Blinded by Science: What’s Your Dangerous Idea?

Posted on January 4, 2006 by Dave Pollard

Each year, the Edge Foundation asks its members a challenging question, and posts the answers. A couple of years ago, the question “What is Your Law?” provoked some memorable principles and ideas that have since spread. So when I learned, thanks to bloggers Jeremy Heigh and Carroll McNeill, that the 2006 question was “What is Your Dangerous Idea?” I immediately pored through the 12 long pages of ideas proffered by 107 of Edge’s invitation-only luminary members, mostly from the sciences and academia (the site is closed to comments from non-members), looking for danger.

I was stunned by the blandness of the responses and the utter disconnectedness of respondents from the critical issues of our world today. From the social scientists, who are overwhelmingly from the so-called ‘cognitive sciences’, we get navel-gazing speculations on consciousness that are neither dangerous nor useful. From the technologists we get technophilia, muddle-headed blather about technology as religion and as the saver of the universe, dangerous only its naivety. From the real scientists we get shopworn retreads about the compatibility or incompatibility of science and religion. From philosophers we get starry-eyed dreaming about a new political order, a world where people suddenly stop behaving the way they do and start behaving responsibly. What planet do these people live on?

Only four of the 107 ideas, in my opinion, are vaguely dangerous:

Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychology professor, dares to think that “the pessimists [who warn of our apparent willingness to destroy the world] may be right” and that we may be destined “to follow Sisyphus, not Pandora”.
Richard Dawkins says it’s time to stop looking for causes of problems and perpetrators to blame, and accept that we can’t change who we are.
Andy Clark, a University of Edinburgh philosophy professor, goes further, suggesting that what we do is driven by our unconscious, the “quick-thinking zombies inside us”, and our conscious thought is all after-thought to rationalize what we’ve already decided.
Clay Shirky tells us that, if we ever had it in the first place, “free will is going away”, and we need to decide what kind of economic and political systems we need in a world where free will is absent.

As for the rest, no dangerous ideas here, folks, please move along.

Perhaps if Edge proprietor John Brockman could get past the idea that his beloved “Third Culture”, the blending of elite intellectuals from both the scientific and literary world, doesn’t need the collective intelligence of the great unwashed rest of the world to inform, provoke, qualify, amplify and act on its ideas, and, as Einstein expounded and exemplified, to keep us all self-critical and humble, Edge might stand a chance of once again becoming relevant to the real world. In the meantime, the most dangerous idea that emerges from this self-referential group is the propensity of elites to groupthink and to exaggerate their own awareness, knowledge, importance, power, authority, and relevance.

I’m not usually one to criticize without offering some alternatives, so here are ten really dangerous ideas, none of them mine:

Our civilization is in its final century [John Gray]. No civilization lasts forever, and there is no political, economic, social, educational, religious or other ‘solution’ that will make the members of any civilization suddenly and radically change their behaviour. We do what we must do, and nature will do what she must to compensate for our excesses, and, since…
Nature always bats last [Kenny Ausubel], the world will go on just fine after we are gone.
The crowd is always wiser than the experts [James Surowieki]. No elite, no godlike president or junta, no priest or CEO, no crack team of managers or consultants or global thought leaders can make better decisions, or predict the future better, than all of us together in our collective wisdom. Leadership of all kinds is a dysfunctional vestige of an era in which that collective wisdom could not readily be tapped.
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred [George Bernard Shaw]. If you really think that anybody really understands what another person has said, do an experiment after the next presentation you attend and ask attendees one-on-one immediately afterwards what they got out of it. You’ll be astonished.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality [Bucky Fuller]. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Show, don’t tell [Derrick Jensen]. This is a key answer to the malaise of our education system, and to the ineffectiveness of ‘knowledge management’. We learn much more from observing than from listening or reading, and we learn even more by trying it ourselves, hands on.
Human beings will be happier only when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again [Kurt Vonnegut]. The way we live today isn’t the way human beings were meant to live, and deep inside we know it. That doesn’t mean throwing away technology, it means interacting with those in your community (human and non-human) in deep, authentic, synaesthetic ways we have forgotten.
People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before [Daniel Quinn]. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
No one is in control. This is two dangerous ideas in one, though I’m not sure if anyone has realized this explicitly. The first idea is that because no one is in control, the appearance of control that governments and corporations and their handmaidens in the media try to convey is all illusion: This world is far too complex for even the most powerful and complicitous elite to be able to steer or direct. That is the liberating idea: Don’t worry about fighting the ‘bad guys’, because they’re just caught up in the flow like all the rest of us. The second idea is that because no one is in control, everything is out of control. That is the terrifying, personal responsibility-burdening idea: No one can stop global warming, biochemical warfare, [your worst nightmare scenario here]. So now what do you do?

