Category: ideas

“The practice of science cannot be long sustained without the co-operation of our wider culture (legally, economically, pedagogically). This is the theoretical half of our present crisis. As the culture becomes more doubtful of scientific legitimacy—whether through postmodern philosophy, the rise of fundamentalism and superstition, or some other means—proponents of empirical science cannot remain indifferent to these doubts if the practice is to flourish. The best of them, the ones entertained by thoughtful people, must be addressed. But how can the skeptical critiques of modern science and philosophy be met?”

“The advantages of AI are most visible in firms’ predictions of what users want. Automated recommendations and suggestions are responsible for around three-quarters of what people watch on Netflix, for example, and more than a third of what people buy on Amazon. Facebook, which owns the popular app Instagram, uses machine learning to recognise the content of posts, photos and videos and display relevant ones to users, as well as filter out spam. In the past it ranked posts chronologically, but serving up posts and ads by relevance keeps users more engaged. Without machine learning, Facebook would never have achieved its current scale.”

“Many of us are familiar with mind-wandering in a number of guises: procrastination, reflection, meditation, self-flagellation, daydreaming. But while some mental meandering seems fruitful, on other occasions it has the unmistakeable bite of a bad habit, something that holds us back from reaching our full potential. Reverie can be a reprieve from reality and a font of inspiration, yes. But equally familiar is the mind’s tendency to devolve into sour and fruitless rumination when left to its own devices, especially when we’re in the grip of depression, anxiety or obsession.”

“This conflation of the work of our bodies with the work of our lives can feel insidiously prosperity gospel–ish. The idea that better, harder, faster, and more are all concepts that are inextricably linked can certainly be motivating, but it can also be dangerous and damaging to equate them entirely. This doesn’t just happen in SoulCycle: It’s also present in CrossFit’s relentless, maximalist ethos, as well as more subtly in things like barre programs and kickboxing classes. Across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body will get smaller, your world will get bigger, and your life will get better, but only through rigorous, sweaty work.”

We live in an age of deep complicity — and not just the political sort. The world’s most pressing problems are global — poverty, hunger, environmental decimation and warming — and implicate us all. To a greater or lesser extent, and often with the best intentions, we have done our part in contributing to the mess.

“Human beings and other animals are, like plants, living things. In all three cases, Philippa Foot urged, there is room for speaking of healthy or unhealthy, excellent or defective specimens of their kind. This means that there is room to speak of the qualities conducive to their being healthy or excellent or otherwise. The vocabulary of human virtues and vices – courage, temperance, justice and so forth – belongs among the same structure of concepts. The human virtues, she proposed, are natural excellences, while human vices are natural defects.”

Vision has a general advantage, in humans, over touch, so the virtual reality environment should be OK. And yet! “Touch is the fact-checking sense. … Touching is more psychologically reassuring than seeing. Touch does not always make us experience things better, but it certainly makes us feel better about what we experience. Even when we can see that the keys are in our bags, we are much more certain that they are once we’ve touched them.”

Though, of course, humans use organization for good and for evil: “The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all information systems, the index card had unexpected political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such classification.”