times, those signals are everywhere, and so people are triggered to move into a phase that they don’t even know that they have.
Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have rather than to match our best instincts—when we are capable of being good to each other because there’s abundance, we have those instincts and so it’s not incorrect to say that human beings are capable of being marvelous creatures and being quite ethical.
Now I would argue there’s a simple way of reconciling the correct understanding that religious belief often describes truths that, in many cases, fly in the face of what we can understand scientifically, with the idea that these beliefs are adaptive. I call it the state of being literally false and metaphorically true. A belief is literally false and metaphorically true if it is not factual but if behaving as if it were factual results in an enhancement of one’s fitness. To take an example, if one behaves in let’s say the Christian tradition in such a way as to gain access to heaven one will not actually find themselves at the pearly gates being welcomed in, but one does tend to place their ...
For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/bret-weinstein-how-evolution-explains-religion
,1,Jordan Peterson: The fatal flaw in leftist American politics
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What is political extremism? Professor of psychology Jordan Peterson points out that America knows what right-wing radicalism looks like: white nationalism. "What's interesting is that on the conservative side of the spectrum, we've figured out how to box-in the radicals and say, 'No, you're outside the domain of acceptable opinion,'" says Peterson. But where's that line for the Left? There is no universal marker of what extreme liberalism looks like, which is devastating to the ideology itself but also to political discourse as a whole. Peterson is happy to suggest such a marker: "The doctrine of equality of outcome. It seems to me that that's where people who are thoughtful on the Left should draw the line, and say no. Equality of opportunity? [That's] not only fair enough, but laudable. But equality of outcome…? It's like: 'No, you've crossed the line. We're not going there with you.'"Peterson argues that it's the ethical responsibility of left-leaning people to identify liberal extremism and distinguish themselves from it the same way conservatives distance themselves from the doctrine of racial superiority. Failing to recognize such extremism may be liberalism's fatal flaw.
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JORDAN PETERSON
Jordan B. Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt-plane, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with astronauts, and built a Kwagu'l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, while his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion. His latest book is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
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TRANSCRIPT:
JORDAN PETERSON: I would like to talk briefly about depolarization on the Left and the Right, because I think there's a technical problem that needs to be addressed. So here's what I've been thinking about.
It's been obvious to me for some time that, for some reason, the fundamental claim of post-modernism is something like an infinite number of interpretations and no canonical overarching narrative. Okay, but the problem with that is: okay, now what?
No narrative, no value structure that is canonically overarching, so what the hell are you going to do with yourself? How are you going to orient yourself in the world? Well, the post-modernists have no answer to that. So what happens is they default—without any real attempt to grapple with the cognitive dissonance—they default to this kind of loose, egalitarian Marxism. And if they were concerned with coherence that would be a problem, but since they're not concerned with coherence it doesn't seem to be a problem.
But the force that's driving the activism is mostly the Marxism rather than the post-modernism. It's more like an intellectual gloss to hide the fact that a discredited economic theory is being used to fuel an educational movement and to produce activists. But there's no coherence to it.
It's not like I'm making this up, you know. Derrida himself regarded—and Foucault as well—they were barely repentant Marxists. They were part of the student revolutions in France in the 1960s, and what happened to them, essentially—and what happened to Jean-Paul Sartre for that matter—was that by the end of the 1960s you couldn't be conscious and thinking and pro-Marxist. There's so much evidence that had come pouring in from the former Soviet Union, from the Soviet Union at that point, and from Maoist China, of the absolutely devastating consequences of the doctrine that it was impossible to be apologetic for it by that point in time.
So the French intellectuals in particular just pulled off a sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into post-modern identity politics. And we've seen the consequence of that. It's not good. It's a devolution into a kind of tribalism ...
