“Almost 2,500 years before the current vogue for behavioural economics, Plato was identifying and seeking to understand the predictable irrationalities of the human mind. He did not verify them with the techniques of modern experimental psychology, but many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky. Seminal papers in behavioural economics are highly cited everywhere from business and medical schools to the social sciences and the corporate world. But the earlier explorations of the same phenomenon by Greek philosophy are rarely appreciated.”
Category: ideas
Was “Cool” Ever Really Cool?
In its origin, cool was a creation of African-American jazz musicians to face the pressure of Jim Crow arrangements during a time when the United States was an unembarrassedly racialist white society. At various points in its history, cool was, in Dinerstein’s language, “the aestheticizing of detachment,” “an emotional mask, a strategy of masking emotion,” “a public mode of covert resistance,” “a walking indictment of society,” “relaxed intensity” played out through the jazz musician, who was “global culture’s first non-white rebel.”
Do You Believe The World Keeps Getting Faster? Then You’re An Accelerationist
“Over the past five decades, and especially over the past few years, much of the world has got faster. Working patterns, political cycles, everyday technologies, communication habits and devices, the redevelopment of cities, the acquisition and disposal of possessions – all of these have accelerated. Meanwhile, over the same half century, almost entirely unnoticed by the media or mainstream academia, accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.”
You’re Keeping At Least Five Secrets You’ve Never Told Anyone Else, And That’s Cool, If You Don’t Think About Them
Having a secret is mostly about thinking about the secret, alone (which makes sense, really). “The actual act of hiding — the moment a person makes up a lie, or changes the subject, or simply omits certain information from a conversation — proved to be only a minor part of the experience of having a secret. Instead, what seems to affect people much more is how often they think about the secret.”
So KFC Commissioned A Romance Starring Colonel Sanders For Mother’s Day
And apparently the book – a branding campaign, via Nike’s ad firm Wieden + Kennedy – isn’t too terrible: “Lady Madeline Parker flees the pending oppression of a loveless marriage, taking a job in a seaside tavern under the cloak of anonymity. She soon meets Harland, a bespectacled sailor with a mysterious past.”
We’d Have No Concept Of ‘News’ Without Our Particular Ideas About Time
“While we frequently wring our hands about the fact that news is in ‘crisis’, we rarely discuss what news actually is. Much like history, news is fundamentally a way of imposing order on the messy totality of what’s going on around us. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘news’ as ‘newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events’. Or, in [historian Robert] Darnton’s words, news is ‘stories about what happened’. What we consider to be news is therefore intimately connected to our perception of time.”
Moralizing Is Annoying. So Why Do People Do It?
“Moral grandstanding is worse than being merely annoying. There are strong moral reasons to avoid grandstanding: it leads people to adopt extreme and implausible claims, and it devalues public moral discussion. But what is it and what are moral grandstanders trying to do?”
The End Of Art? (An Interesting Existential Debate)
When these philosophers claim that art has ended, they are not saying that there will be no new artworks. Their claim is quite different. They are telling us that art has some kind of goal, or line of development, which has been completed; plenty more will happen in art, but there is nothing left to achieve.
What Happens When Computers Get “Better” At Great Art Than Artists?
“If art is defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Picasso or Lennon? After all, emotions are not some mystical phenomenon — they are a biochemical process. Hence, given enough biometric data and enough computing power, it might be possible to hack love, hate, boredom and joy.”
Maybe Beauty And Pleasure In Animals Did Not Evolve Solely To Stimulate Reproduction
“Most [evolutionary biologists] see outrageous sexual traits” – say, beautiful plumage and elaborate mating rituals in birds – “as reliable advertisements. The logic goes that only the fittest manakins could coordinate their movements just so. Only the healthiest peacocks could afford to carry such a cumbersome tail. Their displays and dances hint at their good genes, allowing females to make adaptive decisions. But [ornithologist Richard] Prum says that view is poorly supported by years of research, and plainly makes no sense when you actually look at what birds do.”