“The debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided – pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics – I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.”
Category: ideas
Early To Bed And Early To Rise Does Not Make You More Moral (Take That, Ben Franklin!)
“Early birds aren’t ethically superior. And, to the extent that other research suggests that they are, it may just be that they are luckier: modern society, for the most part, is built around their preferences.”
Beyond The Turing Test: Artificial Intelligence Will Never Be Human Intelligence
“Some insist that ‘hard A.I.’ (with human-level intelligence) can never exist, while others conclude that it is inevitable. But in many cases these debates may be missing the real point of what it means to live and think with forms of synthetic intelligence very different from our own. … A mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal.”
What Philly Cheesesteak Does To The Brain (The Science Of Appetite)
And then there’s scrapple. The researcher’s name for the appeal of these two Philadelphia delicacies is dynamic contrast. (podcast)
Are Humans Smarter Than They Were 100 Years Ago? Here’s The Evidence
“Our improved ability to reason abstractly may also be the result of the spread of scientific thinking-reason, rationality, empiricism, skepticism. Thinking like a scientist means employing all our faculties to overcome our emotional, subjective, and instinctual brains to better understand the true nature of not only the physical and biological worlds, but the social world (politics and economics) and the moral world (abstracting how other people should be treated) as well.”
Yes, It Is Possible To Be Scared To Death
Adrenaline can be a dangerous thing.
Fifty Years Ago, Britain’s Only White Paper On The Arts Suggested Daily Engagement – Did It Work?
“The good news is that the arts are a significant contributor to the economy; the bad is that culture and creativity are being erased from the classroom, and that audiences for the arts are substantially white, middle class, affluent and well educated. Worryingly, there is a downward trend in participation.”
What Is Acting, Really?
“Certainly impersonation has long been part of the acting tradition, and the skill required in building a character from the outside in is equal to the skill that builds a character from the inside out. My question instead is why the outside-in version, particularly when it involves miming an extreme ailment or an actual person, has become the default for Oscar voters.”
Grand Budapest Hotel Is The Rarest Of Things: A Thoughtful Comedy About The Holocaust
“To be sure, the period also needs to continue to be addressed head on. But hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise shy away saw this movie, and took away its important lessons about tolerance, governance, and the rule of law. That matters.”
Dear Movie Studios: How About Bundling All Of The Oscar Nominees Into One Streaming Package?
“It isn’t hard to imagine someone downloading a best picture bundle and plowing through two or three movies a night the week leading up to the Oscars. The proposition has the added bonus of heightening interest in the broadcast, thus driving viewers to it and perhaps sparking their interest in other nominees, creating a theoretical virtuous cycle.”