Category: ideas

With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance. – CNN

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. These concepts and the experiences associated with them are not historically stable. – Aeon

Many people no longer hold the kind of religious views according to which our time of death is not allowed to be of our choosing. There are an increasing number of countries where physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia is permitted in a medical context. But why think that the right to choose our ending is given legitimacy only, if at all, on health grounds? Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style? – Aeon

The challenge of a world without work isn’t just economic but political and psychological. To paraphrase the children’s author Richard Scarry: what will people do all day? You can only contemplate the world with admiration and delight for so long. – The Guardian

The Artistic Genius is male because men are most fit to be Artistic Geniuses. The goalposts of greatness are hyper-specific, socially manipulated, and ultimately less interested in the aesthetics of the work produced. And they are seldom scrutinized. – Paris Review

One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved. Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations. Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly. – The New Yorker

The lack of progress in adversarial philosophical exchange might rest on a simple but problematic division of labour: in professional settings such as talks, seminars and papers, we standardly criticise others’, rather than our own, views. At the same time, we clearly risk our reputation much more when proposing an idea rather than criticising it. This systematically disadvantages proponents of (new) ideas. – Aeon

None of us are good listeners all the time. It’s human nature to get distracted by what’s going on in your own head. Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough. – LitHub

Both the retrospective and the prospective interpretations of the Hubble Constant have stoked ongoing controversy in the 90 years since Edwin Powell Hubble published the first definitive evidence of an expanding universe in 1929. Recently, the controversy has taken on yet another guise, as increasingly precise techniques for measuring the expansion rate have begun to yield distinctly different predictions. The discrepancy has cosmologists wondering whether they are missing important elements in their models of how the Universe evolved from the Big Bang to today. – Aeon

Writing to learn, as I am imagining it, is a divergent social practice fueled by a lovely cocktail of curiosity, imagination, experience, and ignorance. For my purposes, there are two kinds of ignorance that most matter. The first kind of ignorance can be characterized as a refusal to learn. When reason, experience, scientific research, rigorous theory, and historical knowledge are not enough to educate a person to the wrongness or limitations of her ideas then this is a refusal to learn; it is a form of ignorance dependent on willful power, tribalism, and arrogance. The second kind of ignorance, by contrast, describes a state of “not knowing.” – 3 Quarks Daily