Category: ideas

“It would be easier for men in the top 1% to support 3 wives, at least financially, than for a man in the lowest quartile of earners to support one. … Yet in much of the world, particularly the wealthier parts, monogamy – albeit with cheating around the edges – has flourished. Why?”

“The internet may not have changed the way we think, yet. But it is affecting our ability to concentrate.”

“Middle East scholars Michael Streck and Nathan Wasserman describe and interpret some thigh-slappers scrawled on a badly damaged tablet from Babylon, circa 1500 BC.” And there is indeed a yo’-mama zinger among them.

“The mass media which has been used to sell mass products to the mass market no longer captures a mass audience. Instead, digital technology, the internet and social media have shattered the media and its audience into tens of thousands of specialised niches. Seth Godin’s argument is built on his belief that people do not naturally conform to the ideal of normality sold to us by the advertising industry, and free of its coercive influence millions of us will choose our own weird ways of living and working instead.”

“What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.”

“People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true.”

Yes, really: “Mr. Jégo envisions visitors skiing through a re-enactment of Napoleon’s catastrophic retreat from Russia surrounded by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses,’ he told the Sunday Times.”

“For nearly 50 years, ever since computers were first used to help college kids hook up, people assumed, or hoped, that the fact of technology as mediator would mean not just more dates but better dates. The Great God Computer must know something we don’t, the thinking went. It just must. The notion became a wonderful marketing tool–red meat for the media.”

“People who smile in photos are generally warmer and friendlier than their sad face counterparts. The smilier they are, the easier time they have with social relationships. Heightened smiling intensity in said photos correlates with greater life satisfaction.”

“It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.”