Category: ideas

Even if you see social media platforms as something more akin to a public utility, not all speech is protected under the First Amendment anyway. Libel, incitement of violence and child pornography are all forms of speech. Yet we censor all of them, and no one calls it the death knell of the Enlightenment. – The New York Times

If you’re tired of other people’s “Month of Gratitude” posts on Facebook, sorry to tell you this, but that’s the secret – gratitude. Wildly, if you want to save for retirement or something, gratitude is also the way to go: “We’ve repeatedly been able to show the close link between gratitude and self-control. In 2014, we demonstrated that people induced to feel grateful, compared with those induced to feel happiness or no emotion at all, became much more willing to wait for a larger financial reward (eg, $80 in three weeks) compared with a smaller, immediate one ($35 now).” – Aeon

Neural lace and other AI-based enhancements are supposed to allow data from your brain to travel wirelessly to one’s digital devices or to the cloud, where massive computing power is available. – Nautilus

Lone wolves, domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and militiamen on the far-right fringes who have long trafficked in an expansive body of published manifestos and propagandist fiction. Theirs is a kind of sick pop culture, constantly updated and running parallel to the mainstream, that fully accounts for apocalyptic race wars and nationalist-driven coups d’etat. Those steeped in this body of literature are primed to expect the moment where their rhetorical “shit” hits the real-life “fan.” – The New Republic

Paying attention is not easy to do. It demands “a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen”, and the discipline to “resist our tendency to declare our observations finished.” – The Guardian

Inventors are significantly more productive when they are working in larger geographic clusters. The study finds that when inventors move from a smaller to a large cluster, they experience increases in both the number of patents they generate and the impact of those patents, based on their subsequent citations. – CityLab

For many years, Silicon Valley and the machines that came out of it were presented as personally, economically, and socially transformative, agents of revolution at both the level of the individual and the whole social order. They were democratizing, uncontrolled, anarchic, and new. Most of all, they were supposed to be fun—to open up a space of play and freedom. How is it, then, that just a few decades in, we find ourselves trapped in a dreary spectacle that seems to replicate the old patterns of exploitation and dominion in almost every sphere, but with a creepy new intimacy? – The New Republic

Peter Ditto created a survey website to learn to what extent different moral frameworks shape outlooks on political questions, and indeed the greater world. His findings were compelling, but likely unsurprising if you’ve ever had an irreconcilable political squabble at the dinner table: it’s our moral filters, not facts or rational thinking, that mould our ideological outlooks. – Aeon