Ideas

Put simply, life is beginning to look ever more complex and ever more collaborative. All this has fractured Western biology’s consensus on Darwin. – Slate

Serious authors create; self-help writers multiply. But the influence of self-help on prestigious literature is much deeper and more sustained than figures such as Macdonald would have us believe. – Aeon

Within anthropology, Mead is still revered, but mostly as a way to understand the discipline’s origins. In the popular mind, Mead’s name has all but vanished, her reputation whittled down to an apocryphal quote found on coffee mugs and dorm-room posters: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’ What’s more, Mead has become a target of vitriolic dislike for a particular kind of cultural conservatism. – Aeon

It was, for Scruton, impossible to conceive of society without prejudices and exclusions, discrimination and inequality. That’s why his views, despite mellowing over the years, never substantially altered. Scruton the philosopher required Scruton the polemicist. – The Observer

The controversy over “Attack Helicopter” is another case study suggesting that rejecting “art’s for art’s sake” in favor of “art for justice’s sake” doesn’t necessarily yield more justice. It may help no one, harm many, and impede the ability of artists to circulate work that makes us think, feel, grapple, empathize, and learn. Americans will always seek out, discuss, and be moved by art that is messy, tense, and chaotic, whether the censors of any moment like it or not. If liberals stop producing art like that, illiberals of all sorts will fill the breach. – The Atlantic

Using metrics designed by evolutionary biologists, they compared the rates of cultural change to the rates of biological change for finches from the Galapagos Islands, two kinds of moths, and a common British snail. The result was kind of surprising: Biology and culture move at about the same speed. – Wired

Status-mongering is the mess that results from leaving some of our ethical theorizing undone. We don’t know who we think we are, and it shows. – The Point

“My colleagues want to better understand how people behave in the wild and how we can capture every-day behavior without asking people to self report … [because] that’s a very unreliable way of collecting data. What I’m seeing is just a very new landscape and regulations that are not ready.” – Vice

Re-reading Bloom, I am thunderstruck, because my inclination is to blame it all on social media and attendant technologies favoring vicarious experience. But Bloom’s 1987 narrative establishes an earlier start. He distinguishes my sixties’ generation from his eighties’ students, in whom tendencies that we initiated yielded a dead end. It may in effect be read as a tale of unwanted, unanticipated consequences. – The American Interest

We don’t know without a lot of careful analysis because words and their meanings change. However, “over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past.” – Aeon

Hysterical critics are self-centred – not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round… What seems self-evident to me is that public writing is always at least a little bit self-interested, demanding, controlling and delusional, and that it’s the writer’s responsibility to add enough of something else to tip the scales away from herself. – London Review of Books

With HireVue, businesses can pose pre-determined questions — often recorded by a hiring manager — that candidates answer on camera through a laptop or smartphone. Increasingly, those videos are then pored over by algorithms analyzing details such as words and grammar, facial expressions and the tonality of the job applicant’s voice, trying to determine what kinds of attributes a person may have. Based on this analysis, the algorithms will conclude whether the candidate is tenacious, resilient, or good at working on a team, for instance. – CNN

Over the past two or three decades, the historical study of emotions has developed a rich set of tools with which to chart the ways that emotions have changed over time. Emotions such as anger, disgust, love and happiness might seem commonplace, but they are not so readily understood in the past. These concepts and the experiences associated with them are not historically stable. – Aeon

Many people no longer hold the kind of religious views according to which our time of death is not allowed to be of our choosing. There are an increasing number of countries where physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia is permitted in a medical context. But why think that the right to choose our ending is given legitimacy only, if at all, on health grounds? Why don’t we have the right to end our lives not just when we want to but to also do so in style? – Aeon

The challenge of a world without work isn’t just economic but political and psychological. To paraphrase the children’s author Richard Scarry: what will people do all day? You can only contemplate the world with admiration and delight for so long. – The Guardian

The Artistic Genius is male because men are most fit to be Artistic Geniuses. The goalposts of greatness are hyper-specific, socially manipulated, and ultimately less interested in the aesthetics of the work produced. And they are seldom scrutinized. – Paris Review

One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved. Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations. Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly. – The New Yorker

The lack of progress in adversarial philosophical exchange might rest on a simple but problematic division of labour: in professional settings such as talks, seminars and papers, we standardly criticise others’, rather than our own, views. At the same time, we clearly risk our reputation much more when proposing an idea rather than criticising it. This systematically disadvantages proponents of (new) ideas. – Aeon

None of us are good listeners all the time. It’s human nature to get distracted by what’s going on in your own head. Listening takes effort. Like reading, you might choose to go over some things carefully while skimming others, depending on the situation. But the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough. – LitHub

Both the retrospective and the prospective interpretations of the Hubble Constant have stoked ongoing controversy in the 90 years since Edwin Powell Hubble published the first definitive evidence of an expanding universe in 1929. Recently, the controversy has taken on yet another guise, as increasingly precise techniques for measuring the expansion rate have begun to yield distinctly different predictions. The discrepancy has cosmologists wondering whether they are missing important elements in their models of how the Universe evolved from the Big Bang to today. – Aeon

Writing to learn, as I am imagining it, is a divergent social practice fueled by a lovely cocktail of curiosity, imagination, experience, and ignorance. For my purposes, there are two kinds of ignorance that most matter. The first kind of ignorance can be characterized as a refusal to learn. When reason, experience, scientific research, rigorous theory, and historical knowledge are not enough to educate a person to the wrongness or limitations of her ideas then this is a refusal to learn; it is a form of ignorance dependent on willful power, tribalism, and arrogance. The second kind of ignorance, by contrast, describes a state of “not knowing.” – 3 Quarks Daily

The average American household possesses more than 300,000 items. In the UK, one study found that children have on average 238 toys, but only play with 12 of them on a daily basis. We are addicted to accumulation. The minimalist lifestyle seems like a conscientious way of approaching the world now that we have realised that materialism, accelerating since the industrial revolution, is literally destroying the planet. Yet my gut reaction to Kondo and the Minimalists was that it all seemed a little too convenient: just sort through your house or listen to a podcast, and happiness, satisfaction and peace of mind could all be yours. – The Guardian

“We ask too much of attention and not enough of concentration. The recent cultural emphasis on attention risks subsuming too many variables of human experience, as if they could ever be held constant. We have to pay attention with the body, the will, the place, the mood, the memory, the moment, the relationships, the affordances, not the least the smartphone. All these variables are implicated in our capacity to attend, but they have their own kinds of agency, too, and they play with each other in unpredictable ways.” – Aeon

Science in the 2010s became more global and collaborative than ever before. These days, major breakthroughs are likelier to come from groups of 3,000 scientists than groups of three. – National Geographic

Why is Knives Out selling out movie theaters more than a month after it was released? Basically, the cause is that it’s “a pretty good movie that’s exceeding people’s expectations because their expectations for the movies are so damn low.” Ouch. – BuzzFeed

We know it’s a little late to tell you this, but it might be time for take-backs – and a plan to make those resolutions during a better month (especially for those in the Northern Hemisphere). “Spend the early parts of January getting back into the flow of things. You’ve got all year to make yourself better.” – Fast Company

Celebrities didn’t vanquish the paparazzi so much as figure out how to undercut them — and the publications they fueled. In the end, the solution was so straightforward. Celebrities simply became their own paparazzi, posting all manner of details and footage of their daily lives on social media, and effectively put real paparazzi out of business. – Buzzfeed News