Category: ideas

Comedy poses a threat to sovereign power not only because of its anarchic bent, but because it makes light of such momentous matters as suffering and death, hence diminishing the force of some of the judicial sanctions that governing classes tend to keep up their sleeve. – Commonweal

Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela, is a fictional character created by a Los Angeles startup called Brud. Miquela has 1.5m followers on Instagram, where she shares pictures of her imaginary life and proclaims her support for LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter. In the past few years, the virtual model has become a veritable celebrity: starring in Ugg ads, interviewing artists at Coachella and collaborating with Prada.  – The Guardian

Adversarial examples are like optical (or audio) illusions for AI. By altering a handful of pixels, a computer scientist can fool a machine learning classifier into thinking, say, a picture of a rifle is actually one of a helicopter. But to you or me, the image still would look like a gun—it almost seems like the algorithm is hallucinating. – Wired

“The idea that being a decent person involves controlling the kinds of thoughts you allow yourself to think can easily be met with resistance. If virtue depends on limits to what is thinkable, and a certain free-thought ideal celebrates no limits, then the potential conflict between freethinking and virtue is obvious.” – Aeon

“The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.: – The New Yorker

The standardized tests, it turns out, aren’t so standardized when you account for the disparities of students taking them. Where you grew up matters. How good was your school matters. So new algorithms attempt to measure these factors and level the field. – The Atlantic

You know Flow. It’s a psychological idea that basically, psychologists say, describes “a state of engagement that arises when people are completely focused on an activity, such as tennis or rock climbing.” Turns out marketers know we get just as much into the flow of YouTube or Facebook – and that’s why we can’t quit. – The Atlantic

Seriously. There are small planets, Earth-sized planets, huge planets, and humongous planets. What there aren’t are planets that are 1.5-2 times as big as our Earth. Uh? Where are they? (No, this isn’t a Doctor Who episode, but it sounds like one.) – Wired