Seven scientific terms that should be more widely known

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As the holiday season and year's end descend upon us, it seems like a good time to take a look back on the Edge 2017 question of the year.

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Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Introduction

As Thanksgiving week arrives, the "holiday season" is officially upon us. Of course, the holiday season ushers in the new year, and the new year can only mean one thing. Edge's 2018 Annual Question. I have no idea what that question will be, but I thought it would be fun to revisit the Annual Question for 2017, 2017 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?, which I don't think I ever actually finished reading this year.

I thought a fun way to write about this question would be to review five of the answers, and then offer my own. Before picking any of the Edge answers, I picked my own topic, which would be, "Wicked Problems." Then, in order to pick the five answers that I would write about, I started with 10 by scanning the list of titles from their list of 206 authors. Then added an eleventh which caught my attention at the last minute, as I was about to close the page.

In no particular order, the eleven answers below were titles that looked like they might be interesting, but which I did not reflexively agree or disagree with. In fact, as I begin my review, I don't even know what some of them mean. Three of the eleven were written by authors who I know and already have opinions about, particularly the ones by Daniel Dennett, Lisa Randall, and Bruce Schneier. The eleven answers that I am starting with are:

• The Premortem, Richard H. Thaler
• Affordances, Daniel C. Dennett
• Effective Theory, Lisa Randall
• The Trolley Problem, Daniel Rockmore
• Class Breaks, Bruce Schneier
• Enactivism, Amanda Gefter
• Epsilon, Victoria Stodden
• Surreal Numbers, Siobhan Roberts
• Cumulative Culture, Christine H. Legare
• Included Middle, Melanie Swan
• The Principle of Least Action, Janna Levin

Now, please excuse me while I go read the candidates and pick five to write about. To be honest, I'll be surprised if Dennett, Randall, and Schneier don't make the final five, but we'll see...

... I'm back. I was right about Dennett, Randall, and Schneier, and I also decided to incude six answers instead of five, because two were so closely related. So the answers I'll be covering include the following:

• The Premortem, Richard H. Thaler
• Affordances, Daniel C. Dennett and Effective Theory, Lisa Randall
• Class Breaks, Bruce Schneier
• Epsilon, Victoria Stodden
• Included Middle, Melanie Swan

Then I'll wrap up with my own suggestion, "Wicked Problems."

The Premortem, Richard H. Thaler

Thaler discusses Gary Klein's idea, the premortem as a useful decision making tool. The premortem is a process where a team of people undertake a thought experiment before making a major decision. The thought experiment is to assume that it is some time in the future, and your proposed initiative has failed. Now, answer the question, "Why did it fail?"

For example, the Steemit community might hold a pre-mortem to answer the question, "It is 2025, and our Steem has lost all its value. Why?"

According to Thaler, this exercise may be useful for two reasons. First, it could help to overcome the temptation to indulge in "group think"; and the second is psychological, the question "why did it fail?" stimulates thought more than, "why might it fail?"

When I was reading this, I remembered that I'd actually read about it before, when I reviewed The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company. In that book, John Rossman reported that Amazon.com uses the premortem technique to good effect.

- Affordances, Daniel C. Dennett / Effective Theory, Lisa Randall

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Daniel Dennett describes the concept of Affordances as the notion that any organism's cognitive processing is designed to pick up environmental queues that are useful to it, and to ignore the rest. Similarly, Lisa Randall describes Effective Theory as follows:

This notion of effective theory extends beyond the realm of science. It’s really how we approach the world in all its aspects. We can’t possibly keep track of all information simultaneously. We focus on what is accessible and relate those quantities. We use a map that has the scale we need. It’s pointless to know all the small streets around you when you’re barreling down a highway.

According to Dennett, a better understanding of the notion of affordances will lead to a better understanding of how "the neural machinery does it's job," and according to Randall, awareness of effective theory can lead us outside of our comfort zone to a more fundamental reality and yield a richer understanding of the world.

