IDEAS

What if it’s degrading our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately? - Vox

David Brooks: "These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue." - The Atlantic

It is not at all difficult to find books on the broad scope of human knowledge written by authors who really know nothing other than that there are other people who know a lot about many separate things. - 3 Quarks Daily

“The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies—the whole industry,” as Zuckerberg put it. “You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet.” - Vice

Sociology suggests that pundits and policy makers have been looking at vaccine refusal all wrong: It’s not an individual problem, but a social one. - The Atlantic

"As fallible as human transmission can be, the fact that our mistakes in transmitting cultural information occur in systematic and directed ways, rather than purely randomly, is opening a new pathway to understanding continuity and change within the field of cultural evolution." - Nautilus

And, like old Dutch memento mori paintings, the forum lets people talk about something that happened to an awful lot of people in 2020 and 2021 - death. - Boston Globe

That depends on when you ask them. (And yes, that has a bearing on the lives of the rest of us as well.) - The Atlantic

The launch of these NFTs is the latest chapter in a long and complex history of non-human animals in the art world. - The Conversation

To perceive the outside world, our brain combines signals entering our brains through our eyes with what we expect the world to look like based on our past experiences. This means that our perception of the outside world is strongly influenced by what we believe. - Nautilus

When online surveyor YouGov conducted a survey asking over 8,000 US adults, “Do you believe that the Earth is round or flat?,” only 84 percent of respondents felt certain that the Earth is round. - LitHub

As the Blitz and other collective crises have taught us, resilience is not a given and has to be managed with an understanding of peoples’ fears and wishes, including their need for connectedness. - Psyche

Even our most mundane habitual routines actually display a great deal of intelligence. Indeed, they are often intelligently context-sensitive and flexible in such a way as can support and structure our goals and projects. - Psyche

There are only three such impulses: greed, self-defense, and ideas or emotions. - The Nation

Any question, any debate must be formulated. How and whether the question can be resolved is contingent on the way it is formulated. - 3 Quarks Daily