Category: ideas

“When we are performing our normal, practiced tasks everyday, we often are – counterintuitively — not paying attention to all the little details of what we are doing; our prefrontal cortex is running largely on autopilot. But in times of intense stress, like a playoff game, major presentation, or a job interview, your prefrontal cortex can go into overdrive. When the pressure is on, we often start focusing on the step-by-step details of our performance to try and ensure an optimal outcome and, as a result, we disrupt what would have otherwise been fluid and natural.” – Harvard Business Review

Some scientists believe if robots can master conversational humor, and speak like the people they serve, it could help humans accept them as part of our lives. But is that even scientifically possible? – Daily Beast

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: ‘Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma.’ But something else is happening too. Human history was formerly all about divergence; now, as cultural differences are eroded, we are converging. The result, according to his hypothesis, will in the end be a slowing down of the imagination and ideas.” – Spectator

Maybe morality started with food. Really. – The New York Times

The problem is that it’s difficult to defend the notion that the truth is recognisable by its beauty and simplicity, and it’s an idea that has contributed to getting fundamental physics into its current mess. – Aeon

“At the most benign level of the junk industry are papers, published in journals with no effective screening process, that are obvious nonsense—about Martians being supermanagers on Mars, chocolate being a “superfood,” or even just the sentence “get me off your fucking mailing list” repeated 863 times. But beyond these papers, in journals with varying standards and reputations, are far more dangerous, flawed studies, including misleading reports about safe drinking water, fake “proof” that humans aren’t responsible for climate change, or bogus research that vaccines cause autism.”  – The Walrus

Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city startup from Google parent company Alphabet, has released its master innovation and development plan to turn a sizable swath of Toronto’s Lake Ontario shoreline into “the most innovative district in the entire world.” – CityLab

Being a philosopher on brain rest is like being a point guard on hand rest. The major asset for your profession is suddenly not working reliably. – The New York Times

Some of the earliest scientific studies of creativity focused on personality. And some evidence suggests that innovation comes easier to people with certain personality types. A 1998 review of dozens of creativity studies found that overall, creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident. They also tend to be less conventional and conscientious. – Nautilus

Far from having evaporated, ‘folkloric disenchantment’ is still common today in the writings of self-described magicians, shamans and witches. But we also find its analogue in academic disciplines. In this academic version of the myth, nostalgia for vanished magic has been replaced by the idea that a scientific worldview has stepped in to replace more primitive folk-belief systems. – Aeon