What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable

Very interesting indeed. Great coffee table books that could be read over days or months. The new ideas are still very dangerous in this modern world fucked up by Christian and Islamic religions.

Science is the only way to advance humankind and hopefully we will not destroy it out of stupidity. The rational thinking of the brightest minds reminds us that we are still animals, come along in the last few seconds of the evoluation history. Look how much we have destroyed on Earth already. We are not good for Earth for that matter because we destroyed more than we could build, yet we are the only specie that could have the chance to find solutions to the problems we created.

Most of the human on Earth do not think rationally. That's just sad and make the future that much more dangerous. ( )

A collection of short essays about the next "dangerous idea". Copernicus's idea that the earth went round the moon and Darwin's idea of evolution are given as the stock examples of ideas that were dangerous in the past. What will be proved true in the future that we would find difficult to believe today? I found the articles to be very hit and miss. They variously seemed too obvious, too esoteric or barely worth mentioning. And too many were of the navel gazing "the idea of a dangerous idea is dangerous" or variations. One of the problems is that there are a lot of short articles and they've been arranged so that the themes follow on from one writer to the next; this makes for some degree of redundancy. There is a lot here that's interesting to read but the book as a whole wasn't gripping.

Every year the Edge website gathers together a large number of "scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world," many of them giants in their fields, asks them to answer some broad, philosophical question, and then collects all the answers together into a book. 2006's question was "What is your dangerous idea?", defined as "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." The result is a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of the answers failed to strike me as either particularly shocking or remotely likely to lead to social destabilization. There was a fair amount of repetition, as multiple people offered essentially the same answers in different words. A number of folks seem to have subtly misinterpreted the question, choosing to talk more about other people's false ideas than their own true-but-dangerous ones. And a few of them were just plain wacky. On the other hand, there were also quite a few answers that were both intriguing and provocative, and the book as a whole is interesting as a snapshot of what really smart people are thinking about and finding themselves disturbed by here in the early 21st century. The central question itself is also interesting, since it raises the further question -- which a number of respondents addressed explicitly -- of whether "dangerous" ideas ought to be suppressed or embraced. ( )

This book contains over a hundred essays from scientists and thinkers on what they consider to be their most dangerous idea. Some ideas were good, some were ridiculous and some were incomprehensable. My eyes glazed over during the physics section - string theory, blah, blah. But I really enjoyed reading the ideas that were related to the social sciences and psychology. ( )

I found this much less interesting than I imagined. It is incredibly bitty, which perhaps I should have expected, but this also means it is a bit repetitive - for example, many of the contributors address similar concerns, but utterly disconnected from one another, which can be repetitive, and far less informative than a more selective / synthesised approach might have been. Personally I was also expecting more political / social / economic discussion, whereas the book was much more philosophical / scientific in the balance of topics raised.
Personally I think the dangerous ideas we have to worry about most in the next, say, fifty years, will be more the former, than the latter. However if the latter does interest you, this would be an interesting book to dip in and out of (but not to read through). ( )