Category: ideas

The ideal of super-smart people using those super smarts to create disruption for the betterment of all, or as Steve Jobs once put it, engineers working, quote, “to solve most of humankind’s problems.” He said that more than 20 years ago. There’s been a lot of history since then. There’s been a lot of money made, too, but also there’s been the emergence of certain kinds of problems that are only possible because of technology. – Wired

Peter Galison: “The general project that I’m working on is about the self and technology—what we understand by the self and how it’s changed over time. My sense is that the self is not a universal and purely abstract thing that you’re going to get at through a philosophy of principles.” – Edge

“We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.” – Edge

A revolutionary, and now widely accepted, countermodel to Freud’s scheme goes by the term “predictive mind.” The theory comes in different flavors, but overall it holds that automatic processes play a central role in the mind, allowing us to predict events quickly and accurately as they arise. Learning, experience and consciousness constantly improve our implicit, or unconscious, predictions, and we take note of events only when the predictions fail.  – Scientific American

Philosopher Tim Sommers makes the case that, “in general, it’s very hard to not involve yourself in some kind of ‘performative contradiction’ – where what you do contradicts what you say – when you try to disavow free will.” — 3 Quarks Daily

The researchers found that both IQ and emotional intelligence were independently correlated with well-being. IQ was positively correlated with personal relationships, self-acceptance, personal growth, mastery, and purpose in life. Emotional intelligence was correlated with the same well-being measures, but was additionally related to a sense of autonomy in life. – Scientific American

A series of laws passed in California this year raise a new possibility: that individual US states will splinter off into their own versions of the internet. In July, California passed a privacy law, similar to the European Union’s policies, that will give users more control about the data companies collect about them. Governor Jerry Brown followed by signing a net neutrality law in late September meant to replace federal rules banning broadband internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful content, as well as a law that requires bots to identify themselves if they promote sales or try to influence an election. – Wired

Every person has two choices for how to cope with any aspect of society that is uncomfortable: act to change it, or surrender. Miseducation is the art of teaching people to surrender. To be miseducated, as Carter Woodson had it, is not merely to be poorly educated, although that’s often a byproduct. Miseducation is a deeper evil, one that arises whenever an intrinsic trait, such as sexuality or ethnic heritage, is treated as a flaw to be overcome, rather than a gift to be developed. – The Atlantic

Even the smallest action or fragment of speech, Emily Martin believes, can be a useful clue to the mostly invisible wider cultural assumptions that shape how research is done in any specialized field. She observes and collects these fragments, hoping that, later on, she’ll be able to find connections between them and make better sense of a scientific world view that is fascinatingly foreign to her. – The New Yorker