There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness. - The Walrus
The difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo. - Persuasion
In one moment, you see children playing on the grass, and you are genuinely moved. In the second moment, you see the children playing, and you think how nice it would be to be moved. The latter is the substance of kitsch. - 3 Quarks Daily
In one chat that I share with literary friends, we sometimes joke that after we’re all dead, if historians try to unearth our correspondence, they will find only this sprawling, years-long museum of absurdities. - The New Yorker
In some cases, you need to make it (ever-so-slightly) harder for people to sign up for the program to help them feel like it’s worth the effort, suggests research forthcoming in Management Science. - Harvard Business Review
If we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.” - The Point
A massive volcanic eruption in AD536 has led historians to describe it as the “worst year to be alive”. Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia were plunged into darkness for 18 months. Temperatures in the summer months fell by 1.5˚C to 2.5˚C, initiating one of the coldest decades in the past two millennia. - The Conversation
Perceiving, experiencing and thinking are inherently embodied activities. The body is not just a physical object, it is a living organism that is in constant flux. It is also part of the social, cultural and material world. - Nature
The adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that, characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state. - The Guardian
If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. - Aeon
What is Intelligence? simply reduces everything to physical implementations, either in AI neural networks or in the brain, and often conflates the two. - Inference Review
Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zinn, the scholar-activist, is in that pantheon. But A People’s History’s had flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones. - The New Republic
Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives. A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. - MIT News
But, cautionary moment (akin to making movies about war): “Sometimes the filmmakers, they can kind of get wrapped up in the bad behavior … of the men that they're trying to critique.” Think Fight Club. - NPR
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. - TechCrunch
