Ideas

But – these stories have been rewritten before in earlier scientific study. And before we declare a definitive new theory, there are questions… – The New York Times

Francis Fukuyama had a great idea. His “end of history” suggested a way of thinking about what was now happening to the world and synthesized the work of a number of philosophers. “The only flaw in the brilliance of The End of History was that its thesis turned out to be wrong, and wrong in a huge way.” – The New Republic

Philip Kennicott: “When we remember our lives authentically, we ask a fundamental question: Why did I remember this thing, at this moment? The “Why now?” question gives memory its meaning. Facebook randomizes and decontextualizes memory and detaches it from our current self.”  – Washington Post

And yet, that’s what some thought when push buttons first appeared on machines: “Do you not think that this prodigious diffusion of mechanism is likely to render the world terribly monotonous and fastidious? To deal no longer with men, but to be dependent on things!” Pushing buttons made life too easy, too simplistic, or too rote, when a single finger-action could conjure one’s desires. – Aeon

“Today, experimental philosophers and philosophically inclined psychologists are designing experiments that can help to answer some of the big philosophical questions about the nature of art and how we experience it – questions that have puzzled people for centuries, such as: why do we prefer original works of art to forgeries? How do we decide what is good art? And does engaging with the arts make us better human beings?” – Aeon

“The virtue of reading like a historian is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.” – Aeon

“Traditionally, forgetting has been regarded as a passive decay over time of the information recorded and stored in the brain. But while some memories may simply fade away like ink on paper exposed to sunlight, recent research suggests that forgetting is often more intentional, with erasure orchestrated by elaborate cellular and molecular mechanisms.” – The Atlantic

One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. – The New Yorker

The “bad place” has been detailed extensively – these are all the bad things that will happen to you if you don’t behave. Hell has been a moral consequence, it has been a spur to behave better. And increasingly we’re being warned of the possibilities of versions of it visiting earth. The point is, the concept of hell is a powerful idea that has framed our thinking. – The New Yorker

If there is a universal truth about beauty — some concise and elegant concept that encompasses every variety of charm and grace in existence — we do not yet understand enough about nature to articulate it. – The New York Times

We’re all going to be driving an Uber before long, and everyone who’s not will be freelancing at something else, right? Or maybe the gig economy isn’t growing so fast – or isn’t really growing at all. Economists can’t agree. – The Atlantic

The list of celebrities who have used iPhone Notes app to apologize in recent months is, well, long. What’s the appeal? False intimacy: “Sometimes statements include grammatical and spelling errors, or profanity, which function (perhaps unwittingly) as rhetorical devices, making the authors seem not only unpretentious but fallibly human. Their notes also frequently employ clichés of spoken apologies: ‘from the bottom of my heart,’ ‘profoundly,’ ‘I wish I knew then what I know now,’ and so on.” – The New York Times

Scientist Garth Paine: “I have spent decades making field recordings in which I create a setup before dawn or dusk, then lie on the ground listening for several uninterrupted hours. These projects have taught me how the density of the air changes as the sun rises or sets, how animal behavior shifts as a result, and how all of these things are intricately linked.”

Commonly known as ‘pickup’ or ‘game’, the seduction industry first took shape in the United States in the early 2000s. What began as a few online forums and meetup groups soon gave rise to commercial products and services. Some of those with a personal interest in seduction began to style themselves as professionals, offering practical training and personal development for heterosexual men who wanted greater choice and control in their intimate lives. – Aeon

“Urbicide is the targeted destruction of cities as a tactic of war. The violence chronicled here is not aerial annihilation—hospitals and homes reduced to rubble—but the “gradual construction of buildings and infrastructure” in ways that collapse boundaries between war and peace, militarizing everyday life.  – Public Books

We’ve gone from having individual experiences and relationships with the objects around us to slaves of algorithmic calculation and formulas in which the actual things themselves are only considered pieces of larger systems. This is a huge challenge to creativity. – The Point

Eight writers, including Dahlia Lithwick, Kate Julian, and Tyler Cowen, offer their predictions on sex, computers, neo-antebellum politics, China, the Internet, and the Supreme Court. — New York Magazine

It’s not uncommon to see people spending more attention on picture-taking than focusing on the experience they’re having. But “taking photos of an event, rather than being immersed in it, has been shown to lead to poorer recall of the actual event — we get distracted in the process.” – Global News (Canada)

Seriously, it’s time to reform the academic journal – especially in the sciences, where colleges are being priced out (and if colleges are priced out, who’s buying the journals?). – Wired

The video, and its many predecessors, and the many dancing videos it’s spawned since a right-wing Twitter user tried to use it to shame the Congressional representative, is only available because the Electronic Frontier Foundation pushed back (pushed back hard) against takedown notices from a record label … and won. – Wired

The ideal of super-smart people using those super smarts to create disruption for the betterment of all, or as Steve Jobs once put it, engineers working, quote, “to solve most of humankind’s problems.” He said that more than 20 years ago. There’s been a lot of history since then. There’s been a lot of money made, too, but also there’s been the emergence of certain kinds of problems that are only possible because of technology. – Wired

Peter Galison: “The general project that I’m working on is about the self and technology—what we understand by the self and how it’s changed over time. My sense is that the self is not a universal and purely abstract thing that you’re going to get at through a philosophy of principles.” – Edge

“We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.” – Edge

A revolutionary, and now widely accepted, countermodel to Freud’s scheme goes by the term “predictive mind.” The theory comes in different flavors, but overall it holds that automatic processes play a central role in the mind, allowing us to predict events quickly and accurately as they arise. Learning, experience and consciousness constantly improve our implicit, or unconscious, predictions, and we take note of events only when the predictions fail.  – Scientific American