Class Breaks, Bruce Schneier

In his answer, Bruce Schneier tells us about the idea of class breaks. A class break is a particular type of security breach whereby an attacker can break not just a single target, but an entire class of targets. For example, if a criminal intercepts my tax filing, they can compromise my identity, but if they hack the Equifax computers, they can compromise 143 million identities.

His answer was actually somewhat prescient, because it pre-dated this year's massive Equifax and Yahoo breach announcements. Here is an example that Schneier gave:

An example: Picking a mechanical door lock requires both skill and time. Each lock is a new job, and success at one lock doesn't guarantee success with another of the same design. Electronic door locks, like the ones you now find in hotel rooms, have different vulnerabilities. An attacker can find a flaw in the design that allows him to create a key card that opens every door. If he publishes his attack software, not just the attacker, but anyone can now open every lock. And if those locks are connected to the Internet, attackers could potentially open door locks remotely—they could open every door lock remotely at the same time. That's a class break.

According to Schneier, technology is moving society from a predominance of single target breaches to a predominance of class breaks, and we need to learn ways to deal with the changing scale in both response and design.

Epsilon, Victoria Stodden

In her answer, Victoria Stodden describes epsilon as follows:

In statistical modeling the use of the Greek letter “epsilon” explicitly recognizes that uncertainty is intrinsic to our world. The statistical paradigm envisions two components: data or measurements drawn from the world we observe; and the underlying processes that generated these observed data. Epsilon appears in mathematical descriptions of these underlying processes and represents the inherent randomness with which the data we observe are generated.

As with Schneier's answer, ever-expanding technology is what makes this concept important. In today's world of big data and statistical analysis, epsilon - or uncertainty - is part of most calculations, and for that reason, data driven research simply cannot predict the future.

Stodden points out the important fact that this has implications throughout society, including wide-ranging areas like policy, medicine, pricing and market prediction, and personalization of social media.

Included Middle, Melanie Swan

I was on the fence with this one, but ultimately decided to include it. According to Melanie Swan, the concept of the included middle was proposed by Stéphane Lupasco in 1951. It arises out of quantum mechanics and physics but may also be relevant to consciousness, computing, and information theory.

The idea is that A and not-A are insufficient to describe some natural logics. (Steemit's up-vote, down-vote, and abstain sprang instantly to mind for me!) The example that she gave was of Schrödinger’s cat, which is potentially dead and alive, until an observer checks its state.

Swan says that the concept should be more widely known because it is a model for thinking that overcomes dualism and opens the mind to complex, multi-dimensional ideas that extend beyond "binary elements and linear causality."

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

My own answer: Wicked Problems

According to Peter Denning,

A wicked problem is a very messy social tangle. All prior attempts at solving it have failed. No one has enough power or resources to impose a solution, but everyone has enough power to block someone else’s disagreeable proposals.

I didn't know that I'd be covering Stodden's "Epsilon" when I chose my answer, but the two go hand and glove. If there were no uncertainty, wicked problems wouldn't be so wicked. In our complex, uncertainty filled world, however, wicked problems are common. Denning gives two types of problems that have been classified wicked problems. Some, like climate change modeling and drug development are called wicked because of their complexity, but at least with those, the players agree on a problem description. Others, which is Denning's preferred definition, are messy social tangles, where participants don't even agree on the definition of the problem.

Steemit's recurring drama over flagging and self-voting comes to mind as a possible example of this sort of social tangle.

Denning offers the following tools for dealing with this sort of problem: Appreciation, speculation, resolution & ambition, and follow up. Additionally, other sources have suggested the use of governance techniques like holacracy, and sociocracy.

Conclusion

So there are my five picks and my own offering for Edge's Annual Question for 2017, WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with any of these answers? Do you have an answer that you think should have been included?

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As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Thank you for your time and attention.

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Here's a reward for anyone who made it this far:

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is a co-founder of the Steemit's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.

Follow: @remlaps

RSS for @remlaps, courtesy of streemian.com.

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