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John Brockman
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What is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable Hardcover – 6 Nov. 2006

by John Brockman (Editor)
3.9 out of 5 stars 69 ratings
The history of science is replete with ideas that were considered socially, morally or emotionally dangerous in their time. The Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are obvious examples -- radical, brilliant insights that did not so much push the envelope as rip it into shreds. These ideas were dangerous because they challenged our comfort zone. But what are the dangerous ideas of the twenty-first century? Which theories do the world's leading thinkers and scientists regard as too hot to handle -- not because the idea might be false, but because it might turn out to be true? Collecting together the very best contributions to the renowned Edge.org question from the most eminent respondents, WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? is another endlessly fascinating and provocative insight into the bleeding-edge of intellectual endeavour.
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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster Ltd
  4. Publication date
    6 Nov. 2006
  5. ISBN-10
    0743295536
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0743295536
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster Ltd (6 Nov. 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743295536
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743295536
  • Customer reviews:
    3.9 out of 5 stars 69 ratings

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John Brockman

John Brockman

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3.9 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Dean P. D'souza
    5.0 out of 5 stars interesting and informative.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2015
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    These books are interesting and informative.
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  • Gene Savage
    3.0 out of 5 stars None
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 July 2014
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    I was somewhat disappointed it did not live up to my expectations given the Title. There were articles or essays which I would not describe as "dangerous" if anything they were inane.
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  • Lancly
    4.0 out of 5 stars brilliant to keep sharp thinking on the train
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 January 2012
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    OK, so it's a bit of a jumble - occasionally related subjects seem to be together, or not, but it has an index so that's fine. I enjoyed the sharp short 'essays' - sometimes the idea is so precised that there is a lot of idea in one paragraph. I like this also. I like the jumble of ideas and having a variety to choose from. Small amount of reading leads to a lot of thinking if you want it. I'm not a career scientist.
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  • Robert Morris
    5.0 out of 5 stars "Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché", Richard Dawkins
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 September 2013
    According to founder and editor, John Brockman, the Edge Question was first posed in 1998: "What questions are you asking yourself?" There are 110 contributors and then, after editing, their responses were published in this volume. Each year since then, another question was asked and responses to it were published, also be Harper Perennial.

    There were 155 contributors and 154 responses to the 2006 Edge Question, suggested by the psychologist Steven Pinker:

    "The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?" What was Pinker's choice? "The year 2005 saw several public appearances of what I predict will be the most dangerous idea of the next decade: that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments." (Page 13)

    Here are some of the others, each of which is discussed further in context:

    o John Horgan: "The dangerous (probably true) idea I'd like to dwell on is that we humans have no souls." (Page 1)

    o Paul Bloom: The idea that "mental life has a purely material basis. The dangerous idea, then, is that Cartesian dualism is false. If what you mean by `soul' is something immaterial and immortal, something that exists independently of the brain, the souls do not exist." (4)

    o David Buss: "The idea that evil has evolved is dangerous on several counts...The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology, or exposure to media violence. The danger comes from failing to gaze into the mirror and come to grips with the capacity for evil in all of us.7 & 9)

    o V.S. Ramachandran: "An idea that would be `dangerous if true' is what Francis Crick referred to as the `astonishing hypothesis' - that notion that our conscious experience and sense of self consists entirely of the activity of 100 billion bits of jelly, the neurons that constitute the brain." (22)

    o Daniel Goleman: "The dangerous thought: The Internet may harbor social perils that our inhibitory circuitry was not evolutionarily designed to handle." (75)

    o Kevin Kelly thinks that "more anonymity is good; that's a dangerous idea." (82)

    o Ray Kurzweil: "My dangerous idea is the near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion. The idea is dangerous, however, only when contemplated from current linear perspectives." (215)

    o Freeman J. Dyson: "There are two severe and obvious dangers: First, smart kids and malicious grown-ups will find ways to convert biotech tools to the manufacture of lethal microbes; ambitious parents will find ways to apply the biotech tools to the genetic modification of their babies. The great unanswered question is whether we can regulate domesticated biotechnology so that it can be applied freely to animals and vegetables but not to microbes and humans." (218)

    o Howard Gardner: Although sustaining two hopeful assumptions about the prospects for human survival, "Yet I lie awake at night with the dangerous thought that pessimists might be right. For the first time in history (as far as we know), we humans live in a world we could completely destroy." (290)

    o Richard Dawkins: "Dangerous ideas are what has driven humanity onward, usually to the consternation of the majority in any particular age who thrive on familiarity and fear change. Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché." (297)

