Category: ideas

Computational linguist Kees van Deemter: “A vague concept allows borderline cases … such as the word ‘grey’. Some birds are clearly grey, some are clearly not, while others are somewhere in between. The fact that such birds exist makes ‘grey’ a vague concept. The vagueness does not arise from insufficient information: some concepts are fundamentally vague. … [And] vagueness is crucial if you want to build computers and robots that communicate with people.”

This “distinctively American philosophy … emerged in the early decades of the 20th century in the work of William James, John Dewey and C.S. Peirce. Pragmatism may or may not be an ethical program … but it always emphasizes the resources of historically given institutions and practices and de-emphasizes the role played in our lives by supra-historical essentialisms (God, faith, truth, reason, brute fact, overarching theory).”

A recent paper by two psychologists from the New School “suggests [that] some women who are objectified by men internalize this perception and think of themselves as ‘a sexual object to be scrutinized.’ For reasons that are not entirely clear, this process appears to undermine their cognitive ability.”

“Now, many experts accept the view that memories are stored like individual files on a shelf; each time they are pulled down for viewing, they can be altered before being put back into storage. Altering a memory during the time it is off the shelf can create an updated memory that can be saved in place of the old one, scientists believe.”

“Whatever you do gets re-used and re-mashed so many times its origins are lost. You start to lose the context of information and therefore the meaning. You have music samples, for instance, that might have a touch of novelty but are no longer part of a musical culture that has any history or heritage. That’s happening to ideas as well, where you have little snippets that get passed around on things like Twitter without context.”

“Because of social networks, your actions aren’t just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I’m not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I’m also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.”

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing. The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

“British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.”

“A new randomized trial shows that on average, three months after receiving a series of 10 massage sessions, patients had half the symptoms of anxiety. … [But the research] also found massage to be no more effective than simple relaxation in a room alone with soft, soothing music.”

“[Researchers] found that individuals have reduced self-concept clarity after a breakup. … The loss of the relationship has multiple psychological consequences, including the tendency for individuals to change the content of their selves and the feeling that their selves are subjectively less clear and even smaller.”