Category: ideas

Requiring attendance and the passage of an exam, for instance, can help. But still: “There is only one way to go on, as I tell students – and that is to go on. This is the first and greatest difficulty they face. There’s no reason for them to continue reading. There is so much else to read that is shorter, and not just aimed at them, but, in the case of their Facebook feed, tuned to their experience. Marketed to them. Why would they bother reading something that was neither for them nor about them?”

“What makes philosophy such an endurable affair, in the West as well as in the East, is that it engages not only our cognition, but also our imagination, emotions, artistic sensibility, religious impulses — in short, our being complicated, messy, impure creatures. To be human is to be always caught in existential entanglements, to have to deal with hybridity and messiness of all sorts. We are an unlikely union of high and low, spirit and flesh, reason and unreason. And philosophers, if they are not to lose their integrity, need to account for such wholeness.”

“The emerging picture of efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit referendum leads to an awkward paradox. For the first time in a long time, voters who recognized the rigged nature of the system voted in large enough numbers to overthrow “the swamp” of “politics as usual”; at the same time, the system itself was perhaps more rigged than ever, thanks to the new-fangled methods. While it is vital to expose how these worked, it is even more important also to develop a politics that validates voters’ legitimate repudiation of a corrupt establishment, rather than dismisses them as ignorant and gullible.”

“Our mental shortcuts work fine at the level of individuals and small-scale societies, but in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world, they are a danger to society. Effortless thinking is at the root of many of the modern world’s most serious problems: xenophobia, terrorism, hatred, inequality, defence of injustice, religious fanaticism and our shocking susceptibility to fake news and conspiracy theories. All are facilitated by people disengaging their critical faculties and going with their gut – and being encouraged to do so by populist politicians channelling anger at the liberal establishment.”

It all went pretty well, as you might expect, with some twists that might be particular to Ann Patchett: “Not shopping saves an astonishing amount of time. In October, I interviewed Tom Hanks about his collection of short stories in front of 1,700 people in a Washington theater. Previously, I would have believed that such an occasion demanded a new dress and lost two days of my life looking for one. In fact, Tom Hanks had never seen any of my dresses, nor had the people in the audience.”

The genre, which exploded after Malcolm Gladwell started his “Revisionist History” podcast, is riddled with sweeping pronouncements, some of which ignore recent scholarship or popular knowledge. They can definitely be informative and useful, but beware: “Sometimes the counterintuitive take is just wrong.”

Well, at least everything about the “implicit” or “unconscious” bias tests that people are taking online, not to mention the “overcoming implicit bias” trainings that almost everyone in the corporate world has to take. “The forgiving notion of unconscious prejudice has become the go-to explanation for all manner of discrimination, but the shaky science behind the IAT suggests this theory isn’t simply easy, but false. And if implicit bias is a weak scapegoat, we must confront the troubling reality that society is still, disturbingly, all too consciously racist and sexist.”

Smellmaps, developed by English artist Kate McLean, “can come in handy for people interested in new ways of exploring both the cities they live in and the ones they visit. So far, McLean has led small armies of urban explorers on ‘smellwalks’ around 12 other cities, including New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Kiev.”

Brain augmentation might sound like science fiction, but the technology is already a well-established field of neuroscience. There are noninvasive forms of tech like EEG, in which sensors use electrical signals to communicate with our brains, and cochlear implants that interface with auditory neurons to restore hearing. Brain-computer interfaces already play a crucial role in treating diseases such as Parkinson’s, epilepsy and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease.

“The technologies underlying this shift will soon push us into new creative realms, amplifying the capabilities of today’s artists and elevating amateurs to the level of seasoned pros. We will search for new definitions of creativity that extend the umbrella to the output of machines. But this boom will have a dark side, too. Some AI-generated content will be used to deceive, kicking off fears of an avalanche of algorithmic fake news. Old debates about whether an image was doctored will give way to new ones about the pedigree of all kinds of content, including text. You’ll find yourself wondering, if you haven’t yet: What role did humans play, if any, in the creation of that album/TV series/clickbait article?”