A new nationally representative survey about “screen time and device distractions” from the Pew Research Center indicates that it’s not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones—many teens themselves do, too. Fifty-four percent of the roughly 750 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed said they spend too much time absorbed in their phones, and 65 percent of parents said the same of their kids’ device usage more generally.
Category: ideas
Business And Slavery (And Some Direct Lines Between Them)
Modern narratives of capitalist development often assume that vast wealth accumulated by a few accompanies improved circumstances for many. The history of slavery’s capitalism warns against all these expectations.
What Does It Mean To Be Human? The Question Itself Is A Problem
Martha Nussbaum: “We humans are very self-focused. We tend to think that being human is somehow very special and important, so we ask about that, instead of asking what it means to be an elephant, or a pig, or a bird. … The question, ‘What is it to be human?’ is not just narcissistic, it involves a culpable obtuseness. It is rather like asking, ‘What is it to be white?’ It connotes unearned privileges that have been used to dominate and exploit. But we usually don’t recognize this because our narcissism is so complete.”
Philosophy And Art Can’t Answer The Big Questions. Only Science Can
Perhaps whole revised paradigms of thought, such as those a century or so ago when relativity and quantum mechanics emerged, will take comprehension in currently unimaginable directions. Maybe we shall find that the cosmos is just mathematics rendered substantial. Maybe our comprehension of consciousness will have to be left to the artificial device that we thought was merely a machine for simulating it. Maybe, indeed, circularity again, only the artificial consciousness we shall have built will have the capacity to understand the emergence of something from nothing. I consider that there is nothing that the scientific method cannot elucidate.
Be Authentic! Everyone Cries. Well, That Takes A Bit Of Work, Actually
Do people judge themselves to be more or less authentic over time? My inclination is that people believe they are becoming more of their true self as time passes. After all, most of us would like to think that we are growing and changing in positive ways. And the constant bombardment of messages to be ‘true to ourselves’ can suggest that some force prevents us from fully expressing who we really are.
In The Age Of Social Media We’ve Lost Privacy. But What Did Privacy Even Mean?
What did people used to believe they lost when they lost their privacy? Surprisingly, it turns out that a large number of people began to speak of privacy in a self-conscious way only toward the end of the nineteenth century. As is often the case, the first defenders of privacy became aware of its value at the moment they were on the verge of losing it.
This Is How A Poetry-Reading Class Can Go Horribly Wrong
Close reading is hard, which is how this class ended up telling its professor that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was about a prostitute. “The predominant interpretation holds sway because students have been trained that their emotional response to a text is just as valid as, say, what it means to read a text within its historical or cultural context.”
How One Stand-Up Comedian Copes With A Devastating Loss
Comedian Adam Cayton-Holland: “I don’t really have a joke about it. It’s more like a public service announcement that I make into the microphone, urging people to seek help, urging people to not feel ashamed of feeling powerless when it comes to their brains. You can see the audience tense up. I pepper in a few jokes here and there, to try to cut the tension. Which kind of works. It’s not perfect, but it’s real.”
Morality And US Higher Education, A (Fascinating) History
The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally sanctioned, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and relying on the administrators who oversee the system.
Will We Still Need Companies When Artificial Intelligence Takes Over?
While there has been a lot of discussion about “what’s left for humans?” as AI improves at exponential rates — the customary answer is that humans need to focus on the things they are uniquely good at, such as creativity, intuition, and personal empathy — I think we now have to ask, “what’s left for firms?”