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Share Your Most Dangerous Idea
GabrielF writes "Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask "What is your most dangerous idea?" The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond -- and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial."
I found David Buss's article interesting. He sums up with the following, "On reflection, the dangerous idea may not be that murder historically has been advantageous to the reproductive success of killers; nor that we all house homicidal circuits within our brains; nor even that all of us are lineal descendants of ancestors who murdered. The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology, or exposure to media violence. The danger comes from failing to gaze into the mirror and come to grips the capacity for evil in all of us."
Dan Gilbert is a bit of a hero of mine. His research basically is about happiness--it's all any of us really, universally, want, so why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it? We should be experts! His stuff on affective forecasting and rationalization is amazing. I highly recommend his papers--and hearing him talk, if you ever have the opportunity, even more so! Anyway, he's a REAL character, and his response betrays that:
DANIEL GILBERT
Psychologist, Harvard University
The idea that ideas can be dangerous
Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
Well, Dan, have you read Slashdot lately? I think we're still all right. For now.
Think about it. Everyone's pissing and moaning about the coming oil shortages, and so on, and NOBODY is thinking about how conveniently flammable alcohol is.
We have an entire Midwest full of Great Plains which are very well suited to growing grains which could produce alcohol.
It has been demonstrated that you can run a car on alcohol. Dragsters do it all the time.
It has been demonstrated that a fuel cell can generate electricity from methanol.
Alcohol doesn't poison the environment if you spill some. It burns clean if you have a darwinian-selection moment and light it up. And in a pinch, you can drink it. Try THAT with petroleum.
Well? Wouldn't an alcohol economy be easier than a hydrogen one?
Just a thought...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Now, there MAY be a way to use a BEC more destructively. If you have a BEC that consists of pure deuterium, use magnetic containment to prevent the BEC from expanding back out at all, raise the temperature as close to instantaneously as possible to the point where fusion can occur...
The BEC obviously can't remain a BEC at superhigh temperatures, so must unfold to some degree. The structure is guaranteed to move to the lowest possible energy state, because that is what atomic structures do. This is part of why it would be important to raise the temperature rapidly. You want it so that there simply is no valid state with deuterium nucleii.
If deuterium is simply not an option, the nucleii will fuse. They have no alternative. Here is where it gets fun, though. If the energies are high enough and the compression great enough, you can produce elements as far up the periodic table as you like. Unlike normal particle accelerator efforts to produce super-massive atoms, these will actually last for a while - there won't be room for them to fall apart.
The difficulty in producing the correct conditions would be enormous, but if you could crack that nut, there'd be no theoretical reason why you couldn't push for a nucleus with an atomic mass of a thousand or so.
The energy to produce such a monster atom would be guaranteed much greater than ALL of the energy output by the fusion reactions. (Iron takes more energy to fuse than it gives out and we're talking something a couple of orders of magnitude larger.) Sustaining it might even be worse.
The fun part, though, will be in letting it collapse after a time. A very substantial part of the energy put into the fusion of the nucleii would be released in a matter of microseconds over an extremely small space. Current physics predicts that if you exceed a certain energy density, space will "inflate". This might cause the whole of space/time to explode, it might form a pocket universe, or it might do all sorts of other strange things. Nobody knows much about energy densities of that magnitude.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My ideas that are most dangerous to human life on earth are to invent the transporter, and also warp speed, or impulse spacecraft. Just one spaceship the size of Enterprise A tearing through the Earth at Warp 1 would in theory destroy the earth into a cloud of planet vapour. Transporters would be used to rob every bank devised, and kidnap world leaders. Everyone would have to have a transporter inhibitor, or you'd be kidnapped almost right away, and probably not by aliens, but by the Swords of Righteousness Brigade or their ilk in Iraq.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
A quick Google search will confirm that you're not the only one who's thought of burning alcohol as a fuel.
Replacing oil with alcohol would not solve our problems.
