And that’s because our conception of time is driven not by the seasons, not by the light that exists during the day, but by a relentless clock and deadlines that won’t quit. – The Atlantic
Category: ideas
No Wonder We’re Skeptical Of The Future – It’s Scary
Isn’t the ‘crisis of democracy’ old news? Absolutely. It’s as ancient as democracy itself. Still, present circumstances raise the question as to whether we can look ahead to a time after the crisis. What does it mean to be ‘forward-looking’ in times like ours? The fear that drives much of contemporary political culture is caused by the disruptions that global complexity and a destabilised planet introduce into what was once called the body politic. – Eurozine
Are The Humanities Worth Saving? (A Rant)
“If we were living in a culture dominated by grown-ups, Martin Scorsese would be considered the purveyor of middle-brow forgettable fare rather than the gold standard of sophistication, and at least the childless among us would not even have to be aware of Spider-Man’s existence.” – Substack
The Difficulty Of Determining Rights
Some desirable ideals – like a human right to subsistence – simply can’t be realised as a universal human right, Biggar argues, since it is impossible to determine who must deliver on the obligation to feed the entire world’s poor. – Literary Review
Research: Success And “Dark Personality” Traits
We know that approximately 1-2 per cent of individuals in the general population display extremely dark personality features – enough to meet the clinical threshold for a personality disorder – and about 10-20 per cent of individuals have moderately elevated levels. We know that even people with moderate levels of dark traits can wreak havoc: they are more likely to lie and cheat, show racist attitudes, and be violent towards others. – Psyche
New AI Can Predict Your Moral Principles
The development team “choose to focus on a theory commonly used by social scientists called Moral foundations theory. It postulates several key categories of morality including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The aim of the new models is to infer values of those five moral foundations just by looking at their writing, regardless of what they are talking about.” – IEEE Spectrum
Why The Most Interesting British Philosophers Were Born Before WWI
This mix of genius, the dark history of the mid-20th century and wonderful anecdotes and gossip about intellectual life in Oxford and Cambridge make for a good read. There are some fine philosophers around today but the smart money would still bet that the next major biography of a philosopher will be about someone born before the First World War. – The Critic
Does Cancel Culture Even Exist? (A History)
“So much has been written about cancel culture in the past year that weariness sets in just reading the words. What it is, what to call it and whether it even exists are all in dispute. The term is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment.” – The New York Times
Examining The Politics Of Cultural Appropriation
“Permission to use another group’s cultural expressions isn’t something that it’s possible to receive, because ethnicities, gender identities, and other such groups don’t have representatives authorized to grant it. When novelists, for example, write outside their own experience, publishing houses now routinely enlist “sensitivity readers” to make sure they say nothing that will offend—but once the books are published, novelists are on their own. There’s nothing they can do to rebut the accusation that the products of their imagination were “unauthorized,” nothing they can do to ward off the charge that they’ve caused harm by straying outside their lanes.” – Dissent
The Cost Of Singlemindedly Pursuing The New
The pursuit of novelty for its own sake doesn’t just fuel income inequality or threaten the environment (though it does contribute to those): it takes resources and attention from what really matters, which is maintenance and repair. These more modest activities are undervalued in just about every way. – Los Angeles Review of Books