It’s not impossible to make your argument stick. And there’s been some good scientific work on this. Here are two strategies that, based on the evidence, seem promising. - Vox
As one gets older and realizes that most of life’s good stuff is contained between two ledger entries, one sees that if it weren’t for dreams, for stories and for art, for inventing personas and writing books through their hands and eyes, life would be insufferable. - 3 Quarks Daily
Yotta (24 zeroes) was the largest prefix in the metric system before the new additions. Now, the Earth's mass can be said to be about 6 ronnagrams rather than 6,000 yottagrams. The sun can be said to be about 2,000 quettagrams rather than 2,000,000,000 yottagrams. - NPR
Studies on the four-day work week prove it, too. "Instead of seeing time as a vacuum that needs to be filled, what might it look like if we considered that high performance is, in part, the result of work not done?" - Fast Company
Why? "Modern global computing systems have become more tightly intertwined and more reliant on hyper-precise timing, sometimes to the billionth of a second. Adding the extra second heightens the risk." - The New York Times
The stories of the Rote Kapelle group "show the power of joy, creativity, and love in the fight against the compliance, fear, and silence upon which fascism still depends." - Hyperallergic
Thinking that some things are true would no longer be an unquestioned assumption: we would understand why we ought to think that some things are true. - Aeon
There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls “storification.” We’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication. - The Atlantic
AI-generated content can be of higher quality than content created by humans, due to the fact that AI models are able to learn from a large amount of data and identify patterns that humans may not be able to see. This can result in more accurate and informative content. - Harvard Business Review
Longtermism is a technocratic dream that purports to give some of the wealthiest people in the world the ability to plan the far future of humanity according to their personal whims. It is hubris. - New Statesman
Consistency isn’t of value, in and of itself. If the outcomes are bad, the fact that they were arrived at by employing a consistent decision-making process doesn’t improve the outcomes themselves at all! - 3 Quarks Daily
Disasters compress time, and in a world besieged by them, dramatic shifts occur: For planners and architects and officials, whose work typically unfolds over years, disaster recovery requires and enables otherwise-unthinkable haste. - The New York Times
What happens when you go look at a painting you’ve never seen before? What I think happens is that you’re seeing it in the context of all the other pictures you’ve ever seen. When you go and look at something new, what you’re saying is, “What’s different about this experience?” - The New York Times
How is it that the dawning of the age of reason, which saw science and technology become preeminent in western culture, coincided with the industrial revolution, which is turning out to be disastrous for the natural world and, quite possibly, humanity too? - 3 Quarks Daily