Why are these ten ideas ‘dangerous’? Because they threaten deeply-entrenched ideas and strongly-held, widely-held beliefs. Because those who they threaten will do almost anything to prevent them becoming widely accepted. And because they’re actionable. Take them as your own and they will change what you think, believe and do.

What’s your dangerous idea?

Photo: Thomas Dolby

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25 Responses to Blinded by Science: What’s Your Dangerous Idea?

Dermot Casey says:

January 4, 2006 at 17:07

Daveyou forgot one MIHALYI CSIKSZENTMIHALYI who thinks that “The Free Market” is a dangerous (and very damaging idea)Dermot
medaille says:

January 4, 2006 at 19:31

You read all of the essays? I commend you on that. I only made it through the first page and the ones you pointed out. I had two main ideas after reading the first page.My first thought was that these people especially the first couple are really limited and narrowly focused. I got the impression that they are all philosophers and are really analytical in their thinking. It seemed that they are all describing new labels for the same things. Everyone should know that labels are meaningless, and hell, even thoughts, ideas in all their perfectness are worthless if they aren’t changing action. Which brings me to my second main thought. None of these people are giving me any information which I can use to interact better with other people, to help change things for the better, to help teach others.With all the weaknesses I see in their ideas, I can’t blame them. I see a lot of myself in them, like I do in most everyone. I really like the way they talk and speak through their writing. It reminds me of my own style of writing which is fairly stream of conscious or more precisely a stream of unconscious that finds its way onto the imprinted medium. I think really analytically, like they do, but my creativity burns in effort to use that information positively. I don’t see that in their writing. I get the impression that they are so impressed by their own thoughts that they fail to see the gravity and the dire consequences that exist around them. Maybe we’re all just turtles/ostriches trying to avoid feeling pain. I really think these people need to take some time off and explore themselves and rediscover their creativity. I mean, are they more than robots if their ideas don’t leave the virtual domain? I look at my own thoughts written down and I start to fear that my thoughts are as sterile as theirs, impotent to produce change. It provides me motivation to keep pushing forward learning how to create change both in minds and in the physicaldomain.I don’t blame them because they’re raised in the same crap that I’m raised in. Their society is the same as mine. They’re trained to consume not to overcome. Its amazing how institutionalism in all aspects of our life paralyzes the majority of to accept what the bold tell us and do for us. The more we fail to resist the tighter its grasp on us is and the harder it is to resist in the future. Institutionalism makes us complacent and weak.I really liked and not coincidentally totally agree with Richard Dawkins. In the past, I’ve read comments by you that are very similar to what Dawkins said, and it struck a bad chord with me and prevented me from seeing what you were saying. I’ll mention it, because I imagine its driving republicans away from you (probably the only area I overlap with them). You said:Richard Dawkins says it’s time to stop looking for causes of problems and perpetrators to blame, and accept that we can’t change who we are.I agreed with the first part, but the idea that we can’t change who we are put a bad taste in my mouth. Before, I took it to mean that we don’t have the ability to take action today to make changes in who we are tomorrow. After reading Dawkins piece, I realized it meant that the patterns we created in our brain due to our conscious actions that we took in the past as well as the patterns we absorbed via culture are more likely to influence our current actions than our current consciousness is capable of. This is due to our inability to be perfectly conscious at all times. It still leaves the window open for us to make conscious actions in the present to change the patterns in our unconscious which will change our actions in the future. This was the sticking point for me, in that I can see perfectly fine that I am capable of changing myself to produce actions that are closer to the ideal that I strive for, although I also notice that I fail often and do stuff that isn’t in line with my ideal and is a remnantof my past actions and also of the culture I’ve absorbed. Republicans seem to be sticking to the idea that each individual must change to conform to the ideal society produces for itself, and are ignorant to the tremendous influence culture has over our actions. I’m finally equipped to respond to them with enough ammo to point out the flaws I could only sense before.I’m sure you’ve been paying attention to my comments in the past, and can see that this is the basis for how I view how society needs to change in order to produce actions in people that are desirable to the society (and thus to all its members) as a whole. If I had to produce a “dangerous” idea, that is what it would be, that in order to change things we need to change the patterns in our brains so that we unconsciously produce the actions we desire, and that this includes both conscious action and conscious action that alters culture in a manner which produces desirable actions in the future. This differs than the current predominant notion that culture (forewarning, I’m probably not credible to talk about culture in academic terms, so its definition is my own) just is. Meaning that it exists in a similar sense that fashion exists, but most people ignore the fact that you can change culture by changing the social and physical world around us in the same way that a few trendsetters can change fashion in real time. This idea appeals to me because it is broad in the sense that everything we sense is culture and thus we can easily change culture in small increments as an individual so it is perfectly applicable to life. Applicability being the important part.
Stephen Downes says:

January 4, 2006 at 20:29

My dangerous idea is a bit long, and doesn’t reduce to a slogan, but is captured a bit in this: Knowledge is a network phenomenon, to ‘know’ something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To ‘learn’ is to acquire certain patterns. This is as true for a community as it is for an individual.An Introduction to Connective Knowledge.
cindy says:

January 4, 2006 at 22:12

I share these two you listed: # Human beings will be happier only when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again [Kurt Vonnegut]. # People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not beforeOne of my thoughs is, we spend too much time coining terms that, perhaps, scare the living daylight from average person such as myself. Terms such as knowledge management, knowledge workers, innovations … what do they really mean? Therefore I am constantly moving between ‘YES I know it’, ‘NO I don’t think I know it’. Things that relate to human behaviour/nature can hardly be resolved with a ‘formula’. But the way we talk about innovation, for example, is as if we can … therefore why what Kurt Vonnegut says is so true for me. There are many things in life should be simple and primitive.
Carroll says:

January 4, 2006 at 22:53

Was I hallucinating the “rabbits’ eye view” photos earlier?
Jon Husband says:

January 4, 2006 at 23:58

Dave, you know i’m pretty pessimistic, which is why I am concentrating on living instead of tryiong to re-create a successful career (though I do hope to carry out bits and pieces opf useful work here and there).I agree with this obsevation: Clay Shirky tells us that, if we ever had it in the first place, “free will is going away”, and we need to decide what kind of economic and political systems we need in a world where free will is absent.We live in a higly-structured machine, one of the critical elements of which is the sense-surround media that essentially foreclose on our ability to form deep ideas and values or to think critivcally (for most of us). In order to even consider that we as individuals may have a biot of free will means, i think, a willingness to live on the edges of society and to speak out somehow. Speaking out while in the mainstream of life is hazardous and / or alienating now.I like the fact that Stephen’s note … that *to know* is to demonstrate / describe / understand patterns of connectivity, and that *to learn* means evaluating / incorporating / acquiring patterns of connectivity … makes me think about *wirearchy* more deeply.
ScrewDriver says:

January 5, 2006 at 00:15

I see this glaring fact that the spill over of Bush think, (an oxymoron). Is in fact that, the dumbing down of America and those parts that don’t protest his logic. Are conventional today!
Jon Stahl says:

January 5, 2006 at 00:35

I briefly noted this on my blog the other day, but I think you’ve given eloquent voice to the strange taste this piece left in my mouth. Nice work, as usual, Dave. Thanks.
James P. Wall says:

January 5, 2006 at 01:15

I was hoping to read your opinions on this matter. I breifly reviewed the first 8 pages’ worth of “dangerous ideas” here:http://writingstatic.blogspot.com/2006/01/most-dangerously-banal-ideas-of-2006.htmlIn short, I agree that, with a handful of exceptions, they are not only not dangerous, but not even ideas.
Srinath Vellure says:

January 5, 2006 at 01:36

I agree with John Gray in saying that we will kill ourselves plain and simple. As we have no idea what we are doing.Here is one probabily reason why?—————————Unless you know thyself(your authentic nature i.e. what it means to be a human) everything that you try to accomplish will obviously be futile/useless – Osho Rajneesh—————————
Adam Wasenczuk says:

