Public philosophy isn’t simply popularizing philosophical ideas (though it typically involves that). It is more often a matter of instigating a kind of thinking, a kind of thinking that can be disorienting, heretical, and frustrating. - 3 Quarks Daily
Human consciousness depends on a body that developed through evolution. If we want to create AI that is conscious in the same way we are, should we be building it in something like the way that evolution built us? - Commonweal
If you want to know how young people are experiencing the pandemic, the assault on the Capitol Building in January, vaccinations, and more, what better to do than ask? A project called Dispatches from Quarantine "launched in April 2020, and those questions were explored and answered through all sorts of mediums — like the stringing of words, the strokes of...
What’s different today is the speed, scope and scale of misinformation, enabled by technology. Online media has given voice to previously marginalised groups, including peddlers of untruth, and has supercharged the tools of deception at their disposal. The transmission of falsehoods now spans a viral cycle in which AI, professional trolls and our own content-sharing activities help to proliferate...
"As it turns out, there was never much in the literature to support either of the two ideas that launched grit on its way: that it was more useful than conscientiousness and that it seriously outperformed “traditional” measures of cognitive or, in the context of military training, physical performance." - Nautilus
One of the distinctive features of my cognition is that not only do I think with sound and music; I also don’t think in images during my waking hours (although I dream vividly and visually at night). This lack of visual imagery is known as aphantasia, partial in my case. - Aeon
Introduced in 1842, the US design patent law saw just 14 designs registered in its first year, including a typeface, a bathtub and a “corpse preserver”. By 1930, the patent office was issuing 3,000 design patents a year, and 6,500 by 1941, a figure that wasn’t exceeded until 1989. That number has now mushroomed to around 35,000 – good...
"As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in radical ways by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society." - The Conversation
"Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas. We are unable to change our minds or to persuade others. We are not even in a position to form our views in thoughtful, disinterested ways. But there may yet be a way out. Precisely by codifying and accelerating the...
Hawking was no Newton. He said so himself. At a White House event in 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton read a question from the Internet: “How does it feel to be compared to Einstein and Newton?” He replied, “I think to compare me to Newton and Einstein is media hype.” Then again, as Charles Seife demonstrates in Hawking Hawking,...
Despite what every podcast host says (is forced to say?) and what your author friends tell you, it's not five-star reviews. Those are literally a dime a dozen. This is a different appeal, according to a study, and it explains why people crying about books on TikTok can juice those books' sales. - Fast Company
We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public...
Blockchains may radically transform many facets of business life, but they’re a tool particularly well suited for collaborations. Put simply, blockchains are digital ledgers where several people have joint control over the shared information — a feature that makes them ideal for situations where trust and information sharing are important. The technical design of blockchains makes it virtually impossible...
"Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It is still common for people to talk of “guilty” cultural pleasures—TV, dance music—about which no one has felt guilty in decades, and to apologize for them with an enthusiasm that looks a lot like pride. But the pretense of guilt is merely there to increase our pleasure; it adds...
With the rise of artificial intelligence, machine programming, and the ever more rapid automation of technical skills, many companies are seeking just the creative and humanist thinking that emerges from a study of the liberal arts. - Forbes
