Category: ideas

“In this installment of our ‘Annals of Obsession’ video series, we dive into the history and validity of personality assessments, from the less-known measures used by psychologists to … the ever-popular Myers-Briggs, created by a mother-daughter duo without any experimental training. Do these measures … tell us anything real about ourselves? And what is it about the human mind that leads us to keep seeking them out, in era after era and society after society, endlessly striving to organize the people around us into ‘types’ that may, or so we hope, help explain them all?” (video)

“The notion of mattering is intimately linked with the notion of attention. To say that something matters is to assert that attention is due it, the kind of attention that both recognises and reveals its reality. Something that matters has a nature that demands to be known, and the knowledge may yield other attitudes and behaviour due it. If I say that something doesn’t matter, I’m saying that it’s not worth paying attention to.”

Routinely exposing a population of 80,000 to a perfect barren in relatively safe circumstances should be seen as an ingenious experiment. After all, philosophers from Edmund Burke to Arthur Schopenhauer have recognised that qualities in nature can be appreciated as sublime only if they fall just short of absolute threat.

The most widely tested model, so far, is called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo. When it was released by the Allen Institute this spring, ELMo swiftly toppled previous bests on a variety of challenging tasks—like reading comprehension, where an AI answers SAT-style questions about a passage, and sentiment analysis. In a field where progress tends to be incremental, adding ELMo improved results by as much as 25 percent.

The history of quaternions includes a mathematician gleefully carving his ideas into Dublin’s Broome Bridge, spurious negative numbers, and a war among physicists.

When you let the algorithm go in Netflix Roulette, things can get interesting. “No one could have predicted binge-watching, which means that once again reality has outstripped our wildest, grimmest imaginings.”

What’s the issue when libraries are more used than ever, and for more reasons than ever? Uh, they’re seriously underfunded. “Libraries are being disparaged and neglected at precisely the moment when they are most valued and necessary. Why the disconnect? In part it’s because the founding principle of the public library — that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage — is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our world. But it’s also because so few influential people understand the expansive role that libraries play in modern communities.”

If other humans are beyond our comprehension, what hope is there for understanding the experience of animals, artificial intelligence or aliens?

What sorts of responsibilities would we owe to these simulated humans? However else we might feel about violent computer games, no one seriously thinks it’s homicide when you blast a virtual assailant to oblivion. Yet it’s no longer absurd to imagine that simulated people might one day exist, and be possessed of some measure of autonomy and consciousness.

In some cases, the questions that preoccupy philosophers are identical to the questions of psychologists and so are amenable to straightforward scientific research. Sometimes, though, the philosophical questions aren’t empirical—nobody is going to do an experiment to answer the question “What is art?”—but, still, one can study an interesting near neighbor, in the style of what’s sometimes known as “experimental philosophy.” For instance, you can look at what people (art experts, laypeople, four-year-olds) think is art.