For more than a decade, John Brockman’s Edge was one of my favorite websites. I’d visit every few days to check for new posts by eminent scientists discussing their ideas. This 2012 interview in the Guardian captures the intent and spirit of the website well. No other part of the internet offered the same combination of exciting ideas, accessibility and brainpower.
The website and its trove of material is still accessible, but nothing is being added any more. The reason is that Brockman was funded by and close to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a man with a unique combination of reputational radioactivity and exceptionally long posthumous half-life in the news.
Here are some of the posts that are still worth reading:
- How to Get Rich, with Jared Diamond (1999)
- What Questions Have Disappeared? (2001)
- What’s Your Law? (2004)
- Real Life is Not a Casino, with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2008). Also this
- Consensus Statement on Morality (2010)
- A Short Course in Superforecasting, with Philip Tetlock (parts 2, 3, 4, 5) (2015)
- What Do You Consider the Most Interesting Recent [scientific] News? (2016)
- What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known? (2017)
- Alzheimer’s Prevention, with Lisa Mosconi (2019)
- P-Hacking and the Replication Crisis, with Robert Kurzban (2019)
- Possible Minds (2019)
Nehaveigur 