Category: ideas

“Even if the Orwell sculpture is counted, it only takes the tally of statues of novelists across the city’s 32 boroughs to two, together with one of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock Square.”

“There is an urgent need to take stock of the planning systems we have now, what they can deliver, and to debate alternative futures for planning that might produce much better results.”

“So which is it? Is academic philosophy in danger of withdrawing ever further into itself? Or is philosophy, in daily practice and in the academy, at a high point—accessible to more people than ever, and spilling over its disciplinary boundaries?”

“Economic arguments for the value of a humanistic education will not save the humanities, and we should stop making them. The value of the humanities as the heart of a university education does not lie primarily in “transferrable skills” nor in the “critical thinking” that employers presumably want. Instead, a core education in the humanities gives students the intellectual space to grapple with questions of enduring importance.”

“Those options are derived in large part from philosophy and classical economic theory, rather than data. In a new paper, researchers have flipped the script, using observations of simple social situations to show that optimism, pessimism, envy, and trust, rather than selfishness and sacrifice, are the basic ingredients of our behavior.”

“This surprisingly blunt – and very public – talk from prestigious academics is what happens when scientists help themselves to, or conversely categorically reject, philosophical notions that they plainly have not given sufficient thought to.”

“Enter Artemidorus of Daldis, the world’s first true dream researcher. He was a citizen of Ephesus during the second century A.D. … He did what any good researcher would do: he went out into the field, and gathered dreams. … Artemidorius made himself into an empiricist of fantasy, and he compiled his findings in a book called the Oneirocritica, or the Interpretation of Dreams.”

“Artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are about decreasing the length of human perception. Google autocomplete is an attempt to shorten the time and path between thought and a response — to decrease the time and path between seeing something and categorizing it or identifying it and moving on. To me what poetry in particular is so good at is defamiliarization. Increasing the length of perception.”

“Traditionally, the way the digital divide has been portrayed has definitely been a binary,” says Crystle Martin, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California–Irvine who specializes in studying digital literacy. “It’s been viewed, if you give people access to technology, they will be able to be online and able to access all the things available. But it actually doesn’t turn out to be true.”

“My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.”