Category: ideas

Asking a troll to define trolling is a bit like asking a terrorist to define terrorism. The question backfires; it invites prevarication and propaganda. But in the past few years, an answer has become increasingly necessary—and elusive. Without one, can we clearly distinguish teasing from hate speech? – Wired

Tenured professors, perhaps? This article thinks so. “As far back as 1972, The New York Times reported that the [American Historical Association] was ‘facing open discontent in its ranks as a result of the recession, academic budget trimming and an oversupply of trained historians,’ which engendered a ‘job crisis’ that showed little sign of abating. Nevertheless, for nearly a half-century, historians have failed to organize to halt the disappearance of positions. This must now change.”  – The Chronicle of Higher Education

You’d think an ill-conceived, badly written mini-screed might not be worthy of worry for critics. You’d be wrong – dangerously so, when it comes to stars “taking on” the low-paid people who cover their art. Check out this week’s Dumpster fire of a screed, for instance: “Using the hard-earned clout of the Me Too movement to deflect critique of the fashion-celebrity industrial complex is not a feminist crusade.” – HuffPost

Although still a long way from restoring natural speech, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have generated intelligible sentences from the thoughts of people without speech difficulties. – Scientific American

The tech is now so good, it can impersonate voices you know. “The main takeaway is that human brains may not be able to distinguish a speaker’s voice from its morphed version, which means that people would be susceptible to voice impersonation attacks at a fundamental biological level.”  – The Daily Beast

“Our very attempts to stave off disaster by introducing safety systems ultimately increases the overall complexity of the systems, ensuring that some unpredictable outcome will rear its ugly head no matter what. Complicated human-machine systems might surprise us with outcomes more favorable than we have any reason to expect. They also might shock us with catastrophe.” – The Atlantic

It occurred to historian Jamie Kreiner that the monks she studied spent a lot of their time trying to figure out how to stay focused. And maybe their advice might be useful to the present-day world full of digital distraction. – Aeon

“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” New York Review of Books

Influence was worrisome long before it was digital. The word “influence” appears in a quarter of William Shakespeare’s plays, in which the condition of being influenced is rarely happy or dignified. Almost without exception, Shakespeare gives influence a darkly astrological cast. – The New Yorker