Why is the discussion about the First Amendment, and freedom of speech in general, so frustrating right now? “The two ancient concepts of free speech came to shape our modern liberal democratic notions in fascinating and forgotten ways. But more importantly, understanding that there is not one, but two concepts of freedom of speech, and that these are often in tension if not outright conflict, helps explain the frustrating shape of contemporary debates.”
Category: ideas
Perhaps Humans Aren’t ‘Naturally Good’ At All
To Philippa Foot, one of the marvelous generation of British philosophers that also included Iris Murdoch, that seemed almost clear after WWII. “What would a moral philosophy look like if it started from a darker picture of human beings as not, basically, ‘decent chaps’? Part of what animated Foot and her allies was a conviction that the answer to such a question would not be easy or self-contained, would not be the sort of logical proof one could polish off in a few weeks.”
This Is What Happens When You Put A Price On Everything
“Arguments from economic rationality can obscure as much as they reveal. For if capitalism meant the transformation of land and lives into units of wealth-producing human capital, it also meant the transformation of sickness and death into a currency of wealth-reducing decapitalization. And this poses a question: wealth for whom?”
Study: Teenage Brains Can’t Distinguish What’s Important (And What’s Not)
“Adults are generally pretty good at being able to tell when a situation is worthy of extra time or concentration. Research has found that, when potential rewards or losses are higher, for example, adults will perform better on tasks. But this doesn’t seem to be the case for adolescents.”
The Digital World Isn’t Subverting Democracy, It’s Helping It (Really?)
“Digital technologies are changing politics as we know it, but not because of some inherent or immutable characteristic that stands apart from the world in which they were created. Instead, these technologies have helped an underlying condition, namely growing discontent at marketisation – the privatising of ever more goods, services and social interactions, and the ideologies that justify that process – to find meaningful expression in the formal political arena.”
Do We Have Time For Utopias? How About Dystopias?
“It is a tough job to reclaim the idea of utopia for the twenty-first century and deploy it in the battle against the neoliberal agenda. But – if we were to want to do such a thing – these are books that could help us. If there is an alternative to a neoliberal future, the imaginative effort required by utopian thinking is a necessary step to achieving that alternative.”
How Restaurant Menus Manipulate Customers
“There is now an entire industry known as ‘menu engineering’, dedicated to designing menus that convey certain messages to customers, encouraging them to spend more and make them want to come back for a second helping.” Reporter Richard Gray ferrets out a few tricks of the trade.
Is It Females Who Decide What Is Beauty?
“The view has long been that males, in their sexual communication, are saying something important about themselves, and it’s up to the females to figure out what that is, to figure out which males are truly attractive and which are not. I argue the other side of the coin. Females aren’t trying to figure out what males are saying. When they mate with a male, by definition, that male is attractive. So females are the deciders. Over evolutionary time, it seems males are trying out a lot of different courtship traits. A bright orange here, a bright blue there, rub your wings together and make a sound, or jump up and do a dance. They are trying to do these things to tickle females’ preferences. But it’s really the females calling the shots. It’s the female’s brain that sets the bar for what kind of traits are attractive and unattractive.”
How Reuters Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Find And Write News
“Once a conversation or rumor is potentially identified as news, an important consideration is its veracity. To determine this, Tracer looks for the source by identifying the earliest tweet in the conversation that mentions the topic and any sites it points to. It then consults a database listing known producers of fake news, such as the National Report, or satirical news sites such as The Onion. Finally, the system writes a headline and summary and distributes the news throughout the Reuters organization.”
How Social Media Make It Difficult To Really Think
“If you’re on social media, you’re being presented with stimuli all the time, stimuli that are demanding a response from you. If that’s the case, how do you navigate that moment? The thesis of the book is that, in reality, we don’t want to master those impulses. We don’t want to, because by responding to those stimuli in an instinctive way, we can signal our belonging. But we ought to resist those stimuli, because the social and personal costs of not resisting those stimuli are enormous.”