January 5, 2006 at 08:56

‘Kate’s Three Laws of Management Science’:1. A paradox is a sign that something really important is hiding nearby.2. You can always get more out of a really great work.3. You have to make room to manouevre.
Dave Pollard says:

January 5, 2006 at 09:00

Thanks, everyone, for the comments, amplifications and links to your own blogs on the subject. Dermot, I was going to include Mihalyi’s idea, but decided not to because it’s so obvious and so often-stated that it can’t be dangerous, because everyone just chooses to ignore it. It’s also three ideas: (a) that the economy we have today is in any sense a ‘free market’ economy,(b) that a truly ‘free market’ economy is possible, and (c) that if it were possible, it is desirable. Medaille: That is truly a dangerous idea. Because we’re now mostly run by software (culture) rather than hardware (genes), it is possible to ‘reprogram’ us much more quickly than one could reprogram, say, a rabbit. That has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with evolution. It’s dangerous because it raises the issue of, if it is to be applied to ‘save’ humanity, who will do the reprogramming?Stephen: I like that idea. It’s consistent with the one I posted last week from Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, and which should have been on my list of 10: We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit.Carroll: No hallucination. I just decided the photos distracted from the article, and the Thomas Dolby pic with the visual pun (only those who listened to rock in the ’80s will get it) was more a propos.
Adam Wasenczuk says:

January 5, 2006 at 10:04

Almost forgot my favourite ‘dangerous’ idea:”Scientists get their best ideas from outside science.”Most of them don’t like to admit this…
Peter Bodo says:

January 5, 2006 at 10:46

BTW Csikszetnmihalyi is not Mihalyi, but Mihalyas for the free market. if the preposition of rational and egoist, but empathic market players were true it would be desirable in my opinion, because of the optimal utlity distribution neo-classical economics imagine.since neither is true for the market player it is not.also free market is not possible (having rational market players) since you need to internalise certain externalities through a system, which requires compliance (e.g. taxation).If players are rational, they will often choose not to pay taxes (since all they work is about risks and returns -compliance with the law is just the same), so in this case there will be no free market.if you suppose full compliance it seems your players are not rational, so there will be no optimisation.
medaille says:

January 5, 2006 at 18:37

Who would do the reprogramming?Well, there are some important qualities that the reprogrammer (either a single person or a group as a whole) would need. They need to have a very broad knowledge base that includes a good understanding of how the mind stores information and how it uses it for making decisions. I don’t think that is something science has really come to a conclusion on, but its important that they’ve thought it through thoroughly and have a good grasp on it, and all members of a group that tried to reprogram others would need to know the information so that they could know how it would interact with other areas of study or focus that they could bring to the table. There needs to be a diverse knowledge base The two other important things are promoting healthy (conscious) choices to begin with and changing the infrastructure around us to promote healthy unconscious choices. The first one is relatively easy to conceptualize as we already have that done, its just being undermined subconsciously. It can be seen in our use of stories, morals, etc (which also influence the unconscious); high school guidance programs; AA programs. These are all the institutions that are created to help people make wiser choices. They try to interact with the person on a conscious level and hope that it sticks. Changing the infrastructure requires a bit more effort. It requires more manpower and more physical energy to change and people are resistant to change. A single person with the right connections could easily transform the culture people absorb through things like the media because its all fairly virtual and there aren’t tons of buildings already built and capital invested and the such. Physical infrastructure is more difficult, because it requires massive amounts of energy and the like. Buildings are already built, roads are already built, laws are in place that rig the game towards big business.That means that whatever entity takeson the role of reprogramming needs to have control of government or else they are in for a tremendous uphill struggle. I think ideally this should be the government itself, especially in local governments (small). They can be fairly easily controlled and if the population is properly motivated (propoganda/education) they will be able to overcome their fear of the unknown and thus allow the government to take the actions necessary to get the job done.By far the biggest challenge to overcome is to educate the people enough to allow change to happen. They are tremendously afraid of giving up their “rights” and the stuff they “own.” They fear that if they allow the government to have too active of a role then they will have nothing. If the government can take their house to build a subway than they are net losers in the action regardless if its better for the community as a whole or not. I think the government (or whatever organization pushing the government for change) needs to initially focus on providing needs to the people and earning trust of the people. If all of a sudden people don’t have to fear not having food, shelter, clean water, etc they will be less likely to be resistant to change and less likely to fear giving up their house/property if they know that they’ll be taken care of in the process. Coincidentally, if the people notice one particular organization doing tremendous amounts of good for the community then they will be more likely to be agreeable to listening and actually learning about the challenges in full.
Wissbegieriger says:

