Category: ideas

Red Burns, one of the founders of tech design, saw technology “as something you needed to get to the real work: improving people’s lives, making them feel more connected, bringing delight in big and small ways, and empowering them to affect change.”

“There are thousands of words we don’t know, long or short, soft or clunky, in print or heard in conversation. We can just let them go, like passersby, and we’re none the worse because of it. But if we’re active, we give new words a try on our own.”

“Analyzing vast amounts of information puts the commodity of data in a whole new context and infuses it with new meaning: new information is created and benefits not only big business but also society and individual customers. Provided that we are willing to accept its utility – in both material and immaterial respects -, data can help us solve many problems.”

“We all know that if you practice something you will get good at it. There’s no question that if you practice on a brain training game you’ll get better at that brain training game. The question we were trying to get at is: Does it lead to any general benefit in other areas of life, in other aspects of cognitive function?”

“Among the many things that set humans apart from other animals is our capacity for counterfactual thinking. At its most basic level, this means we can hypothesize what might happen if we run out of milk; in its most elaborate form – we get War and Peace. Stories, then, are complex counterfactual explorations of possible outcomes: What would happen if I killed my landlady? What would happen if I had an affair with Count Vronsky? How do I avoid a water buffalo?”

“Here’s the best way to know for certain: Do you annoy and infuriate people at dinner parties and other social gatherings by correcting others on how they use or pronounce certain words? That’s the key hallmark, because there’s certainly nothing wrong with simply knowing things about words that the average person does not.”

“Over the past couple of decades, a line of research has suggested there is little or no link between a person’s general intelligence level and their success at the classic board game.”

“After 12 hours of playing a road game designed to improve attention and focus, healthy 70- and 80-year-olds performed as well as people a half-century younger. The improvements were still evident six months later, and they extended beyond the skills learned for the game.”

“The connection between work and happiness is much more intense in Protestant countries than in others. Protestants suffer intense hardship from unemployment; the ‘psychic harm from unemployment is about 40 percent worse for Protestants than for the general population,’ according to the authors. This also holds true for non-Protestants living in Protestant countries.”

“The numbers of philosophers of color, especially women of color, is even more appalling. The 2003 number quoted above of 16.6 percent full-time women philosophy instructors includes zero women of color.”