Category: ideas

It was, for Scruton, impossible to conceive of society without prejudices and exclusions, discrimination and inequality. That’s why his views, despite mellowing over the years, never substantially altered. Scruton the philosopher required Scruton the polemicist. – The Observer

The controversy over “Attack Helicopter” is another case study suggesting that rejecting “art’s for art’s sake” in favor of “art for justice’s sake” doesn’t necessarily yield more justice. It may help no one, harm many, and impede the ability of artists to circulate work that makes us think, feel, grapple, empathize, and learn. Americans will always seek out, discuss, and be moved by art that is messy, tense, and chaotic, whether the censors of any moment like it or not. If liberals stop producing art like that, illiberals of all sorts will fill the breach. – The Atlantic

Using metrics designed by evolutionary biologists, they compared the rates of cultural change to the rates of biological change for finches from the Galapagos Islands, two kinds of moths, and a common British snail. The result was kind of surprising: Biology and culture move at about the same speed. – Wired

Status-mongering is the mess that results from leaving some of our ethical theorizing undone. We don’t know who we think we are, and it shows. – The Point

“My colleagues want to better understand how people behave in the wild and how we can capture every-day behavior without asking people to self report … [because] that’s a very unreliable way of collecting data. What I’m seeing is just a very new landscape and regulations that are not ready.” – Vice

Re-reading Bloom, I am thunderstruck, because my inclination is to blame it all on social media and attendant technologies favoring vicarious experience. But Bloom’s 1987 narrative establishes an earlier start. He distinguishes my sixties’ generation from his eighties’ students, in whom tendencies that we initiated yielded a dead end. It may in effect be read as a tale of unwanted, unanticipated consequences. – The American Interest

We don’t know without a lot of careful analysis because words and their meanings change. However, “over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past.” – Aeon

China’s rapidly expanding network of surveillance cameras increasingly relies upon AI-aided facial-recognition technology to achieve much of its primary mission: to keep track of, record, control and modify the behaviour of its citizens. Within this system, ‘face’ really has nothing to do with traditional conceptions of moral or social status – at least, their ideal forms; it is not about how one views oneself or how the members of one’s community regard one. Instead, it is to be an object under the gaze of a systematic government surveillance system established by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and guided by increasingly sophisticated AI. – Aeon

Hysterical critics are self-centred – not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round… What seems self-evident to me is that public writing is always at least a little bit self-interested, demanding, controlling and delusional, and that it’s the writer’s responsibility to add enough of something else to tip the scales away from herself. – London Review of Books