January 5, 2006 at 19:19

Just a note on your Surowieki crowd-as-wiser (and re today’s quiz) — perhaps the importance of experts isn’t so much in their prediction of futures??
M. Williams says:

January 5, 2006 at 20:17

I blogged about it and your comments, Dave, here: http://beyondrivalry.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/01/05/dangerous-ideas.htmlI liked Philip Zimbardo’s idea that “The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism.” I think it’s true and I think it’s dangerous, because it challenges the way most of us think, that we can isolate good and evil people, that people can be pretty much all good or all bad. And what we believe on this issue might change how we see abortion, the death penalty, prison as punishment vs. prison as restorative justice, war, enemies and neighbours, the possibility of transformation in a person, in a situation.
Garrett Romain says:

January 6, 2006 at 16:46

The most dangerous idea? Time. Humans believe that they have forever, they always have “time”. They use this time to fight wars, install corporate governments, destroy the natural resources of the planet, instead of using “time” to extend life.However time is on the side of Earth(plantets). When critical mass is reached some natural catastrophe will occur or some man made event will occur and nature will reclaim the planet.There is somewhere between 1 billion and 4 billion years left before the sun heats the earth up, and then vaporizes it, then goes dark. So the next species, if human, will repeat our 3000 years of existance over and over until the planet ceases to exist.However there is hope…some suggest that we have a biological drive towards space. So one can hope that “beam me up Scotty” will be more than a movie line or bumper sticker.
Barbara W. Klaser says:

January 7, 2006 at 16:08

My dangerous idea is that many of these other dangerous ideas have already come to pass. We may be only recognizing symptoms of changes that are already too far along to do anything about. Years ago I read that genetically engineered (GE) corn was migrating on its own into other cornfields. Today I learn that the genetic engineered-in qualities of rapeseed have now crossed over to weeds in ways that were never predicted as possible by the scientists who developed the rapeseed. This is only the beginning of the end of biodiversity. No one can say how farreaching the effects of this one technology (GE) may be on the very plants we need for food. And that’s just one techonology that we were arrogant enough to believe we could control when applying it to Nature. We’re like the guy who built Jurassic Park. We’ve started something we can’t control, and we may already be poisoned, as a species, only awaiting our actual die-off. But the planet will live on without us.
Martin-Eric says:

January 12, 2006 at 18:02

Dave: Having also read the whole article (and went back to read the previous years’ material as well), I’m simply not sure that merely mentioning “free will” can truely convey the deep implications of Clay Shirky’s dangerous idea. I think that Clay’s explanation of the situation and its implications would deserve a blog entry all to itself. Would you agree?
Martin-Eric says:

January 12, 2006 at 18:48

I vaguely recalled that one of the dangerous ideas was the very observation that civilisation as we know it is fallling appart, yet few people realize it or the implications of the finding. This blog discusses this dangerous idea proposed by Kai Krause.
Lawrence says:

January 15, 2006 at 11:45

Martin-Eric, re Shirky: yes! The key point is not that free will is “going away”; talking about volition in this binary manner has always been a gross oversimplification, but only now do we have the data to notice.
Lawrence says:

January 15, 2006 at 12:05

My dangerous idea: You are not your thoughts.
Lawrence says:

January 15, 2006 at 22:22

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting one: open source currency.
Ed says:

April 25, 2007 at 17:43

I came across this post a little late, but I have a few dangerous ideas all interconnected:There *is* life beyond death as what we experience as consciousness does survive the death of the body. No, there is no reincarnation as the body that produced the consciousness is long gone and no other brain could possibly capture or reproduce the same consciousness you refer to as “I”. And lastly, we will all be around for the collapse of our sun into a black hole. Hopefully, we’ll manage to find a way to escape its pull before it is too late.