"People become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems." - The New...
"My own favoured explanation, in The Decadent Society, is adapted from the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s arguments about how cultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: the problem for the Western world is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the baby boomers (and the pre-boomer innovators they followed) were too...
Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games. How much pure hucksterism is involved on the part of the cultural arbiters, as opposed to astute positioning of worthy work so that it will thrive in the market, can be hard to tell. - The Atlantic
“Some glitches are mild, like an Alexa that randomly giggles (or wakes you in the middle of the night, as happened to one of us), or an iPhone that auto-corrects what was meant as ‘Happy Birthday, dear Theodore’ into ‘Happy Birthday, dead Theodore. But others—like algorithms that promote fake news or bias against job applicants—can be serious problems.” -...
A study identifies a negative personality trait they call TIV or Tendency toward Interpersonal Victimhood. People who score high on a TIV test have an “enduring feeling that the self is a victim in different kinds of interpersonal relationships,” they write. - Nautilus
The American Psychological Association has reported that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% in productivity. Why is the cost of multitasking so high? Because our brains were never meant to multitask in the first place. - Fast Company
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom believed so. "While conservation almost always carries at least some short-term costs, researchers have found that many community-based conservation projects reduce those costs and, over time, deliver significant benefits to their human participants, tangible and intangible alike." - Aeon
In short, disgust may not derive from a simple aversion to harmful substances but from a tension between the desire to explore and consume new things and the dangers of doing so. - Nautilus
The Oscar-nominated short film A Love Song for Latasha, says filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison, was one way of figuring how to deal with the aftermath of a violent death, from the people who best knew the murdered teen. "So often we hear from elders, adults, or community activists, and I’m always really curious as to how our children process...
"Complete rejection of expertise not only makes little epistemic sense (for there is no doubt that expertise exists); the complexities of the modern state make trust in others’ expertise indispensable. On the other hand, unqualified deference to those in positions of power and privilege vitiates the basic principles of democracy." - Boston Review
"Everyone else might be taken, but the effort to be ourselves is the surest path to being just like everyone else, especially in the context of a highly commodified and surveilled culture where we always seem to be on stage. If some person or organisation claims to be concerned with authenticity, you can be almost certain that they’re conformist...
The sense of wonder we get when looking at a star-studded sky is a powerful one, even today an intense and even emotional experience, connecting us perhaps with an echo of that ancient amazement shared by thousands of generations before us. But perhaps too this feeling is not enough to understand the origin of this deep-seated, urgent, primordial, almost...
Turns out this Science entity doesn’t have a single voice, and in many cases hearing what it has to say isn’t straightforward. As intellectual historian Andrew Jewett notes at the end of Science under Fire, “Such blanket injunctions to place our trust in science, or religion, or the humanities, or any other broad framework, offer remarkably little guidance on...
The example of Socrates has always been both an inspiration and a warning. Heterodox gadflies tend to get swatted. In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. - Claremont Review of Books
Today affect-recognition tools can be found in national-security systems and at airports, in education and hiring start-ups, in software that purports to detect psychiatric illness and policing programs that claim to predict violence. The claim that a person’s interior state can be accurately assessed by analyzing that person’s face is premised on shaky evidence. - The Atlantic
