“Time’s unknowable perils contributed to the flourishing of economic thought. But then something interesting happened. The creature became the creator: The economy re-invented time. Or, to put things less obliquely, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time.”
Category: ideas
Want Kids To Be Good At Math And Reading? Teach Them Philosophy
“The nature of truth. Theories of fairness. The essence of bullying. These are big, weighty subjects, and apparently 9- and 10-year-olds just eat them up.”
When The Science Of Mistakes Made A Big Mistake
“This scientific study of scientific bias would ignite a romance of the mind, one that spanned several decades and ended up transforming both psychology and economics. Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky went on to show that mistakes in human judgment are not exceptions but the rule, resulting from a host of mental shortcuts and distortions that cannot be avoided. We do not behave like “rational actors,” as economists once presumed; rather, we’re predictably misguided—subject to a “bounded rationality.” Tversky went on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant on the basis of their work. Kahneman would get a Nobel Prize.”
The Church Of Efficiency Is Making Us Anxious
“The quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of your limited time – is a dominant motif of our age. And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.”
Does Empathy Lead Us To Moral Actions Or Get In The Way Of Them? (A Debate)
Research psychologist Paul Bloom, author of the new book Against Empathy, and a colleague from Stanford, Jamil Zaki, argue it out.
The Internet Has Almost Killed The Curly Quote
And old-school stylists are in pain: “Straight quotes appear as an abomination in a typeface, because their designers rarely love them; they’re included by necessity and often lack cohesion with other characters. The non-curly quote comes from the typewriting tradition, and arose from cost.”
At The End Of A Year Like 2016, Hope May Seem Futile – Here’s Why It’s Not
“Is it naïve to be optimistic? Foolish to harbor hope? Three modes of inquiry – neuroscience, history, and psychology – supply complementary and contrasting perspectives. By putting them together, you can start to see what good hope and optimism might do you. And the country.”
What Is The Speed Of Human Thought?
“Human thought takes time to form, and so the ‘right now’ that we’re experiencing inside our skulls is always a little later than what’s going on in the outside world. .l. So, in a sense, the future has already happened – we’re just not aware of it yet. To make things even more complicated, the different senses operate at different speeds.”
Technology Has Betrayed Our Privacy, And Artists Are Inspired
Artists tangle with the implications of our trackable lives – including a widely used app called “Churchix,” that surveills and records the identities of anyone who goes into certain churches. “Because many artists — all of us, really — were so captivated by the initial promise of the internet, they were blinded to its potential problems.”
How An 18th-Century Presbyterian Minister Helped Create Modern Computer Science, Forensic Science, And Brain Science
In 1748 David Hume argued, inter alia, that the probability of witnesses inaccurately claiming to have witnessed the risen Jesus was greater than that of Jesus actually rising from the dead. For the Reverend Thomas Bayes, this was simply not acceptable.