Category: ideas

She’s not the hero of a fourth-grade report, but “her brazenness is bewitching at a remove, as are the mythical accomplishments of a demigod.”

That’s right, we need to understand irreducible alterity – a philosophical concept developed by a Holocaust survivor. “What if instead of sameness it were otherness that was the foundation for ethical action? What if being confronted by someone utterly different from you — someone you are opposed to, confused by, scared of, someone you can’t understand — was the urgent signal that there was a life in need of your protection?”

Katherine Whitcroft examines the history of what’s now called the “Proustian effect.”

“Most studies assume that the relationship between diversity and creativity is linear, but recent evidence suggests that a moderate degree of diversity is more beneficial than a higher dose. This finding is consistent with the too-much-of-a-good-thing paradigm in management science, which provides compelling evidence for the idea that even the most desirable qualities have a dark side if taken to the extreme. In other words, all things are good in moderation (except moderation).”

“Transcendence is a fundamental part of the human experience. Since the dawn of our species, people have been losing themselves in ritualistic prayer, song, and dance. Even so, for a long time, the prevailing consensus in psychology was that such experiences were pathological rather than natural. Freud believed that ‘oceanic feelings of oneness’ were neurotic memories of the womb and the signs of a deranged mind. … The person who got transcendence right, [research psychologist David] Yaden says, is William James.”

Laughter is no different than political systems, commercial relations or artistic practices: it evolves over time, the result and cause of material and social transformations. For medieval man, laughter was the great leveller. Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive. In fact, as Bakhtin notes, late-medieval laughter marked a victory, albeit temporary, not just over the sacred and even over death; it also signalled ‘the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that represses and restricts’.

The rich have, Daniel Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.”

“The history of computer chess is the history of artificial intelligence. After their disappointments in trying to reverse-engineer the brain, computer scientists narrowed their sights. Abandoning their pursuit of human-like intelligence, they began to concentrate on accomplishing sophisticated, but limited, analytical tasks by capitalizing on the inhuman speed of the modern computer’s calculations. This less ambitious but more pragmatic approach has paid off in areas ranging from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars. Computers are replicating the results of human thought without replicating thought itself.”

Even the American Academy of Pediatrics has started to relax a little about screen time. Also, the entire discussion is a status marker: “The ability of parents to limit screen time, like the ability to limit unwholesome food, has become more than a matter of health. It has become a statement of class, order, purity and parental authority.”

Basically, “Zelda” taught people how to grow up: Link and Zelda “navigate spaces that over time have become more difficult to traverse and more populated, just as the real world expands as one ages. And so, it’s dawned on me: With its young characters, its longevity, its accessibility, and the evolution of its gameplay, The Legend of Zelda is hands-down the best franchise about the joys and frustrations of leaving youth and facing the challenges of adulthood.”