Category: ideas

“Our findings are consistent with the idea that we have an innate system for representing quantity ideas and that the lack of number words in a language should not prevent us from completing simple number and computation tasks.”

“Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors – where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin – can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so.”

These spam-busting challenges are everywhere on the web these days. The system is the latest incarnation of “human computation,” the idea that you can network human brains to solve problems computers still can’t handle. Similar systems are being used to identify images, describe music, and gather common-sense facts about the world to build a more convincing computer intelligence.

The idea that appearance is valued more than performance is one of those painful facts of life that people always hate to be reminded of.

“In a society whose watchword is ‘new and improved,’ new and unimproved is a heresy. But the religion of my homeless ancestors really was richer and deeper than the religion of my housed contemporaries. And I do not see that American life will be improved by the absence from it of second-hand bookstores, or large movie screens, or patience in journalism, or privacy. The view that everything is changing for the better is marketing propaganda–Google progressivism.”

“Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger–at least in certain locations. But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. Despite the quest to unravel the roots of high IQ, researchers say that people often overestimate the significance of intellectual ability. Studies show that practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart does.”

“The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste. In the cultural sphere, ever tighter restrictions on copyright and fair use limit artists’ abilities to sample and build on older works of art.”

“How can reading a good book or watching a film be almost as emotional an experience as events in your own life? The answer may be that you use the same brain region to make sense of them all.”

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have for the first time found synesthetes who hear sounds when they watch certain motions.

“The frontier of knowledge is becoming very hard to reach, making innovation more difficult and costly, and narrowing the window of opportunity in a prospective innovator’s (limited) life span.”