Ideas

“We don’t need digital detox. Or more accurately, we do need a detox, but we have misidentified the toxin. Interacting online is not inherently poisonous, and online interactions are no less meaningful than talking face to face. Different, yes, but just as valuable. If we experience problems relating to each other online, I believe it’s because we’re doing it wrong.” – NewMusicBox

In the popular mind, an epicure fine-tunes pleasure, consuming beautifully, while a stoic lives a life of virtue, pleasure sublimated for good. But this doesn’t do justice to Epicurus, who came closest of all the ancient philosophers to understanding the challenges of modern secular life. – Aeon

Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead – all influenced by their mentor, Franz Boas – changed the way we think about human relationships. “The anthropologists had a revolutionary new idea, which they called ‘cultural relativity.’ The phrase is a bit misleading, because it implies there is no truth to be found, but Boas and his students didn’t think that. Instead, they argued that all societies face the same basic problems—love and death, work and children, hierarchy and community—but that different societies could find different, and equally valuable, ways of solving them.” (And Mead, especially, had a lot of sex along the way.) – The Atlantic

Sure, people use the word “epicurean,” but do they know what the pursuit of happiness really means, or where it came from? In our age of deep anxiety about politics and the planet itself, it’s a good time to find out more about the original philosopher. – Aeon

It’s a longstanding thing – consider the ways that Clytemnestra became “an archetypal domestic murder plot” after the play premiered in 458 BCE. “Killing Eve is just the latest example of popular culture’s preoccupation with attractive young women who conceal a dark psychopathy: Villanelle is the embodiment of the classic female killer, who both seduces and repels.” – The Guardian (UK)

San Diego Comic Con, like the moon walk, turns 50 this year. And, wow, things have changed. “More than 130,000 people are expected to attend this year; they’re here for comics, yes, but also for their favorite movies, TV shows, books and toys. It’s a far cry from the 300 people who gathered in the basement of San Diego’s U.S. Grant Hotel in the summer of 1970, to see Kirby and the equally legendary sci-fi author Ray Bradbury.” – NPR

Perhaps our distant evolutionary ancestors, millions of years in the past, also had an innate navigational ability that exploited magnetic field lines. This would be extremely useful, offering advantages not only in barren environments, but when exploring new territories to find resources for survival. – Aeon

Unruliness, perversity, pigheadedness—psychologists have long been interested in this bestiary of paradoxical thought and action. Perversity is a puzzle. It’s hard to explain, scientifically, what Edgar Allan Poe described as “the imp of the perverse.” – The New Yorker

The company is developing a device to implant inside the brain that supposedly will allow people to control computers and other devices with their minds. At the announcement, Musk said the company is on track to begin testing the implants in human patients as soon as next year. – The Atlantic

“The urge to rank and measure might itself seem anti-intellectual—more Top Trumps than top scholarship. But the aim is not to chase a chimera still less to deliver the results of some supposedly objective IQ test. Rather it is simply to honour the minds engaging most fruitfully with the questions of the moment.” – Prospect

Grant Sanderson has a video explainer that shows you how machines are learning to learn. – Aeon

A contingent of science fiction writers – that is, novelists, to be clear – are being hired by companies to predict the future. Yes, really. “Mega consulting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper published a guide on how to use sci-fi to ‘explore innovation.’ The New Yorker has touted ‘better business through sci-fi.’ As writer Brian Merchant put it, ‘Welcome to the Sci-Fi industrial complex.'” – Wired

At the crescendo of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, a pair of computer scientists have announced that they’ve created an artificial intelligence poker player that is stronger than a full table of top human professionals at the most popular form of the game — no-limit Texas Hold ’em. – FiveThirtyEight

The finding is likely to reshape the story of how humans spread into Europe, and may revise theories about the history of our species. – The New York Times

The Palo Alto Consensus held that American-made internet communication technologies (both hardware and software) should be distributed globally and that governments should be discouraged from restricting speech online. Its proponents believed that states in which public discourse was governed by “everyone” — via social media and the internet — would become more democratic. – The New York Times

So when do networks enable cooperation to thrive? And when do they hinder it? A vast body of work from across anthropology, psychology, and sociology has explored the conditions under which cooperation—the propensity for individuals to pay a personal cost for the benefit of the whole—operates. – Nautilus

UK digital minister Margot James described the initiative’s vision in an opening event. “Imagine being inside the world of a Shakespeare play, or in a video game as professional players battle it out for millions of dollars, or immersed in a national museum, solving a detective narrative involving dinosaurs and robots with fellow virtual museum-goers.” – Ludwig Van

“Contrary to the popular view, I think that we sometimes have good reasons to argue against the person. In other words, ad hominem arguments can be good arguments, especially when they are construed as rebuttals to appeals to authority.” – Aeon

In the past, experiments played a vital role in developing theory and vice versa. For some time now that back-and-forth has not existed in certain fields where experiments are barely managing to test theories developed over decades. Wherever experimental data can be coaxed out of nature, it suffices to corroborate or refute a theory and serves as the sole arbiter of validity. But where evidence is spare or absent – as it is for a growing number of questions in physics – other criteria, including aesthetic ones, have been allowed to come into play both in formulating a theory and evaluating it. – The Guardian

In the past, work was recognized for its colonizing power, expanding to fill and dominate time itself such that there might exist no clear line between work hours and nonwork hours. Our current condition is worse. The Interface, leveraging boredom, makes us all into unpaid workers for the advertisers who support those apparently cost-free platforms. We ought to recall that there is no such thing as a free transaction. In this species of transaction, you pay with your individuality, freedom, and happiness. – The Walrus

Today, nature is valued as a signifier of sustainability, resilience, and good quality of life not only in European and American cities, but also in new “smart” cities across Asia and the Middle East, and in “megacities” of the Global South. – Public Books

Rapid progress in information technology has led to the ‘big data’ revolution, in which gigantic quantities of information can be obtained and processed. Patterns of human behaviour can be extracted from records of credit-card purchases, telephone calls and emails. Words suddenly becoming more common on social media, such as ‘demagogue’ during the 2016 US presidential election, can be clues to hot political issues. – Aeon

“These findings,” the scientists write, “show that, with the appropriate interventions, the large mammalian brain retains an underappreciated capacity for normothermic restoration of microcirculation and certain molecular and cellular functions multiple hours after circulatory arrest.” – New York Times Magazine

Will our pre-wiring—together with toxic cultural forces, such as racism—lead to fiercer, meaner, better-armed tribal conflict? Or will the part of us that expands love from mates to friends to shipmates come to dominate?  – Reason

The power to see the future was previously limited to psychics and shamans. Now researchers (and, increasingly, anyone with a computer) use pattern recognition to precognitive ends, feeding their programs artifacts of the past to generate data on the future.  – Hyperallergic