"Systemic polarization, as it is usually told, is a basically symmetrical story. Polarization arises from a social dynamic that afflicts almost everybody. The social forces at play—social mobility, online media bubbles, algorithmic filtering—are pervasive, and their effect is nearly universal. Like-minded individuals naturally clump together and end up boosting each others’ confidence unreasonably. Conservatives and progressives are approximately as...
A biographer says of Natalie Barney and her wealthy, artistic circle: "They were destined, if you like, to break away. I think of modernism as this break from old ways of writing, old ways of seeing, and old ways of being. Of course, to be lesbian or to be gay, you have to break away because look at the...
Who dominates in the (hoped-for, perhaps arriving) after-COVID era will affect theatre, music, dance, and other performing arts. Psychology professor Laurie Santos: "The pandemic has taught us that there are negotiable things that we can subtract from our schedules, ... and some of those subtractions feel good." - The Atlantic
Part of what seems awry with contemporary fitness culture is its artifice, symptomatic of the wrongness of modernity, prior to which, one imagines, real life was excessively challenging and exercise blissfully inadvertent. Condemned to an “active” lifestyle, pre-modern humans would surely never have dreamed of inventing excuses to expend extra energy for the sake of it. - New Statesman
"For me, as a psychologist with a special interest and expertise in the arts, our fascination with art raises two long-standing and fundamental questions, ones that have engaged philosophers, psychologists and art lovers. First, why are we so drawn to works of art? For their beauty, of course, but that can’t be all, as the thought-experiments above show us....
University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein popularized the term “nudge” in 2008, but due to recent advances in AI and machine learning, algorithmic nudging is much more powerful than its non-algorithmic counterpart. With so much data about workers’ behavioral patterns at their fingertips, companies can now develop personalized strategies for changing individuals’...
“Our research shows breaks are important, not just to make us less exhausted by the end of the day, but to actually improve our ability to focus and engage while in those meetings,” says Michael Bohan, senior director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering group, who oversaw the project. - Microsoft Research
"The trend of people celebrating and posting photos of themselves or loved ones receiving the vaccine has been far more effective than any attempt to disprove a baseless claim about Bill Gates or 5G mobile technology. In the attention economy that governs tech platforms, drowning out is a better strategy than rebuttal." - Big Think
The year was terrible due to cataclysmic eruptions that blocked out the sun and the spread of the plague. It ushered in the coldest decade in thousands of years and started a century of economic devastation. - Big Think
What most comes across is the protean creativity of the period, the globe-spanning connections that promoted it, and Menand’s mastery of large slices of it. “People cared. Ideas mattered,” Louis Menand writes. “People believed in liberty, and thought it really meant something.” It would be silly to say that people no longer care about such things, but perhaps they...
On your path to becoming an intellectual in Silicon Valley, understanding these two lessons—the Peter Principles, we’ll call them, since that adds nothing to the conversation but sounds sophisticated—will be key to your success. First, the point of your interventions in the public sphere is not to “win” any “argument,” nor to attract new adherents or convince neutrals of...
As the risks reduce and the research possibilities open up, then it is easy to imagine how we could slip, unnoticing, from thinking the recording of neurons in a healthy human brain is unimaginable to thinking it is something that needs doing to further our understanding of ourselves. Sooner than we thought, we will face a deep ethical challenge,...
"For all sorts of understandable reasons, we have become very wary of public and social norms. We are conscious of the legacy of appealing to such supposed norms in the context of gender and sexuality, conscious also of the persistent marginalising of persons who are neurologically atypical or living with learning challenges. The truth, however, is that without some...
"What we are primarily focusing on at Time is how NFTs relate to subscriptions, memberships, and access to unique experiences, which would allow us to drive recurring revenue streams, rather than one-time payments. A larger, longer-term opportunity is using blockchain technology alongside these tokens.” - Vanity Fair
