Edge #525: Judith Rich Harris: 1938 - 2018

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. January 9, 2019 THE THIRD CULTURE [Judith Rich Harris: 1938-2018]( Photo: Nomi L. Harris It was in the 1990s that I received a phone call from Steven Pinker who wanted to make the world aware of the work of Judith Rich Harris, an unheralded psychologist who was advocating a revolutionary idea which she discussed in her 1999 Edge interview, “Children don't do things half way: children don’t compromise,” in which she said “How the parents rear the child has no long-term effects on the child's personality, intelligence, or mental health.” From the very early days of Edge, Judith Rich Harris was the gift that kept giving. Beginning in 1998, with her response to “What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?” through “The Last Question” in 2016, she exemplified the role of the Third Culture intellectual: “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.” Her subsequent Edge essays over the years focused on subjects as varied as natural selection, parenting styles, the effect of genes on human behavior, twin studies, the survival of friendship, beauty as truth, among others are evidence of a keen intellect and a fearless thinker determined to advance science-based thinking as well as her own controversial ideas. In this special 16,000-word edition of Edge, dedicated to Judith Rich Harris, we take a deep dive into her ideas. —JB CONTENTS [Judith Rich Harris]( by Steven Pinker “We are in considerable doubt that you will develop into our professional stereotype of what an experimental psychologist should be." When the Harvard psychology department kicked Judith Rich Harris out of their PhD program in 1960, they could not have known how true the words in their expulsion letter would turn out to be. ([Continue...)]( [Children Don't Do Things Half Way: Children Don’t Compromise: A Talk with Judith Rich Harris]( 28, 1999] I'm prone to making statements like this one: How the parents rear the child has no long-term effects on the child's personality, intelligence, or mental health. I guess you could call that an extreme statement. But I prefer to think of myself as a defender of the null hypothesis. ([Continue..]( [Essays In Response The Edge Question]( (1998-2016) — "What Are The Questions You're Asking Yourself?" (1998) — "What is Today's most Unreported Story?" (2000) — "What Questions Have Disappeared?" (2001) — "What's your Question?" (2002) — "What Are The Pressing Scientific Issues For The Nation and the World, and What Is Your Advice On How I Can Begin to Deal with Them?" (2003) — "What's Your Law?" (2004) — "What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" (2005) — "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?" (2006) — "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?" (2008) — "How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? " (2010) — "What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?" (2012) — "What Do You Consider The Most Interesting Recent [Scientific] News?" (2016) — "What Is The Last Question?" (2018) IN THE NEWS: ["Childhood's End" b]( George Dyson]( VANITY FAIR: HIVE ["No one is at the Controls": How Facebook, Amazon, and Others Are Turning Life into a Horrific Bradbury Novel]( By [Nick Bilton]( [1.3.19] Could 2019 be the year that these and other emergent technologies evolve from merely creepy to potentially totalitarian? In a New Year’s Day [column]( published on Edge, a Web site devoted to discussions about science, technology, and philosophy, George Dyson, the science historian and author, argues that we’ve reached an inflection point. “Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines,” Dyson writes. “Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.” Today, code itself has come alive: algorithms sift through our search histories, credit-card purchases, and geolocation to model our personalities and anticipate our desires. For this, a small number of people such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, have become unimaginably rich. In the beginning of the essay, Dyson cites the novel Childhood’s End, written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1953, which tells the story of a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious “Overlords” who “bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth.” As Dyson points out, this story, much like our own story, “does not end well.” [ [Continue...]( ] BOINGBOING [George Dyson: look to analog systems for autonomy and intelligence]( By [David Pescovitz]( [1.2.19] Over at [EDGE.org]( the must-read hub of intellectual inquiry and head-spinning science, Boing Boing pal and legendary book agent John Brockman is launching a new series of essays "from important third culture thinkers to address the empirically-driven and science related hot-button cultural issues of our time." First up is author George Dyson's ["Childhood's End,"]( a provocative riff on how the digital revolution has stripped much of our individual agency and that "to those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to look." [ [Continue...]( ] ARTS & LETTERS DAILY [Essay & Opinions]( [1.4.19] "The search engine, initially an attempt to map human meaning, now defines human meaning. It controls, rather than simply catalogs or indexes, human thought..." [Continue reading George Dyson's "Childhood's End"]( [ [Continue...]( ] THE BROWSER [Dyson, Brexit, China, Kukla, Iraq]( [1.2.19] Powerful [short essay]( on the digital revolution. The map has become the territory. “We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model. This fits our preconception that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere, but it is no longer the way the world works. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled with no central model except the traffic itself. The social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph” (1,250 words) [ [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) 2019 by Edge Foundation, Inc., 260 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001. 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