For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/top-10-jordan-peterson-leftist-liberal-politics
,1,Richard Dawkins: Why Religion and Evolution Don't Mix Well
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What is the Darwinian survival value of religion? That's not the right question, says Richard Dawkins. To find the right question, he relies on an evolutionary analogy: Why do moths fly into flames? It means instant death, so what's the evolutionary value of this kamikaze behavior? Dawkins delivers a crash course in proximate and ultimate causality, two very important distinctions in biology. Moths evolved to navigate using celestial objects as compasses. The moon and the stars emit parallel light, a very reliable and consistent beam, meaning a moth can fly in a straight line guided by that light. Candle light is an entirely different source that emits light in a spiral... leading straight to the hottest part of the flame. These moths aren't suicidal, says Dawkins, it's a misfiring of an evolutionary trait because of a modern technology in their environment. "The right question is not, 'What’s the survival value of a suicidal behavior in moths?'" he says, "The right question is, 'What is the survival value of having the kind of physiology which, under some circumstances, leads you to fly into a flames?'" There survival value of religious behavior may be at the genetic level, Dawkins suggests, and the proximate question in this case would be: what part of our brain does religion serve, and is religion really the only way that function is manifested? Richard Dawkins' new book is Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
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RICHARD DAWKINS:
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and the former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the author of several of modern science's essential texts, including The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006). Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Dawkins eventually graduated with a degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford, and then earned a masters degree and the doctorate from Oxford University. He has recently left his teaching duties to write and manage his foundation, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, full-time.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Dawkins: I’m very often asked, "What is the Darwinian survival value of religion?" and I usually reply, "That may be the wrong question." You may have to rephrase the question and it may turn out to be not the survival value of religion but the survival value of something else in the brain, which manifests itself as religion under the right circumstances.
Now, a good analogy which I’ve used is the question: Why do moths fly into candle flames? Now, you could describe that behavior as suicidal behavior in moths, self-immolation behavior in moths, kamikaze behavior in moths. That would be one way of phrasing the question, but it’s the wrong question.
If you actually look at the way moth and insect eyes generally work, insects use celestial objects like the sun or the moon or the stars as compasses. It’s important, it’s valuable, there is survival value for any animal moving in a straight line. If an animal wants to move in a straight line, a very good way to do it is to keep a celestial object at a fixed angle, and that’s easy to do in insects because they have compound eyes, very unlike our eyes. Their eye is a whole sort of hemisphere of little tubes looking outwards, and so you can maintain a fixed angle to something like a star or the moon by keeping the moon in one ommatidium. If you do that, because rays from the moon come from optical infinity, they’re parallel, and so if you keep of the moon in one ommatidium you will fly in a straight line. It might be say 30 degrees; keep the moon at 30 degrees to your right. And that works, and that’s valuable, and that’s what many insects do.
However, candles are not at optical infinity, candles are close. The rays of light from a candle are therefore not parallel, they are radiating out. If you maintain a fixed angle of say 30 degrees to the rays that are emitted from a candle you will describe a neat logarithmic spiral into the candle flame and kill yourself.
So these moths are not killing themselves, it’s not suicidal behavior; it’s a misfiring of a natural, normal behavior, which before the invention of candles would have worked. And it still does work the vast majority of time because most of the time in the dark a moth is not subjected to artificial light. So ask the right question. The right question...
For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/richard-dawkins-did-evolution-gives-us-religion
,1,Questions Are the New Answers, with Warren Berger
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Journalist Warren Berger discusses how thinking in questions can catalyze innovation and reveal more effective answers. The time to adopt this mindset is early and Berger advocates for teaching this skill in primary schools. Berger is the author of A More Beautiful Question (http://goo.gl/rUr785).
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WARREN BERGER:
Warren Berger is a speaker on innovation and the author of A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas (Bloomsbury, March 2014).
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TRANSCRIPT:
Warren Berger: You know, the idea that questions are becoming more valuable than answers it seems kind of counterintuitive, but it's actually an idea that's being really embraced these days in Silicon Valley and other areas of other centers of innovation. And the reason why is if you look at a lot of the innovations and breakthroughs today and you trace them back, as I did in my research, to their origin, a lot of times what you find at the root of it all is a great question; a beautiful question of someone asking why isn't someone doing this or what if someone tried to do that? So I found that questions are often at the root of innovation. And that's why in Silicon Valley these days they're actually saying questions are the new answers. But at the same time it's important to note that questions aren't just important to innovators or tech people, they're a survival skill for all of us. And that becomes even more true in a time of dynamic change.
I mean we've got so much that we have to adapt to. We have to solve problems. We have to deal with change, uncertainty and questioning is the tool or one of the primary tools that lets you do that. A great definition I saw for questioning is that questioning enables us to organize our thinking around what we don't know. So in a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we really need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.
If you look at the research, a four-year-old girl is asking like as much as 300 questions a day. And when kids go into school you see this steady decline that happens as they go through the grade levels to the point where questioning in schools, by junior high school, is almost at zero. There are a lot of reasons why questioning declines as we get older. But one of the key issues is that in schools we really value the answers. And there is almost no value placed on asking a good question. In fact, the teachers now are so stressed to teach to the test and to cover so much material that they really can't even entertain a lot of questions even if they want to. So it becomes a real problem in our school system, in our education system.
