Studies with creative writers and physicists reveal that about a fifth of their most important ideas occur when they’re mind-wandering, not focused on a specific task. This is why spending time in nature or simply gazing out of a window can enhance creativity. - Harvard Business Review
I would argue that climate change and advanced AI are the only two risks where parts of their probability curve include singularities where change is so fundamental that we cannot forecast beyond it. All other risks are a continuation of the status quo, to a greater or lesser extent. - 3 Quarks Daily
After all, who wouldn’t have enjoyed seeing The Bear face off against Shōgun, or The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki go up against True Detective’s Jodie Foster? - The New York Times
But “the creator of the Pulitzer prize-winning musical Hamilton said it may still be too soon after 2012's movie Brave, which is set in Scotland, for a Disney animation set in Wales.” (They are rather different countries, but … well.) - BBC
“When we learn something with other people—be it a college study group, a cooking class, or workplace learning—we encode the information more robustly in the brain and feel more motivated to act.” A virtual environment can substitute, but basically, humans learn better with each other. - Fast Company
I have come to believe it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks. - Wired
"It's strange that we don't still really know the answers to questions like when do children have a proper distinction between the past and the future, given that this seems to structure the entire way that we think about our lives as adults." - BBC
Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined groups—to varying levels of intelligence, which it defines as a biological quality shaped largely by our DNA. - LA Review of Books
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Kurzweil. “We are finally getting to the steep part of a fifty-year-old exponential trend…. Humanity’s millennia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint.” - The New Republic
The humanities, as it turns out, are pretty hard to kill—though the twentieth century made a good fist of it. Educational modernizers in England during the First World War, around the time of the Battle of the Somme, argued that classical education was responsible for Britain’s inability to beat the Germans. - First Things
The circumstances for studying philosophy in a college or university setting, democratised by the post-Second World War expansion of higher education, are in the midst of great change, if not dying out altogether. - Aeon
How should we create things? The word “should” isn’t quite right, since there’s no correct way to be creative; still, when you’re actually creating something, you have to answer the question definitively for yourself, with some urgency. - The New Yorker
Scholars around the world are concerned about the effects of an extreme audit culture in higher education, one in which researchers’ productivity is continually measured and, in the case of the REF, directly tied to research funding for institutions. - Nature
As of this summer, eleven streets in total have been transformed into seasonal pedestrian-only destinations, creating almost ten kilometres of walkable car-free surfaces across several boroughs. The experiment has proven so popular that it has drawn praise, and not a little astonishment, from visiting urban planners. - The Walrus
Novelist Tracy Chevalier: The middle ground "is where people (women!) make things and are not patronised for it. ‘Crafter’ … is being superseded by the vaguer but more muscular ‘maker.’ The Swedish have even merged the two concepts into one word: konsthantverk, or artcraft.”- The Guardian (UK)
