Category: ideas

“It turns out that self-control, and all the benefits from it, may not be related to inhibiting impulses at all. And once we cast aside the idea of willpower, we can better understand what actually works to accomplish goals, and hit those New Year’s resolutions.”

“In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech. And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake videos.)”

“Bill Miller, the value investor who famously beat the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index for 15 consecutive years (and whose faith in bank stocks later won a mocking depiction in the movie The Big Short), has donated $75 million to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University.”

“Imagine you find a Monopoly board and a handful of street cards plus one little tin hat and a little tin shoe, nothing else,” says game historian Ulrich Schädler. Reporter Natasha Frost looks at some games from the ancient world – and at the ways scholars try to figure them out.

“Our technological evolution is happening faster than most people ever imagined, and it is clearly happening faster than society is able to deal with it. How should we respond?”

“Not so long ago, it was commonly believed that the right hemisphere is the exclusive generator of creative thought. Later on, researchers’ focus shifted to connectivity between the two hemispheres. That model has been refined in recent years, as scientists have begun mapping not just regions of the brain, but the neural networks that spring into action as needed. Now, researchers have identified a brain network that is strongly associated with creativity.”

“As humans, we naturally need food, water and shelter to survive. But equally important is understanding. To survive, we need to understand our environment, each other and ourselves. We invented culture to meet this need: we found a short-hand to take the essential values and truths a society holds, and collapse them into coded narrative, sound, images and symbols that mean something to all of us.”

From a BBC presenter: “Listeners didn’t just say they ‘disliked’ something. They used the most emotive words they could think of. They were ‘horrified’, ‘appalled’, ‘dumbfounded’, ‘aghast’, ‘outraged’, when they heard something they didn’t like. Why do people get especially passionate about pronunciation, using language that we might think more appropriate as a reaction to a terrorist attack than to an intruded ‘r’ (as in ‘law(r) and order’)?”

“Color is one of the longstanding puzzles in philosophy, raising doubts about the truthfulness of our sensory grasp on things, and provoking concerns as to the metaphysical compatibility of scientific, perceptual, and common sense representations of the world. Most philosophers have argued that colors are either real or not real, physical or psychological. The greater challenge is to theorize the subtle way that color stands between our understanding of the physical and the psychological.”

“People who see themselves as poor make different decisions, and, generally, worse ones. … One explanation for this is that poor people engage in riskier behavior, which is why they are poor in the first place. By [research psychologist Keith] Payne’s account, this way of thinking gets things backward.”