ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Why Storytelling Is A Critical Part Of Good Medicine

 “Yes, it’s important to examine people, but you work out what’s going on from the stories. And if people know you and trust you, and you give them time to talk, they give you gems of critically important medical information.” - The Guardian

Study: We Make More Virtuous Decisions When We Read On Paper

For example, participants who read their options and made a selection on paper were significantly more likely to give money to charity, choose a healthy entrée, and opt for an educational book rather than something more entertaining. - Harvard Business Review

The Purpose Of Learning, The Links To Creativity

We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” - The New York Times

The Venue Where Rushdie Was Stabbed Usually Reflects Calmly On A Century Plus Of The Life Of The Mind

"Documentarian Ken Burns has called the institution an embodiment of the 'pursuit of happiness.' 'Happiness with a capital ‘H’ is about lifelong learning and the improvement of the brain, the heart, the body and the soul throughout one’s lifetime,'" he said. - Washington Post

How Digital Content Leads Artists To Endless Tinkering

Some might call it endless fixing, but whatever it is, digital copies mean the art can be changed or deleted at will. "If you only have a digital version, you don’t have a finite finished product. You’re renting a product from whatever service that you have." - Washington Post

How Word Games Give Us A Sense Of Control In An Out Of Control World

"I started playing word games as a way to stop reading the news first thing in the morning. Death counts, infection rates, mass shootings, disasters on our overheating planet, and what could I do about it all? I’ve protested, voted, and written." - Nieman Lab

Why Facts Mostly Don’t Change People’s Minds

For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity and can cause them to harden their position. Here’s some of the research that explains why it’s natural to resist changing your mind – and how you can get better at making these shifts. - The Guardian

Does Life Have A Purpose?

There is no controversy in saying that a single organism wants to remain alive. Even bacteria purposefully move toward where there is more sugar. But things get more complicated when we ask whether all of life shares a collective sense of purpose. - Big Think

Post-Modernist Wong Turn? Maybe We Need To Redefine Reality…

Postmodern ideas have gained the status of absolute truths. Relativism, selectively appropriated into the language of both left and right politics, has metamorphosed into dogma. As oversimplification distorts communication, public trust in scientific fact has eroded. Could renewed ideas of objectivity be a way out? - Eurozine

Why People Are Attracted To The Density Of Urban Living

Rubbing shoulders with strangers is considered both a pleasure and a pain of urban life. Density can be an endless source of social possibility, of chance encounters in city streets. - Aeon

Does Social Media Negate The Wisdom Of Crowds?

Here’s the thing about the wisdom of crowds – it only applies when those individual decisions are reached independently. Once we start influencing each other’s decision, that wisdom disappears. - MediaPost

Moral Grandstanding? Virtue Signaling? So…

“Moral grandstanding” and “virtue signaling” are slurs. They are variations on the charge of being “woke”, “politically correct,” etc., going at least as far back as Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay on “radical chic.” These are all ad hominems, attacking the person, not the argument or cause. - 3 Quarks Daily

Are We All Just Living In An Artificial Simulation?

This idea is surprisingly popular among philosophers and even some scientists. Assume that in the far future, civilisations hugely more technically advanced than ours will be interested in running “ancestor simulations” of the sentient beings in their distant galactic past. - The Guardian

Our Brains Fill In Details Of Experience Based On Other Experiences

 If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone about an event you both participated in that left you feeling like one of you was delusional because your stories were so different, you might have a hint about how much your experiences have shaped the way you understand the world around you. - Nautilus

What If We Are The Ancients The Future Remembers?

Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in its most distant past. - The New...

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