The idea of surpassing politics with technical-scientific rationality such that the “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things” is often associated with St. Simon, but the originator of the phrase, in fact, was German philosopher (and frequent coauthor of Karl Marx) Friedrich Engels. - Boston Review
We have become too used to thinking of intelligence as the private skill of individuals, vying against one another in a neoliberal world of relentless competition. What is needed, especially in an age of irredentist warmongering and climate disaster, is a greater emphasis on our ability to reason together, our “collective intelligence”. - The Guardian
The intensity of our collective distraction is historically unprecedented, and for obvious reasons. Most importantly, the power players in our online experience are financially invested, and deeply so, in training users to flit quickly and continuously from one hyperlinked stimulus to another. - Hedgehog Review
About 1,100 Mensans journeyed to the Reno area for this year’s convention. They came because they think they are smart, they care deeply about a certain type of intelligence, and they feel most at home in a crowd of other high-IQ individuals. - New York Magazine
But now we know car companies and other companies might tell us we're also renting proprietary info and perhaps services too, what does this mean? (This is not what Gen-Z activists mean when they talk about abolishing property.) - Wired
In 1871, a mob murdered 18 Chinese people and looted every Chinese building in what's now downtown LA. "A bronze plaque embedded in the sidewalk outside the Chinese American Museum on Los Angeles Street stands as a rare memorial. It’s smaller than a pizza box." - Los Angeles Times
"Sorting through this morass might seem too overwhelming to even consider—unless we shift how we think about the purpose of organizing information: What if the end goal was not efficient retrieval? What if, instead, the sorting process itself was imbued with meaning?" - The Atlantic
It''s "a movie about responsible innovation—as Chris says, about how you can’t have science without philosophy. ... Creators need to think about how their inventions will be used, and why someone wants them created in the first place." - Slate
All these behaviors—as well as many more observed in the wild—suggest that octopuses learn, remember, know, think, consider, and act based on their intelligence. This changes everything we think we know about “higher order” animals, because cephalopods, unlike apes, are very, very different to us. - Nautilus
By adding all of these features, Google has effectively changed the experience from an explorative search environment to a platform designed around verification, replacing a process that enables learning and investigation with one that is more like a fact-checking service. - Wired
Attention is finite, the record of how we spend it public, and it is easy enough to check if somebody who tweets every day about Ukraine has ever tweeted about Yemen. Many people are inclined to give somebody they trust a pass. - Hedgehog Review
“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” - MediaPost
“Yes, it’s important to examine people, but you work out what’s going on from the stories. And if people know you and trust you, and you give them time to talk, they give you gems of critically important medical information.” - The Guardian
For example, participants who read their options and made a selection on paper were significantly more likely to give money to charity, choose a healthy entrée, and opt for an educational book rather than something more entertaining. - Harvard Business Review
We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” - The New York Times
