Ideas

It’s been … a lot. “It is a generation-defining cataclysm, but for many of us the day-to-day reality has been lonely, even dull. It is a call to action, but the most useful thing most of us can do is stay at home. Covid-19 is a disease that attacks the lungs, but it has also worsened mental health while causing a drastic reduction in patients seeking care for depression, self-harm, eating disorders and anxiety.” – The Guardian (UK)

The ways that each culture defines gender norms and structures are unique. Historically, the U.S. enforced a rigid gender binary to support its relentless growth, eliminating any traces of those that threatened its perception of normalcy. Prior to colonization, many Indigenous cultures valued queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people as integral members of society. – Inside Design

For almost any abstract notion, some philosopher has wondered what it really is. Yet, despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade. – Aeon

“The debate isn’t about whether there’s been racism; it’s about what racism has meant and what it’s done to America. Is it something that’s been progressively overcome as we move toward fulfilling our national ideals, or is it something that’s been a constant force in society, making society itself irredeemably racist?” – Christian Science Monitor

The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future. – Boston Review

Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual person. – The New York Times

“In the prevailing scientific worldview, counterfactual properties of physical systems are unfairly regarded as second-class citizens, or even excluded altogether. Why? It is because of a deep misconception, which, paradoxically, originated within my own field, theoretical physics. The misconception is that once you have specified everything that exists in the physical world and what happens to it—all the actual stuff—then you have explained everything that can be explained. Does that sound indisputable?” – Nautilus

For the first time, Timothy Morton wrote, we had become aware that “nonhuman beings” were “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking.” The nonhuman beings Morton had in mind weren’t computers or space aliens but a particular group of objects that were “massively distributed in time and space.” Morton called them “hyperobjects.” – The New Yorker

“In the past, statistical analysis at this scale was limited by the complexity of the task and the lack of mathematical and computational tools. The triumph of modern machine learning lies in developing increasingly sophisticated, efficient, and data-driven computational methods for doing such analysis. “But is this AI?” ask the skeptics. It is too narrow, too specialized, too dependent on data and statistics.” – 3 Quarks Daily

There is the possibility that technology can come to influence or reflect our values in ways that are beyond our control. For example, wearable technologies (such as fitness trackers or smart watches) provide us with a stream of biometric information. This information changes the way in which we experience ourselves and the world around us. – 3 Quarks Daily

“For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of our electronics. And we’re wandering around with an early primary school level of knowledge about it.” Noema Magazine

Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. – Scientific American

When Twitch entered the picture 10 years ago, most creators – writers, artists, makers, eaters of food on YouTube – weren’t yet earning money through digital patronage. That has changed, and dramatically. Co-founder Justin Kan says “he and his cofounders spent years ruminating on how to make people interact online and give each other money. Should they have a sidebar chatroom? (Yes.) Emotes? (Definitely.) Career potential? (Yes.) The end goal wasn’t live video; it was the creator economy. Subscribing to people doing things.” – Wired

If you want to be healthier and happier, that is. “Can’t we stop succeeding for just one moment? Cease trying to be exceptional at something? The answer is yes, but to do so you must embrace your inner amateur.” – Psyche

Humans have probably changed dog genes in this arena. A new study shows that “even 8-week-old puppies with little exposure to humans can understand pointing and show sophisticated levels of social cognition in other tests. On top of that, the study found that each fluffball’s genetic makeup was a strong predictor of its ability to follow a pointed finger to a hidden treat as well as the pup’s tendency to pay attention to human faces.” – Smithsonian

Precise stimulation may be able to retrieve vanished memories from where they’re encoded – and create fake memories as well. – LitHub

You can already see a divide in the literature – positive stories about people with ALS or locked-in syndrome learning to use neural transmitters to control movement; negative stories about the threat of law enforcement “reading” our intentions before we do. It’s the same tech, so what’s the real story? – Three Quarks Daily

It goes way – way – beyond dopamine. “You could say that dopamine is to happiness what petrol is to a car; it’s an integral part of making it work, but if you were to literally fill your car with petrol, to the point where it’s leaking out the windows, that wouldn’t help anyone.” – Psyche

The facts just don’t bear it out. “It’s questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians.” Perhaps one conclusion is that classifications like “the Renaissance” are not great mechanisms for understanding the world of ideas, or the historical world either. – Aeon

Or else it’s something else. But it’s no mere city. “Los Angeles fits the city-state frame well, certainly better than it does a lot of other possibilities—if we update the model a bit. In 2010, Forbes suggested that if the criteria for a place to be considered a city-state were modernized for the 21st century, certain global capitals might qualify thanks to a few key features: a big port to sustain trade; investors from overseas; money laundering; international museums worth visiting; multiple languages spoken in good restaurants serving alcohol; and an ambition to host the World Cup.” Check, check, check, check, check, and check. – The Atlantic

Eataly is not actually Italy, despite the advertising tagline. “Eataly celebrates agricultural life, but its urban stores feel miles away from a rural idyll. It champions hyper-local produce, while being wedded, not least through its name, to the idea of a national cuisine. Eataly presents itself as the whole nation in microcosm; the best of Italian cuisine, all conveniently collected under one roof – yet even if such a thing as the ‘essence’ of a nation or its cuisine existed, it would be impossible to encapsulate it in miniature.” – Vittles

This is an entirely new concept for many researchers. “For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep’s connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people’s daily experience attest to human sleep’s connection to the brain. But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged.” – Wired

Are there biological or other scientific causes for our moral beliefs? If so, how does that affect our moral beliefs and choices? It’s a bit complex: “Our evolutionary conditioning might have made it impossible for us to acquire knowledge of objective moral truths, even if they exist. The other is that our evolved psychology might make it impossible in any case for us to live according to objective moral standards.” – Nautilus

Here’s the dirty little secret that few of my fellow economics professors will admit: As those “perfect” research papers have grown longer, they have also become less relevant. Fewer people — including academics — read them carefully or are influenced by them when it comes to policy. – Bloomberg

“Despite the often blood-soaked history of the use of the term ‘magic’, we must remember that Western history is filled with thinkers who have defended its honour as good natural science – a tried-and-true technology for harnessing interactions between minds and bodies, human and otherwise. And their empirical claims were never tested more than during the centuries of plague.” – Psyche