Category: ideas

“This is not just a Cape Cod for the mind, a time to relax before wading back into the sifting and processing. Daydreaming, it turns out, is part and parcel of how the mind works, of how it locates and makes sense of the data we’ve already accreted and the links between them.”

“No matter what the crisis is — whether financial, emotional, spiritual, creative, physical or other — it is not the time to be setting future objectives or making determinations about how you’ll behave in a year, or two, or three. You don’t have objectivity in a crisis and your ability to be strategic is greatly diminished.”

“Foucault loved the archive and grounded his scholarship in encyclopedic knowledge. His teaching showed it.”

“Down deep, most people are most afraid of this one thing: sounding dumb. New research shows that people shy away from asking for help for fear of appearing less competent, but that this is an unfounded fear: Asking for advice actually makes you seem more capable.”

“[The study] finds watching ‘reality shows’ of that variety, in which cast members habitually attack or undermine their rivals, appears to raise the aggression level of viewers. What’s more, this effect is more pronounced than it is for watching violent fictional crime dramas.”

“Koko is perhaps the most famous product of an ambitious field of research, one that sought from the outset to examine whether apes and humans could communicate. … But no new studies have been launched in years, and the old ones are fizzling out. A behind-the-scenes look at what remains of this research today reveals a surprisingly dramatic world of lawsuits, mass resignations, and dysfunctional relationships between humans and apes.”

“They’ve been a part of our lives. We see them on TV, they’re in our living rooms, we feel we know them, and we incorporate them almost as though they’re part of our families, though most of us recognize that they’re not. [But] there are some people whose reactions to celebrity deaths are so obsessional and extreme that it can literally make them sick.”

“‘This isn’t about shortened attention spans. This is about an overabundance of decontextualized snippets of info.’ Facebook headlines and Tweets simply don’t consistently provide the cues one would need to distinguish weird news from fake news, ‘unless the [source] is consistently ironic’.”

People have been arguing about this for a long time. Researchers have been studying it for almost as long. Maria Konnikova takes a brief look at the history.

“There is a real danger that inequality is not just related to literal capital accumulation, but to equality of opportunity and the accumulation of cultural capital. This might include things like what kind of education your family can afford to give you. … It isn’t hard to see how this ends up a popular theme in young adult dystopias.”