“The greatness of the Enlightenment lies less in its ideals, than in our efforts to realize them. The tragedy of the Enlightenment lies there too. … It was a set of abstract philosophical ideals, but it was also a lived historical experience, full of ordinary disappointments and irregularities” – it was, like a centaur, an impossible combination. “We know what a centaur should look like, but we never see one in real life.”
Category: ideas
13 Reasons You’re Sleep-Deprived
No, we mean besides the fact that you’re an overworked arts professional.
Are Our Smartphones Making Us Stupid?
“What does it say about our thinking skills when we habitually outsource problem-solving to our phones?”
Nietzsche And Climate-Change Denial
Andrew O’Hehir: “The philosopher gave himself credit for being the first modern thinker to tackle ‘the problem of science itself,’ for presenting ‘science for the first time as problematic and questionable.’ Dude! If the perverse German genius could only have known how far ‘the problem of science’ would extend in our age, or to what ends his critique of Socratic reason would be twisted.”
17 Things We Know About Forgiveness
First of all, “The scientific literature on forgiveness only dates back to 1989, amazingly.”
How Our Attention Is Being Stolen From Us
“Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention.”
The Truth About Psychedelic Drugs And Mental Illness
Several recent studies are indicating that “so-called classical psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms)” may not be as dangerous as War-on-Drugs rhetoric has led us to believe – and that they can have genuine therapeutic value under certain circumstances.
Why Does Hunger Shape So Much Behavior That Has So Little To Do With Food?
“Hunger makes Belgians less charitable, Israeli judges more draconian, and Ohioans likelier to stick pins into voodoo dolls that represent their spouses. And, according to a paper published last month … it turns Canadians into hoarders.” Why? “Part of the answer can be gathered from observations of other animals.”
Why Writing By Robots Might Be Important
“Wordsmith essentially does two things. First, it ingests a bunch of structured data and analyzes it to find the interesting points, such as which players didn’t do as well as expected in a particular game. Then it weaves those insights into a human readable chunk of text. You can think of it as a highly complex form of Mad Libs — one that takes an understanding of both data and writing to create.”
These Ideas Must Die
“Rather than asking if a new idea is a good one, we ask whether it’d be better if some of the ideas we cling to were killed off.” For instance, testing products on mice. (podcast)