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From: "Edge" <editor@edge.org>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2014 07:53:08
To: Edge Mailing List<edge_editions@sand.lyris.net>
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Subject: Edge #417 - Rory Sutherland: This Thing For Which We Have No Name
Edge.org
May 13, 2014
http://www.edge.org
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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"'No one ever got fired for buying IBM' is a wonderful example of understanding loss aversion or 'defensive decision making'. The advertising and marketing industry kind of acted as if it knew this stuff—but where we were disgracefully bad is that no one really attempted to sit down and codify it. When I discovered Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and the whole other corpus on Behavioral Economics…. when I started discovering there was a whole field of literature about 'this thing for which we have no name' …. these powerful forces which no one properly understood—that was incredibly exciting. And the effect of these changes can be an order of magnitude. This is the important thing. Really small interventions can have huge effects. ...
"...Markets actually work because they're adaptive. Bad things get killed, good new things sometimes get promoted. But most of the time what you'll find in business is no one has the faintest idea of why the things that work actually work. What's very useful here is that finally a group of academics with money, time, and immensely high intelligence were finally sitting down to codify and make sense of things, which we'd been aware of for years but which, to our shame, we'd never attempted to actually try and systematize."
THIS THING FOR WHICH WE HAVE NO NAME
A Conversation with RORY SUTHERLAND
(10,500 words)
Edge Video
[49:17 minutes]
RORY SUTHERLAND is Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman, OgilvyOne London; Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather UK; Columnist, The Spectator.
__________
THIS THING FOR WHICH WE HAVE NO NAME
"The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they're completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays. I always find this very strange when you occasionally get in the realm of happiness research, you get fairly considerable assaults on consumerism as if it's just mindless status seeking. Now, the point of the matter is, is that academics are just as guilty of the original crime, they just pursue status in a different way. ...
"I have probably stolen, without realizing it, your own job title of 'impresario' rather unfairly. The reason I did this was that occasionally people started writing about me online as a 'behavioral economist' and I realized that, among academic behavioral economists, this would drive them practically apoplectic to have someone with no qualifications in the field so described. (I'm a classicist by background in any case). So my being described as a behavioral economist would make them practically deranged."
It's not my job to be a behavioral economist; my job is to actually popularize behavioral economics. The interesting thing to me—as someone who has a brother who's an academic—is that academics, however brilliant, are the worst marketers in the world. And there's a reason for this, which is they, of course, possibly rightly, despise the idea of marketing. Their idea is that there is a pure and objective truth and people should appreciate it. As they see it, the way in which you present that truth should be irrelevant to its acceptance. So indifferent are academics to presentation, it seems, that the PowerPoint slide which announced the existence of the Higgs Boson was partly written in the font Comic Sans.
My contention would be that there are ideas which, depending on how you present them—it's rather like the experiment with Wason Cards—may either be easily accepted and understood or are incomprehensible and/or repellant. The reaction to those ideas will entirely depend on how they're framed and presented, and have nothing to do with the objective truth underlying the findings. My personal view, as much as it may seem repellant to them, is that academics actually need impresarios, need marketers, and need popularizers.
I was always taken by the Richard Feynman thing where he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "When you come up with some true thing, you can often find the same truth that's expressible in three or four different ways." And what those four different expressions say is identical in objective reality; however, the kinds of ideas and implications and applications that arise, depending on how you express the truth, are psychologically completely different. Expressing the same thing in four different ways is, in one sense, completely worthless as an activity. On the other hand, in terms of generating further ideas based on those insights, the kinds of things that will be generated will be dependent on how those things are presented. "Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics." That's a really important thing.