I think people are starting to address it, try to deal with it. In my research I found a number of teachers, schools that are trying to place more emphasis on questioning. I came upon a great nonprofit group, the Right Question Institute, that has developed a whole system of class exercises that are just focused on encouraging kids to ask as many questions as possible, just formulate questions and think in questions. And that's kind of the direction we need to move in. It's simply a matter of finding ways within the school system to allow and encourage kids to think of their own questions.
Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton
Journalist Warren Berger discusses how thinking in questions can catalyze innovation and reveal more effective answers. The time to adopt this mindset is early and Berger advocates for teaching this skill in primary schools. Berger is the author of A More Beautiful Question (http://goo.gl/rUr785).
,1,Naomi Wolf on the New American Coup
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By deploying the First Brigade, George Bush effectively created a private army for himself.
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Naomi Wolf:
Naomi Wolf is an author and essayist whose works have appeared in The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.
Her first book, The Beauty Myth, was an international bestseller. She followed it with Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood; Misconceptions, critique of pregnancy and birth in America; The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot; and Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Wolf is also co-founder of the Board of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization devoted to training young women in ethical leadership for the 21st century. She is a graduate of Yale University and completed her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: How has a coup taken place in the United States?
Wolf: So, the dictionary definition of a coup is a sudden change in our form of government. And for 200 years, when America have been protected from the prospect of soldiers policing our streets, our civilian streets by two laws, the 1807 Insurrection Act and the 1879 Posse Comitatus Act and what Bush did is with a signing statement he disregarded limitations Congress set on him and made it possible for him to deploy these troops on the streets. Now, why is this so disturbing? Why do I, why am I using such language designed to get the people’s attention? Because I think it really requires our attention. These are three to four thousand warriors. They were the people who maintain crowd control in [Fallugia]. They are not answerable to Congress. They’re not answerable to the American people. Their only boss is the President of the United States of America. He is the Commander in Chief. So, I was just trying to, kind of think this through and I contacted a source of mine, Major David Antoon, and I asked him and these are questions I asked because I’ve studied closing societies and in closing societies often the leader or the president will send military especially during an election to deed or harass or arrest or worst voters and opposition leaders and I said, “You know, if the president tells the members of the first brigade to arrest civilians, what happens?” And he said they have to do it. And I said, well, if the president tells the first brigade to shoot at civilians, what happens? He said they have to do it and I said, well, if the president, you know, tells First Brigade to arrest Congress, what happens? He said they have to do it. So, you know, is this a worst case scenario? Obviously. Is there a reason that the founding generation made it absolutely clear that we were not to be policed by the military on the streets that we’re not answerable to the people? Yeah, there’s a reason because they understood from their own experience of George III mercenaries intimidating a civilian population. How difficult it is to remain a free people when the leader has its own army basically. So, it’s very, it’s a very serious development and it’s one I think we need to reverse.
,1,Naomi Wolf on a Police State in America
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Eight years ago, Naomi Wolf would not have believed in the level of surveillance we have today.
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Naomi Wolf :
Naomi Wolf is an author and essayist whose works have appeared in The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.