Sure, it would invest in agriculture rather than exploiting technology to find, extract and refine crude oil. But It would replace the known problems associated with enriching arab states with a history of bad civil rights, with some unknown problems related to a huge mega-farm raising a monoculture crop. Pesticides, GMO, soil depletion are issues we know would be involved, but what else is involved with monobreed farming on that scale?
There's also the problem that American bio-energy fuel production could only generate a 10th of the fuel supply that the USA currently uses - and that's only gasoline. There are lots of products we get from crude oil that we can't press out of biomass: think about plastics, asphalt, lubricants.
Then there's the issue of what we're fueling in the first place: the realized dream of cheap fuel for vehicle freedom has resulted in a transportation engineering crisis that requires moving around and storing enormous cars rather than people. That creates sprawl that eats up farmland so we can have a parking lot around WalMart and sprawling acres of land devoted to roadways, driveways and freeways to link far flung suburban housing developments and equally sprawling office parks, and the previously mentioned WalMarts. Not to mention vehicle's polluting of the the environment.
And yes you can drink alcohol, but not the 85% Ethanol/15% Gasoline mix we create for cars. It also is only about 30% cleaner than burning raw gasoline, so you might not want to light up indoors. It's also significantly more expensive, even if you ignore the farming subsidies that artificially cheapen it.
Sometimes the simplest solution is also the least well thought out.
I would suggest determining the real problems before offering a solution. A nation designed around cars instead of people is definitely part of the problem, and alternative fuel doesn't solve that particular problem at all.
Here is an even more dangerous idea.
Forgo alcohol/biodiesel.
Switch to a large number of Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactors like China is doing, and use this energy to run run cars on Hydrogen or electricity.
Believe it or not, Nuclear power is actually CLEANER ounce per ounce than most other energy methods (Try comparing it to coal, for example, which is still currently used, or many other things.) However, most people are scared of it, because they dont understand it.
For those about to reply OMG! Nuclear power ZOMG!!!111!!11One!!! You should perhaps read the wikipedia article.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Wow. Only a psychologist would come up with an idea like this. It's clearly a straw-man argument. The simpler version we've all heard for years: if a tree falls in the forest and noone is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is of course it does. The weight of the tree crashing against the ground via the force of gravity sends a shockwave through the air. Whether or not a person is in range of the shockwave is completely irrelevant.
This is the highest form of hubris: it takes people/intelligence for quantifications to have meaning. Bullshit.
Take a universe exactly like ours in every respect with the very minor alteration that life never got started on earth. Well guess what? It still takes a minimum threshold of matter to condense and form a burning star. The label we've given to that threshold is nothing; a mere convienience. The real important fact is that matter *can* condense into a burning star, and it will do so even if there's no humans around to pontificate.
End rant.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Control in a way, and I wouldn't say invented. There is strong evidence that our brains are wired for religion. In other words, religion helped early humans in some way probably by letting them explain the world around them and explaining why certain social norms should be followed. In other words it's the flip side of rationality and logic.
Now that in itself says nothing about it being required or useful in the modern day (or counterproductive). However, one of the above has been replaced with science and the other isn't required (atheists aren't all moraless bastards).
Wow, quite a list of ideals you'd like to see fulfilled there. It's a shame nowhere in the world really manages to live up to them. No, wait, I think there is at least one.
Somalia has a free market economy with everything privatised, and no government - freedom for all. Let's see how it stacks up:
In monitary policy - everyone seems to think that other measures of inflation and growth are more important, than the freedom from controll that the gold standard offers.
Well there is no real central bank for Somalia anymore as far as I can find, and due to counterfeiting and other problems the Somali currency was so seriously debased that they may as well be using gold instead and use the gol standard.
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
All education in Somalia is private. It's a free market economy with no government. We get a big check for this one.
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
There is no government so there is certainly no social security of medicare equivalent. At worst there is a certain amount of foreign aid and World Bank assistance, but I think that counts as outside charity. A big check for this one too.
In copyrights and patents - everyone talks about the poor starving inventor or creator, and noone talks about all the people that need to be coerced to make these systems of incentive work.
