Category: ideas

A company called Cyborg Nest has invented a one-inch chip called North Sense, to be permanently attached to the body, that vibrates when facing magnetic north. You don’t turn it off any more than you do your eyes or ears; it provides the same constant data stream they do – which is why the Cyborg Nest folks think it will change cognition and perception.

“Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.”

“When given nothing else to do, the brain defaults to thinking about the person it’s embedded in. … [That is,] brain areas related to processing emotions, recalling memory, and thinking about what’s to come become quietly active.” It’s quieting that area that Buddhist meditation practice is all about.

“Making multitasking actually work is not a matter of expanding your working memory. It’s the reverse. In order to multitask effectively, you need to decrease the amount of working memory that a task requires. And that’s where habits come in.”

“We tell stories that make us seem adventurous, or funny, or strong” – or virtuous or stoic or oppressed. “We tell stories that make our lives seem interesting. And we tell these stories not only to others, but also to ourselves. … If we reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves, both to others and to ourselves, we may well find out things about who we are that complicate the view we would prefer to be identified with. Why might this matter? Here is one reason.”

“The editors who select the topics are “deeply aware of the social impacts of new technologies and of the role of real people in shaping those technologies. We don’t treat technology in a vacuum here. We talk about how people who use technology have a chance to take some responsibility for it, and to influence its future design and direction.”

Luck is chance viewed through the spectacles of good or bad fortune. It’s really good news, at least for you, if you win the lottery, and it’s really bad news if you’re one of the passengers on the plane when it crashes. Chance, then, is the objective reality of random outcomes in the real world, while luck is a consequence of the subjective value you place on those random outcomes. Luck, we might say, is chance with a human face. Understanding this gives us a clearer view of reality, and a clearer view of reality means we can choose better courses of action.”

“For better or worse, we must accept that civility ‘does not exist outside of politics as an independent force,’ … but rather is just as much the ‘subject of political struggle’ as everything else.”

“The reality is, for our generation, if you care about the life of the mind, you’re just going to have to keep doing it, and who knows where you’ll be doing it? Is it going to be as an adjunct? On a tenure track? At Gotham Writers Workshop? As a journalist? As long as you can keep it going in your own head without going mad, you’ve got something.”