Category: ideas

A “consciousness lecture,” an “intention experiment,” electronic “personal meditation assistants,” and the MIT Mood Meter: a reporter visits the first-ever World Happiness Summit in Miami.

“We measure the very moments of our lives by computer-driven clocks and calendars that we keep in our pockets. I get why people think this way. Still, it’s a pernicious fallacy. To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.”

“No one ever tells you how much you suck at something. Unless you have a mean boss, an abusive parent or a malicious friend, most people are happy to help us maintain the delusion that our efforts are not in vain. No, we cannot count on people around us to let us know how much we suck. It is far more acceptable to compliment than to criticize. So the onus is on us as individuals to admit to ourselves how much we suck at something. And then do it anyway.”

“The harm of a censorship system is not just that it impoverishes intellectual life; it also fundamentally distorts the rational order in which the natural and spiritual worlds are understood. The censorship system relies on robbing a person of the self-perception that one needs in order to maintain an independent existence. It cuts off one’s access to independence and happiness. Censoring speech removes the freedom to choose what to take in and to express to others, and this inevitably leads to depression in people. Wherever fear dominates, true happiness vanishes and individual willpower runs dry. Judgments become distorted and rationality itself begins to slip away. Group behavior can become wild, abnormal and violent.”

In a single two-hour workshop, “Devine and Cox offered ideas for substitute habits. Observe your own stereotypes and replace them, Cox said. Look for situational reasons for a person’s behavior, rather than stereotypes about that person’s group. Seek out people who belong to groups unlike your own. Devine paced among the desks, making eye contact with each student. ‘I submit to you,’ she said, her voice steady with conviction, ‘that prejudice is a habit that can be broken.'”

That’s right: Google may be making plans for people to use Android Pay … by triggering facial recognition.

How? Maybe just luck (there haven’t been high-profile suicides or murders on Twitch, unlike Facebook Live, for instance), and maybe the way Jeff Bezos is obsessed with managing the company’s “cool” look.

See, this is why research funding is so important: “Not familiar with YInMn? Don’t worry, it’s pretty new to the color scene. The pigment was discovered by accident in 2009 at Oregon State University in a chemistry lab run by Mas Subramanian, a professor in materials science, and his graduate students. Accident or not, Crayola liked the new hue.”

“Ear-openers represent the top slice of bread in the complaint sandwich. The meat of the sandwich is the complaint itself, or the request for redress, and the bottom slice of bread in the complaints sandwich is the digestive. The digestive is a positive statement much like the ear opener that comes at the close of the complaint.”

‘The language of analytic philosophy,’ he complained, ‘“forces” the reader to a conclusion through a knock-down argument.’ Discussion thus became a zero-sum game. If the loser of an argument did not accept his opponent’s conclusion ‘he dies’, a victim of his own mental weaknesses. Among the collateral damages of this aggression was an appreciation of intellectual diversity. Nozick aspired to pacify philosophy.