For how long has science occurred outside the West? Is it fundamentally a Western export, a product of distinctly Western attitudes and values? - Boston Review
Gorsuch’s fairness question resonates right away. Why these debts and not others? Why them and not me? These are rhetorical questions, and they have a rhetorical purpose: to frame student loan forgiveness as a sucker’s game. - Slate
One of the most consequential developments of our moment is that the experiences that create sensory memories are disappearing even faster than temperatures are rising. - City Journal
Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region that processes visual signals, called the early visual cortex, and the images that people were viewing. - New Scientist
One of the first things I’d learned about optimization was that something is optimal if it is equal or preferable to any alternative. To optimize an experience, then, is to shepherd it toward the preferable. - Wired
There is little hope for meritocracy as a theory of distributive justice. The “playing field” isn’t level, there is an oversupply of talent and the methods for determining merit are often winner-take-all, the social determinants of merit often don’t line up with objective criteria of merit. - 3 Quarks Daily
The idea of ‘truth’ as something subjective may seem odd, but nevertheless it is clear how the notion of lived experience leads in this direction. - 3 Quarks Daily
The toys - but "the most desired lot of all was Raccacoonie, a raccoon puppet that features in one universe in the film where the raccoon is revealed to be helping a chef with his cooking, a reference to the Pixar film Ratatouille. Raccacoonie fetched US$90,000." - The Guardian (UK)
A massive new study shows that, at least for white-collar companies including advertising agencies and consulting firms, it's a good deal for employees and employers alike. Could the arts benefit as well? - Fast Company
"In a sense, Bing and Bard are finishing what Ask Jeeves started. What people want when they ask a question is for an all-knowing, machine-powered guide to confidently present them with the right answer in plain language, just as a reliable friend would." - The Atlantic
For a long time, psychologists saw personality as fixed throughout our lives. This has since been disproven – although personality is relatively stable, it’s far from set in stone. - Psyche
Hannah Arendt argues that while objectivity, as the view from nowhere, might be both an impossible and undesirable aim, there has been ever since Homer an achievable norm for the making of claims in public debate over matters of fact that can be established. - Hedgehog Review
Writers, someone once said, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. The whole point of the metaphor was to destabilize the notion of authorial agency by suggesting that literature is the product of unconscious processes that are essentially combinatorial. - N+1
In her view, we are often pushed around, one way or another, by the stuff we come into contact with on any given day. A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head. - The New...
Sometimes, the euphoria that accompanies epiphany gives way to disorientation, and self-transcendence can turn into self-deception. It took me years of wrong turns to realise that not all the transformations from awakening experiences point in the right direction. - Psyche
