Category: ideas

“In many ways, they’re becoming more like us. Whether you find it exhilarating or terrifying (or both), progress in robotics and related fields like AI is raising new ethical quandaries and challenging legal codes that were created for a world in which a sharp line separates man from machine.”

Researchers are finding that “the physicality of a printed page may matter for those reading experiences when you need a firmer grounding in the material. The text you read on a Kindle or computer simply doesn’t have the same tangibility.”

Researchers are finding that we – all of us – are way more suggestible than we’d like to think, and influenced by factors even the savviest of us might not expect. (They’ve even fooled a class of oenology students by coloring a white wine red.)

“A team of researchers at George Mason University has found that people who are interrupted while writing end up producing lower-quality essays than writers who are allowed to work undisturbed.”

Serendipity is our friend; planning is for losers. “Spontaneity” is rhetorically offered as the reason to celebrate both online social media and last-minute travel bucket shops.

“What is sentimentality? Is it a manipulation tactic, a type of emotion – the desire to be overwhelmed mixed with self-regard – or an overwrought response to a trigger? What factors predispose you to it: youth or age, a gene, a gender, a mood, an IQ score? Is sentimentality useless or precious? … Why does weeping in the darkness of the theater feel so lovely? Why does clicking on an Upworthy link feel so wrong?”

“Peer-review is based on trust, but as the international scientific community grows, scientists won’t spend their careers in the small, trusted networks of known colleagues that earlier generations of researchers were used to. Journals and reviewers need to step up their efforts to check for misconduct, but inevitably, papers with major problems will get through. Crowd-sourced, post-publication review through social media is an effective, publicly open way for science to stay trustworthy.”

“It’s become fashionable in recent years to tout the notion that the language you speak affects the way you think, and even influences how you experience reality itself. It’s an attractive idea, and one that makes some visceral sense.” But linguist John McWhorter says it’s wrong, wrong, wrong, and he explains why in this Lexicon Valley podcast.

“The value-of-practice debate has reached a stalemate. Compiling results from 88 studies across a wide range of skills, it estimates that practice time explains about 20 percent to 25 percent of the difference in performance in music, sports and games like chess. In academics, the number is much lower — 4 percent — in part because it’s hard to assess the effect of previous knowledge, the authors wrote.”

“I imagine all of the strings of text that have come before or after mine that similarly disappeared into the void. But what happens when those spaces stick around, as in a virtual world—when they can’t physically decay?”