Category: ideas

Because the ideologies of the past century have been largely discredited as false utopias, we are bereft of the notion of a better future. Whether the idea of a utopia ever returns will depend on our spirit, our faith in what is to come. Yet who are we to make demands of the spirit, which will wander as it will? – The New York Times

“First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.” – The New York Times

Can’t get through to your kid? Sure, you could stalk them around the house, but probably their social media presence – especially Instagram, where they might even be pretty great photographers – can reveal much more than any sparse conversation would. – The New York Times

That’s right, strivers: Stop it. Well, don’t stop striving. Just stop striving for perfection. “Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.” – The New York Times

Tim Berners-Lee: “The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We’re asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019.” — New York Times

Although there are sex differences in brain and behavior, when you move away from group-level differences in single features and focus at the level of the individual brain or person, you find that the differences, regardless of their origins, usually “mix up” rather than “add up.” — The New York Times

The privacy warriors of the 1960s would have been astounded by what the tech industry has become. They would be more amazed to realize that the policy choices they made back then — to demand data transparency rather than limit data collection, and to legislate the behavior of government but not private industry — enabled today’stech giants to become as large and powerful as they are. – The New York Times

Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. – Aeon

A new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute seems to indicate life in the gig economy is not what it has been cracked up to be. The study didn’t rely on surveys or questionnaires. It used actual financial data. The company dug up 38m payments directed through 128 different online platforms to 2.3m of its customers’ checking accounts from October 2012 to March 2018. Its conclusions are pretty obvious: you may want to keep your day job. – The Guardian