What have you changed your mind about? Why?

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly’s blog entry, I started looking at the long list of people and their answers to the 2008 questions from Edge,

“What have you changed your mind about? Why?“

Here are links to the top 27 of my ranked favourites (out of a list of 160+),

1. Alison Gopnik - Imagination is Real. (I find this piece unexpectedly insightful even it may seem a bit abstract. And Gopnik just bumped Dyson off the top of my list!)
2. Freeman Dyson - when he speaks, I listen and think. And here, Dyson tries to demolish the myth that “the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end” in order to take the “useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons“. I will find some time to check out “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” from International Security.
3. Daniel Gilbert - “The willingness to change one’s mind is a sign of intelligence, but the freedom to do so comes at a cost.” (Check out his master class videos - session 1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6)
4. Frank Wilczek - The science formerly known as religion
5. Howard Gardner - view about Jean Piaget. I love Piaget’s study of children (including his own).
   
6. Kevin Kelly - How Wikipedia changed his mind
7. Esther Dyson - “What have I changed my mind about? Online privacy.” Interesting discussion re: Facebook Beacon. I had similar thoughts. And yes, Esther is daughter of Freeman Dyson. I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to her once in Bruce Mau’s Massive Change conference. And I should also mention we have one of the best and smartest privacy commissioner (with a blog) in the world!
8. Terrence Sejnowski - “I have changed my mind about cortical neurons and now think that they are far more capable than we ever imagined.“
9. Nassim Taleb - The Irrelevance of “Probability” (author of The Black Swan)
10. Daniel Engber - It’s hard to perform ethical research on animals
11. Alan Kay - Vacuums Don’t Suck.
12. Leo Chalupa - Brain Plasticity and more
13. Marti Hearst - Natural Language processing
14. Helena Cronin - Why men are at the top - More dumbbells but more Nobels. A pretty good read.
15. James Geary - Neuroeconomics really explains human economic behavior
16. Bart Kosko - The Sample Mean vs. the Sample Median. (Quite statistical but very insightful.)
17. Karl Sabbagh - the views of the experts vs non-experts. quite a good read.
18. Irene Pepperberg - the fallacy of hypothesis testing. a bit technical but insightful
19. Tim O’Reilly - “social software”
20. David G. Myers - on psychological science
21. Robert Sapolsky - Adult brain making new neurons
22. John McCarthy - (AI pioneer, LISP inventor) Attitudes trump facts
23. Xeni Jardin - co-editor Boing Boing about online community
24. Linda Stone - on healthy breathing patterns
25. Daniel Kahneman - the sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
26. Danny Hillis - (He is just neat. not a great entry though.)
27. David Gelernter - (I just want to tag and remember David as people I think are smart (Bill Joy, Danny Hillis, Cliff Stoll) think David is smart.)