Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? – Pacific Standard
Category: ideas
A Life Without Boredom: The War For Your Attention
The war for your attention is a zero-sum game. If Netflix retains four hours of your day, that’s four hours HBO can’t get. The way for companies to remain competitive is to ensure a never-ending stream of content, which is how we reached the era of content overload. This is how boredom, as a state of existence, died. – OneZero
They Told Us The Digital Revolution Would Make Our Lives Better. It Hasn’t Turned Out That Way
Douglas Rushkoff: “In some ways, we’re all hostage to our technologies, or we’re simply at the mercy of this system. We’re being steamrolled by our devices, and the result is a kind of emotional slavery. And we know that billions of dollars are going into applying everything, every nasty trick we know about behavioral finance, to the digital realm.” – Vox
The Internet Seems To Have Killed Many Things, And You Can Now Add Buffets To The List
At least this one isn’t just Millennials’ fault. But seriously, buffets used to dot the landscape in the United States. No longer. “Yelp and Google Reviews and TripAdvisor and all of their ilk could be partially responsible for the demise of buffets. When things go awry — be it food poisoning or oyster crackers — a record is online instantly. There are no secrets.” – Vox
Turns Out The World Isn’t As Random As We Thought
Crickets? Fireflies? Metronomes … and clapping: “Objects with rhythm naturally synchronize.” OK, but so what? Well, scientists are finding real-world applications of abstruse mathematical theories – for instance, “rules about how to stabilize the synchronization of power grids and more stably integrate the U.S. grid with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind.” – Quanta Magazine
A History Of The Color Blue (Yes, There Is One)
Blue was once little-known in the Western palette. Homer’s sea was “wine dark”; blue would not be used as water’s color until the seventeenth century. It has evolved from its original association with warmth, heat, barbarism, and the creatures of the underworld, to its current association with calm, peace, and reverie. – Claremont Review of Books
The Battle Between What You Believe And What You See
Work on artificial intelligence suggests that our brains engage in constant battles between what we think we know versus what we actually experience. It’s a kind of constant skepticism that informs our consciousness. – Aeon
Will Non-Physicists Ever Be Able To Intuitively Understand The Connection Between Space And Time?
Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli thinks that “counterintuitive phenomena — for example, of time moving slower for faster travelers — will, slowly, become intuitive. ‘It has happened with the fact that the Earth is a sphere (clarified two millennia ago) and the fact that it spins (clarified a few centuries ago). At first these were extremely counterintuitive ideas; nowadays we accept them as comprehensible. But it takes time.'” – Nautilus
Why The Slowpoke In Front Of You On The Sidewalk Or In The Checkout Line Drives You Nuts
Blame evolution. “Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act. But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough — or rewarded at all.” – Nautilus
A University Course In Bullshit Detection (Because Bullshit Really Is Everywhere)
“Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World” at the University of Washington “is not dedicated to teaching students that Fox News promotes ‘fake news or that National Enquirer headlines are fallacious. Instead, the class operates under the assumption that the structures through which today’s endless information comes to the consumer — algorithms, data graphics, info analytics, peer-reviewed publications — are in many ways as full of bullshit as the fake news we easily recognize as bogus.” – Pacific Standard