“The urge to rank and measure might itself seem anti-intellectual—more Top Trumps than top scholarship. But the aim is not to chase a chimera still less to deliver the results of some supposedly objective IQ test. Rather it is simply to honour the minds engaging most fruitfully with the questions of the moment.” – Prospect
Category: ideas
Rethinking Hipster Culture – What It Says About Our Time
The grand consensuses of modern life online—the politics of approbatory or condemnatory agreement—keep culture from renewing and reinventing itself. When hipster lost its edge and went mainstream, we entered a period of aesthetic and moral stagnation. This wasn’t hipster’s fault, and—dear god—hipster was never going to save us. It is simply what happens when we defang the subversive element in culture, even the stupidly subversive. – Hedgehog Review
In Hyper-Curating Our Desires Have We Lost The Thread Of Reality?
One doesn’t have to subscribe to Plato’s ladder of ascent or gift of the gods to appreciate his point that the realm of selfish desire is the futile and corrupting alternative to more genuine longing. And one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to see how longing can open up a different logic of meaning in our contemporary aesthetic stage. – Hedgehog Review
Wondering How A Neural Network Works?
Grant Sanderson has a video explainer that shows you how machines are learning to learn. – Aeon
Sci-Fi Is Trying To Prepare Us For An Uncertain Future (And Present)
A contingent of science fiction writers – that is, novelists, to be clear – are being hired by companies to predict the future. Yes, really. “Mega consulting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper published a guide on how to use sci-fi to ‘explore innovation.’ The New Yorker has touted ‘better business through sci-fi.’ As writer Brian Merchant put it, ‘Welcome to the Sci-Fi industrial complex.'” – Wired
The Robots Can Now Beat You At Poker Too
At the crescendo of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, a pair of computer scientists have announced that they’ve created an artificial intelligence poker player that is stronger than a full table of top human professionals at the most popular form of the game — no-limit Texas Hold ’em. – FiveThirtyEight
Discovery Of A Skull In Greece Changes What We Know About Human Pre-History
The finding is likely to reshape the story of how humans spread into Europe, and may revise theories about the history of our species. – The New York Times
Unlimited Information And Free Access? Turns Out It Was A Problematic Idea
The Palo Alto Consensus held that American-made internet communication technologies (both hardware and software) should be distributed globally and that governments should be discouraged from restricting speech online. Its proponents believed that states in which public discourse was governed by “everyone” — via social media and the internet — would become more democratic. – The New York Times
What Burning Man Taught Us About Networks Of Cooperation
So when do networks enable cooperation to thrive? And when do they hinder it? A vast body of work from across anthropology, psychology, and sociology has explored the conditions under which cooperation—the propensity for individuals to pay a personal cost for the benefit of the whole—operates. – Nautilus
A Push To Create Immersive Virtual Reality Experiences In The Arts
UK digital minister Margot James described the initiative’s vision in an opening event. “Imagine being inside the world of a Shakespeare play, or in a video game as professional players battle it out for millions of dollars, or immersed in a national museum, solving a detective narrative involving dinosaurs and robots with fellow virtual museum-goers.” – Ludwig Van