Design, of course. “Cities need to design for the modes they want people to use because they already lost the opportunity once, says McPherson. In the 1890s, American cities experienced a bicycle boom so pervasive it changed women’s fashion. Bikes were such a popular mode of urban transportation that cities scrambled to build cycling superhighways for them. Yet bikes lost that valuable urban real estate as sprawling cities prioritized cars.”
Category: ideas
Why Are Humans So Obsessed With Labyrinths?
Maybe because we think they’re like our brains or our pasts: “For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze – achieving mastery over it, mapping it, finding one’s way out of it – was the work of psychoanalysis, he told an interviewer in 1927.”
There Is No Such Thing As Unconscious Thought
In particular, when you walk away from a difficult problem, then come back later and suddenly see the solution, your mind was not working on the problem unconsciously. Your brain doesn’t work that way, and if it tried, the electrical signals traveling along your neurons would get hopelessly crossed. Behavioral scientist Nick Chater explains what’s really going on in such cases.
Your Mind Is Not Like An Iceberg, With Masses Of Stuff Hidden Below The Surface
Behavioral scientist Nick Chater: “This whole idea of uncovering things from the unconscious and making them conscious has the presupposition that they are of the same type. … The tip of the iceberg is made of the same stuff as the rest of the iceberg, which is an invisible mass. And I think that’s really a mistake. The reality is that the things we’re conscious of — experiences, thoughts, fragments of conversation — are completely different in type from the things we’re unconscious of — all these mysterious brain processes, which lay down and retrieve memories, piece fragments of information together, and so on. The brain is doing lots of unconscious work — but it is not thought in any way we understand it.”
Have We Lost Our Sense Of Moral Rigor And Equivalency?
The outrage over a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager unfolds at the same level of intensity as the outrage over what might or might not be a case of racial profiling by a sales clerk in a small Brooklyn boutique. This is intentional: The general feeling seems to be that distinguishing between degrees of morally repugnant conduct will lead to some sort of blanket pardon of all such conduct; that to understand is always to forgive. Such concern is understandable, but misplaced — it flattens and obfuscates, rather than clarifies.
Human Consciousness – A Multidisciplinary Problem
Data will solve the basic conundrum: how is it that the roughly 1,400 grams of grey mush inside our skulls can produce our hopes, fears and dreams – as well as allowing us to revisit the very specific redness of a particular apple, one perhaps seen many years since?
We Need New Ways To Measure Pleasure
“In fact, there are two standard ways to compare different pleasures with each other – the ordinal and the cardinal. The ordinal criterion simply tells us which of two pleasures is more pleasurable, and nothing about how much more pleasurable it is. The cardinal criterion, on the other hand, tells us how much more, or less, pleasurable one activity is compared with the other; for instance, does someone find reading a book twice as pleasurable as drinking a Coke?”
A Sucker Born Every Minute – Here’s Why People Fall For It
Why do people fall prey to these scams? My colleagues and I set out to answer this question. Some of our findings are in line with other research, but others challenge common assumptions about fraud.
How Artificial Intelligence Might Change The Ways We Measure Human Intelligence
Rose Luckin’s latest book, Machine Learning and Human Intelligence: The future of education for the 21st Century, argues that if we want to avoid turning our kids—and their teachers—into robots, we have to radically redefine intelligence. She advocates using AI to help us develop and measure human intelligence in various forms to better prepare students for a workplace that requires constant adaptation and learning.
We Think We Can Tell What Others Are Thinking (We Can’t)
The fate of democracy depends on our ability to grasp and accept differing mindsets – yet the seemingly near-universal absence of reasonable public discourse suggests that this rarely occurs. We accuse those with conflicting opinions of having character defects, subliminal prejudices, faulty education, cultural brainwashing and a myriad of other ‘if only they knew better’ flaws of reasoning. But there’s a more basic and frightening possibility. What if we really aren’t capable of a sophisticated reading of other minds?