Ideas

It wasn’t that the conversations in the café were necessarily intellectually productive; it was that the practice of free exchange itself—the ability to interact on equal terms with someone not of your clan or club—generated social habits of self-expression that abetted the appetite for self-government. – The New Yorker

Philosophers go to conferences to find critics who can help them improve their theories. All of us need to recognise the value of listening carefully and charitably to opponents. Then we need to go to the trouble of talking with those opponents, even if it means leaving our comfortable neighbourhoods or favourite websites. – Aeon

What I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing. – The New York Times

“So let me clarify: we have forgotten how to hate well. We have forgotten how to hate rigorously and virtuously. This is, I believe, because we have forgotten how to distinguish between hate’s negative and positive iterations. In the former camp is racial hatred, religious hatred, and other forms of intense, frothing, violent dislike inflamed by malformed ideological doctrines and blind prejudices. The latter, more productive, form of hating is conceived as a form of rigorous, ruthless critique.” – The Walrus

Academics are unlike the employees of most organisations in that they fight over symbolic rather than material objects of aspiration, but they are like other workers in that they too are motivated by fear and greed. Instead of competing over power and money, they compete over respect. – Aeon

These observers captured the moment when civilization turned from typographic culture—itself a massive break from the largely oral culture that preceded it—to electronic media. They’re the metaphorical physicians who noted the first symptoms of a worsening malaise we’re seeing now. In other words, our internet-and-smartphone-driven age does not represent, as we might think, its own huge shift from the Enlightenment tradition, but rather the most recent stages of a shift that started with disembodied voices and faces streaming out of clunky boxes. – Wired

As the West becomes increasingly fractious and polarised, the New Silk Road countries are working more closely together. At the centre of this is China with its giant economy and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), often referred to as a New Silk Road, which exemplifies the changes in global influence. – Irish Times

While Headspace adds hundreds of corporate deals and an NBA sponsorship, Calm won the 2017 iPhone App of the Year and has caught up in downloads and monthly subscribers with its older, larger competitor. The Calm CEO: ““I would say we’re in mindful competition with each other.” Headspace’s chief business officer: ““We have the strongest brand.” – The Wall Street Journal

Twenty-two predictions for 2019, including paid accounts at Facebook, a massive data breach at Instagram, and a tough year for Snap(Chat). – The Verge

Most chores could be accomplished in minutes, but hordes of people wait days, weeks, even years. What the heck, brains? Is it “decision fatigue,” or is it “chronic procrastination,” or is it just that doing dishes is mind-numbingly boring? – The Atlantic

Deep learning is good at learning using many fewer connections between neurons, when it has many episodes or examples to learn from. I think the brain isn’t concerned with squeezing a lot of knowledge into a few connections, it’s concerned with extracting knowledge quickly using lots of connections.” – Wired

“As we seek political and philosophical bearings in this time of renewed calls for a socialist alternative to capitalism, postwar efforts to bring Marxism and existentialism together have much to teach us—not only because of the continuing importance of each mode of thought to political thinking and organizing, but also because their interaction in Sartre’s work deepens our understanding of how we exercise agency under conditions we do not control.” – Boston Review

It finds that news consumers are more trusting of the media—and more secure about their own ability to discern the truth—when they are exposed to a combination of fact-checking articles and opinion pieces arguing for the importance of journalism. “When one side attacks over and over again, and the other doesn’t respond, at some point people assume that journalists have conceded the point that they’re biased.” – Pacific Standard

The seemingly obvious answer is, Of course it matters! How could it not? Ivy League and equivalent institutions provide more than world-class instruction. They confer a lifetime of assistance from prodigiously connected alumni and a message to all future employers that you’re a rarified talent. College isn’t just an education; it’s a network, a signal, and an identity. But what appears obvious may not be true. – The Atlantic

There is nothing wrong with making things easier, in most cases, and the history of technology is filled with examples of amazing advances brought about by reducing complexity. Not even the most hardened Luddite, I suspect, wants to go back to the days of horse-drawn carriages and hand-crank radios. But it’s worth asking: Could some of our biggest technological challenges be solved by making things slightly less simple? – The New York Times

The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future. – Pew Research Center 

Conceiving of attention as a resource misses the fact that attention is not just useful. It’s more fundamental than that: attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda. – Aeon

According to the neuroscientist Matthew Walker—in his 2017 book, “Why We Sleep”—insomnia, strictly defined, is a clinical disorder most commonly associated with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, and it is triggered, typically, by worry and anxiety. Insomniacs can write twee lists of their blessings until the cows come home, but their cortisol levels will still tend to look as if they’re gearing up to storm the Bastille. – The New Yorker

Because the ideologies of the past century have been largely discredited as false utopias, we are bereft of the notion of a better future. Whether the idea of a utopia ever returns will depend on our spirit, our faith in what is to come. Yet who are we to make demands of the spirit, which will wander as it will? – The New York Times

“First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.” – The New York Times

Can’t get through to your kid? Sure, you could stalk them around the house, but probably their social media presence – especially Instagram, where they might even be pretty great photographers – can reveal much more than any sparse conversation would. – The New York Times

That’s right, strivers: Stop it. Well, don’t stop striving. Just stop striving for perfection. “Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.” – The New York Times

Tim Berners-Lee: “The World Wide Web Foundation, an organization I founded in 2009 to protect the web as a public good, has drawn up a set of core principles outlining the responsibilities that each party has to protect a web that serves all of humanity. We’re asking everyone to sign on to these principles and join us as we create a formal Contract for the Web in 2019.” — New York Times

Although there are sex differences in brain and behavior, when you move away from group-level differences in single features and focus at the level of the individual brain or person, you find that the differences, regardless of their origins, usually “mix up” rather than “add up.” — The New York Times

The privacy warriors of the 1960s would have been astounded by what the tech industry has become. They would be more amazed to realize that the policy choices they made back then — to demand data transparency rather than limit data collection, and to legislate the behavior of government but not private industry — enabled today’stech giants to become as large and powerful as they are. – The New York Times

Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. – Aeon

A new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute seems to indicate life in the gig economy is not what it has been cracked up to be. The study didn’t rely on surveys or questionnaires. It used actual financial data. The company dug up 38m payments directed through 128 different online platforms to 2.3m of its customers’ checking accounts from October 2012 to March 2018. Its conclusions are pretty obvious: you may want to keep your day job. – The Guardian

With an eye to the surprisingly large amount of present-day consumer technology that was predicted and inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, a constellation of companies and independent designers and consultants has formed to “help clients create forward-looking fiction to generate ideas and IP for progress or profit. … And corporations like Ford, Nike, Intel, and Hershey’s, it turns out, are willing to pay hefty sums for their own in-house Minority Reports.” — Medium

We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts. This was demonstrated in a controversial 2014 study in which 67 per cent of male participants and 25 per cent of female participants opted to give themselves unpleasant electric shocks rather than spend 15 minutes in peaceful contemplation. – Aeon