The reason I'd happily describe myself as a behavioral science impresario is that many recent insights from six or seven interrelated fields of social science are extraordinarily important in terms of business activity, but more important still, public policy. If those things aren't widely known, appreciated, and understood, and if people aren't allowed to grasp them in the right way, then they will be crudely overlooked. I said elsewhere on Edge that in the social sciences, the good ideas aren't always influential and the influential ideas aren't always good. To have some very, very important ideas from Kahneman, for instance, or Jonathan Haidt from evolutionary psychology. to have those overlooked or effectively rejected by practical people in positions of power or influence would be really tragic. ... MORE
Permalink: http://edge.org/conversation/this-thing-for-which-we-have-no-name
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IN THE NEWS
http://edge.org/edgenews
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BILIM VE GELECEK - Monthly Science, Culture, Politics Journal
WOULD OWN SCIENCE / SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY AND RESEARCH OBJECT, 'MIND'
Nalân Mahsereci
May 12, 2014
Mind...opens the minds of readers across brings many questions. Edge yield of a series of the book, was published by the same name in Turkish: Mind(Alpha Science). Edge scientists, philosophers, artists and technology experts...together reached the limits of our knowledge and horizons that exposes some discussions, talks and conferences organizer, who publishes an intellectual platform. www.edge.orgevents some videos and documents produced in the framework can be accessed.
John Brockman editor of the Mind book, biology, neurology, neurobiology, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics total of 16 scientists, their expertise in the context of mind that questions and theses have been passing. …
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BOWLING GREEN DAILY NEWS - SOUTH CENTRAL KENTUCKY'S #1 SOURCE FOR NEWS
'WORRIED' DELIVERS A DARK PICTURE
Aaron W. Hughey
May 11, 2014
I was fascinated by this book from the moment I picked it up at Barnes & Noble. I had heard of a few of the writers Brockman tapped for this volume, but I was unfamiliar with most of the names listed in the table of contents. Moreover, I could not find any rhyme or reason to the authors selected to present their various perspectives on what should, in fact, be on our radar screens when it comes to what we should be distressing about. Although everyone arguably has some connection to science, I found it impossible to identify a common thread characterizing all of the contributors.
Most of the selections run only two to three pages, which made the book particularly easy to digest in a series of short sittings. Over the week it took me to get through all of the vignettes, I probably spent no more than an hour reading the book at any one time. Still, many of the ideas resonated with me on several levels. I found myself thinking about what I had read as I was involved in other activities throughout the day. For example, I spent my entire run one afternoon reflecting on the chapter by Martin Rees, "We are in denial about catastrophic risks." Rees is an emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.
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DER BUND - CULTURE
WOMEN SUGGEST THEIR MEN AS RESEARCH OBJECTS
Linus Schöpfer
May 7, 2014
Svante Pääbo has decoded the genome of the Neanderthal. In the interview, the researchers about the fatal stagnation of prehistoric humans, similar genes - and rather strange fantasies talks.
Q. In your book, you combine sober portrayals with very private insights: "We ran naked along the pristine beaches, snorkelled with fish." Can science literature with such intimate sprinkling sell?
A. (laughs) It was the New York agent, John Brockman, who persuaded me to write the book. I said, OK, I'll do it. "But it should be a book that not only interested geneticists, but also my children, will find of interest." An example was the American biochemist Jim Watson and his book THE DOUBLE HELIX in which he describes the operation of science and and also how scientists work with each other in a personal way.
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BIG PICTURE SCIENCE (RADIO)
SKEPTIC CHECK: WHAT, WE WORRY?
Seth Shostak
May 5, 2014
We all have worries. But as trained observers, scientists learn things that can affect us all. So what troubles them, should also trouble us. From viral pandemics to the limits of empirical knowledge, find out what science scenarios give researchers insomnia.
But also, we discover which scary scenarios that preoccupy the public don't worry the scientists at all. Despite the rumors, you needn't fear that the Large Hadron Collider will produce black holes that could swallow the Earth.
It's Skeptic Check, our monthly look at critical thinking … but don't take our word for it!
Guests:
• David Quammen – Science journalist, contributing writer for National Geographic Magazine, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
• Sandra Faber – Astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz
• Paul Saffo – Technology forecaster based in the Silicon Valley
• Seth Shostak – Senior astronomer, SETI Institute, host,Big Picture Science
• Elisa Quintana – Research scientist, SETI Institute
• Lawrence Krauss – Theoretical physicist, Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University
Inspiration for this episode comes from the book, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night edited by John Brockman.
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