Category: ideas

“We’re eager to optimise our workouts, our sleep patterns, our pregnancies, our policing tactics, our taxi services, and our airline pilots. Even the academy is intrigued. From spatial history to the neurohumanities, digital methods are the rage. Lecture halls have been targeted for disruption by massive open online courses (MOOCs). Sometimes it seems as though there’s little that can’t be explained by scientific thinking or improved upon through digital innovation. What are the humanities for at such moments, when we’re so sure of ourselves and our capacity to remake the world?”

“In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” (link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball (link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president (link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.”

“In many ways, pornography is no different to a scary movie or a bungee jump. We just view it differently because it happens to involve sex. … [One researcher] likened pornography addiction – the notion that, like a drug, the more you watch, the more, and higher doses, you crave – to the emperor who has no clothes: everyone says it’s there, but there is no actual evidence to support it.”

“The metaphor-stretcher might say Dada was The Velvet Underground of its time; in its short life, few experienced Dada – yet it changed everything.”

“What does the ‘end of work’ mean, exactly? It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States remotely likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs. Eventually, by degrees, that could create a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.”

“Each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud. Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses. Twenty-three per cent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish people. Korean women want to know the secret. They found the secret in this book.”

“In short, a working knowledge of the way in which causes and effects relate to one another seems indispensible to our ability to make our way in the world. Yet there is a long and venerable tradition in philosophy, dating back at least to David Hume in the 18th century, that finds the notions of causality to be dubious. And that might be putting it kindly.”

It’s all about the thalamus and the group of cerebral regions sometimes nicknamed “the oh shit circuit.”

“There is an external world, and it is full of things: tables, crocodiles, textures, etc. These things and this world exist whether I like it or not: their existence is independent of my beliefs, opinions, or preferences, and hence we say that such an existence — or, to use the technical term, such an ontology — is objective. There is also a subjective world, and it consists of internal states of mind. Such states are not ontologically objective, but subjective: they depend for their existence on the person who has them.”