We're perfectly good for this one - there is no government of court system to enforce any such thing. A big check here too.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Wow. That's just what Somalia is! A free for all where anyone at all can arm themselves and take part. Sounds perfect.
And from elsewhere...I'm sorry for responding to my own post, but no argument about freedom would be complete without mentioning the "war on drugs".
A big check for this one too! Somalia seems to have everything you're looking for. No government coercion, just freedom for everyone and a truly free market economy. The imminent arrival of Somalia as a significant player on the world economic stage seems inevitable given it's almost utopian society. It's been without government for 15 years now, but I'm sure Somalia will well and truly be on it's feet any year now. I expect you'll be moving there, given it's fulfillment of your radical dream, very soon, so perhaps you cna help really get the economy moving.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
It's a bit like taking liquid hydrogen and exerting enough pressure on it to turn it into solid metal. The temperature technically goes up, but it can't remain liquid or convert to a gas because the volume is too small. The most stable state it can enter is a "high-temperature" solid.
In this case, what we're doing is compressing a BEC "superatom" to a temperature in which it can no longer remain a BEC, but it cannot revert to deuterium atoms either. Neither is stable, under the conditions imposed. The only alternative is for the nuclei to fuse together, because it is the only valid way left that they can reduce the space requirements to what they have.
You'd need to be a little careful, though. You don't want to leave any nuclei with no valid state, or you're going to squish the lot into a quark-gluon soup. Again, that could be nasty, as I'm not sure you can magnetically contain the gluons... which ARE going to react with the containment system.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
By almost any available metric equality simply does not exist. Any reasonably apt person has looked at the standard distribution of intelligence and the mathematically certainty has hit them; 'average is pretty stupid, and half the population has to be less'. Countless other examples exist, including the golden calves of race and gender. These thoughts have been used and abused throughout all history. People react in differing ways, some want to crush those 'beneath them', others want to ignore it and embrace everyone as 'one'.
A thought that weighed heavily on Shakespeare's mind, among many others, were the things that are universal, the things that do bind us as equals. Life and death.
Choice! Aye there is the rub. We do not choose the manner of our birth nor (for the most part) our death. I think it was Adam Johnson who first linked this concept with that of equality. The analogy of birth was taking all the characteristics of humanity; our personality, our physicality, our experiences, our potential and our opportunities and putting them in a opaque bag which, once shuffled, would be redistributed at birth. With this is mind, now design a society, a government, an economy and a culture around this limitation. With this in mind, design how you would wish to live and what kind of world you would want passed on to your descendants.
This is the only way I have been able to retain my sanity and hold the apparently mutually exclusive concepts of 'there is no equality' and 'striving for equality is noble' as both true.
And I applaud this article, because I have long believed that the most dangerous of all things is thought.
Dr. Drew's observation that bi people settle into one or the other group (i.e. homo or hetero) may well be correct. I am inclined to agree that it's often helped along by traumatic lifestyle or childhood problems, for some years. But: who doesn't have traumas? I suggest virtually everyone has childhood "issues" which reverberate through their years of sexual identity discovery (whether that's orientation, or other aspects of sexual identity such as religious taboos, fetishes, shame about perceived unusual fantasies, lack of knowledge, etc.).
But that doesn't tell us whether the bi-curious settle because society treats them better for doing that... or if they settle because they finally discover their "innate" sexual orientation...
Certainly, I have met a relatively large proportion of people who identify as bi, who complain that both the hetero world, and the homo world (i.e. gay friendly environments), often reject or dismiss bisexuals as somehow fence-sitters, or undecided, or likely to change and therefore dump their partner, or are traitors, or something.
Unfortunately, those compaints are consistent with the theory that people who settle into one of the homo/hetero orientations may be doing it because that's more socially comfortable. It doesn't prove the theory, but it supports it's plausibility.
I wonder what people would do, in a society where they are encouraged to be sexual in whatever way they enjoy each day... rather than trying to please other people or stay out of trouble.
Perhaps the next 50 years will gives us some clue.
-- Jamie