Her first book, The Beauty Myth, was an international bestseller. She followed it with Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood; Misconceptions, critique of pregnancy and birth in America; The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot; and Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Wolf is also co-founder of the Board of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization devoted to training young women in ethical leadership for the 21st century. She is a graduate of Yale University and completed her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Wolf: Let’s think about the last seven or eight years. You know, if you had told me in 2000 that within 5 years, the United States from the top down would have a policy of torture camps, top down, and that right down the chain of command from [Donald] Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, from George [W.] Bush, who acknowledged that he is, who acknowledged that he was present while these orders were being given to torture prisoners. And that [right down] that chain of command are military and contractors went along with these illegal orders to torture human beings. [All] of that, that was a handmaid’s tale scenario although that was crazy in America that wouldn’t happen. But if you have told me that we’d have within 6 years a surveillance society in which the White House has basically confirmed and isn’t budging and, you know, Congress isn’t budging from a position that they’re free to listen in on each and everyone of us without a warrant, just as they eavesdrop on the personal phone calls of our brave men and women in Iraq calling home to their loved ones and transcribing them, you know, I would have thought that was surreal or Orwellian in that, that was a crazy scenario we’d never stand for it. So, at this point, should we, you know, look at which way the cards are falling and tried to prevent the worst, I do think that’s wise. When I said that coming police state, you know, we have a police state at this point in the sense that we have paramilitary forces not answerable to people, Blackwater. We now have soldiers on our streets, the First Brigade. We have a surveillance apparatus. And to ordinary citizens, we have harassment of activist which I’m hearing about daily in a terrifying way. Like the stories are getting worse and worse. I met a brave young Iraqi vet who brought with a group of Iraqi veterans their protest to the [gates] of the debate, the presidential debate because they felt like veteran’s issues have not been addressed. And the police rode a horse into the crowd and trampled the face of one of these Iraqi vets. And, you know, I just heard from Nancy [Shamis], the wife of a well known film producer who’s a [IB] activist and she’s on the terrorist list in Maryland. She’s identified as a terrorist because she’s a peace activist, and two nuns who are peace activist, identified as terrorists. And, you know, the Ron Paul Community is under continual surveillance, you know, the secret service surrounded them at the RNC and confiscated their possessions and Amy Goodman was arrested at the RNC and ABC producers were arrested for taking pictures and people’s, you know, film and video was confiscated. I mean, this is what a police, they look like Hello, America.
,1,Big Think Interview With David Shenk
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A conversation with the author of “The Genius in All of Us.”
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David Shenk:
David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including "The Forgetting," "Data Smog," and "The Immortal Game." He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS. His new book, "The Genius in All of Us," will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: What is genius, and what does it mean to say we all have it?
David Shenk: Well genius is an amorphous term to be sure and I actually try to stay away from it in the book. What I talk about in the book mostly is this idea of high achievement, so people becoming great at stuff, becoming really, really good at stuff. I don’t think it’s really important to make a dividing line to try to figure out you know when you’ve crossed over into genius. The point is gathering your resources, doing the best you can, pursuing whatever it is you love to do with an intensity and a resilience and a passion and just going as far as you can possibly go.
Question: Why do you believe the “nature-nurture” distinction to be a false one?
David Shenk: Sure, so this is a big part of my book and it has a long history. We’ve been living with this myth for about a hundred, hundred and fifty years, going back to the time of Darwin, although I’m not blaming Darwin for this. If the blame resides anywhere it’s really with Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. We can get into that if you’d like, but so the idea is that we think that it’s nature versus nurture, that there is genes that have all this information that kind of want to push us in a certain direction and then there is the environment, which is nurture, which is obviously different and kind of an opposing force and it’s kind of either or and there are all these studies that are constantly trying to figure out well how much is nature and then add onto the nurture. You know is it 60% nature, 40% nurture depending on what trait you’re talking about? Well it turns out that genes don’t work that way. Genes don’t get you part of the way there you know to the point you’re born or the point shortly after that or before that. Genes are always interacting with the environment, so the new way to think about this is that it’s not nature plus nurture on nature versus nurture. If anything it’s nature interacting with nurture if you have to use those words, so one of the phrases that scientists are using now is G Times E, that is genetics times environment as opposed to G plus E. They call it an additive model. The additive model is well, you have so much inborn intelligence and then plus what you get in the environment. That would be the you know nature plus nurture. The new model is you can’t separate them. You just absolutely cannot separate the effects of genes from the effects of the environment, so all we can do of course is to identify the resources that we have in our environments and maximize them as best we can.
Question: How does research with lab mice demonstrate the fallacy of the nature-nurture distinction?
David Shenk: Right, so there have been some… The science that I’m describing in the book is really lots and lots of different pieces of science from different realms of science and if there is any contribution in this book it’s really putting them together. It’s bringing all these different disparate pieces together and it’s giving a voice and some phrasing and some metaphors to what scientists have been really trying to say for a long time and just haven’t quite… They know what they’re trying to say, of course. They understand the stuff, but they haven’t quite been able to interpret it well for the public. So one of the studies is… goes back to 1957 or ’58, where these two guys were looking at rats that had been genetically designed, genetically bred that is, to be intelligent, and in generation after generation they were incredibly intelligent in you know as seen in mazes and things like that. So then they wanted to see, well, what if you subject them to different environments, extreme environments like sensory deprivation kind of thing or extra treats and you know so called intellectual stimulation for rats if you can imagine what that is. Basically it’s lots of toys and different textures and sounds and sights and colors and things like that.
