Why should a name matter so much? Psychologists have a term that might help explain what’s happening here: prestige bias. Developed by the cultural evolution theorists Joseph Henrich and Francisco J Gil-White, the concept describes the human tendency to preferentially attend to, learn from, and value the outputs of high-status individuals. - Psyche
At the time, Americans did not understand that they were living through the largest energy transition in human history. Instead, they perceived a series of disconnected events. Unable to discern or conceptualize an underlying cause, they often declared the transformations around them were “kaleidoscopic.” - MIT Press
Using social media applications to digest bite-sized educational content actually reduces a person’s ability to remember the information, according to new research. - Psypost
A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. - The New York Times
Some called for defunding the national public broadcaster and others bemoaned the failures of successive federal governments to properly invest in the CBC. Many other Canadians, however, mourned the loss while simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief. - The Conversation
“What is the sense that something escapes the conditions of knowledge? It is, I think, the sense, or fact, that our primary relation to the world is not one of knowing it.” - The Point
Art forms that once expressed creators’ personal visions are reduced to fulfilling the audience’s cravings. In theory, I understand why some people say AI is just another creative tool, like the camera or the keyboard. In practice, that tool is filling our world with the ugly, frictionless, disposable content we’ve quickly come to call “slop.” - The Atlantic
Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, insists that for humans ‘existence precedes essence’. We do not have an essence until we give ourselves an essence. In short, ‘man first exists: he materialises in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself.’ I define myself. - Psyche
This poorly argued case that it may be time to restrain the principles of academic freedom and faculty autonomy is not helping the situation. - Boston Review
Citizens can agree on verifiable facts and still inhabit different worlds, because facts do not interpret themselves. To see why, we need to look beyond narrow factual disagreements to the competing systems of interpretation through which people select, categorize, frame, connect, explain, and narrate facts. - Persuasion
When a tool reliably performs a cognitive operation, the internal capacity for that operation tends to weaken with disuse. People who know they can look up something on Google develop weaker memory for the information itself, and habitual GPS users show measurable decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial navigation. - Aeon
