Category: ideas

The metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas,” where some sort of rational choice theory means the eventual selection of the best quality information, looks naive in an environment where junk news driven by bots and trolls and other forms of non-transparent amplification floods the web, spreading faster than any byte of truth. – The American Interest

Michael Chabon: “Maybe the world in its violent turning is too strong for art. Maybe art is a kind of winning streak, a hot hand at the table, articulating a vision of truth and possibility that, while real, simply cannot endure. Over time, the odds grind you down, and in the end the house always wins. Or maybe the purpose of art, the blessing of art, has nothing to do with improvement, with amelioration, with making this heartbreaking world, this savage and dopey nation, a better place.” – The Paris Review

Millennials aren’t looking for lifehacks to win friends and influence people; they are looking for workable systems that will sanction and codify their behaviors. Luckily for them, philosophers have been working on doing just that for the past several thousand years. – LitHub

“Merit is a sham,” the preacher saith. “Merit itself is not a genuine excellence but rather—like the false virtues that aristocrats trumpeted in the ancien régime—a pretense, constructed to rationalize an unjust distribution of advantage.” – The New Yorker

Together, between the late 1960s and the 2008 financial crisis, they tore down the model of activist government intervention in the economy and replaced it with the simple idea that markets should be left on their own. In the process, they made economics the dominant explanatory framework of our time, commonly rolled out to account for matters from criminal sentencing to the dating “market.” – Washington Post

Public life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief. Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works. – The Guardian

For Aristotle, the virtues of character are not enough by themselves to work the magic of illumination that comes with exiting Plato’s cave. We also need the intellectual virtues: practical wisdom (phronêsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia) – the latter being what philosophia is the love of. – Aeon

In Europe, an entire way of life is ending. “Around 1960, there were still about 110,000 nuns and monks in Germany. Twenty years ago, there were 38,348. Now, there are about 17,900.” But what to do with all of the art, architecture, land, and so much more? Er, how about student housing? “The students bring life into the convent. When they party on the field behind their building in the summer, it’s the superior general who has to deal with the calls from unhappy neighbors.” – Der Spiegel

How can that be real? Chemistry, biology, physics … “The real measure of whether two people hit it off is how much they synchronise internal bodily functions, like heart rate and sweating.” – New Scientist