Category: ideas

“From ages eight to eleven, kids are natural philosophers—before puberty and those awful inhibitions creep in. All you have to do is trigger the question and let it roll.”

Even when you’re not Hamlet, it can be a little … intense. It started here: “I won a contest hosted by Airbnb, where entrants were invited to explain why they wanted to spend the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death at Kronborg Castle — better known to the English-speaking world as Elsinore.”

There was poetry, there were colorful signs, and there were scientists who only went into science because they read Margaret Atwood. The marches weren’t supposed to be political, but “one of the poems in Ms. Roberts’s handout,’“Advice from a Caterpillar’ by Amy Gerstler, felt like it could serve as a manual for resistance, or at least for survival. ‘Behave cryptically to confuse predators,’ it read: ‘change colors, spit, or feign death. If all else fails, taste terrible.'”

And, of course, versus Robert Moses. A new documentary shows how “through a combination of grassroots activism, fundraising and persistence, Jacobs blocked Moses and successive city overlords from running Fifth Avenue through the historic Washington Square, tearing down much of SoHo and Little Italy to make way for a billion-dollar expressway, and building a six-lane highway up Manhattan’s west side.”

“Cryptographers think that a new kind of computer based on quantum physics could make public-key cryptography insecure. Bits in a normal computer are either 0 or 1. Quantum physics allows bits to be in a superposition of 0 and 1, in the same way that Schrödinger’s cat can be in a superposition of alive and dead states. This sometimes lets quantum computers explore possibilities more quickly than normal computers. While no one has yet built a quantum computer capable of solving problems of nontrivial size (unless they kept it secret), over the past 20 years, researchers have started figuring out how to write programs for such computers and predict that, once built, quantum computers will quickly solve ‘hidden subgroup problems’. Since all public-key systems currently rely on variations of these problems, they could, in theory, be broken by a quantum computer.”

Confabulation does seem to be innate: consider the stuff that people imagine they’ve done when they have brain damage, and that children come up with while the prefrontal cortex is developing. Neurologist Jules Montague writes about the phenomenon and the “doubt tags” people use to keep it in check – and how they can be induced to miss those tags and develop false memories.

“While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.”

“A lot of people are saying this is showing that AI is prejudiced. No. This is showing we’re prejudiced and that AI is learning it.”

Studies of waking and sleeping unconscious processes suggest that deception is not, and has never been, the second self’s true forte. As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead sagely observed in the early days of psychoanalysis, the unconscious is essentially an enabler, quietly rolling up its sleeves to expand ‘the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking of them’.