Category: ideas

“Fundamentally, neurons connect when they are stimulated together. A schema is a set of related concepts that define a mental object. When any of the sub-concepts in the schema arise in the mind as a result of external stimuli, the associated neurons fire, and cause some firing of connected neurons. So, if you read, ‘large, gray, mammal, trunk, tusk’, your brain is primed to fire ‘elephant,’ and many other ideas associated with an elephant. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea. One interesting consequence of all this is the associative rut, which is when your mind gets stuck in some area of mental space because all of the concepts lead to one another in a circular way.”

“Science does show that some brain training programs do work. So which ones? As the Australian study showed, Mahncke’s BrainHQ and competitor Cognifit actually do have a real benefit. Because both are based on brain training that is focused on improving processing speed–the speed and accuracy with which the brain processes information.”

“To put it simply: Much of digital technology seems to be, in the words of our YouTube debunker, not in sync. It doesn’t quite track. Twitter emotion doesn’t rise and fall the way human emotions do. Similarly, death, final by definition, is not final in Super Mario 0dyssey. GPS tech is not true to the temperature and texture of physical landscapes. Alexa of Amazon’s Echo sometimes seems bright, sometimes moronic, but of course she’s neither; she’s not even a she, and it’s a constant category error to consider her one. Living in the flicker of that error—interacting with a bot as if its sentiments were sentiments—is to take up residence in the so-called uncanny valley, home to that repulsion we feel from robots that look a lot, but not exactly, like us.”

The idea of a group of people untouched and unblemished by modernity encouraged social scientists to see them as a control group when it came to asking questions about whether humans have an original nature that has been somehow sullied by civilization. Among the most popular questions are ones about the human capacity for violence and war. Are people inherently violent or was the slow march away from hunting and gathering that left us war-mongering and conflict-ridden?”

What studios and labels should fear is something that makes downloading more convenient. The VCR and the DVR both upended the industry by letting people record a show and watch it later. Both won landmark lawsuits ruling that their existence amounted to fair use, that people could record programs and manage them on their own terms. Someone will come along and become the TiVo of the internet, the online DVR for everything you watch and everything you listen to. Someone like PlayOn.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple—Europeans refer to the group simply as gafa—didn’t eliminate the gatekeepers; they took their place. Instead of becoming more egalitarian, the country has become less so: the gap between America’s rich and poor grows ever wider. Meanwhile, politically, the nation has lurched to the right. In Franklin Foer’s telling, it would be a lot easier to fix an election these days than it was in 1876, and a lot harder for anyone to know about it. All the Big Tech firms would have to do is tinker with some algorithms. They have become, Foer writes, “the most imposing gatekeepers in human history.”

Post-truth’s stations of the cross are pretty familiar. Most if not all of them are given some attention in each of the books under review. In terms of contemporary evidence, any journalistic book on the subject will do what all three of the ones here do at some length. They pick over the global warming “debate”; over claims made in the Brexit referendum – especially the notorious £350 million figure on the side of the Vote Leave bus; and the various lies of the great orange elephant in the room, the forty-fifth President of the United States. The row over the crowd size at the Presidential inauguration, the “birther” conspiracy, “alternative facts”, “fake news” – it’s all here. Where they differ a little in their approaches is in how they unpick what led us here, and in their more or less optimistic ideas as to how we (that we being less interrogated than perhaps it should be) can fight back.