Ideas

“Suppose you think, as I do, that knowing that something is the case (e.g. that the MMR vaccine is safe) requires being reasonably confident that it’s the case and also having the right to be confident. In that case, anything that effectively undermines my confidence or right to be confident is a threat to my knowledge. So, for example, getting me to doubt the safety of the MMR vaccine by spreading spurious but convincing stories about links between MMR and autism can prevent me from knowing that it’s safe.” 3AM Magazine

Nearly 70 years later, The Human Use of Human Beings has more to teach us humans than it did the first time around. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the book is that it introduces a large number of topics concerning human/machine interactions that are still of considerable relevance. Dark in tone, the book makes several predictions about disasters to come in the second half of the 20^th century, many of which are almost identical to predictions made today about the second half of the 21^st. – Slate

This is the hipster effect—the counterintuitive phenomenon in which people who oppose mainstream culture all end up looking the same. Similar effects occur among investors and in other areas of the social sciences. How does this kind of synchronization occur? Is it inevitable in modern society, and are there ways for people to be genuinely different from the masses? – MIT Technology Review

It’s a question worth asking. To imagine a better version of our mediated world, we need to acknowledge these alternatives and to embrace their multiplicity—and often to retrace our steps to roads not taken in the past. – Public Books

It was 1923, and Francesco Ruffini was going to rescue science. The Italian senator’s plan was simple: Give scientists an ownership stake in their discoveries—a sort of patent on the laws of nature they discovered. The idea has re-emerged in the US Senate.  – Slate

We can’t resolve disagreements about how much the information we possess supports a hypothesis just by gathering more information. Instead, we can make progress only by way of philosophical reflection on the space of possibilities, the information we have, and how strongly it supports some possibilities over others. – Aeon

The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism. – The Atlantic

As employees in a hyperproductive, work-obsessed world, we’ve become acutely aware of any opportunity for optimization. Attempts by companies like Google or Freshly to create services that save you time misfire, as millennials see them not as services that will give them more time to relax, but as services that will increase the amount of time they’re available to work. – Medium

Carolina Miranda: “Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong. It was part of different maps that co-exist, one on top of the other: layers of visions and lesser-known narratives, that are ongoing and still unfolding.” – Guernica

Well, yes, it can be. If you want to see a Western that focuses on women without being cutesy or trite about it, look abroad. The form is still legendary; now it lives better in places where “it’s no longer a throwback.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

How did we get to this idiotic point? Workism. What’s that? “It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.” – The Atlantic

If you thought middle school girls were “innocent” while middle school boys awoke to their own sexuality, well, think again. In new movies and TV shows, “our girls are awkward and weird. They are undergoing orthodontic treatments. They have made out with every bedpost and doorframe in their bedrooms. Through their eyes, it is the boys who become smooth, uncomplicated objects.” – The New York Times

You might wonder how people who seem so good by occupation could be so bad in private. The theory of moral licensing could help explain why: When humans are good, it says, we give ourselves license to be bad. – Nautilus

“Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.” – MIT Technology Review

Jack Clark says it may not be long before AI can reliably produce fake stories, bogus tweets, or duplicitous comments that are even more convincing. “It’s very clear that if this technology matures—and I’d give it one or two years—it could be used for disinformation or propaganda,” he says. “We’re trying to get ahead of this.” – MIT Technology Review

Scepticism about common-sense things has been on the agenda of philosophers for centuries, but only as a plaything confined to the study. It does not spill into everyday life. So, what on earth do people mean when they say we are living in a “post-truth” world? – New Statesman

The past is once more being bent to suit present purposes in the hope of ushering in something that may one day look as bizarre as anything in this history of “past futures”.  – New Statesman

What exactly is ‘intellectual cool’? For a start, although it includes intellectual trends, or what we sometimes call ‘fashions,’ it obviously is not just this. And here we run up against a very difficult problem – what we call ‘cool’ never describes itself, never declares itself, and never advises who it will be visiting next. People who write about Spinoza will never say they’re doing so because he’s really cool at the moment. Equally, ask a hipster who they hate the most and they will say, without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Hipsters! I f*cking hate them!’ – Sydney Review of Books

Lostness has always been an enigmatic and many-sided state, always riven with unexpected potencies. Across history, all varieties of artists, philosophers, and scientists have celebrated disorientation as an engine of discovery and creativity, both in the sense of straying from a physical path, but also in swerving away from the familiar, turning in to the unknown. – The Atlantic

Most people do not realise that Aristotle wrote works designed for the general public. If they did, then perhaps more philosophers would automatically assume that they needed to follow his example.  – Aeon

Western philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to Marx to Ayn Rand (okay, bear with us here) may have differed on what constitutes greatness, but all of them held it as an ideal. Avram Albert argues for a different goal, one espoused by Buddhist thinkers and Romantics (and which we might call the Lake Wobegon ideal): good enough. And even that is difficult. – The New York Times

“The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know. – The New Yorker

In his masterpiece, “The Lady of Shalott”, Alfred Tennyson describes a character from the Arthurian legend who is cursed to remain in a tower, looking at the world only through a mirror, and weaving the “mirror’s magic sights” into her web. AI today is, it seems, in its Lady of Shalott stage, trying to weave four-dimensional reality into a two-dimensional web by looking into the dim, distorting, and often deceptive mirror of data. – 3 Quarks Daily

Fakery is gushing in from everywhere and we’re drowning in it. “Deepfake” videos mash up one person’s body with someone else’s face. Easy-to-use software can generate audio or video of a person saying things they never actually uttered. Even easier? Fake clicks, fake social media followers, fake statistics, fake reviews. A gaggle of bots can create the impression that there’s a lot of interest in a topic, to sway public opinion or to drive purchases. It is even a breeze to create a fake newspaper online. – Wired

The basic irony of standards is the simple fact that there is no standard way to create a standard, nor is there even a standard definition of “standard.” There are, however, longstanding ways that industries and nations coordinate standardization efforts. In the United States, the system of voluntary consensus standards is coordinated by ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. – The New York Times

“That professionalization process had the effect of setting up boundaries between ‘scientists’ and anyone else who might be interested in science, so it led to the exclusion of a whole bunch of people from formal scientific activity. Arguably, popular science created its own demise by making science too popular and too successful.” – Smithsonian

In the largest analysis of the issue thus far, investigators have found that the smaller the research team working on a problem, the more likely it was to generate innovative solutions. Large consortiums are still important drivers of progress, but they are best suited to confirming or consolidating novel findings, rather than generating them. – The New York Times

Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them – or believed we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth. – London Review of Books

For us, time is a sequence of events, a measure of gradually changing content. That explains why we remember recent events better than ones from long ago, and why when a certain memory comes to mind, we tend to recall events that occurred around the same time. But how did that add up to an ordered temporal history, and what neural mechanism enabled it? – Quanta Magazine