Category: ideas

“Part of the problem is hindsight bias, of course – hard work and merit constitute a tighter, more linear and straightforward story, and therefore one that’s easier to process cognitively. The other problem is that people tend to react very poorly to any ideas that chip away at their sense of who they are.”

“This one, taking advantage of open access and the efficiencies of web-based publishing, threatens to be a massive success. The first issues have been devoted to fish pain (Do they have it? How can we know for sure?) as well as other important topics such as that of animal mourning.”

“Watching what my colleagues do, and understanding why they do it, has convinced me that brute force alone will not innovate the technologies that will enable human civilisation to become an effective arbiter of this planet and her resources. The solution requires tapping into the same impractical, impatient, passionate drive that spurred the video-game-fuelled GPU revolution. And although that kind of lateral innovation cannot be instituted forcibly, it can be recognised and fostered.”

“The net in fact exposes problems that have long lurked in our epistemology, problems that come into stark relief when knowledge is freed of paper, and we freely connect with it and through it across all boundaries of time and place. There’s something about how we’ve been thinking about knowledge — something inherent in traditional epistemology — that blinds Michael P. Lynch and many others to the knowledge-enhancing aspects of what’s happening on the screens in front of us.”

Stephen Hawking: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
Luciano Floridi: “Suppose you enter a dark room in an unknown building. You might panic about monsters that could be lurking in the dark. Or you could just turn on the light, to avoid bumping into furniture.”

Humanities scholar Alexander Nehamas: “The major point is that morality is supposed to be impartial and universal. … Contrary to morality, friendship is a kind of value that is absolutely partial and preferential. In other words, it’s essential that I treat my friends differently from the way I treat everyone else. I will do favors for you and I will help you in ways that I will feel absolutely no obligation to do for someone else. And that doesn’t fit with our conception of morality, which says you should treat everyone the same.”

“One persistent critic, the City Club of New York, asks on its website: ‘Should private donors determine the future of public places?’ But noblesse oblige is no problem for budget-strapped officials like Mayor Bill de Blasio. ‘I know a good deal when I see one,’ he said.”

“The study has generated widespread interest, receiving coverage from newspapers and websites around the world. The paper was also accompanied by an online interactive model that allowed users to explore exactly how words are mapped in our brains. The combination yielded a popular frenzy, one prompting the question: Why are millions of people suddenly so interested in the neuroanatomical distribution of linguistic representations? Have they run out of cat videos?”