IDEAS

Eyewitness Memory Is Unreliable. Or Is It?

The science of memory has been shifting. A re-evaluation of real-world criminal cases and laboratory experiments suggests that an eyewitness’s confidence in a specific memory can be a strong indicator of the veracity of their account, at least in certain circumstances.  - Nature

You Couldn’t Design A More Anti-News Internet If You Tried

It’s like an invisible tax levied on our communities that we pay civically, cognitively and sometimes even literally, in the form of higher local bond prices due to more wasteful government spending. Increasingly, this invisible tax is being silently levied by Big Tech. - NiemanLab

Why Has The World Stopped Making Babies?

Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. - The Atlantic

Gandhi And His Notion Of Micro- And Macro-Morality

Gandhi demonstrated that micro-morality is essential, but not good enough. We have to be morally good people used to looking inside and judging what we do before we do it, but also people who look seriously at the flawed systems that surround us and think about what we can do to oppose them. - 3 Quarks Daily

Maybe We’re Thinking About Ecosystems The Wrong Way

Why do we keep thinking ecosystems have functions they could fail to perform? - Aeon

What Happens When You Give Artists A Guaranteed Income

The extent to which AI will upend creative work remains unsettled. But that uncertainty has made guaranteeing income for creatives a more viable policy idea. - The Conversation

Is Arts Criticism A Moral Good?

We no longer argue about whether art as such is a matter of life and death—we assume that it’s not. Consequently, critics aren’t prompted to ask about the political valence of their own activity: Is criticism itself a moral good? - Artforum

AI Passes Turing Test For The First Time

Researchers discovered that when equipped with specific “persona” prompts, advanced models like GPT-4.5 were judged to be human 73% of the time, significantly outperforming actual human participants and fundamentally altering our understanding of machine intelligence. - Neuroscience News

How Does Your Brain Process Beauty?

“Neuroaesthetics is a search to give a value, a quantity, to beauty—to locate it, perhaps, in the brain and in the heart.” - Smithsonian

Always On: Pretty Much Everything We Do Now Is Being Recorded

The next time you conduct a delicate bit of office diplomacy or share a romantic or financial secret with a friend over drinks, a sensor built into someone’s glasses, necklace, or lapel pin might be watching you and listening. - The Atlantic

The Slop Before The AI Slop

In 1962, a programmer at Librascope, a California-based defense contractor, announced that “a computer can be programmed to write meaningful and relevant sentences in proper English.” - The New Yorker

How AI Has Taken Over College Education

During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books. - The New Critic

The Gamification Of Homework

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) - The Atlantic

What Both Old And New Amadeus Teach Us

Every great artist needs a nemesis - fictional or not! - in order to stand out. - Salon

Artists, Writers, And Musicians Experiencing Despair As Generative AI Collides With Art

“Musicians, artists and writers generally possess something AI does not, which is the lived human experience out of which they create. That experience includes the accidents, serendipities and epiphanies that shape our arts.” - KC Studio

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