Ideas

It’s often said that we are also witnessing a crisis of liberalism: liberal norms are being eroded, institutions are under threat, and across Europe, parties of the centre are haemorrhaging votes. Meanwhile, the critics of centrism are louder than they have been for years. – The Guardian

Of course, people with dementia experience significant changes in their self-concept, self-knowledge, social relationships, perception of their own capacity, and even their physical appearance. Yet the essence of the person endures. Recognising this has important implications for approaches to care. – Aeon

How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? – The Conversation

A researcher in the 1940s suggested that the tablets had recipes on them, but – shocker! – her fellow researchers didn’t believe her. And yet, she was right. “So far, the cooking team — which also includes a food historian, a curator, a chemical biologist specializing in food, a professional chef and an expert on cultural heritage — has re-created three stews. ‘One is a beet stew, one is vegetarian, and the final one has lamb in it.'”- NPR

Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. – New York Review of Books

“No one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is. He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude.” – Lithub

At what cost is an externally or even cerebrally normalised life, a life of routine and regulation, elevated over a life that flops and flutters but also throbs? At what price is a life that sails over the many-sided intricacies of emotion and the ripples of discontent? – Aeon

“Genuinely, I think the internet and the smartphone have been a disaster for civilisation,” he says. “I think it would be very helpful for us to see it as a disaster, see it as something like nuclear weapons or . . . I was going to say the invention of heroin, but morphine is a wonder drug, so there’s an upside to heroin which I really can’t f**king see with the internet. It’s easier to get taxis, but that’s it. It’s addictive. It changes the nature of discourse in a horrible way. What was billed as the democratisation of knowledge has turned into the death of truth.” – Irish Times

Because of biology’s track record, Kenneth Stanley and others have come to believe that if we want algorithms that can navigate the physical and social world as easily as we can — or better! — we need to imitate nature’s tactics. Instead of hard-coding the rules of reasoning, or having computers learn to score highly on specific performance metrics, they argue, we must let a population of solutions blossom. Make them prioritize novelty or interestingness instead of the ability to walk or talk. They may discover an indirect path, a set of steppingstones, and wind up walking and talking better than if they’d sought those skills directly. – Quanta

She’s at the intersection of race, gender, and social media. “Kim’s particular fame derives from a cherished place in the American racial imagination that, combined with wealth, prevents contact with the deathly effects (and melancholic affects) of brownness in this country while reaping the exoticism of not-quite whiteness.” – Slate

The idea of a monolithic Scientific Method is mythical but it is based on a genuine historical insight. From the early seventeenth century to the present, there are long chains of divergent development connecting the initially imprecise ideas of those we call the “founders of modern science” to the diversity of methods now used in various fields of research. – Boston Review

We learn more by trusting than by not trusting. Moreover, when we trust, we learn not only about specific individuals, we learn more generally about the type of situations in which we should or shouldn’t trust. We get better at trusting. – Aeon

“It’s not at all obvious how to go about thinking up some new twist on these things—the transformation from test-taker to theorem poser and then theorem prover is difficult to articulate. My ideas have always felt contingent and magical to me. I don’t think I’m alone, at least as far as the magic goes.” – The New Yorker

Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them. – Aeon

Karl Ove Knausgaard: “I’m not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to us—and, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently.” – The New Yorker

Neighborhoods with higher street density not only have more patented innovations, but more citations of the patents they generate. This suggests that neighborhoods with denser streets help facilitate greater knowledge exchange and higher levels of interaction over the ideas they generate. – CityLab

A new study reports that it “turns out that your penchant for variability, such as when you toss a new ingredient into a recipe or follow a creative hunch into the unknown, is often driven by brain errors that are imperceptible to you. Your curiosity is a mistake.” – Fast Company

Without the blunt, binaristic borders between zones — humanities versus sciences, humanities versus social sciences — the disciplines could connect across the much more complex and multifarious surfaces and interfaces they have with each other. Scholars could interact with their counterparts in all fields without the burdensome assumption that they represent more — an entire community more — than their specific area of expertise. – Inside Higher Ed

“Particularly in the past few years, conspiracy theories have been omnipresent on the internet and in social media. These modern forms of communication allow conspiracy theories to spread faster than ever, and make it easy for like-minded people to connect and form online echo chambers. As a result, the flat-Earth movement – endorsing the conspiracy theory that the Earth is actually flat and that scientists have been lying to the public for more than 500 years – is now an organised society with regular conferences.” – Aeon

In the U.S., at least, kindness and empathy are on a statistical decline. So what can parents do? Stop the focus on success, and focus on what we can do that’s decent and good. “The point is not to badger kids into kindness, or dangle carrots for caring, but to show that these qualities are noticed and valued.” – The Atlantic

The Golden Rule begins with imagining oneself as selfish, but try Mengzi instead. “Mengzian extension starts from the assumption that you are already concerned about nearby others, and takes the challenge to be extending that concern beyond a narrow circle.” – Aeon

Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim. – Aeon

Like other mass media that boomed around the same time—radio, movies, monthly magazines—syndicated news diverted people’s energies and attention from local culture with alluring, slickly-produced entertainment. And like those other media, newspapers became a conduit for a shared commercial culture. – Zocalo Public Square

“Happiness is in many ways the marketing breakthrough of the past decade, with self-care and anti-stress products now rounding out the bestseller list on Amazon (think of ‘gravity blankets’, ‘de-stressing’ adult colouring books and fidget spinners), where they nestle alongside chart-topping tomes by ‘happiness bloggers’. All of this is made possible by a specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs.” – Aeon

“The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants.” – New York Review of Books

In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. – Scientific American

“The part of our brain that regulates our time perception has been overloaded and exhausted, causing our sense of past, present and future to melt together.” – The Guardian

General infallibility is a tempting proposition. Treating an individual’s attitudes and preferences as givens – as matters beyond debate or criticism – might seem to promote human dignity by forcing us to treat all views as equally worthy of respect. But such an outlook is likely, if anything, to have the opposite effect. This is because taking seriously a person’s capacity to make mistakes is critical to taking seriously their capacity for rationality. Only by recognising that people are capable of error can we properly value anyone’s goals or engage in rational debate. – Aeon

Two years ago, ICOs lured billions of dollars into blockchain companies and spawned a cottage industry of pilot projects. For a while, a blockchain seemed a salve for just about any problem. Many were scams from the start. But even among the more legitimate enterprises, there are relatively few winners. – Wired