Category: ideas

How A D&D Tool Helped Organize Our World Views

The pleasure of filling out an alignment chart is similar to that of playing a simple brainteaser, or completing an elementary-school worksheet: You’re making judgment calls, sorting, putting objects into little boxes—and you end up with something neat and composed. It has the allure of surety. If we could decide, once and for all, what is the exact best way to live, maybe everything would fall into place. – The Atlantic

A Plague Of Curators

“It’s used because it sounds fashionable. It sounds like it’s for … the aesthetically conscious.” As zeitgeisty as other oddly specific and much hashtagged words like “wanderlust” or “journey” or “empower,” “curate” is spreading. The word’s overuse has left it almost devoid of meaning, and curators themselves — the traditional, museum-dwelling kind — are up in arms. – The New York Times

Misplaced Priorities? We’re Studying “The Brain” But Not People

The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more impossibly complicated both reveal themselves to be. We have picked no low-hanging fruit after three decades and $50 billion because there simply is no low-hanging fruit to pick. The human brain has around 86 billion neurons, each communicating with thousands of others via hundreds of chemical modulators, leading to trillions of potential connections. No wonder it reveals its secrets only very gradually and in piecemeal fashion. – Aeon

Computers Are Amazing. They’re Not Intelligent

The amazing feats achieved by computers demonstrate our progress in coming up with algorithms that make the computer do valuable things for us. The computer itself, though, does nothing more than it ever did, which is to do whatever we know how to order it to do—and we order it to do things by issuing instructions in the form of elementary operations on bits, the 1s and 0s that make up computer code. – American Scholar

What We Know About Deja Vu

Scientists do have some hypotheses for what brings déjà vu to the surface of consciousness – from the idea that it might be a built-in processing glitch in the brain, or an indication of healthy memory, to the slightly more puzzling notion that it’s part of quantum entanglement. – Aeon

A Backlash To Oversharing Our Lives?

Oversharing just doesn’t look like it did before. Like most things on the internet, it too has become commodified. Where we once divulged, without much thought or artifice, the hardships in our marriages or the frustration of a bad-hair day, now this seems a little cheap and amateurish. Professional influencers make a living from their oversharing. Ours doesn’t look as neat, as well thought-out, as supported. Even our connection to oversharing is controlled, manipulated, and artificial. – Wired

We’re Recreating The Nature Around Us With Technology

Under the rubric of “ubiquitous computing,” “smart dust,” and the “Internet of Things,” computers are melting into the fabric of everyday life. Light bulbs, toasters, even toothbrushes are being chipped. You can summon Alexa almost anywhere. And as life becomes computerized, computers become lifelike. Modern hardware and software have gotten so complicated that they resemble the organic: messy, unpredictable, inscrutable. – Nautilus

While We Weren’t Looking The Robots Became Our Bosses

The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call center workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager. – The Verge