Category: ideas

The so-called “alt-right” didn’t go for National Review style (not in any way). Instead, “they have adopted the fetishism of transgression that marked the Cultural Studies left: they embedded themselves in subcultural styles repellent to mainstream, middlebrow liberal sensibilities and they call on their armies to attack the tastes and sensibilities embodied by n00bs and ‘normies.'”

Turns out that people who are more intelligent, at least in pattern recognition, may be more likely to stereotype. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to be able to counter those stereotypes with new information. In short, it’s complicated.

Simple, right? Kids who get free lunches in the school year often don’t eat in the summers. So a bunch of libraries are trying to fix that problem. “Librarians used to forbid any food or drink to avoid staining books and attracting pests. People who tried to sneak snacks in the stacks would be reprimanded. But in recent years, a growing number of libraries have had a major shift in policy: They are the ones putting food on the table.”

Give a bunch of atoms more and more energy, and they’ll create a planet where a bipedal mammal with a certain size of brain will hunt other large animals into extinction or near-extinction, but also make art. That is to say, at least sometimes, a chemical soup can evolve into something more.

“Convinced that mankind had been on a journey of unrelenting progress since we emerged from the swamp, he believed the 15-hour week to be the culmination of hundreds of generations’ collective ingenuity and effort. Perhaps Keynes would have had a different view had he known that the 15-hour week was a reality for some of the handful of remaining tribes of autonomous hunter-gatherers, and that, in all probability, it was the norm for much of the history of modern Homo sapiens.”

“This approach to markets and governments, commonly called neoliberalism by its critics, has grown increasingly dominant. As this theory moved off the page and the blackboard, people who wanted to live according to neoliberal principles ran into a basic problem. This is a specific way of dealing with markets, even for those committed in principle to capitalism. So, as more governments and businesses adopted market measures as often as possible, new ways of talking about many aspects of life, including work and careers, arose. Every total way of life, after all, requires its own vocabulary.”

“Inattentional blindness is just one example of a more general feature of our visual experience known to cognitive scientists as ‘the grand illusion’. When we look at the world around us, almost everything in our visual field appears clear, vivid and rich in detail but, in experiments, our objective ability to detect change is more suggestive of an observer with a bag on his head, with just a small hole through which to see anything. This observation hole can be moved around by the observer himself or it can be manipulated automatically when interesting events occur in the environment.”

“This isn’t just metaphysical poetics. Every sensory experience triggers changes in the molecules of your neurons, reshaping the way they connect to one another. That means your brain is literally made of memories, and memories constantly remake your brain. This framework for memory dates back decades.”

“At the core of the beautiful soul is the idea that the individual possesses an innate cognitive potential. Subject to the right environmental and educational conditions, this latent potential can be developed to reach a more perfect state of intellect, morality, character and conduct. The beautiful soul is an aesthetic concept focused on developing human capacities and advancing knowledge and culture. It entails the pursuit of personal cultivation to create a convergence of the individual aesthetic impulse with a collective ethical ideal.”