Category: ideas

Now that we’re in the “post-fact” era, here’s the story of the paper “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” how it got past peer review and into an academic journal, and how Sokal revealed his caper: “Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the window of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

“We want to live in futuristic betterment but at the same time dread being shot back into premodern bare want. For every promise that some place can be great, there is a parallel claim that if some people are not excluded from it, the greatness will falter and fail. Somehow, the greatness is finite.”

“The phenomenon isn’t confined to fiction: Plenty of people have reported having what researchers call ‘life review experiences,’ or LREs.” So a group of neurologists set out to find what people’s reported LREs had in common and what areas of the brain might be involved.

“Privately expressed contempt may be cathartic. Publicly expressed contempt, however, is perilous. … Widespread public contempt has the potential to undermine the moral basis of all human relationships and, indeed, of human community itself.”

“For tens of thousands of years, technology has been directed outward—on the world at large. Now, for the first time in human history, technology has reached a point where it can be directed inward—back on its creators. Technology has found something new it would like to change: Us.”

Evidence of absence: “Interpreting fossils that aren’t there comes with its own peculiar challenges, and these gaps and ghosts that haunt the fossil record are a big part of palaeontology’s allure. In dinosaur palaeontology, sample sizes are often small, and the challenge is to find creative ways to extract information from fossils. One of the most daring moves of all is to begin treating the fossils we don’t have as data.”

That’s sort of young. “So how do they do it? Like children and adults, infants appear to rely on two key features to detect funniness.”

Take a hint from the art of the Moche people: “Order gives way to chaos. The internet of things turns on its makers.”

“If something is beyond words, then it’s hard to get a handle on what, if anything, it means. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, was convinced that it was nonsensical to try to speak about what lies outside the limits of language. Even so, he wrote an entire book about what cannot be said.”