Category: ideas

Ah, That Simpler Time When Children Made Their Own Toys …

Rebecca Onion: “In mid-December, as I struggled to keep my own toy purchases under control, the idea of 19th-century children constructing their own playthings — probably by the fire, while calmly listening to their mother playing the piano — is eminently appealing. But as with many things in the history of childhood, children’s toy-making was less idyllic than it seems.” — Slate

Report: Is Social Media A Threat To Democracy?

Manipulation of our media environment by foreign as well as domestic actors is now the new normal. “If anything has changed since 2016,” writes one experienced reporter, “it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s the terrain on which our entire political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape our everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are nearly endless.  – The Guardian

What Does It Mean To Be ‘Cosmopolitan’?

Bruce Robbins says that “cosmopolitanism” has implications far beyond what movies, art, food, and other culture we might enjoy from all over the world. “If you are willing to benefit from a system that systematically deprives people far away of a great deal of the product of their labor and ships that surplus over to you and makes your life more comfortable, and you’re not ready to say anything about that, that’s as bad a problem as going along with war.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

My New Best Friend Is A Computer – But How Does It Feel About Me?

Can computers actually think? Well, they are designed to perform functions that humans perform through thinking. They expertly process information, present it at appropriate points in a conversation, and use it to draw reasonable conclusions. But thinking in this sense can just be a kind of high-level functioning. It’s another question whether iPals’ calculations are accompanied by a subjective awareness of what they’re doing. – Commonweal

Is There Any Wisdom In The Notion Of Wisdom Of The Crowd?

The “wisdom of crowds” refers to the result of a very specific process, where independent judgments are statistically combined (i.e., using the mean or the median) to achieve a final judgment with the greatest accuracy. In practice, however, people rarely follow strict statistical guidelines when combining their own estimates with those of other people; and additional factors often lead people to assess some judgments more positively than others. – Harvard Business Review

Is There Any Point, Really, In Pondering The ‘Big Questions’? (Maybe.)

“Kant put his finger on the problem when he observed in the Critique of Pure Reason that human reason is driven by its very nature to ask itself questions that it is unable to answer. … Should we, then, set aside the Big Questions, and train ourselves only to pose questions that are sufficiently well-defined and empirically grounded as to guarantee the possibility of a definite answer? This is, by and large, the scientific mindset.” Even so, argues Emrys Westacott, “an inclination toward the Big Questions should not be despised.” — 3 Quarks Daily