Category: ideas

Jessica Gross talks to Dan Ariely, Mr. Behavioral Economics, who explains just what behavioral economics is (it’s the way to leave behind “Assume x“) and why bonuses just aren’t such a good idea.

Why might people in the past have been hesitant to embrace the idea of progress? The main argument against it was that it implies a disrespect of previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work written in the early 1930s, “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress … until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.”

Science writer Erik Vance gives a brief history of hypnotism (back to Dr. Mesmer and before), explains the neuroscience if hypnosis and what it can and can’t do, and recounts his own attempts to hypnotize a friend.

Professor of ethics Gordin Marino looks (briefly, so don’t worry) at the positions of Camus, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jesus, and a retired Vietnam vet in a Florida swimming pool to come up with the answer.

“Before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs had a philosophically rich culture, with people they called ‘philosophers’, and their specious counterparts the ‘sophists’. We have volumes and volumes of Aztec thought recorded by Christian clergymen in codices” – and it can bear comparison with the Greeks and Romans. Sebastian Purcell gives a basic introduction.

“A designer sees a problem, proposes a solution, makes a difference. Such tidy narratives fuel a reigning ideology in which every object, symbol or pool of information is just another design problem awaiting some solution. The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the toothbrush, the car dashboard – all have been redesigned, whether anybody was clamoring for their alteration or not.” A deep dive into the thought, and the process, behind this makeover mania.

The items are the bike lock, the cell phone tower, the hospital gown, the toilet, the airport baggage carousel, and the prescription-medicine label. We think one of them is elegant but frivolous, one might work well but is unlikely to be adopted anytime soon, one’s confusing, one is genuinely ingenious (if it really works), one is “why didn’t anyone think of this before?”, and one should be put into production immediately. See if you agree.

“You can find aspects of vagueness in most words of English or any other language. Out loud or in our heads, we reason mostly in vague terms. Such reasoning can easily generate sorites-like paradoxes. Can you become poor by losing one cent? Can you become tall by growing one millimetre? At first, the paradoxes seem to be trivial verbal tricks. But the more rigorously philosophers have studied them, the deeper and harder they have turned out to be. They raise doubts about the most basic logical principles.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, from this year’s BBC Reith Lecture: “I think you should give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the great political challenges of our time.” For a start, what exactly is “the West”?

“Judging from the research papers already indexed by the new search engine, the volume of academic research is increasing at an exponential rate, and one independent study says that the number of papers is increasing about 4 or 5 percent a year, with 2.5 million published in 2014. That means researchers just don’t have the time to look through everything. They need some help.”