“Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions.” David Graeber explains why. (Don’t blame Charles Darwin.)
Category: ideas
Science’s Problem With the Idea of Play Goes Deeper Than Economics
Barbara Ehrenreich: “But I would say that the roots of our short-sightedness about play range far beyond economics, that they extend into all of Western science, and that what is at stake here is ultimately even deeper than play. For the last few hundred years, Western science has been on a mission to crush all forms of agency, which I mean in the philosophical sense as the capacity for action.”
See the Languages English Has Pillaged for Vocabulary In One Cool Graphic
Philip Durkin of the Oxford English Dictionary gives us a cunning interactive timeline.
Where Are The Real Scholars Of Technology? (It Matters Because The World Is Changing)
“Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing about technology. Unfortunately, the conversation is impoverished by the absence of a robust cadre of scholars who can engage with and critique the role of technology in society.”
Why Does Anyone Get A Ph.D. And What Do You Do With It After You Get It?
“I didn’t need a Ph.D. to work at Kickstarter, just like I wouldn’t have needed a Ph.D. to wait tables (though it adds color to both). In truth, nobody needs a Ph.D. Ok technically you need one to be a college professor, but it is not an indicator of whether you will be a good college professor.”
How Science Fiction Books And Movies Changed Development In California
“This was so accepted as a likely trajectory for the city that it was written into an LA redevelopment plan as a warning of what could happen were the plan not adopted. The plan, LA 2000: A City for the Future, calls this ‘the Blade Runner scenario: the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities.'”
How Science Is Trying To Look Inside Your Soul
If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you.
Why Do We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others?
Bernd Brunner (aggrieved): “People often describe German, my native language, as hard and aggressive. They relish criticizing its guttural sounds, long compound words, and the sentence structure … According to popular accounts, it was five hundred years ago when the apparently polyglot Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, declared ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.'”
Today’s Universities Are Broken. So How Do We Fix Them?
“It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.”
Are Big Tech Companies Gentrifying Buddhism?
“Ire at Google buses, tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s close collaboration with the NSA has been all over the news, but the demonstration at Wisdom 2.0 was different. It wasn’t just aimed at the tech industry; it was also aimed at what some see as an elitist streak in American convert Buddhism.”