Category: ideas

“Nowadays, when cheating is considered by some teachers to be an excusable response to a difficult assignment, or even a form of pro-social activity, our society risks a future of moral numbness brought on by a decline of honesty and all the virtues that rely on it.”

“Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package.”

“As challenging and demanding as cooperation is, it has been our species’ secret weapon, and those of us alive today are the descendants of people who had what it takes to make it work.”

“If everything is traceable, that means that we’ll be more aware of the entire life cycle of our stuff — even once we’ve given it up willingly.”

“Literary necrophilia” runs amok thanks to, well, greed – and maybe a desire to know the end of the story. But when should we let unfinished art, left behind when the artist or writer died, simply exist as it is?

“But anyone who cares to read Smith’s Wealth of Nations for themselves will find an economics discussed and justified in explicitly moral terms, in which markets, and the division of labour they allow, are shown to both depend upon and produce not only prosperity but also justice and freedom, particularly for the poor.”

“The sounds astronomers attribute to cosmic activity have enormous wavelengths and low frequencies that make them inaudible to us. But while we may be deaf to the sound of space, technology is not.”

“Art that feels like a duty is probably bad art. But most of the art industry is geared towards foisting that kind of art on us. … It’s the joyous, uninhibited art that truly matters – and this is what keeps me hooked.”

“Duolingo [is] a free language tutorial website that doubles as a paid-for translation service. The deal is that users get to learn a language while simultaneously helping to translate website content.”

“Of course being too original is a common problem only for geniuses … For the rest of us, the challenge is reversed: how can we be sufficiently novel? One approach is to combine many old thoughts in a new melting pot. With patience, it’s then possible to be reasonably systematic about allowing new ideas to form.”