Ideas

Today, those wishing to sow discord don’t need bots to post and spread their falsehoods and distortions. They have plenty of unwitting people to do that, their beliefs and actions warped by a “behavioral modification system. That mistrust has destabilized democracy around the world. – Wired

It’s not just that these goods are shoddily constructed and add to the world’s clutter. Often, they’re actively harmful. The labor exploitation crap relies on dates back as far as crap itself. Many of the “decorative knickknacks” we consumed in the nineteenth century, for example, were produced in British factories where thousands of people, including young boys, worked with materials that contained lead and arsenic for a couple of shillings a week. – The Baffler

“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus

Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian

“Research already suggests that, on average, wealthy people live longer ,biologically. Now, emerging work hints that varied and novel experiences could create more “time codes” in the human brain as it processes memory formation. This, in turn, could mean that people who can afford to enjoy more vacations and hobbies, and who have more stimulating jobs, will recall having lived for a longer time on Earth.” – National Geographic

The achievements of the enterprise became evident as the playoff games got underway. The bubble games blended theatre and sports to create a hybrid performance space that offered a great “live” experience while protecting performers and audiences. Curtains and video screens masked empty seats in the auditorium. Digital logos and ads, lighting effects on the court, and amplified soundtracks with music, sound effects, and fan noises mimicked the feel of live games both for the players and for those watching at home. – Ludwig Van

Those holding odd beliefs are not typically less intelligent. An answer may be found in the way modern communication media have restructured society, leading to the process of opinion-formation no longer chiefly taking place at the individual, but at the collective level, largely unmoored from concerns of factuality and appropriateness. This is best understood by studying the physics of phase transitions. – 3 Quarks Daily

“One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.” – Boston Review

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. – Aeon

At least, that’s what Kirkegaard believed. “In order to philosophize, you must have doubted everything.” – Aeon

To ask whether people reason about moral issues, we need to answer two kinds of questions. Firstly, what kinds of moral principles and beliefs do people hold at the outset? And secondly, do people form moral judgments based on those prior principles and beliefs – that is, do humans form moral judgments that align with their moral principles and beliefs? It turns out that they do, from a surprisingly young age. – Psyche

Lithuanian scientists are working on a device they hope will measure happiness. Why? “Because, during the pandemic, people’s psychological state could be damaged not only by the fear and anxiety caused by the spread of the virus, but also by the economic and social consequences that the quarantine would bring about.” – Eurozine

The key factor is tuition fees – currently £9250 per annum for full-time study – which in 2012 replaced most direct funding of universities. Today half of UK universities’ £40 billion annual income comes from fees. Universities are businesses forced to think commercially, regardless of any humane virtues traditionally associated with academic life. Academic heads of department – otherwise known as ‘line managers’, some of whom control their own budgets – are set aspirational admissions targets which often prove unachievable due to the vicissitudes of an unstable market. – London Review of Books

Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox—particularly its widely watched opinion shows—has had on American politics and culture. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. – The Atlantic

Human intelligence is incredibly useful but it doesn’t safeguard you against having false beliefs, because that’s not what intelligence is for. Intelligence is associated with coming up with more convincing bullshit and with being a better liar, but not associated with a better ability to recognize one’s own bias. Unfortunately, intelligence has very little influence on your ability to rationally evaluate your own beliefs, or undermine what’s called “myside bias.” – Nautilus

Ever since Theresa May announced a huge national event celebrating our departure from the EU, set for 2022 and with a budget of £120m, it’s acquired that nickname, suggestive of drizzle, stale pies and being forced to listen to Rule Britannia (with the words) on loop. Even the organisers are keen to stress that the current working title is actually Festival UK. – The Guardian

The gulf between our solitary thoughts and the words that would convey them to others constantly confronts us all. The thoughts we struggle to articulate might be as momentous as a transformative moral epiphany or as ordinary as an insight into a movie or the hurtful behaviour of a friend. – Aeon