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/big-think-interview-with-david-shenk/
,1,David Shenk's Favorite Geniuses
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His book is called “The Genius in All of Us.” But do any men or women of brilliance hold special fascination for David Shenk?
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David Shenk:
David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including "The Forgetting," "Data Smog," and "The Immortal Game." He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS. His new book, "The Genius in All of Us," will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: What interests you about genius as a subject?
David Shenk: Yeah. I’ve always been interested in this question of what is the difference between people who are mediocre at something and the people who are great at something, and I think a lot of us are and it’s my good fortune as a writer to be able to follow my curiosities and I’ve done a lot of science writing, so I read a lot of science and I try to be the guy who is going to explain a scientific concept to the general public, so that’s just what I do in a lot of my work. What got me on the road to this book is that I noticed that there were a lot of different pieces of science kind of pointing in this certain direction, but no one had ever really put it together. There is this… You know there are all these people saying, well, blank slate is dead. We’re not all born the same and that’s obviously true, and then there’s all these people pointing out all these… all the power of genes, which is also obviously true, and there’s all this neat stuff about intelligence, which we’re learning more and more about, so I saw that all these different pieces of science could be woven together and tell a story that in newspapers and magazines and so far other books wasn’t being told. I think partly because they were from so many different eras of science and different arenas as well.
Question: Do you have any “heroes” whose gifts you find particularly admirable or fascinating?
David Shenk: Great question. My mind goes in a lot of different directions there. My writer heroes are people like John McPhee who and Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe and E.B. White who are able to… were able to take nonfiction to a whole new art, particularly John McPhee, who does a lot of science writing and does that trick of taking things that scientists understand, but aren’t quite able to articulate for the general public, and just thinks about them and pushes them in all these different metaphorical ways and comes up with stories so that he can put the stuff into a format that people would enjoy reading and find a way for non scientists to kind of put this knowledge in their own brains and then of course apply it to their own lives.
Other heroes, I mean there are heroes in the book. Alfred Binet who came up, who invented the concept of IQ and developed the first IQ test before it was basically stolen by Lewis Terman and not really stolen, but adapted it in this kind of manipulative way so that by the time it got to America it was thought to be this test that revealed this innate intelligence whereas Alfred Binet actually invented the test to expose weaknesses in learning that were going on in young children and say, “Hey, what can we do about this?” This is before all the science that came out. This is more than a hundred years ago. His whole concept of intelligence was this set of skills and that if we come up with a good test to divine what people… what kids aren’t learning well we see their weaknesses, we can show that to the teachers and say, all right, let’s figure out how to build up these other skills as opposed to this school which then, dominated unfortunately intelligence for many decades, which is this idea of this innate endowment, which we now know to be false.
Recorded on January 19, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen
,1,Where Does Genius Come From?
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Genes and environment don’t determine different quantities of our success (or failure). Instead, they operate together in surprising and complex ways.
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David Shenk:
David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including "The Forgetting," "Data Smog," and "The Immortal Game." He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS. His new book, "The Genius in All of Us," will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: What is genius, and what does it mean to say we all have it?
David Shenk: Well genius is an amorphous term to be sure and I actually try to stay away from it in the book. What I talk about in the book mostly is this idea of high achievement, so people becoming great at stuff, becoming really, really good at stuff. I don’t think it’s really important to make a dividing line to try to figure out you know when you’ve crossed over into genius. The point is gathering your resources, doing the best you can, pursuing whatever it is you love to do with an intensity and a resilience and a passion and just going as far as you can possibly go.
Question: Why do you believe the “nature-nurture” distinction to be a false one?
David Shenk: Sure, so this is a big part of my book and it has a long history. We’ve been living with this myth for about a hundred, hundred and fifty years, going back to the time of Darwin, although I’m not blaming Darwin for this. If the blame resides anywhere it’s really with Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. We can get into that if you’d like, but so the idea is that we think that it’s nature versus nurture, that there is genes that have all this information that kind of want to push us in a certain direction and then there is the environment, which is nurture, which is obviously different and kind of an opposing force and it’s kind of either or and there are all these studies that are constantly trying to figure out well how much is nature and then add onto the nurture. You know is it 60% nature, 40% nurture depending on what trait you’re talking about? Well it turns out that genes don’t work that way. Genes don’t get you part of the way there you know to the point you’re born or the point shortly after that or before that. Genes are always interacting with the environment, so the new way to think about this is that it’s not nature plus nurture on nature versus nurture. If anything it’s nature interacting with nurture if you have to use those words, so one of the phrases that scientists are using now is G Times E, that is genetics times environment as opposed to G plus E. They call it an additive model. The additive model is well, you have so much inborn intelligence and then plus what you get in the environment. That would be the you know nature plus nurture. The new model is you can’t separate them. You just absolutely cannot separate the effects of genes from the effects of the environment, so all we can do of course is to identify the resources that we have in our environments and maximize them as best we can.