    Although taken out of context, these brief excerpts suggest the thrust and flavor as well as the diversity of perspective of the contributions by these and other cutting-edge thinkers. If asked to answer the given question, what would your response be?
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  • Mr. D. Whelan
    3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 August 2014
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    Narrow field of vision, but accessible.
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  • RB
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 April 2018
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    Good
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  • Geoff Bond
    5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging assumptions to expand your brain
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 November 2008
    What is Your Dangerous Idea?

    This is a book that has to be read twice to properly appreciate the depth and subtlety of the vast range of bright ideas. Not all of them are dangerous or unthinkable but they are all, nevertheless, thought-provoking. Not all of the 108 contributions will speak to you - but even if you find only one - that will have repaid your efforts handsomely.

    Here are some of my favorites:

    Evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, says that evolution programmed us with the capacity to "commit despicable atrocities against our fellow humans - atrocities that most of us would label evil" and that "The danger comes from people who refuse to recognize that there are dark sides of human nature that cannot be wished away by attributing them to the modern ills of culture, poverty, pathology, or exposure to media violence."

    Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's dangerous idea is that genetically there are such things as races, that different races have genetically different average levels of intelligence and genetically different "life priorities". Presumably Pinker is making an oblique reference to the works of Phillipe Rushton Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, Jon Entine Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It and Murray & Herrnstein Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. As Professor Richard Dawkins observes in the Afterword: if we can breed horses for speed, why not humans for athletic ability? The sub-text is that the vagaries of racial differentiation over the millennia have already done that in the case of black domination of sprinting and white domination of swimming.

    Cosmologist Paul Davies' idea is that the fight against global warming is futile and anyway already lost. But his dangerous idea is that the world will be a better place for it. This chimes with Nature editor, Oliver Morton's view that the earth doesn't need ice-caps and that even a quintupling of carbon dioxide levels will not reach the levels of the late Permian.

    Philosophy professor, Denis Dutton debunks "social construction theory" which he categorizes as "... a series of fashion statements, clever slogans and postures imported from France in the 1960s...". His dangerous idea is that a Darwinian approach would provide a true theory for understanding and analyzing art, music, and literature.

    Behavioral geneticist David Lykken observes that "Traditional societies in which children are socialized collectively, the method to which our species is naturally adapted, have very little crime." Lykkens' dangerous idea is that parents should only be allowed to make babies when they are over twenty-one, married and self-supporting.

    Psychologist and author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Judith Rich Harris in a colorful and pithy piece says that there is no proof that "parents do shape their children". Moreover, "Parents are exhausting themselves in their efforts to meet their children's every demand not realizing that evolution designed offspring... to demand more than they really need." Her dangerous idea is that the "establishment's idea of the all-powerful, and hence all-blamable, parent" is incorrect.

    Kai Krause writes a witty piece on his haunting realization that "Individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities, states, countries all just barely hang in there between debt and dysfunction." We need to re-evaluate priorities: "while we are looking at the horizon the ground beneath us is crumbling. The anthill could go to ant hell!"

    Matt Ridley says "everywhere there is too much government". Weak governments, as in eighteenth century England, allowed the country to develop the world's first industrial revolution. Strong central government (as in Argentina, Cuba, Stalinist Russia, imperial Spain) leads to "parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war." His dangerous idea is that "the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be."

    Cognitive psychologist Roger Schank makes the case "School is bad for kids. Professor Clay Shirky argues that: "everyone from advertisers to political consultants increasingly understands, in voluminous biological detail, how to manipulate consciousness in ways that weaken our notion of free will". Logician Andy Clark notes that our brains make decisions for us in the split second before our consciousness informs us of the event. His dangerous idea is: "that we are indeed designed to cut conscious choice out of the picture whenever possible."

