Category: ideas

“India’s public karaoke-for-literacy experiment is the only one of its kind in the world. Technically known as same-language subtitling, or SLS, it manages to reach 200 million viewers across 10 states every week. In the last nine years, functional literacy in areas with SLS access has more than doubled.”

“These days many companies are obsessed with fun. Software firms in Silicon Valley have installed rock-climbing walls in their reception areas and put inflatable animals in their offices. Wal-Mart orders its cashiers to smile at all and sundry. The cult of fun has spread like some disgusting haemorrhagic disease.”

Charles Seife, “a veteran science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, examines the many ways that people fudge with numbers, sometimes just to sell more moisturizer but also to ruin our economy, rig our elections, convict the innocent and undercount the needy. Many of his stories would be darkly funny if they weren’t so infuriating.”

Metacognition is when people “assess how confident they are in the cognitive processes in their own brain that produced [an] answer” – how sure they are about a given fact or whether someone is trustworthy. Some people are better at this than others, and “the reason seems connected to a bit of brain just behind the eyes.”

Think of the mind as an environment – a savannah or ice cap – and new information as an animal. “If our minds offer savannah, lions thrive and polar bears die. If we have arctic chills, the polar bears live and the lions die.” Showing evidence that contradicts a deeply-held belief is “like setting a lion down on a polar icecap and expecting it to drive the polar bears into extinction.”

Gordon Marino: “I offer training in both philosophy and boxing. … I would rather take a punch in the nose any day than be subjected to some of the attacks that I have witnessed in philosophy colloquia. However, I have a more positive case for including boxing in my curriculum for sentimental education.”

“[This] particle is so crucial to contemporary physics, and yet simultaneously so elusive. And is that not a bit like God? If God does exist, then God would be the ground of everything, and also never quite seen – only detected in the after effects of the divine wake, like traces in a particle collider.”

How can some observers claim that the Muslim scripture carries a message of peace while others argue that the book is irredeemably warlike? The same way they can do it with the Bible, of course: “[the human] tendency to latch onto evidence consistent with your worldview and ignore or downplay contrary evidence.”

“For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. … What makes creative relationships work? How do two people – who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own – explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together?”

“The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would. New sensations require new terms; below are a few such terms to encapsulate our present moment.” Vocabulary includes blank-collar workers, memesphere, and omniscience fatigue.