“A recent study of priorities among young people found that achieving one’s career passion ranks highest of all — more than making money or getting married. Finding a fulfilling job is almost three times more important than having a family, teenagers in the study reported. It is daunting to contemplate.” – The New York Times
Category: ideas
How Change Happens – With A Million Tiny Steps
“The unknown becomes known, the outcasts come inside, the strange becomes ordinary. You can see changes to the ideas about whose rights matter and what is reasonable and who should decide, if you sit still enough and gather the evidence of transformations that happen by a million tiny steps before they result in a landmark legal decision or an election or some other shift that puts us in a place we’ve never been.” – Literary Hub
New Understanding Of The Brain Argues For Lifelong Plasticity
It’s no longer a question of our brains being a product of either nature or nurture but realizing how entangled the “nature” of our brains is with the brain-changing “nurture” provided by our life experiences.” – Literary Hub
What Does The Kennedy Center’s New “Reach” Want To Be?
Phil Kennicott: “When the Kennedy Center was built, it was designed to fulfill a specific sets of needs and functions. Now it is has been expanded to enfold an unknown number of new functions and needs, in spaces that are flexible and multipurpose. On any given evening, the old building hums with activity, despite its dated interiors and problematic furnishings. In five years, let’s put the new building to the same test. If the majority of its new spaces are active and throwing off sparks, it will be a success. If not, the problem will almost certainly be a lack of institutional foresight rather than architectural planning.” – Washington Post
What Are The Limits Of Academic Freedom?
“Academic freedom is no simple matter. We have distinct ways of understanding it, often according to class, discipline, race, gender, and ideology. At base, academic freedom entitles us, as both faculty and students, to say or investigate things that might upset others without fear of retaliation. As with any condition of speech, limits exist. And as always, complexity begins at the imposition of limits.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
Machines Are Increasingly Taking Over Creative Jobs. Should We Be Worried?
Once we thought drivers, doctors, accountants, and lawyers were irreplaceable. And yet we are beginning to see computers encroaching on those fields. Now, even the most human of professions—those centered on creativity, something we thought of as uniquely human—seem to be programmable. – JSTOR
When The Meanings Of Words And Ideas Are Up For Grabs This Is What Happens
“In the decades since the 1980s, and after the victory of capitalism over communism in the cold war, we have lived, Chantal Mouffe told me, within a sense of the “normal” to which there has seemed no alternative. Words and concepts that had been so important for those struggling for freedom from authoritarian rule in the twentieth century Mouffe now saw as having been co-opted by purely economic interests: “choice,” for example, had become a way to justify relinquishing public control of schools and hospitals; “liberty” had migrated in meaning to bolster the selling-off of state assets.” – New York Review of Books
This Person Doesn’t Exist And Never Said That. (The Growing DeepFake Crisis)
As political advertisements already twist candidates’ words and manipulate the truth for the perfect soundbite, can you believe anything you hear when it can all be manufactured on any laptop you can find at Best Buy? – Shelly Palmer
We Need A Plan To Survive Artificial Intelligence
“The more time we have to prepare before superintelligent AI is achieved, the more likely we’ll survive what follows. But you’ll get total disagreement from scientists on how soon this might happen, and even whether it will happen at all.” – LitHub
Tech Giants Are Hiring Philosophers. Will It Help?
“Tech companies seem to be recognizing that they need advice on the unprecedented power they’ve amassed and on many challenging moral issues around privacy, facial recognition, AI, and beyond. Philosophers, who contemplate these topics for a living, should welcome any interest in their work from organizations that are set on shaping humanity’s future. But they need to be wary of the potential conflicts of interest that can arise from these collaborations, and of being used as virtue-signaling pawns for ethically problematic companies.” – Wired