ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

To Fight Disinformation, We Have To Understand Why It Works

These creators understand that we are a species of storytellers, not rational actors. To speak to our irrationality, and tell these stories, they adopt an approach that has been tried and tested throughout history. - Wired

Science Publishing Has A Big Photoshop Problem

By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. - The New York Times

Seen It Before: Shakespeare Plays That Apply To The UK’s Current Political Situation

Questions of moral authority, the right to rule and the nature of a good leader are recurring themes in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Recent political events could almost be ripped from the pages of these four plays. - The Conversation

“Canceling” Our little Piece Of The World Feels Existential (But It’s Not)

We all need to be able to take a step back and realize that just because we feel something disproportionately, it doesn't mean that it exists disproportionately, in reality. In reality, none of the changes people are being asked to make to make things more equitable are actually all that painful. - Wonkette

Politics In Art – There Really Is A Role

It seems reasonable to pose the question of art’s relation to politics in the context of the specific crisis that democracy seems to have entered within the past 10 years or so. The dominant intellectual responses to this crisis have, if anything, pushed the arts further outside the sphere of political relevance. - Aeon

The Art Of Persuasion (As Opposed To Coercion)

At the heart of such suspicion is the assumption that persuasion is to be understood as an act done by someone to someone. One party is active, the other party is passive. - Psyche

Bored By Music? TV? Movies? It’s Not Because There’s Nothing Good. You Need A Strategy

Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.” - The New Yorker

Feeling Trapped By The Nonbinary Gender Brand

We got stuck with this particular version of nonbinary identity—singularly focused on pronouns, clumsy corporate integration, and iconoclastic affect—because nonbinary identity has become a brand. It is both a way of being in the world and an empty signifier. - The Baffler

Nope, Sorry. Cooperation Isn’t Always A Good Thing

We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. - The Guardian

Calculating The Moral Value Of The Distant Future

Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how the technical tools used to predict and quantify those consequences could be a poor fit for a book of applied ethics. - City Journal

Fear Of Cancel Culture Makes Me Wonder…

The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that assumption? - The Atlantic

Remote Work Is Here To Stay

"The point isn’t that there’s something wrong with working from an office. It’s that there’s something right about working from home." Now, what does this mean for the arts? - The New York Times

Dungeons And Dragons, But Make It Mental Health

Because so many people are used to using tabletop role-playing games, some therapists have decided to adapt the tools of the games. - Wired

When The Stories We Tell About History Change… An Existential Crisis

Though the true past is fixed and unrevisable, stories about that past are not. Palaeontologists understand these stories as theories, but their audiences often experience them in the same ways they would experience fictional tales – as narratives that shift with mood and politics and time.  - Aeon

What Scientists Are Learning About Language From The Grammar Of Artificial Intelligence

The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be. - The Conversation

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