For certain kinds of tasks—playing chess, detecting tumors—artificial intelligence can rival or surpass human thinking. But the broader world presents endless unforeseen circumstances, and there A.I. often stumbles. - The New Yorker
Virtue signalling is more nuanced and more interesting than the picture painted by conventional wisdom and political rhetoric. As it turns out, there are bad and good things about virtue signalling – but probably not for the reasons you think. - Aeon
These days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities. The American Community Life Survey reported last year that only 25 percent of people living in areas with “very high” amenity access actually socialize with strangers at least once a week. - The Atlantic
Computer scientists had been trying to coax machines to write verse since at least the 1960s, and Racter was a singular example of how something mindless could create something meaningful. Indeed, it led the avant-garde poet Christian Bök to wonder if humans were needed to produce literature at all. - New Criterion
Yes, but it won't be top-down. "Factchecking outfits may do good work, but they are missing a crucial component: the power of the crowd. Because, as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues." - The Guardian (UK)
Or, more likely, has April Fool's Day ruined the internet? "People, us included, get so easily hoodwinked, and ... this has led us to a place where we start to suspect that nothing online is real." - Slate
The test is still a problem, but not having it as a factor in admissions only harmed lower-income students in college admissions. How? "The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It reveals them." - The Atlantic
“Goblin mode” is taking the current pandemic-ridden world by storm. This state of being is defined by behaviours that feel reminiscent of deep lockdown days – never getting out of bed, never changing into real clothes, grazing from tins or packets instead of cooking... - The Conversation
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Melvin Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit—used for digital data storage today—is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” - Popular Mechanics
We propose that authenticity is a feeling that people interpret as a sign that what they are doing in the moment aligns with their true self. - The Conversation
Jefferson’s Enlightenment contemporaries fully understood. They accepted happiness as our greatest good. But only in theory. And theory, as they were often quick to insist, was not practice. - The American Scholar
“We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full range of academic work.” - 3 Quarks Daily
There is no one past. There are countless pasts. Mine. Yours. The billions, or at least millions, of people who were alive at any given moment. The great, great majority of them never meeting or even knowing of each other, having no discernible influence on each other. - 3 Quarks Daily
The crisis really heats up when the algorithm’s structuring power bends back upon us and constrains us into thinking of ourselves as if we were algorithmic systems. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Part of the reason people are attracted to religion is that its rituals – the standing, sitting and kneeling in unison, the singing, the listening to emotionally rousing sermons – trigger the brain’s endorphin system. - The Guardian
