Category: ideas

“In all cases the story of the Shard should give rise to caution. It set a precedent for a series of other towers across London in which claims for good design became ever less credible. While it contributed to improvements to the station at its base, London Bridge remains seriously flawed. And eloquent statements made by its architect didn’t match reality.”

What makes a person a good bullshit detector? Why are some people more susceptible to bullshit than others?

“Art Basel-goers would surely love to believe that they, and they alone, are responsible for their impeccable taste in art. But recently, researchers have begun to study the neurological and psychological underpinnings that help explain why you may love an abstract Cy Twombly drawing, but your friend thinks it looks like a bunch of scribbles his toddler made.”

“You would be literally designing and producing a new type of baby via the same sort of technology that is used to make a GM tomato, mouse, or monkey. The baby would be a genetically modified human or, to phrase it in an edgier manner, a GM human.”

“Medieval theologians did not sit around debating the ontological status of zombies. They knew for a fact that humans are conscious and built a system of control and punishment around this principle. … Among scientists today, consciousness is being hailed as one of the prime intellectual challenges. … Given that it was off the table of science for so long, why is it now becoming such a hot research subject?”

Alice Gregory: “It’s not self-evident that one’s stances on, say, abortion and what counts as a good movie should align, but they do, remarkably, again and again. To believe in enough of these correlations, and to convince others that you are right, is the role of the public intellectual.”
Pankaj Mishra: “The public intellectual, incarnated as access journalist, policy wonk and, after 9/11, laptop warrior for liberalism and democracy, … has ended up whispering advice and encouragement to power.”

When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”

“Researchers began to realize that there were subtler factors influencing people’s experience of waiting in line, including ideas of fairness, mismanaged expectations, and the strange and inaccurate way that most people perceive both time and pain.”

“The DreamYard Project has a patriotic attachment to the Bronx. Two young actors, Jason Duchin and Tim Lord, founded it, twenty-one years ago, to teach public-school kids in grades K through twelve by using the arts. The idea was to recruit teachers from among working artists of Duchin’s and Lord’s acquaintance in New York and match them with schools whose funding for arts education had been cut. Through a few changes, that has been DreamYard’s basic mission from the start”