Category: ideas

“In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of. Our instinct is to try to make sense of it if we can. But when a new form of writing appears, generated by sophisticated machines, we may not be able to. As we learn to appreciate it, perhaps we will even come to prefer machine-generated literature.” – Nautilus

We can’t escape the question of what matters and why: the way we’re living is itself our implicit answer to that question. A large part of a philosophical training is to make those implicit answers explicit, and then to examine them rigorously. – Aeon

The hidden moments of reclaimed freedom that make any job bearable are being discovered and wiped out by bosses everywhere: That trick you used to use to slow down the machine won’t work anymore; or that window of 23 minutes when you knew your boss couldn’t watch you is vanishing. Whatever little piece of humanity survived in these fragments dies with them.
 – The New Republic

Increasingly there’s this repeated story in our country where actually a whole lot of people don’t get to profit off of the creative insights that they have. That is totally racially structured. That is totally class-structured. So this connection between race and wealth that I’m trying to establish is that the rules of who gets to profit from what they make are totally unequal. We can see this in [areas] that seem to be as frivolous as the makeup you put on your face or the clothes you put on your body. But it all trickles from this initial system of inequality. – Vox

He lays out two such rules in his new book, Loserthink. His first proposal, which he calls the “48-hour rule,” states that everyone should be given a grace period of a couple of days to retract any controversial statement they’ve made, no questions asked. “We live in a better world if we accept people’s clarifications and we accept their apologies, no matter whether we think—internally—it’s insincere,” he says. His other idea is the “20-year rule,” which states that everyone should be automatically forgiven for any mistakes they made more than two decades ago—with the exception of certain serious crimes. – Wired

Few people, particularly those cognizant of current writing on cities, culture, and technology, would blink at the sentence above. “Urban innovation,” the “smart city,” and the “triumph of the city”—these have become familiar as buzz phrases and even book titles. But what about peripheral regions, rural areas, and small towns—can’t they be smart and innovative? And what exactly is meant by “the triumph of the city”? Triumph over what? – CityLab

One view of paradise is that it is a place with no conflict, no sharp edges. But that’s not what most of us want. The peak experiences, the excellence of accomplishment isn’t about frictionless existence, it’s about trying and failing and fixing and learning. – Aeon

The Rise of Jordan Peterson is not a propaganda film. It’s a film about propaganda. It’s about the way facts have become helpless in the face of distortive framing. Whereas we once entrusted our arts institutions to highly trained specialists whose authority lay in their expertise and taste, today’s cultural arbiters often find themselves going along to get along. In the process, they risk defeating the very purpose of their job, which is to discern good art from bad art and to know what’s propaganda and what’s not. – Medium

In other words, there’s little hypocrisy to be seen – and the accusation of “virtue signalling” itself might be a signal from those who make the accusation to like-minded others. That’s because “the accusation does exactly what it accuses others of: it moves the focus from the target of the moral claim to the person making it. It can therefore be used to avoid addressing the moral claim made.” – Aeon