Category: ideas

“The feeling of scarcity differs across various kinds of experiences and that people can feel “poor” with respect to money, time, or relationships with others. But their striking claim, based on careful empirical research, is that across all of those categories, the feeling of scarcity has quite similar effects. It puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see.”

“Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. … We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.”

“A ‘passionate argument’ about [the] 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher … ‘deteriorated into a fistfight’ between two men waiting in line for beer during an outdoor City Day event in the southern Russian metropolis of Rostov-on-Don, police said Monday. The argument ended when one of the debaters pulled out an air gun and shot the other in the head.”

“You know what will happen if you keep nagging your kids about all the bad things their poor decisions will cause? Much less than what would happen if you emphasized what good could come from avoiding those actions.”

“The experience of each succeeding generation is so different from that of the previous one that there will always be people to whom it seems that any connection of the key values of the past have been lost. As long as modernity lasts, all days will feel to someone like the last days of humanity.”

“‘When we look at unbuilt projects, we see so many ideas, so many alternatives,’ says architecture critic Martha Thorne. … ‘It helps us realize that there’s not just one path that a city follows; there’s not just one path that architecture follows.'”

Several acts record and sell their own performances – which are essentially the same, night after night – to each specific crowd at the end of the show. If you can’t beat ’em, sell it to ’em?

“What if computers were able to mimic the techniques of humans? Would you ever consider an algorithm an artist?”

“Drawing on more than 100,000 Google images from cities around the world, the MIT team is looking to measure people’s reactions to inquiries such as, Which place is more beautiful? Or more lively, boring, depressing or wealthier?”

“Developing dictionaries, defining grammatical structures and all the rules that are normally fed into translation programs to mimic human translators hardly play a role for the Google team. In fact, rules often turn out to be too inflexible and are too much for the computer to handle.”