Category: ideas

Seriously, this helps makes sense of our weird reactions: “It begins to make sense why, whenever the former neighbours of a serial killer are interviewed, they consistently report not being able to believe that their neighbour actually killed multiple people.”

“Since temperature is really a statistical quantity, you can’t have a temperature of a single particle. So, the next time someone talks about the temperature of a single electron—or worse, the temperature of a photon—maybe you should just walk away.”

“The problem is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage… The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little. There is a small but growing chorus that worries the status quo is unsustainable.”

As the eponymous physician in the TV series House said, “You talk to God, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic.” Neuroscientist Dean Burnett explains that it’s all about the way the brain sets up its model of how the world works.

“The era’s psychiatrists were fighting the psychic fallout produced by the frenetic pace of urban existence. The profession faced an epidemic of so-called “nervous” diseases, such as hysteria and neurasthenia, which were thought to be caused or exacerbated by overstimulation. Modernity brought speed, stress, and constant sensory bombardment—a perfect recipe for rattled nerves. To repair a shaken nervous system, doctors often prescribed a change of scene, sometimes coupled with baths, special diets, or exercise regimens.”

“The truth of mathematics holds independently of what facts might obtain in the world. The laws of physics could change but the maths wouldn’t. That’s why Hume distinguished between the truths of mathematics, which he said involved the “relations of ideas”, with “matters of fact”, truths about the world.”

Yes, algorithms are getting better all the time and related content is getting more relevant. What does that mean? More wasted time on Facebook. That “quick look at a notification” turns into five minutes watching the “greatest premier league goals from the 1990’s.” Fun? Yes. Life-improving? Not so much.

What one neuropsychology professor thinks: “If our experience of action doesn’t really affect what we do in the moment, then what is it for? Why have it? Contrary to what many people believe, I think agency is only relevant to what happens after we act – when we try to justify and explain ourselves to each other.”

Traditionally, science fiction with spaceships has been about exploration and escaping Earth. But that escape is a pipe dream. “We experience our actual earthbound future as an incomprehensible betrayal. For humanity to flicker and die on Earth alone — and to leave no trace of itself save its garbage and the geological echo of incomprehensibly vast mass extinction — seems to us like a crime against the specialness of our species (not to mention all the other species we’ve made extinct just to get this far).”

“The idea that people have different styles of learning – that the visually inclined do best by seeing new information, for example, or others by hearing it – has been around since the 1950s, and recent research suggests it’s still widely believed by teachers and laypeople alike. But is there scientific evidence that learning styles exist? ‘The short answer is no,’ says Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.”