Various U.S. political parties and politicians love to claim kinship with the president who created the National Park System and busted up monopolies. For instance: “Roosevelt’s welfare-state agenda … was not an end in itself; it was a means to facilitate the growth of a culturally homogeneous nation, dominated by the descendants of Anglo-Saxon settlers. Ms. Warren may dream of having a trustbuster as a running mate, but probably not one who refers to white people as the ‘forward race.'” – The New York Times
Category: ideas
Where Candyland Came From, Or, How Medical Needs Drive Culture
In short, the board game came from the need for kids isolated in polio wards to have something to do. “Abbott set out to concoct some escapist entertainment for her young wardmates, a game that left behind the strictures of the hospital ward for an adventure that spoke to their wants: the desire to move freely in the pursuit of delights, an easy privilege polio had stolen from them.” – The Atlantic
Ain’t No Party Like An Existentialist Party
When you’re partying during what feels like some pretty dark times, take inspiration from the French existentialists of the 1940s. “Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre spent a lot of time partying: talking, drinking, dancing, laughing, loving and listening to music with friends, and this was an aspect of their philosophical stance on life. They weren’t just philosophers who happened to enjoy parties, either – the parties were an expression of their philosophy of seizing life.” – Aeon Magazine
Facebook, Google, And Twitter Need Constant Moderation, But There’s A Human Cost
The thing is, all of our social media are really “a remarkable dragnet for capturing nearly half of the $600 billion or so of the annual global advertising budget.” Sometimes that doesn’t lead to great conditions for the moderation, or for the moderators. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Neuroscience: Making Music Together Puts Us In Sync With One Another
“The way we interact with music is very much in line with developing empathy, and how we put ourselves in the shoes of the musician. Our brains mirror what we’re seeing. So when we’re in sync, many of the rhythms of our brains and bodies entrain—heart and respiration rates, certain brain wave patterns. When you’re moved by music, we see levels of the attachment-hormone oxytocin increase. – Nautilus
The Problem With The Mindfulness Movement
With its promises of assisting everyone with anything and everything, the mistake of the mindfulness movement is to present its impersonal mode of awareness as a superior or universally useful one. – Aeon
Of Course We Make Decisions Based On Rational Information… Don’t We?
“Even statistical decision theorists do not make serious choices by consulting cold, textbook models. Like the rest of us, they resort to a knottier combination of deliberation, gut feel and blind hope. For choices, so too for beliefs, which, when met with evidence, are pushed and pulled by processes that are equally mysterious.” – The Guardian
Study: Power Doesn’t Just Corrupt, It Takes A Toll On Your Brain
The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view. – The Atlantic
Trying To Get One’s Head Around The Idea Of Math As a “Beautiful Art”
That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong. – The Paris Review
Observation Without Judgment: The Hidden Perils Of Machine Learning
Because most machine-learning models cannot offer reasons for their ongoing judgments, there is no way to tell when they’ve misfired if one doesn’t already have an independent judgment about the answers they provide. Misfires can be rare in a well-trained system. But they can also be triggered intentionally by someone who knows just what kind of data to feed into that system. – The New Yorker