Ideas

“An attack on meritocracy is invariably an attack on higher education, where meritocrats get sorted and credentialed. So the turn against meritocracy prompts big questions. Has meritocracy in fact failed?” – Chronicle of Higher Education

In typically developed people, the “foot” part of the map is a solid region, with no distinct representation of the toes. But in the brains of Tom Yendell and Peter Longstaff, there were clear toe areas, arranged in order. – The New York Times

“Money corrupts—which, duh—but the Epstein episode tells an even bigger story. The entire system for metabolizing philanthropic gifts, particularly private ones, into academic research is a poorly illuminated pile of broken guardrails. Even if most institutions and foundations are cautious internally, even if the unfolding scandal with Epstein and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an outlier, the system is essentially a pool of dark money.” – Wired

The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.’ Not only has someone used extensive judgment in choosing what to measure, how to define crucial ideas, and to analyse them, but the manner in which they are communicated can utterly change their emotional impact. – Aeon

Why is this such a secret? “Without the essential first step, without a creative reimagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all.” – Aeon

There’s little mystery about where people are heading, or why: They are mostly moving toward sun and some semblance of affordability. The major Texas metros—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin—have collectively grown by more than 3 million since 2010. The most popular destinations for movers are now Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas, which welcome more than 100,000 new people each year. – The Atlantic

As more religious communities begin to incorporate robotics — in some cases, AI-powered and in others, not —it stands to change how people experience faith. It may also alter how we engage in ethical reasoning and decision-making, which is a big part of religion. – Vox

The notion that intelligence is a measurable ‘something’ that is possessed by people in varying degrees is one of the ways in which we end up with an education system that fails the majority of those it is supposed to be helping. – 3 Quarks Daily

“The intelligent software agents that you interact with online are ‘intelligent agents’ in the sense that they try to predict your behaviour taking into account what you did in your online past (e.g. what kind of movies you usually watch), and then they structure your options for online behaviour. For example, they offer you a selection of movies to watch next. However, they do not care much for your reasons for action.” – 3 Quarks Daily

“Birds enter popular culture from the earliest times, and they continue to pervade literature and art throughout the classical period. They are mentioned in the very first sentence of European literature – as scavengers, at the start of Homer’s Iliad. They feature repeatedly in subsequent epic, lyric, didactic, pastoral and personal poetry, in tragedy and comedy, in epigrams and invective, and in prose writings on geography, history, travel, medicine and early science.” – Aeon

Over the past few years, an ideologically diverse coalition of white nationalists, conservatives and ultra-libertarians has launched attempts to build out its own online infrastructure, setting in motion a migration towards newly established “censorship-free” platforms. – Journal of Design and Science

Novelist Amitav Ghosh has some ideas, but most of all, he wants writers to deal with it in their books instead of ignoring it. “Something this big and this important, there have to be an infinite number of ways to just talk about it,” he said. – The New York Times

Hint: They didn’t do it for themselves. – Aeon

Nearly 20 years and millions of sales after his nonfiction debut, Mr. Gladwell is at something of a professional tipping point. He elicits from readers the kind of polarized reactions usually reserved for talk-radio hosts. To one camp, he is a master storyteller, pithily translating business concepts and behavioral science to a lay audience. To others, he is a faux intellectual, dressing up ordinary truths (such as an “Outliers” argument that success results from a combination of hard work and opportunity) as counterintuitive genius. How “Talking to Strangers” is received could cement Mr. Gladwell in one of those camps for good. – The New York Times

“A recent study of priorities among young people found that achieving one’s career passion ranks highest of all — more than making money or getting married. Finding a fulfilling job is almost three times more important than having a family, teenagers in the study reported. It is daunting to contemplate.” – The New York Times

It’s no longer a question of our brains being a product of either nature or nurture but realizing how entangled the “nature” of our brains is with the brain-changing “nurture” provided by our life experiences.” – Literary Hub

Phil Kennicott: “When the Kennedy Center was built, it was designed to fulfill a specific sets of needs and functions. Now it is has been expanded to enfold an unknown number of new functions and needs, in spaces that are flexible and multipurpose. On any given evening, the old building hums with activity, despite its dated interiors and problematic furnishings. In five years, let’s put the new building to the same test. If the majority of its new spaces are active and throwing off sparks, it will be a success. If not, the problem will almost certainly be a lack of institutional foresight rather than architectural planning.” – Washington Post

Once we thought drivers, doctors, accountants, and lawyers were irreplaceable. And yet we are beginning to see computers encroaching on those fields. Now, even the most human of professions—those centered on creativity, something we thought of as uniquely human—seem to be programmable. – JSTOR

“In the decades since the 1980s, and after the victory of capitalism over communism in the cold war, we have lived, Chantal Mouffe told me, within a sense of the “normal” to which there has seemed no alternative. Words and concepts that had been so important for those struggling for freedom from authoritarian rule in the twentieth century Mouffe now saw as having been co-opted by purely economic interests: “choice,” for example, had become a way to justify relinquishing public control of schools and hospitals; “liberty” had migrated in meaning to bolster the selling-off of state assets.” – New York Review of Books

As political advertisements already twist candidates’ words and manipulate the truth for the perfect soundbite, can you believe anything you hear when it can all be manufactured on any laptop you can find at Best Buy? – Shelly Palmer

“The more time we have to prepare before superintelligent AI is achieved, the more likely we’ll survive what follows. But you’ll get total disagreement from scientists on how soon this might happen, and even whether it will happen at all.” – LitHub

“Tech companies seem to be recognizing that they need advice on the unprecedented power they’ve amassed and on many challenging moral issues around privacy, facial recognition, AI, and beyond. Philosophers, who contemplate these topics for a living, should welcome any interest in their work from organizations that are set on shaping humanity’s future. But they need to be wary of the potential conflicts of interest that can arise from these collaborations, and of being used as virtue-signaling pawns for ethically problematic companies.” – Wired

“Time, as it appears to us, is made of indivisible moments that are parts of succession… A single moment cannot have a duration. Something counts as a duration only if it is a temporal complex. We must perceive a change with respect to moments; otherwise we could not abstract the idea of time.” – Aeon

“To criticise our praise for the wealthy and powerful as excessive inevitably raises the question of meritocracy. To what extent do we live in a meritocracy, and is that a good or a bad thing?” – Aeon

Today’s meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. – The Atlantic

How close do you need to be? Well, this exhibit tells you: In May, an artist “planted a patch of corn within the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and has surrounded it with large yellow megaphones that visitors can stick their heads inside to listen to what a growing stalk sounds like. It turns out the sound is almost extra-terrestrial.” – NPR