Category: ideas

“Culture has taken the coin toss as an impartial way to select between two possible outcomes. It implies fairness—there isn’t anything that coin tossers can do (besides cheat) to favor one outcome. No agency appears to intervene in the decision, and thus the human actors committed to it can comfortably distance themselves from the result. Indeed, in popular culture, the coin toss has become a way to shed moral responsibility for an outcome.”

“Consciousness, we can tentatively conclude, is not a necessary byproduct of our cognition. The same is presumably true of AIs. In many science-fiction stories, machines develop an inner mental life automatically, simply by virtue of their sophistication, but it is likelier that consciousness will have to be expressly designed into them.”

What does it mean when a culture expresses its aspirations and ideals through a longing for a lost past, the past even of another country? Of course, every society has some version of its own past, and many of these are idealized pictures. Fantasizing about a simpler, happier world is a common enough reaction to rapid social change.

“Whether contemplating the pros and cons of climate change; the role of evolution; the risks versus benefits of vaccines, cancer screening, proper nutrition, genetic engineering; trickle-down versus bottom-up economic policies; or how to improve local traffic, we must be comfortable with a variety of statistical and scientific methodologies, complex risk-reward and probability calculations – not to mention an intuitive grasp of the difference between fact, theory and opinion. Even moral decisions, such as whether or not to sacrifice one life to save five (as in the classic trolley-car experiment), boil down to often opaque calculations of the relative value of the individual versus the group. If we are not up to the cognitive task, how might we be expected to respond?”

Aydika James is the art director of Secret Samurai Productions, a collective of artists that aims to solve real-world problems through art. She’s also a member of Maverick1000, a group of entrepreneurs who meet annually on Sir Richard Branson’s private Necker Island in the BVI.

If you look at public opinion polls, scientists are among the most trusted professions, certainly they are in the UK and probably in the US as well. But we’re getting to a stage where that’s at risk for a variety of reasons. Some of them are technical reasons and some of them are cultural reasons.

Flow sounds appealing, and it seems to frequently coincide with some of our most pleasurable pinnacles of human experience, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into optimal performance. In great athletes, performing artists, writers, chess-players, doctors, nurses, air-force pilots and others, beneath the surface of effortless flow is unrelenting determination. And if developing one’s potential is key to a meaningful life – developing what Immanuel Kant speaks of in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as our duty to cultivate our ‘predispositions to greater perfection’ – then flow, while bringing momentary happiness, might impede the attainment of that loftier value.

“There’s an idea we must always be available, work all the time,” says Michael Guttridge, a psychologist who focuses on workplace behavior. “It’s hard to break out of that and go to the park.” But the downsides are obvious: We end up zoning out while at the computer—looking for distraction on social media, telling ourselves we’re “multitasking” while really spending far longer than necessary on the most basic tasks.

“Because we’re fixated on our coffee stain (or whatever we happen to be self-conscious about), we assume others must be, too. But when nothing in particular draws our attention to ourselves, we neglect the fact that we may nevertheless be an object of other people’s interest. In short, we pay too much attention to what we’re paying attention to.”