Ideas

“The Nobel committee seems not to recognise how collaborative science is today; their paradigm remains the lone genius, or a duet or troika at most. Year after year, they perform their arbitrary and often cruel calculus, leaving deserving physicists shivering in the pool without any medal to show for it.” – Aeon

The lack of diversity within artificial intelligence is pushing the field to a dangerous “tipping point,” according to new research from the AI Now Institute. – Engadget

Music is based on influences of music that has come before. So music created by artificial intelligence is composed based on the data and algorithms provided to it. So if AI-made music sounds like say, Beyonce, does that mean Beyonce is owed something? – The Verge

Often, it’s really about politics, nostalgia, and the fear of community change…

Creative people that have a strong ability to associate different words are especially susceptible to false memories. Some people might be more vulnerable than others to believe fake news, but everyone is at risk. – NiemanLab

If we look closely, it’s apparent that evolutionary psychology is due for an overhaul. Rather than hard-wired cognitive instincts, our heads are much more likely to be populated by “cognitive gadgets, tinkered and toyed with over successive generations. Culture is responsible not just for the grist of the mind – what we do and make – but for fabricating its mills, the very way the mind works.” – Aeon

The upside of winning is pleasure and glory, but the cost of always winning is never getting to know how much more was in you. The only way to find the limit is to cross it. But you can’t lose unless you fight your heart out. Which is why I say, more fighting, more biting. – The Point

So many things seem bleak. Politics, the environment, the growing wealth gap, climate change. It’s enough to make anyone despair. But if you despair you become paralyzed. So how, exactly should we think about the coming apocalypse without succumbing to hopelessness? – The Outline

With Bay Area-based tech companies scheduled to hold initial public offerings this year, the city of instant millionaires is about to have thousands of even newer millionaires. And many residents of this city — secretly and not-so-secretly — fear that 2019 is the year San Francisco becomes a truly impossible place to live. – Washington Post

We get that little jolt of pleasure when we share something online and the likes and comments pile up. It’s addictive (and meant to be). But there’s a case to be made that empty low-cost likes can start to replace genuine sharing of experience in real life. Are “likes” the new junk food? – The New York Times

Americans seemed to be into empathy from roughly post-WWII to the 2000s. Then things started going sideways. Now, it’s “Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo. And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.” – NPR

Basically, this is the fastest way … so far. Things still might change, but “it splits up digits, uses an improved version of the fast Fourier transform, and takes advantage of other advances made over the past forty years.” – Quanta Magazine

Molly Shannon, an actor who spent years on Saturday Night Live, didn’t think much of or about Dickinson until she got the chance to play her in a new movie. Then things changed. Shannon: “We have this story that she wanted her poems burned upon death when in reality she’s an L.G.B.T.Q. hero. She’s a model for new wave feminism, which talks about equality for all. [Screams] It makes me want to start a riot.” – The New York Times

OK, fine, everything we thought was good in art from the 1950s and 1960s was indeed funded by the CIA in some way. As for Dr. Zhivago, “Literary propaganda was a company-wide preoccupation. The scheme went all the way to the top.” – LitHub

Indeed, they do. The worst environmental disasters – the ones that killed the most people – were often deliberately worsened by predatory governments, companies and individuals. Societies that escaped environmental disaster were relatively safe from colonial exploitation, and flexible in the face of shifting environmental circumstances. We face an uncertain future but, like early moderns, there is much we can do to either ease human suffering in the face of environmental upheaval – or make it a great deal worse. – Aeon

The claim that the brain is a computer is not just a metaphor. The cognitive sciences are full of hypotheses to the effect that the brain computes such-and-such in so-and-so a way. Many of our perceptual capacities, for example, are understood in computational terms, and there aren’t any viable alternatives around. – Aeon

Peter Skerry’s essay is quite pessimistic about how the world has evolved. He writes that the meritocracy structures we have built have become ingrown, timid and self-involved. He wonders if Glazer would agree with him… – The American Interest

Jenny Odell is tired of all the exhortations to be a better you. Even the acres of digital detox books now flooding stores masquerade as reconnecting with what’s real while all the while suggesting you’ll get even more productive after the detox. Her suggestion. Stop. Be a better you. – The Baffler

Instead of looking at what we’re learning, perhaps we should consider the obverse: what becomes safe to forget? As the internet grows ever more powerful and comprehensive, why bother to remember and retain information? If students can access the world’s knowledge on a smartphone, why should they be required to carry so much of it around in their heads? – Aeon

“Today, with the pollution that new technologies have brought to our information ecosystem, this distinction is no longer so easy to make. And this is the real problem, and danger, of satire: not that it mocks and belittles respect-worthy pieties, not that it “punches down,” but that it has become impossible to separate it cleanly from the toxic disinformation that defines our era.” – The New York Times

There is, of course, the economic argument. Overall, arts and culture contribute more than $760 billion a year to the US economy—4.2 percent of GDP. But there’s an awful lot of “soft” power too. “They incubate ideas, provide ethical standards, and raise questions about the status quo—functions that are becoming ever more important as the tech world, ridden by scandal and crisis, faces a moment of reckoning.” – New York Review of Books

“More and less sophisticated arguments and argumenters are mixed and with plenty of idea exchange between them. Add anonymity, and knowing people’s intentions becomes harder, knowing what they mean becomes harder. Treating other people’s views with charity becomes harder, too.” – The Atlantic

After the intervention, working memory in the older adults improved to match the younger group and the effect appeared to last for 50 minutes after the stimulation. Those who had scored worst to start with showed the largest improvements. – The Guardian

Academia being what it is (a place where everything is contested), there has been considerable debate over what exactly qualifies as bullshit. Most of that debate centers on the question of intention. Is bullshit considered bullshit if the deception was unintentionally presented? – Pacific Standard

Crickets? Fireflies? Metronomes … and clapping: “Objects with rhythm naturally synchronize.” OK, but so what? Well, scientists are finding real-world applications of abstruse mathematical theories – for instance, “rules about how to stabilize the synchronization of power grids and more stably integrate the U.S. grid with intermittent energy sources like solar and wind.” – Quanta Magazine