Category: ideas

Revisiting the Sixties leads to a sobering conclusion: everything has changed, and nothing has changed.

The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death.

For all its sundry failings and inexcusable prejudices, conventional art history provided a fundamental framework for assessing quality. Grouping works according to such commonalities as place of origin, period and circumstances of execution, artistic intent, function and medium facilitated comparative judgments. In the last decades, academia largely rejected this sort of connoisseurship, because it was too often tied to “great man” narratives. Over the same period, professional art criticism was effectively obliterated by a journalistic obsession (both in the surviving print media and online) with glamour, scandal and money. While the art world was never entirely free from market forces, those forces are now essentially left alone to determine value.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Like all the words in our language, the identity labels we use are a common possession. Were everybody to follow Humpty Dumpty’s example [‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’], we simply couldn’t understand one another. If Toni Morrison isn’t a black woman, the term isn’t doing any work. … ‘Lesbian’ isn’t much use if you’re looking for a partner on Bumble unless it signifies a woman who might be open to sex with another woman.”

In short, the algorithm is able to note differences between what it encounters and what it has seen in the past. Like most people but unlike most other algorithms, the new system Higgins built for Google can understand that it hasn’t come across a brand new object just because it’s seeing something from a new angle.

While freelance websites may have raised wages and broadened the number of potential employers for some people, they’ve forced every new worker who signs up into entering a global marketplace with endless competition, low wages, and little stability. Decades ago, the only companies that outsourced work overseas were multinational corporations with the resources to set up manufacturing shops elsewhere. Now, independent businesses and individuals are using the power of the internet to find the cheapest services in the world too, and it’s not just manufacturing workers who are seeing the downsides to globalization. All over the country, people like graphic designers and voice-over artists and writers and marketers have to keep lowering their rates to compete.

“People get hung up on how eccentric some of his ideas were, but the core of his claims remains relevant and important. That is to say: our aesthetic experience, our experience of beauty in ordinary life, must be central to thinking about any good life and society. It’s not just decoration or luxury for the few. If you are taught how to see the world properly through an understanding of aesthetics, then you’ll see society properly.”

When scientists tried to reproduce the results of 100 psychology studies a few years ago, they came to an alarming conclusion: Fewer than half of the studies could be replicated, suggesting the field might be rife with flawed knowledge about human behavior. Now, a few of those same scientists—along with some new colleagues—have taken stock of the field again, by trying to reproduce 21 studies recently published in two of science’s top journals, Science and Nature.