Category: ideas

This sort of thing is everywhere. Children and adults will often say “no offence” before or after saying something crushingly offensive, or introduce a nasty remark with a phrase along the lines of “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m nasty, but…” Politicians sometimes say “with respect” to interviewers before making clear their contempt for the question. There’s nothing new about rhetorical devices that let you have your cake and eat it—“not to mention the weather” gives speakers the chance both to mention that blasted weather and to leave it out. But the subgenre of such remarks that tries to dictate in advance how its targets might categorise it, and by extension the character of whoever might be saying it, does seem to be a recent and peculiar development.

“Tolerance is deeply rooted in the canon of apparent modern ideals: as an inherent good, a necessary individual ethic, a pillar of Western civilisation and proof of its superiority. … Yet tolerance, as an idea and an ethic, obscures the interaction between individuals and groups on both a daily basis and over the longue durée; the mutually reinforcing exchange of culture and ideas between groups in a society is missing in the idea of tolerance. … The purpose of religious tolerance has always been, and remains, to maintain the power and purity of the dominant religion in a given state.” Simon Rabinovitch makes the case for using reciprocity instead.

The bottom-up method is much less ambitious than the top-down kind, but it has two advantages: it makes fewer assumptions about theory, and it’s tightly tethered to data. This doesn’t mean we need to give up on the old unification paradigm, it just suggests that we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think we can unify physics right now, in a single step. It means incrementalism is to be preferred to absolutism – and that we should use empirical data to check and steer us at each instance, rather than making grand claims that come crashing down when they’re finally confronted with experiment.

Into this void march the techies, who come bearing money, jobs and promises of out-of-this-world innovation. But there’s a catch. Corporations are getting wide latitude in determining the future of cities. They are controlling more key services and winning important battles with once-indomitable city governments. Local officials find themselves at the mercy of tech: They can’t live without tech money, even if tech interests have a way of eclipsing every other civic priority.

Among the American Philosophical Association’s estimated 10,000 Ph.D-trained philosophers in the United States today, an estimated 125 are black, 38 are black women. Twenty-five years ago, Adrian Piper and I attempted to invite the Ph.D-trained black women in philosophy to join a professional association. We identified about eight eligible philosophers.

 IBM’s Project Debater sparred with two world-class human debaters in front of an audience, which later ranked each debater’s performance. Based on voting, the first debate was a wash. But in the second, the computer changed the minds of nine undecided audience members, while its human opponent didn’t change any. It even cracked some self-deprecating jokes about its artificial nature along the way.

Daniel Engber: “Scientists use versions of the kill-one-to-save-five hypothetical, reworded and reframed for added nuance, as a standard way to probe the workings of the moral mind. … But if the answers to those questions don’t connect to real behavior” – and some new research indicates that they don’t – “then where, exactly, have these trolley problems taken us?”

In the 18th- and 19th-centuries, cartographers dedicated themselves to mapping the invisible forces behind travel, trade and capitalism. For instance, there was apparently some hidden force that facilitated northeasterly travel between North America and Europe, and penalised North-Atlantic journeys toward the global south. But what was it, and how did it work?

When Beyoncé and Jay-Z want to elevate something in culture, they do, and the image that they chose to publicize their joint world tour meant that the film Touki Bouki is back, perhaps for good. Why is it important? The movie “was radical in resisting the social realist tradition already sweeping through African cinema in favour of a more impressionistic, herky-jerky romanticism reminiscent of Godard.”