Category: ideas

“We tend to think of creativity as something artistic—the quality that produces masterpieces. But it’s actually an important part of just getting everyday stuff done. It’s what allows a programmer to complete her first line of original code, a product manager to identify a new market for an existing product, and an elementary-school teacher to find an entertaining way to teach subtraction. And when it comes to situations as different as these, constraints seem to improve our performance.”

Jay Griffiths lays out how the ideas and propaganda techniques of the early-20th-century movement can be heard and seen in the words and actions of Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump. (Her thorough conflation of libertarianism with the alt-right and fascism is less convincing.)

Worrying actually serves a sort of purpose for most people – figuring out how to solve a problem or avoid a danger or deal with the aftermath of a disaster. “That’s not to say that anyone really enjoys the process – just that it can feel like a productive use of time, rather than a waste of it. … What separates the pathological worriers from the rest of the pack isn’t that they see a point to worrying, but that they have better follow-through.” (Oh, great, Mom.)

Confronting this tendency toward the commodification of persons, and counteracting it with effective cultural strategies for ‘re-humanisation’, will pose one of the most important moral challenges of our time.

Cark Erik Fisher: “As a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept … More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths.”

The experience of time, that is. “As we converse with and consider one another, we step in and out of one other’s experience, including the other’s perceptions (or what we imagine to be another’s perception, based on our own experience) of time. Not only does duration bend, we are continuously sharing these small flexions among us like a currency or social glue.” Alan Burdick explains how this works.

“The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things materially embodying fiendishly complex pieces of mathematics. How can we make sense of this? I’d like to propose that sea slugs and electrons, and many other modest natural systems, are engaged in what we might call the performance of mathematics. Rather than thinking about maths, they are doing it.”

Basically, the MTM Show was about – and a harbinger of – gentrification.

Financial constraints, educational culture budgets slashed, and people staying away from the money-suck that is London – “the same economic pressures that have uprooted politics around the world are destroying the aspirations we express when we go to galleries. There is nothing more aspirational than visiting a museum or art gallery. It is an expression of hope.”

“In recent years, there’s been evidence that sleep is important not just for remembering relevant stuff, but also for forgetting irrelevant things. Perhaps the mass-downscaling of synapses is part of that ‘smart forgetting.’