Category: ideas

“Memorization has enjoyed a surge of defenders recently. They argue that memorization exercises the brain and even fuels deep insights. … Certainly, knowledge matters. A head full of facts – even memorized facts – is better than an empty one. But facts enter our heads through many paths – some well-paved, some treacherous. Which ones count as ‘memorization’?”

The inadequacy of a scientistic explanation does not mean that beauty is therefore a “mystery” or anything similarly occult. It means only that other explanations must be sought, in formal and iconographical and emotional and philosophical terms.

Postmodernism, the school of “thought” that proclaimed “There are no truths, only interpretations” has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for “conversations” in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

“Underlying many popular Silicon Valley failure clichés is entrepreneurs’ belief that “starting companies these days is akin to doing research in the past” — as if we don’t need research when the opportunity to fail is so readily available.”

“So, how did that erroneous story become entrenched as conventional wisdom in the first place? Did our scientists lie to us? Or is the lay audience just so sheeply that we’ll run with any easy explanation we’re fed, without question?”

“When we learn to read, our brain creates new connections between specialized neural modules for vision, hearing, and language. These specialized modules evolved long before the availability of reading material, but our flexible brains rig up connections between them to build a new and cognitively sophisticated function.”

“If student loans, or the threat of student loans, are a significant barrier to high quality talent entering and staying in our field, then we should use our collective power to lobby the federal government to forgive all student debt. Not just for artists, for everyone. Much in the way the technology community is currently advocating for immigration reform for everyone, not just programmers. For young artists and administrators, forgiving their debt would be equivalent to giving them a substantial raise.”

Keith Houston, owner of the blog Shady Characters, recounts the origin stories of these odd punctuation marks – and explains how the hashtag got the name “pound sign”.

“The result of such work is a new, unified science of mind that uses the combined power of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to examine the great remaining mysteries of mind: how we think, feel and experience ourselves as conscious human beings.”