This blurring of the division between public and private finds governments overtly working on the behalf of capital to extenuate an economic system that favors global capital over labor, private corporations over society and social welfare, and economic concentration over economic democracy. It is a system that is perpetuated by the attenuation of politics and capital, whereby the rich purchase beneficial economic policies that further insulate their position and wealth. Through political influence they obtain lower taxes, larger deductions, fewer regulations, and corporate protections, among other things. – Boston Review

The conditions that made the outbreak possible were thus directly connected to the new social relations flourishing in Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was the booming trade in silks and luxury goods, as well as the growth of towns and cities with relatively stable sedentary populations, that laid the ground for the deadly pandemic. – Boston Review

There is, of course, no actual chain linking companies together, but since then the image of a supply chain has shaped the way we picture our global economy and how products move through it. It’s become so entrenched in our thinking that we find it hard to describe the process in any other way. But when we lose sight of the role that these images play in our thoughts, our ideas and imaginations are left constrained, shaped by a metaphor we’ve forgotten is there. – Aeon

That’s right — 28 years after the Milton Friedman doctrine began the paradigm shift that made U.S. big business more powerful than ever, he was still insisting, as he had in his essay, that businesspeople with any willingness to pay a price to make society more fair were indulging “a suicidal impulse.” Which wasn’t just untrue, but by then more like the opposite of true: After the New Deal saved U.S. capitalism from its own excesses and helped enable decades of ultraprosperity and increasing equality, the full Friedmanization of our economy for the last four decades has generated such greed-driven extremes of inequality, insecurity and immobility that the system is now on a path that looks crazily self-destructive. – New York Times Magazine

In practice, this ensures the less read become even less read. It creates what one might call popularity polarization: a few pieces rise to the top, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. With print, this didn’t happen as much. Flipping pages, you would see every article somewhere. But, on your phone, you scroll through what’s been selected for you. And that selection likely reflects a ruthless narrowing of editorial values and priorities. – The Walrus

There are few issues that lead to such widespread feelings of anger and frustration as the idea of nepotism, especially in an artistic or literary context. For many would-be writers or actors, in particular, the suspicion remains that both industries operate as essentially a closed shop, and entry can only be obtained to the glamorous and well-remunerated professions through having a famous name or similarly high-profile connections. – The Critic

With universities and colleges in desperate need of funds far in excess of the $14 billion in federal stimulus money allotted by the CARES Act, Covid-19 may well be what some have called an “extinction-level event” for higher education. Schools often run deficits in normal times; in 2019, nearly 1,000 private colleges were already borderline insolvent. Covid will cause many to shutter for good. It is accounting, not epidemiology, that drives university administrators to push for a rapid return to business as usual, effectively demanding that faculty and staff sacrifice their lives for the financial health of their employer. – The New Republic

Just as authors and composers must be free to write about any world they can imagine, so must interpreters be allowed to play and sing any roles for which they are held to be more qualified than their competitors—provided they agree to the creators’ terms and conditions. – Conrad Osborne

When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. – The Guardian

GPT-3 is a marvel of engineering due to its breathtaking scale. It contains 175 billion parameters (the weights in the connections between the “neurons” or units of the network) distributed over 96 layers. It produces embeddings in a vector space with 12,288 dimensions. And it was trained on hundreds of billions of words representing a significant subset of the Internet—including the entirety of English Wikipedia, countless books, and a dizzying number of web pages. Training the final model alone is estimated to have cost around $5 million. – Nautilus

“One could say that capitalism produces greater artistic variation, thereby speeding up aesthetic evolution. But if the species is rapidly evolving toward decadence and possible extinction, then its proliferation of increasingly varied forms of art and music is destined to be short-lived, however ingenious and enjoyable those forms may be.” – Resilience

“When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse than to present myself in the accustomed New Yorker manner. Reticence, self-deprecation, and wit are the last things a jury wants to see in a witness.” – New York Review of Books

In the midst of present dangers—environmental, humanitarian, and political crises, and now (since the book’s publication) pandemic and economic disaster, and the onset of a sweeping antiracist movement—critique can seem to be a luxury.¹ Problems like these can appear so obvious as to require little further reflection. They give contemporary life to Marx’s exhortation not to interpret the world but to change it. What, then, is the purpose of critique in a moment like this? – Public Books