More and more, findings in deep learning are inspiring new theories of how our brains work. Neural networks need to “dream” of weird, senseless examples to learn well. - Nautilus
The worry is that scientific processes have been undermined by perverse incentives to the point that it’s difficult to know what to believe. - London Review of Books
Just as your memory is a construction, so are your senses. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is the result of some combination of stuff outside and inside your head. - MIT Technology Review
For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. - The New Yorker
Other worlds and other possibilities aren’t just about kind of fantasy possibilities, but actual other worlds that exist alongside us now. And that can hopefully help make what we’re doing mean more and maybe make a difference in the lives of those around us. - The Conversation
It wasn’t so long ago that people were worried that automation would put them out of work. Ironically, instead, people chose to quit jobs they hated, and now companies are scrambling to automate to replace them. - 3 Quarks Daily
Randomness, like cards or dice, is unpredictable because we just don’t have the right information. Chaos is somewhere between random and predictable. A hallmark of chaotic systems is predictability in the short term that breaks down quickly over time, as in river rapids or ecosystems. - The Conversation
"The castle at the center of the park, homage to the glorious medieval years after the bubonic plague wound down, when fair maidens and knights vanquished mysterious evils while kings and queens conquered the farthest reaches of the known world with the Christian God behind them." - The Paris Review
“The big concern here is that, basically, news organizations are now willingly performing much more extreme acts of censorship of their own content than what is being done in the EU under legal mandate. For some reason, most of them don’t acknowledge that.” - CJR
The true challenge is not to enumerate the risk, but to live with it; to stake out the resilient middle ground between denying danger altogether and finding nothing but danger everywhere. - Edward Snowden
"To what extent does the artistic institutional system become distanced from primary creativity? The system of scientific institutions is no less problematic. Sooner or later it will reflect its own institutional logic more than the needs of society." - Designisso
The current emphasis on diversity and inclusivity, however warranted, endangers or distorts a cultural canon that we cannot (in fact, must not) wholly jettison. Indeed, the canon is newly pertinent. - American Purpose
Musical genres have long had a peculiar imaginative power and participatory quality. They aren’t just labels imposed by an industry; they’re shaped by passions and arguments, love and disgust, allegiances and disavowals. - The Atlantic
When Hollywood technicians debated how to make movies sound natural, they were unwittingly following a trail blazed by 18th-century architects, who spent decades working out the acoustic conventions of modern theatres. - Aeon
