Category: ideas

Consider the holes in doughnuts. No, not the “doughnut holes” made out of the dough, because they’re clearly not holes. “If we do not take the removed dough to be the hole, then what do we take the hole to be? Are holes material things, where material things are physical (like tables and chairs), or are holes immaterial things, where immaterial things are not physical (like abstract entities)? Or are holes not even things at all?”

As the philosopher Noam Chomsky has said, “we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” – something the critic and author David Lodge has explored. In his 2004 book Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.”

The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical. Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the “demarcation problem,” the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a “family resemblance” among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called “science” that the rest of the world should recognize as such.

We are seeing the worsening of a trend that the 20th century German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse warned of back in 1965: “In endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood.” This form of “free speech,” ironically, supports the tyranny of the majority.

“It’s not that Russians don’t smile, [cross-sultural studies professor Maria] Arapova explains. They do smile, and a lot. ‘We’re not such gloomy, sad, or aggressive people,’ she tells me. But smiling, for Russians — to paint with a broad brush — is an optional component of a commercial or social exchange and not a requirement of politeness. It means something different to smile — in fact, smiling can be dangerous.”

Evolution has shaped the human body, but it also shaped the human brain, so evolutionary principles are indispensable for understanding our psychology. Yet many students, teachers, and even social scientists struggle to see how our evolutionary history significantly shapes our cognition and behavior today.

“On average, people are over twice as likely to likely to refer to male professionals by surname than female professionals,” Cornell University psychologists Stav Atir and Melissa Ferguson write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That matters because people “referred to by surname are judged as more famous and eminent,” and therefore worthy of recognition.

Facebook “farms” its users for data: the more they produce – the more “user engagement” there is, in other words – the better. Consequently, there is an overriding commercial imperative to increase levels of engagement. And it turns out that some types of pernicious content are good for keeping user-engagement high: fake news and hate speech are pretty good triggers, for example. So the central problem with Facebook is its business model: the societal downsides we are experiencing are, as programmers say, a feature, not a bug.

We are obviously still a fair way from the researchers’ goal of what is technically called Artificial General Intelligence: a machine that can successfully perform any task an average human could and even, perhaps, become self-aware. But what is really engaging in all this is the spectacle of watching IBM’s AI researchers gamely think through the kinds of problem-solving activities that, rolled together, would make something like a human brain.

Think Jesmyn Ward – and Daniel Glover, and the film Get Out. “This black Gothic revival includes tropes of darkness, madness, ghosts, and isolation that combine to create unease and evoke fear and terror.”