“A person (even a New Yorker) could be both dissatisfied and happy at once, and … the act of complaining was not in fact evidence of unhappiness, but something that could in its own way lead to greater happiness.”
Category: ideas
How Can Thousand-Page Biographies Possibly Survive The Digital Era?
“I feel sorry for the biographers of the future. The questions we used to ask with such fervor — Where’s the archive? Do you have access? Are there letters? — will be irrelevant to our successors.”
Board Games Have Conquered Café Culture – Why?
“Adults and kids the world over have all come to the conclusion that what they really want to do on a weekend is open up a cardboard box and decide who gets to be the blue piece.”
Why Hasn’t The Internet Made More Of An Impact On Our Lives?
“The Internet age just isn’t that impressive. Technological advancements of the last century had a truly transformative effect over the previous industrial age. Ice farming was replaced by refrigeration, the horse and buggy by the automobile, burning of fossil fuels for energy by centralized electrical power production. These advancements were notable not just in what they achieved in themselves but how they affected society.”
Artificial Intelligence – Be Careful What You Wish For
“The distinction between a corporation and an algorithm is fading. Does that make an algorithm a person? Here we have this interesting confluence between two totally different worlds. We have the world of money and politics and the so-called conservative Supreme Court, with this other world of what we can call artificial intelligence, which is a movement within the technical culture to find an equivalence between computers and people.”
Why Is Reason Frightening?
The ideal of “clear and intelligent thought,” stripped of its condescension and its indifference to the non-rational dimensions of human life, deserves to be defended. We need not be a nation of intellectuals, but we must not be a nation of idiots.
Wait, So Now Physical And Emotional Pain Aren’t The Same Thing Neurologically?
“In recent years, researchers and the public have, to a certain extent, latched onto the idea that there are important similarities between physical and emotional pain … At the very least,” according to new research, “pain and rejection appear to show up as distinct ‘representations’ in fMRI (brain scan) readings of study participants.”
To Maintain Your Brain, Exercise It, Right? (But Here’s What The Studies Say…)
“In healthy older adults, computer-based brain exercises have limited benefits, and then only when supervised by a trainer once to three times a week. And despite what Lumosity and BrainHQ will tell you, doing the training at home had no effect at all, at least in the short term.”
Color Alert: Scientists Able To Teach Synaesthesia
“By the end of the nine-week course, most of the volunteers had the bizarre experience of seeing text in the real world, on road signs, for instance, take on certain hues.”
How To Make Fewer Stupid Mistakes, From A Man Who Knows
Dr. David Dunning “is probably best known for the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, … which argues, in short, that people without a lot of competence in a given area tend to overrate how good they are at the thing in question.” Here’s some advice he offers on how to avoid that effect.