    In writing this I see that my choices strongly accentuate evolutionary biology. I guess as a nutritional anthropologist and author Deadly Harvest that this is only to be expected. However there is something in this book for everyone, whatever your particular vocation or interest.
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  • Jose Siqueira
    1.0 out of 5 stars Passagem para e-book foi falha
    Reviewed in Brazil on 6 December 2015
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    Já tenho este livro impresso e comprei a versão digital para tê-lo comigo. Infelizmente, a passagem para e-book foi mal feita. Hifens de separação silábica e hifens substitutos de vírgula foram confundidos.
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  • Dr.K.Vasantakumar Pai
    3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
    Reviewed in India on 9 November 2017
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    nice book
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  • Scott Meredith
    5.0 out of 5 stars There is only one dangerous idea
    Reviewed in the United States on 15 March 2007
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    First, this is a really fun and interesting book. A quick and very stimulating read.

    The ideas themselves are all over the map, as they should be, and I won't spoil your pleasure in discovering them, especially since they could all be listed (minus defending verbiage) on a page or two.

    But I will say that ultimately, there is really only one dangerous idea out there. You see, we humans live entirely embedded in self-generated illusions and delusions. Victor Hugo put it kindly when he said "Man lives by affirmation more than by bread." In other words, man lives by lies.

    And why all the lies? One reason: to assert MEANING. Attempts to assert meaning can be all over the map, religion, science, emotion and art, whatever. The point is, everybody wants it like a drug.

    So the only really truly dangerous idea, to which all other dangerous ideas can ultimately be reduced, is simply that absolutely nothing means anything. Everything, without exception, is a completely empty lie and scam from A to Z. That is the single idea that everybody would attack because it threatens everyone at their root.

    From Ecclesiastes to Sartre it's been said many times many ways - all is vanity under the sun. But most of the self-proclaimed daring thinkers in this book can't go quite that far into "depressive realism". They lack the stomach to go all the way.

    But I salute their highly entertaining efforts, and actually a few of them dance dangerously close to the final flame of nothingness. But if they all did, there'd be no book.

    No matter what, even if everything is totally meaningless, it seems our bodies still need to get up each day and "do" something. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Each day a river that must be swum, on pain of shame or death." This book offer some great ideas on how to get through it all.

    But 19th century poet Matthew Arnold stated the most dangerous ideas best:

    For the world, which seems
    To lie before us like a land of dreams,
    So various, so beautiful, so new,
    Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
    Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
    And we are here as on a darkling plain
    Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
    Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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  • Dr. Kannan Vaidyanathan
    3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
    Reviewed in India on 21 April 2016
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    It's Okay
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  • Yours truly,
    3.0 out of 5 stars Out of 109 articles, only 9 were women.
    Reviewed in the United States on 16 August 2018
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    Out of 109 articles, only 9 were women. And, the 9 women who were included were writing about pretty banal ideas. One woman thought everything was pointless. If you have to include a few women in your book, might as well pick suitably unintelligent ones.

    But, Brockman felt that it WAS important to include some jaw-dropping crap from male thinkers. One guy said single women with children should not be allowed to be single. They should be required to marry. His rationale? There's a 0.7 correlation between single parenthood and criminality. He never heard that correlation is not causation, apparently. On top of that, it never occurred to him that the correlation was actually between poverty and criminality. Because he is apparently so stupid, that he doesn't know that female single parents are exceedingly poor.
    Another gem that Brockman felt it important to include was the idea of ending schools for children. This would be great for the Libertarian dream - an illiterate peon class!
    Yet another article sang the praises of unfettered capitalism. Even though the idea has been amply and exhaustively proven to be a very bad idea. Even though Adam Smith warned against it. Even though trickle down is a pipe dream.
    Oh, and both an introduction and an entry by Steven Pinker - a real gem of a sexist thinker.
    There were a few decent articles, of course. You can't fill an entire book with propaganda and bad ideas. Personally, I will avoid anything edited by Brockman in the future.
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