Category: ideas

While we tend to condemn clichés harshly, the scholar of rhetoric Ruth Amossy at Tel Aviv University has shown that they’re in fact crucial to the way we bond with and read other human beings. ‘How have you been?’ – ‘Not bad at all!’: in our daily interactions, clichés represent a communicative common ground, by avoiding the need to question or establish the premises of speech. They are a kind of a shared mental algorithm that facilitates efficient interaction and reaffirms social relationships. – Aeon

This idea is particularly prevalent when it comes to those works of art described as “narrative”: stories, novels, TV shows, movies, comics. We assume that works that depict characters in action over time must make us empathize with them, or as the saying goes, “walk a mile in their shoes.” And we assume that this is a good thing. Why? – New York Review of Books

UK psychologist and author Sandi Mann explores how embracing boredom and letting our minds wander can get us to step off the ever-accelerating hedonic treadmill, and might even encourage creativity. – Aeon

The major thing is that the Paris myth, in some sense, creates its own death through saturation of believers. The truly exceptional people that came to Paris pave the way for the rest of us, but, their being truly exceptional, in some way, is what made the Paris we chase in our minds what it was. – The Smart Set

Maybe. Experiments with some human-robot interactions show that mistake-making robots who apologize for themselves can spread flexibility throughout networks. “Groups with mistake-prone bots consistently outperformed groups containing bots that did not make mistakes. The bots helped the humans to help themselves.” – The Atlantic

So how’s the project, which Alex Poots was first approached about in 2014, going? It’s going OK: “Poots and his board have … doubled the scale of the Shed so that, when it opens this spring with a programme of original commissions including works by Steve McQueen and Björk, it will be in a multistorey glass complex where the largest performance space can accommodate up to 1,200 people. There will be rehearsal and lab spaces for emerging artists, a pop-up bookshop and a 20,000 sq ft outdoor plaza for huge events.” – The Observer (UK)

“Suppose you think, as I do, that knowing that something is the case (e.g. that the MMR vaccine is safe) requires being reasonably confident that it’s the case and also having the right to be confident. In that case, anything that effectively undermines my confidence or right to be confident is a threat to my knowledge. So, for example, getting me to doubt the safety of the MMR vaccine by spreading spurious but convincing stories about links between MMR and autism can prevent me from knowing that it’s safe.” 3AM Magazine

Nearly 70 years later, The Human Use of Human Beings has more to teach us humans than it did the first time around. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the book is that it introduces a large number of topics concerning human/machine interactions that are still of considerable relevance. Dark in tone, the book makes several predictions about disasters to come in the second half of the 20^th century, many of which are almost identical to predictions made today about the second half of the 21^st. – Slate

This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences. How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses? – MIT Technology Review