Category: ideas

“Particularly in the past few years, conspiracy theories have been omnipresent on the internet and in social media. These modern forms of communication allow conspiracy theories to spread faster than ever, and make it easy for like-minded people to connect and form online echo chambers. As a result, the flat-Earth movement – endorsing the conspiracy theory that the Earth is actually flat and that scientists have been lying to the public for more than 500 years – is now an organised society with regular conferences.” – Aeon

In the U.S., at least, kindness and empathy are on a statistical decline. So what can parents do? Stop the focus on success, and focus on what we can do that’s decent and good. “The point is not to badger kids into kindness, or dangle carrots for caring, but to show that these qualities are noticed and valued.” – The Atlantic

The Golden Rule begins with imagining oneself as selfish, but try Mengzi instead. “Mengzian extension starts from the assumption that you are already concerned about nearby others, and takes the challenge to be extending that concern beyond a narrow circle.” – Aeon

Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim. – Aeon

Like other mass media that boomed around the same time—radio, movies, monthly magazines—syndicated news diverted people’s energies and attention from local culture with alluring, slickly-produced entertainment. And like those other media, newspapers became a conduit for a shared commercial culture. – Zocalo Public Square

“Happiness is in many ways the marketing breakthrough of the past decade, with self-care and anti-stress products now rounding out the bestseller list on Amazon (think of ‘gravity blankets’, ‘de-stressing’ adult colouring books and fidget spinners), where they nestle alongside chart-topping tomes by ‘happiness bloggers’. All of this is made possible by a specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs.” – Aeon

“The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants.” – New York Review of Books

In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. – Scientific American

“The part of our brain that regulates our time perception has been overloaded and exhausted, causing our sense of past, present and future to melt together.” – The Guardian

General infallibility is a tempting proposition. Treating an individual’s attitudes and preferences as givens – as matters beyond debate or criticism – might seem to promote human dignity by forcing us to treat all views as equally worthy of respect. But such an outlook is likely, if anything, to have the opposite effect. This is because taking seriously a person’s capacity to make mistakes is critical to taking seriously their capacity for rationality. Only by recognising that people are capable of error can we properly value anyone’s goals or engage in rational debate. – Aeon