Category: ideas

Explaining the deep-seated psychological habits most of us have – the transparency illusion, the primacy effect (that’s the power of first impressions), and the fact that we all tend to be “cognitive misers” – that make it difficult to consistently get an accurate read on other people.

“The consensus answer was that the emphasis should be on collaboration (learning with others, working with others—both keys to much of the advancement of the maker culture), learning how to think (specific subject matter is less important, with an important exception noted below), and being able to think in a systemic way (seeing how things fit together).”

Frédéric Lenoir: “It’s difficult to get what you want. Even if we desire something, most of the time we don’t take the right steps to get it – that’s the problem with pleasure. We want to be happy, but we prefer pleasure. But pleasure and happiness are quite different.”

“The Turing Test, which is intended to detect human-like intelligence in a machine, is fundamentally flawed. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved or modified. Here are eight proposed alternatives that could help us distinguish bot from human.”

“This one thing that we’ve lost in our society is the understanding that exploration, understanding, and creating thinking is what got us to where we are, that made America the ‘idea nation,’ the country that founded Apple and IBM, that invented the car and the airplane.”

On a basic level, the appeal of any sort of porn is what scientists call supranormal stimulus, “[an] exaggerated imitation [that] can cause a stronger pull than the real thing.” But food porn “is a visual experience of something that other people can smell and taste … something that, at its best, should manufacture a desire that it can’t satisfy.” So what happens in the brain that keeps people hooked on it?

“In every place we’ve been, every one we’ve talked with about downtown recovery stresses the crucial importance of getting people to live there.”

“Despite masculinity’s lingering and damaging presence, the women are the victors here.”

“News stations benefit financially from videos like Santana’s, so why shouldn’t the people who shot them?”