Category: ideas

“Janet Vertesi tried hide her pregnancy from the Internet. She detailed her efforts to mask any behavior that suggested the coming change in her life, using everything from Tor to mask her browsing history to paying cash for gift cards to avoid using her credit cards.”

“In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.” (And every one of us is incompetent at something.)

“While 78 percent of college-educated Americans believe that creativity is important to their current careers, most found that they value creativity more as professionals than they expected to while in college.”

“Our original cinematic visions of imagined futures — often dystopian wastelands — were shaped by their film locations on what was then undeveloped land outside Los Angeles. Even the futuristic worlds on soundstages called back to Los Angeles, a city whose rapid growth was multi-pronged and haphazard.”

Yes, it sounds like the sort of bromide your Sunday school teacher might have dished out. But some experimental psychologists are finding that this particular “act-as-if” trick can actually work.

“From the ‘genius bar’ at the local Apple Store to bestselling books that trumpet ‘the genius in all of us,’ geniuses seem to abound. But if we consider the idea of ‘genius’ as it has evolved across history, it starts to look like we don’t really need geniuses as we once did. … The increasing banality of genius in the contemporary world has begun to dissolve it as a useful category.”

The idea of homo sapiens‘ predecessors having been “savage” and “primitive”, in contrast to our own intelligence and ingenuity, has been fundamental to our species’s modern idea of itself. “[Yet] Neanderthals created complex tools, buried their dead, had an organized use of space, probably cared for the infirm, and perhaps even conversed vocally.”

“The idea that localised brain shrinkage isn’t necessarily bad is brought home wonderfully by a new brain scanning study of elite chess players.”

“Feisty personalities, although unpleasant, can be tremendously effective. … You’re probably avoiding this strategy because you think that being negative is, well, negative. … The good news is that a whole range of negativity – of beneficial negativity, mind you – has nothing to do with being a jerk.

“Global information warfare is not virtual. It is mostly latent; that is, it is in the world but not experienced as part of the world. It is a war without shadows. You cannot see it, and you cannot hear it; it happens silently every day, can hit anyone anywhere, and we can all be its unsuspecting victims.”