What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?

chrisd writes "The Edge 2008 question (with answers) is in. This year, the question is: 'What did you change your mind about and why?'. Answers are featured from scientists as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, George Church, David Brin, J. Craig Venter and the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, among others. Very interesting to read. For instance, Stewart Brand writes that he now realizes that 'Good old stuff sucks' and Sam Harris has decided that 'Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.' What did Slashdot readers change their minds about in 2007?"

Comments

Re:Changed my mind about the future of the US.

[damburger]

Ron Paul is a dangerous fad. He does not believe in evolution and he wants to scrap what little healthcare the poor in the US have access to (bear in mind that the US already has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than European countries that spend less per capita on healthcare). His platform is yanking away what little social protections exist in the US so that the middle classes can pay less tax, and considering that the US isn't nearly as far from mass famine as you would think a developed country would be - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/7148880.stm - its a recipe for a Katrina-like failure on a far bigger scale.

Re:Offshoring is a non-solution to a non-problem.

[nido]

If one has to add fear (by offshoring) over their heads to drive a point, something is terribly wrong.

You're more likely to get shot as well. Someone here once recommended Going Postal to me, and it covers such intentional marginalization of the working class, iirc.

Re:I changed my mind on Ron Paul...

[jeremiahbell]

In Ron Paul's system of philosophy the federal government has no authority over education so he is no threat to the acceptance of Evolution. He also believes that abortion should be decided by the states because he rightly states that the federal government does not have the authority. He will do nothing to stop abortion, all he will do is follow the the tenth amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.").

If you believe the federal government should be involved in abortion law and education then amend the Constitution.

Also, on the separation of church and state, read the first amendment, it addresses congress. My state Constitution has provisions for separation of church and state, and a state violation should be dealt with at the state level. If I wanted the federal government to have the authority to address a state level violation of separation of church and state I would, and if you wanted you should, ask for an amendment to the Constitution to allow such.

P.S.--I'm an atheist.

Re:Ron Paul and the war

[Grishnakh]

First point: secularism is no guarantee of liberty. Religion is no guarantee of tyranny... I remind you that this country was first settled by Puritans.

I would also like to remind people that Saddam Hussein was a secularist, as was Josef Stalin. It was only our Administration that tried to paint Hussein as being in league with the Islamists, which was obviously untrue, but it doesn't take much to make the morons who vote in America to believe in a lie.

Not that I care much for religiosity either, but let's keep our facts and history straight (after all, the Taliban were highly religious, and Afghanistan under their rule wasn't a fun place to live either).

Changing Minds?

[Kipper the Llama]

The following are my personal notes on the article, written and organized as I read it:

This is a really good article, though like past years, you can know the general lean (political, philosophical and scientific) of the participants before you begin. However, there are always answers that go up against the grain, and these are the ones I find most interesting. Some of the answers are pretty fascinating, like this one from Joseph Ledoux:

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed.

What's so fascinating about this answer to me is that it is something that's been clear to me, upon reflection, for many years. I have a clear "memory" of my second birthday, even though this is a time from which most persons don't have memories. Now, it's known that that being able to form sentences early (which I was able to do) helps in the creation of memory; being able to "narrate" thought allows us to construct some sort of record of events better. However, around the age of 11 or so, I began to realize that I was not remembering the event so much as my prior recollection of it. This meant I began to be very careful about my use of memory and how much I trusted my own mind, which I know to play tricks on me at times. It's known that, even for a mentally well person, a long-held falsehood can become true for the person simply because they create a memory of the false event. Also, philosophy has been aware of the importance of this sort of trick of the mind for some time. It's interesting to see science just now approach it, and it is instructive in how scientific paradigm (e.g., that memory functions like a hard drive) can override the obvious conclusions of self-reflection.

A lot of the answers touch on classic issues in the philosophy of science, a field some scientists love (most geologists, theoretical physicists) and others hate (most biologists). Karl Sabbagh's answer about expertise is right and wrong in equally interesting measures (yes, one should not trust experts unguarded, but, no, your judgement is not as good as an expert's in an area of their expertise, per se). Piet Hut's answer about explanations is sort of trivial for anyone who knows philosophy of science, but a good example of the problem (or explanation--hah!) for the neophyte. Colin Tudge's answer about the limits of science is simillarly instructive and worth repeating (in part):

I have changed my mind about the omniscience and omnipotence of science. I now realize that science is strictly limited, and that it is extremely dangerous not to appreciate this.

Science proceeds in general by being reductionist. This term is used in different ways in different contexts but here I take it to mean that scientists begin by observing a world that seems infinitely complex and inchoate, and in order to make sense of it they first "reduce" it to a series of bite-sized problems, each of which can then be made the subject of testable hypotheses which, as far as possible, take mathematical form.

Fair enough. The approach is obviously powerful, and it is hard to see how solid progress of a factual kind could be made in any other way. It produces answers of the kind known as "robust". "Robust" does not of course mean "unequivocally true" and still less does it meet the lawyers' criteria -- "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". But robustness is pretty good;

Re:Ron Paul and the war

[The One and Only]

First point: secularism is no guarantee of liberty. Religion is no guarantee of tyranny... I remind you that this country was first settled by Puritans.

Your point is valid, but your example is not. Plymouth was the second successful colony settled by the British--the first was Jamestown, Virginia. Jamestown was settled by migrant Englishmen looking to simply settle and conquer the New World. And if "this country" includes Florida, then the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida predates both by half a century. But in a purely geographic sense, "this country" was settled by Native Americans centuries before any white man set foot upon it.

Furthermore, the Puritans were tyrannical--which is why Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other people who fell out of favor with the Puritans settled Rhode Island. In fact, the Puritans were the perpetrators of the witch hunts.