Group items tagged

First, there’s the concept of the implied warranty. Yes, we all know that any major appliance or product is going to fail days after the manufacturer’s warranty runs out. But apparently, that’s not the end of the story. Have you heard about the concept of “implied warranty of merchantability?” It is part of the Uniform Commercial Code, first published in 1952. That means, said Anthony Giorgianni, associate finance editor for Consumer Reports Money Adviser, that when a retailer sells you something, it is giving you an unwritten assurance that the item being sold will perform how it is supposed to for a reasonable period of time. This implied warranty overrides any return policy or limitations in the manufacturer’s warranty. All states have adopted, in some form or another, this provision of the Uniform Commercial Code or similar legislation, he said.

Quite a bit of rough stuff was bandied about in one of the final Supreme Court decisions of the term released last month — dismembering, bondage, decapitation, a bounty of bloodletting in video games that bring the thrill of the kill to new levels. No problem there, in the view of the court: for children who want to simulate brutal homicide, it’s protected free speech.Sex, not so good. Naked women. Naked men. Fornication. Ewww! The black-robed majority made it clear that the United States of America will always make an exception for sex: “historically unprotected speech,” in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 7-2 video game opinion.

The take-away point from Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association was that the court continued to expand freedoms granted by the First Amendment. But in overturning a California attempt to ban underage video game sales, the case revealed a fascinating intra-justice discussion about modern depictions of sex and violence — why one can be censored, and the other cannot.Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie. If this ruling is indeed a triumph for the First Amendment, it continues a strange double standard.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pressed the issue of why it was O.K. to protect children from sexual images but not from the worst kind of human carnage. His zinger points merit a second look before court-watchers settle into their Adirondack chairs for the summer:But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively but virtually binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?Breyer expanded further, pointing to the absurd implications of the court’s drift. “What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only if the woman — bound, gagged, tortured and killed — is also topless?”

no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.

In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.

We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.

Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.

“You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”

P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”

Second, there has been a loss of utopian élan. If you go back and think about America’s big World’s Fairs or if you read about Bell Labs in its heyday or Silicon Valley in the 1980s or 1990s, you see people in the grip of utopian visions. They imagine absurdly perfect worlds. They feel as though they have the power to begin the world anew. These were delusions, but inspiring delusions. This utopianism is almost nowhere to be found today. Stephenson and Thiel point out that science fiction is moribund; the new work is dystopian, not inspiring. Thiel argues that the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry. Legal institutions and the cable TV culture dampen enthusiasm by punishing failure so remorselessly. NASA’s early failures were seen as steps along the way to a glorious future. Deepwater Horizon’s failure demoralized the whole nation.

Third, there is no essential culture clash. Look at the Steve Jobs obituaries. Over the course of his life, he combined three asynchronous idea spaces — the counterculture of the 1960s, the culture of early computer geeks and the culture of corporate America. There was LSD, “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and spiritual exploration in India. There were also nerdy hours devoted to trying to build a box to make free phone calls. The merger of these three idea networks set off a cascade of innovations, producing not only new products and management styles but also a new ideal personality — the corporate honcho in jeans and the long-sleeve black T-shirt. Formerly marginal people came together, competed fiercely and tried to resolve their own uncomfortable relationships with society.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” If you want to be the next Steve Jobs and end the innovation stagnation, maybe you should start in hip-hop.

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment. Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition). We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down. We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.