Category: ideas

Adam Gopnik: “Surprisingly few people who have considered the alternatives … believe any longer in God. Believe, that is, in an omnipotent man in the sky making moral rules and watching human actions with paranoiac intensity. … But, just as surely, most noes believe in something like what the Super-Naturalists would call faith.”

“Whether we like it or not we are caught up in these flows of technology and as we are carried along by the flows, some barely visible to us, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand back and distinguish between what is good about these innovations and what is not.”

“Shares and mentions can communicate the magnitude of an article’s attention, but they can’t always tell you the direction of the share vector: Did people share it because they loved it, or because they loved hating it?”

“I don’t know what demons might be to blame, but as a one-time junkie, I do know that the demons hardly matter. We imagine addiction as a voluntary act, romantic or tragic, depending on our mood. When we try to imagine the scene, we conjure up pictures of the wrong room and the wrong stress; tumultuous men brought low by vulnerability in the face of fear and loneliness.”

“Our hyperconnected world may be moving toward a state in which there is too much idea flow. In a world of echo chambers, fads and panics are the norm — and so it is much harder to make good decisions.”

Wayne Curtis suggests that our naturally preferred landscape for perambulation may be the “keyhole pathway” – a steady promenade under a canopy of, say, vines on a high trellis or Spanish moss-draped oaks.

“Churn, not density, between places also spurs innovation. No sidewalk ballet required. Conversely: If no one left your super-dense city and no one moved in, innovation would suffer. Migration is economic development. Encouraging a local graduate to stay makes everyone poorer. Walkability and density are of little consequence.”

“All this data is meant to spur us to love ourselves better and run our lives more efficiently. And yet it’s hard not to hear, lurking in this promise of self-possession, the threat of numbers dispossessing us, of becoming a feverish addiction we can’t kick. Can even the most adept multi-tasker really live the life that they’re simultaneously tracking?”

“The Ontological Argument is an infamously devilish a priori argument for God’s existence.” In a bit of theological jiujitsu, a pair of philosophers has used those exact premises to argue that the Devil must, of necessity, not exist – and “the Christian’s world just got a whole lot smaller.”

“Essentially, music is just one example of a hierarchical system, where patterns are nested within larger patterns – similar to the way characters form words, which form sentences, then chapters and eventually a novel.”