Category: ideas

Ross Douthat: “The problem is the one that Auden identified seventy years ago: In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts. And both the turn toward radical politics and the turn toward high theory are attempts by humanists in the academy to supply that justification — to rebrand the humanities as the seat of social justice and a font of political reform, or to assume a pseudoscientific mantle that lets academics claim to be interrogating literature with the rigor and precision of a lab tech doing dissection.”

Beliefs about what is right and wrong might well be evaluable in ways similar to how other kinds of beliefs are evaluable – in terms of whether they fit with experience and survive scrutiny.

There’s always been fake news but what’s different this time is that you can tailor the story to particular individuals, because you know the prejudice of this particular individual. The more people believe in free will, that their feelings represent some mystical spiritual capacity, the easier it is to manipulate them, because they won’t think that their feelings are being produced and manipulated by some external system.

When people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large.

When these brilliant people contemplated writing for the “public,” it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the “general reader,” seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves. Writing for the public awakened the slang of mass media. The public signified fun, frothy, friendly.

Moving far beyond the prevention of genetic illness and advanced prosthetics for those who need them, these rapidly emerging technologies could – to borrow a phrase from Daft Punk – make it possible for anyone (with deep pockets) to be harder, better, faster, stronger.

Recataloging a book is a bad plan: “One time a guy did this with an InterLibrary Loan book he’d checked out. He sent an email to me about it and also one to the lending library. In that email he included a picture of the new ‘tag’ he’d applied to the spine, in which he’d written the call number with a fine-point sharpie. Don’t fucking do this. We went to school for it; you didn’t.”

We have cognitive biases – like weighting something that will happen soon over something that will happen in the future – and they can mess us up. “A solid group of 100 or so biases has been repeatedly shown to exist, and can make a hash of our lives.” Is there a way to use our own cognitive biases to mitigate that potential mess?

Here’s the theory: “We live, at the moment, in a country where basic rights are really being violated. … There’s a real need to understand how video can help people prove what happened.” (But videographers and photographers need to defend their rights to film and take photos, too.)