As the author points out tartly, “The presence of actors is a strong clue” that the Netflix series isn’t a documentary. And yet there is a source for this discomfort: “The real source of unease with The Crown comes from the dissonance between the high naturalism of the program’s costumes, staging, and set design and the liberties taken with its plotlines. The current discussion would not be happening if the show were not so rigorously faithful to the historical record in every department except for its script.” – The Atlantic
Category: ideas
Pulling Apart A Critique Of Meritocracy
Some of the meritorious leaders out there were trade unionists, some Harvard professors. So what? And what’s the alternative? Rule by the meretricious, the stupid and the malevolent? – Literary Review
How They Measure Happiness (And Why)
Within the U.S., a commonly cited data source is the General Social Survey (GSS). This has been measuring general well-being levels every one or two years going back to 1972, and since then, has always shown that the percentage of people who say they are “very happy” hovers between roughly 30 and 35 percent, while the percentage of those who are “not too happy” sits around 10 to 15 percent. – The Atlantic
Study: Hunger And Loneliness Activate Same Part Of The Brain
“[This study] provides empirical support for the idea that loneliness acts as a signal—just like hunger—that signals to an individual that something is lacking and that it needs to take action to repair that.” – Smithsonian
How Your Brain’s Built In Biases Let You Believe Untrue Things
There are several well-known mechanisms in human psychology that enable people to continue to hold tight to beliefs even in the face of contradictory information. – The Conversation
The Science Behind Gratitude
There is a strong correlation between gratitude and well-being. Researchers have found that individuals who report feeling and expressing gratitude more report a greater level of positive emotions such as happiness, optimism, and joy. At the same time, they have a lower level of negative emotions such as anger, distress, depression, and shame. They also report a higher level of life satisfaction. – Fast Company
What Scientists Learned From Analyzing 24,000 Chess Matches
Over the last century or so, chess players, the study shows, have been getting better as well as younger. This parallels the so-called Flynn effect in intelligence, or a notable rise in raw cognitive scores. “Performance increased steadily over the course of the twentieth century,” the researchers write, “but the data also reveal a steepening of the performance increase during the 1990s.” – Nautilus
Our Mythology Of Failure On The Road To Success Is Wrong
“Tech companies have created a “fail-fast” system; a culture in which there is no room for what could be genuinely called failure, but only a series of experiments which lead inevitably and inexorably to the conclusion of success. I find it all exhausting. Failure once allowed you to stop trying – that was, famously, the one good thing it has going for it. Having agonised over a doomed project for years, at least you might have the cathartic relief of finally and permanently throwing it away. You were allowed self-pity. You were allowed, crucially, silence.” – New Statesman
On The Verge Of Thinking Far Beyond Our Own
Why couldn’t one of these marvelous learning machines, let loose on an enormous astronomical catalog or the petabytes of data compiled by the Large Hadron Collider, discern a set of new fundamental particles or discover a wormhole to another galaxy in the outer solar system, like the one in the movie “Interstellar”? – The New York Times
Chatting With AI: Here’s How This Artificial Intelligence Stuff Will Go
The thing that we can be sure of is that the A.I. revolution is not a myth. It is the future. And it is happening right now. – The New York Times