“Most of us love perceptual illusions, and … from 4 p.m. EDT on June 29 to 4 p.m. EST on June 30, participants around the world are invited to visit illusionoftheyear.com to check out this year’s top 10 finalists and cast their votes.” (includes video)
Category: ideas
How Should We Respond To Evil? Destroy It? (Good Luck With That)
“Recent history and philosophy have taught that violence is the surest outcome of blithely ascribing the quality of evil to another. At best, this process may supplant the thing we brand evil for a time, but the notion that evil can be ‘destroyed’ is an ethical version of a fool’s errand. “
How ‘Phubbing’ Went From Rudeness To Normal Behavior
“People are phubbed, but they are also phubbers. In an environment where people are constantly switching from being the protagonists and recipients of this behavior, our data suggests that phubbing becomes seen as the norm.”
Philosophy’s Diversity Problem (Not What You Think)
“Philosophy must become more diverse in order to make progress on its fundamental questions. But cultural diversity means something different in philosophy, compared with other humanities disciplines.”
Problem: Artificial Intelligence Starts With The Biases Of Its Programmers
“Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to.”
Tempting As It Is To Think That Hard Work Matters More Than Talent…
“Far from undervaluing effort, Americans seems to overestimate the potential of their own endeavour. A 2014 study by Pew Research found that 73 per cent of Americans believe that hard work is very important to success, the highest out of all the countries surveyed. Only 49 per cent of Germans agreed. We know, from a growing pile of evidence from many different sources, that while innate ability is far from the only contributor to success, it is probably the best predictor of it.”
Why Even Skilled People Make Big Mistakes In Chess (Or Anything Else)
“The fact that mistakes have more to do with the problem itself, as opposed to skill or time, raises questions well beyond the domain of chess.”
Historians, You Can Save The Internet
If by “save” we mean “archive”: “Philip Napoli (Rutgers Univ.) argued that with current news archiving practices, it would be easier for future historians to study local newspapers from 1940 than from 2015.”
The Border Between Austria And Italy Is Shifting, Sometimes Dramatically
“Even the biggest and most stable things, like glaciers, mountains—these huge objects, they can change in a few years. We live on a planet that changes, and we try to make rules, to give meaning, but this meaning is completely artificial because nature, basically, doesn’t give a shit.”
The 17th-Century Philosophers You Won’t Learn About At Oxford
“Conway engages with the key debates of European philosophy of the period — the relationship between mind and body, the nature of matter, the attributes of God — and with the key philosophers. What she also does is bring concepts into the treatise from the Lurianic Kabbalah, the sixteenth-century school of Jewish mysticism.”