Question: How does research with lab mice demonstrate the fallacy of the nature-nurture distinction?
David Shenk: Right, so there have been some… The science that I’m describing in the book is really lots and lots of different pieces of science from different realms of science and if there is any contribution in this book it’s really putting them together. It’s bringing all these different disparate pieces together and it’s giving a voice and some phrasing and some metaphors to what scientists have been really trying to say for a long time and just haven’t quite… They know what they’re trying to say, of course. They understand the stuff, but they haven’t quite been able to interpret it well for the public. So one of the studies is… goes back to 1957 or ’58, where these two guys were looking at rats that had been genetically designed, genetically bred that is, to be intelligent, and in generation after generation they were incredibly intelligent in you know as seen in mazes and things like that. So then they wanted to see, well, what if you subject them to different environments, extreme environments like sensory deprivation kind of thing or extra treats and you know so called intellectual stimulation for rats if you can imagine what that is.
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/where-does-genius-come-from/
,1,How Not to Squash a Prodigy
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Thanks to teaching methods such as the Suzuki school, “child prodigies” are more common than ever, yet most still peak early. How can parents help kids make the most of their gifts?
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David Shenk:
David Shenk is the national bestselling author of five previous books, including "The Forgetting," "Data Smog," and "The Immortal Game." He is a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com, and has contributed to National Geographic, Slate, The New York Times, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR, and PBS. His new book, "The Genius in All of Us," will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: How can parents develop a child’s talent without squashing it?
David Shenk: Yeah, big question, hard to give you a, you know, a catchall answer, obviously with sensitivity. I can give you a couple… I can give you a couple thoughts. Obviously I want parents to read the book. There is a lot of background here that I think will help inform how a parent applies this stuff to their own lives, so it doesn’t really come down to like five easy steps, but I would say that first of all monumentally important is a parent who wants their child to be great at something, absolutely cannot put love out there as kind of a reward for becoming good at something. It actually works in the short term. You can get a child to be really, really good and really, really motivated by saying, you know, I’m not going to show affection until you get to be really good at you know cross a certain skill level, but it’s a disaster emotionally for kids and it gets even worse as they grow up. Parents need to help their kids understand that first of all whatever they are is okay. Secondly, it’s not only okay to fail at stuff. It’s actually good to fail at stuff. You cannot learn until you fail. Every time you fail it’s if you are open to that being a learning experience, why you failed at something then that is the gateway into learning and then you combine that with persistence, with this idea that you know the people who get great at stuff it requires just pushing and pushing and never stop pushing, kind of enjoying the process and embracing the failure as I said and never being quite satisfied, you know having a certain contentment with the process, enjoying who you are and wherever you are… wherever you’re at skill wise, but also knowing that there is more to do and that over time you will get better at stuff if you push yourself. I know that sounds kind of mundane, but that turns out to be true.
Question: Why do some child prodigies burn out early, and how can their talent be preserved longer?
David Shenk: Sure, so why do child prodigies fizzle out? Well there are a couple of reasons. One is that it’s very important to realize that when kids are immensely great at something, playing the violin or particularly good at a sport, of having some sort of what looks like a gift in another art or skill they’re never performing at an adult great level. They’re only sticking out from what other kids can do, and the reason that’s really important to point out is that they’re great at a technical skill, and I’m not trying to take away from what they do, because obviously it is amazing to watch and when you have… particularly when you’re a parent and you’ve seen all these kids, your kids and other kids performing at a relatively average level in some way, and then you see some other kid just doing something amazing you’re blown away by it, but it’s important to realize that, you know, for example, when you look at Mozart yes, he was performing for kings and queens when he was 5, 6 years old, but his performances then were not… could not be compared to great violinist of 25 or 30 years old. It couldn’t be then and it certainly couldn’t be now. Another point to make is that with the Suzuki method and other methods now there are many, many, many performers now who are performing at that age, 5 and 6 years old, 7 years old as good or better than what Mozart did when he was a kid, so we tend to think of…
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/how-not-to-squash-a-prodigy/
