Edge #512: How To Be a Systems Thinker - A Conversation With Mary Catherine Bateson

News from Edge To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. April 18, 2018 THE THIRD CULTURE [How To Be a Systems Thinker]( A Conversation With [Mary Catherine Bateson]( Until fairly recently, artificial intelligence didn’t learn. To create a machine that learns to think more efficiently was a big challenge. In the same sense, one of the things that I wonder about is how we'll be able to teach a machine to know what it doesn’t know that it might need to know in order to address a particular issue productively and insightfully. This is a huge problem for human beings. It takes a while for us to learn to solve problems, and then it takes even longer for us to realize what we don’t know that we would need to know to solve a particular problem. How do you deal with ignorance? I don’t mean how do you shut ignorance out. Rather, how do you deal with an awareness of what you don’t know, and you don’t know how to know, in dealing with a particular problem? When Gregory Bateson was arguing about human purposes, that was where he got involved in environmentalism. We were doing all sorts of things to the planet we live on without even asking what the side effects would be and the interactions, although, at that point we were thinking more about side effects than about interactions between multiple processes. Once you begin to understand the nature of side effects, you ask a different set of questions before you make decisions and projections and analyze what’s going to happen. MARY CATHERINE BATESON is a writer and cultural anthropologist. In 2004 she retired from her position as Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University, and is now Professor Emerita. [Mary Catherine Bateson's Edge Bio]( [ [Continue...]( ] [Katinka Matson: Featured Artist on Los Angeles Review of Books and Artsy.net]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [ [Continue...]( ] IN THE NEWS THE SAINT [John Brockman: Pioneer of scientific literature]( By Sam Huckstep [4.12.18] The Selfish Gene; The Illusion of Self; The Glass Cage. If you have ever read a book by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Nicholas Carr —among a host of others — you have been in contact, most likely unknowingly, with John Brockman. For Hollywood, there is the parlour game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”: just about every actor or actress is within six connections, normally fewer, of Bacon himself. Emma Watson, for instance, has a Bacon Number of two: she has acted alongside John Cleese, who has in turn acted alongside Bacon. If you were to transpose that game to the world of scientific publishing, you might choose to search out “Brockman Numbers”. The only difficulty would be that Brockman is connected to everybody. I mentioned Brockman to an acquaintance at Oxford University Press, asking their opinion of him. In response I got pursed lips and the comment, “Brockman? He’s a big fish.” . . . It is hard to think of anybody else with this clout; Jeff Bezos, perhaps, or Bill Gates, but it is a small and rarefied group. There are few fish bigger. [ [Continue...]( ] Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. [EDGE.ORG]( John Brockman, Editor and Publisher Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher Nina Stegeman, Associate Editor Copyright (c) 2018 by Edge Foundation, Inc. 260 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001 All Rights Reserved. Published by Edge Foundation, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------- "The World's Smartest Website. Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds." — The Guardian • "We'd certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium which, like the best in science, is modest and daring at once." — David Brooks, The New York Times • "An epicenter of bleeding-edge insight across science, technology and beyond . . . with some of our era's greatest thinkers . . . A lavish cerebral feast." — The Atlantic • "Not just wonderful, but plausible." — The Wall Street Journal • "Deliciously creative, the variety astonishes. Intellectual skyrockets of stunning brilliance." — Denis Dutton, Founder, Arts & Letters Daily • "Take a look. No matter who you are, you are bound to find something that will drive you crazy." — The New York Times --------------------------------------------------------------- Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](