The sense of wonder we get when looking at a star-studded sky is a powerful one, even today an intense and even emotional experience, connecting us perhaps with an echo of that ancient amazement shared by thousands of generations before us. But perhaps too this feeling is not enough to understand the origin of this deep-seated, urgent, primordial, almost...
Turns out this Science entity doesn’t have a single voice, and in many cases hearing what it has to say isn’t straightforward. As intellectual historian Andrew Jewett notes at the end of Science under Fire, “Such blanket injunctions to place our trust in science, or religion, or the humanities, or any other broad framework, offer remarkably little guidance on...
The example of Socrates has always been both an inspiration and a warning. Heterodox gadflies tend to get swatted. In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. - Claremont Review of Books
Today affect-recognition tools can be found in national-security systems and at airports, in education and hiring start-ups, in software that purports to detect psychiatric illness and policing programs that claim to predict violence. The claim that a person’s interior state can be accurately assessed by analyzing that person’s face is premised on shaky evidence. - The Atlantic
It is obvious that “not everyone is born with the same academic gifts,” deBoer writes, but among teachers and educational officials there is a “prohibition against talking plainly about differences in academic talent.” The “cult of smart”—deBoer defines his title on page five—is “the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of...
"Systemic polarization, as it is usually told, is a basically symmetrical story. Polarization arises from a social dynamic that afflicts almost everybody. The social forces at play—social mobility, online media bubbles, algorithmic filtering—are pervasive, and their effect is nearly universal. Like-minded individuals naturally clump together and end up boosting each others’ confidence unreasonably. Conservatives and progressives are approximately as...
A biographer says of Natalie Barney and her wealthy, artistic circle: "They were destined, if you like, to break away. I think of modernism as this break from old ways of writing, old ways of seeing, and old ways of being. Of course, to be lesbian or to be gay, you have to break away because look at the...
Who dominates in the (hoped-for, perhaps arriving) after-COVID era will affect theatre, music, dance, and other performing arts. Psychology professor Laurie Santos: "The pandemic has taught us that there are negotiable things that we can subtract from our schedules, ... and some of those subtractions feel good." - The Atlantic
Part of what seems awry with contemporary fitness culture is its artifice, symptomatic of the wrongness of modernity, prior to which, one imagines, real life was excessively challenging and exercise blissfully inadvertent. Condemned to an “active” lifestyle, pre-modern humans would surely never have dreamed of inventing excuses to expend extra energy for the sake of it. - New Statesman
"For me, as a psychologist with a special interest and expertise in the arts, our fascination with art raises two long-standing and fundamental questions, ones that have engaged philosophers, psychologists and art lovers. First, why are we so drawn to works of art? For their beauty, of course, but that can’t be all, as the thought-experiments above show us....
University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein popularized the term “nudge” in 2008, but due to recent advances in AI and machine learning, algorithmic nudging is much more powerful than its non-algorithmic counterpart. With so much data about workers’ behavioral patterns at their fingertips, companies can now develop personalized strategies for changing individuals’...
“Our research shows breaks are important, not just to make us less exhausted by the end of the day, but to actually improve our ability to focus and engage while in those meetings,” says Michael Bohan, senior director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering group, who oversaw the project. - Microsoft Research
"The trend of people celebrating and posting photos of themselves or loved ones receiving the vaccine has been far more effective than any attempt to disprove a baseless claim about Bill Gates or 5G mobile technology. In the attention economy that governs tech platforms, drowning out is a better strategy than rebuttal." - Big Think
The year was terrible due to cataclysmic eruptions that blocked out the sun and the spread of the plague. It ushered in the coldest decade in thousands of years and started a century of economic devastation. - Big Think
