By adding all of these features, Google has effectively changed the experience from an explorative search environment to a platform designed around verification, replacing a process that enables learning and investigation with one that is more like a fact-checking service. - Wired
Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen. Many people are inclined to give somebody they trust a pass. - Hedgehog Review
“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” - MediaPost
“Yes, it’s important to examine people, but you work out what’s going on from the stories. And if people know you and trust you, and you give them time to talk, they give you gems of critically important medical information.” - The Guardian
For example, participants who read their options and made a selection on paper were significantly more likely to give money to charity, choose a healthy entrée, and opt for an educational book rather than something more entertaining. - Harvard Business Review
We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” - The New York Times
"Documentarian Ken Burns has called the institution an embodiment of the 'pursuit of happiness.' 'Happiness with a capital ‘H’ is about lifelong learning and the improvement of the brain, the heart, the body and the soul throughout one’s lifetime,'" he said. - Washington Post
Some might call it endless fixing, but whatever it is, digital copies mean the art can be changed or deleted at will. "If you only have a digital version, you don’t have a finite finished product. You’re renting a product from whatever service that you have." - Washington Post
"I started playing word games as a way to stop reading the news first thing in the morning. Death counts, infection rates, mass shootings, disasters on our overheating planet, and what could I do about it all? I’ve protested, voted, and written." - Nieman Lab
For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity and can cause them to harden their position. Here’s some of the research that explains why it’s natural to resist changing your mind – and how you can get better at making these shifts. - The Guardian
There is no controversy in saying that a single organism wants to remain alive. Even bacteria purposefully move toward where there is more sugar. But things get more complicated when we ask whether all of life shares a collective sense of purpose. - Big Think
Postmodern ideas have gained the status of absolute truths. Relativism, selectively appropriated into the language of both left and right politics, has metamorphosed into dogma. As oversimplification distorts communication, public trust in scientific fact has eroded. Could renewed ideas of objectivity be a way out? - Eurozine
Rubbing shoulders with strangers is considered both a pleasure and a pain of urban life. Density can be an endless source of social possibility, of chance encounters in city streets. - Aeon
Here’s the thing about the wisdom of crowds – it only applies when those individual decisions are reached independently. Once we start influencing each other’s decision, that wisdom disappears. - MediaPost
“Moral grandstanding” and “virtue signaling” are slurs. They are variations on the charge of being “woke”, “politically correct,” etc., going at least as far back as Tom Wolfe’s 1970 essay on “radical chic.” These are all ad hominems, attacking the person, not the argument or cause. - 3 Quarks Daily
