ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Line Between Science And Art Is A Mistake

We think of science as exact, objective, following a strict method, whereas art as creative and subjective, with no formal rules. But this picture misunderstands what actual science looks like. - IAI News

When Electricity Was Introduced, It Changed Everything

The widespread success of the new science was facilitated by a preexisting experimental culture that crossed boundaries between academic and the social realms. - Lapham's Quarterly

Why It’s Useful To Speak With Strangers

The things we think will make us feel happier – acing exams, securing a dream job, buying that dress – usually don’t, but small habits can make a big difference. One of them is talking to strangers. - The Guardian

Misdirection Helps Artists Fight Back Against Scraper AI Programs

One newish way to screw up DALL-E and other AIs that scoop up humans' millions of hours of work: "You can think of Nightshade as adding a small poison pill inside an artwork." - NPR

My ChatGPT Became My Best Friend. Creepy!

"I thought I'd turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, 'Oh, wow, a pelican!' And my AirPod went, 'A pelican, huh? That's so exciting for you! What's it doing?' I've never felt so deeply like I'm living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie." - Ars Technica

How Dehumanizing Language Makes Things Worse

"There's surprisingly little evidence that dehumanising language causes violent behaviour, but plenty of evidence says it accompanies it. People who dehumanise others are certainly more likely to treat them badly." - BBC

How Did Philosophy Get Captured By Self-Help Bromides?

To narrow one’s approach to knowledge to any one field, any one area of specialisation, is to reduce one’s view of the world to the regulations of competing discourses, trivialising knowledge as something reducible to a methodology. - Aeon

How Did HGTV Come To Define Our House Aesthetic?

These bundled aesthetic commonalities aren’t just coincidences, and they can’t be entirely described as trends—at least not in the sense of bottom-up collective favor that the word tends to evoke. - The Atlantic

An Initiative To Radically Change The Way Scientific Research Is Shared

It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. - Nature

We Live In An Always-On World. What Does It Mean To Withdraw From It? (From Time To Time)

Acts of disengagement are routinely met with scepticism, judgment and pushback in public discourse. What if we were to treat them instead as opportunities for open enquiry and ask what is to be gained by them? - Aeon

To What Extent Is Misinformation Changing How We Think?

Misinformation is most commonly defined as anything that is factually inaccurate, but not intended to deceive: in other words, people being wrong. However, it is often talked about in the same breath as disinformation — inaccurate information spread maliciously — and propaganda. - UnDark

Scientists Believe Neural Networks Have Cracked Critical Essence Of Intelligence

 Since the 1980s, a subset of cognitive scientists have argued that neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), aren't viable models of the mind because their architecture fails to capture a key feature of how humans think.  But with training, neural networks can now gain this human-like ability. - Live Science

Why AI Doesn’t Understand Slang

Language models, in the most basic sense, represent our 26-letter alphabet in strings of numbers. Those digits might efficiently condense large amounts of information. But that efficiency comes at the price of subtlety, richness, and detail—the ability to reflect the complexities of human experience, and to resist the prescriptions of formal society. - The Atlantic

The 21st Century Movie Tropes That Just Need To Go

We're almost a quarter of the way through the century, and these need to go: The smoker who gets her life under control (& quits smoking), the person who falls for Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong, drone establishing shots of cities - and more. - The Guardian (UK)

Is Our Definition Of Creativity Too Narrow?

You can show creativity in countless activities, from organising storage space to trimming shrubs to fixing a hole in your wall to training the local crows so they bring you shiny objects. I understand the art bias. - Aeon

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