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Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse. “It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.

As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about.

There are generally two, radically different ways to relate to the world: objective and subjective. Objectivity is an orientation towards reality based on abstracting away, in various degrees, from subjective experience, and from individual points of view. A subjective orientation, on the other hand, is based on an attunement to the inner experience of feeling, sensing, thinking and valuing that unfolds in our day-to-day living. This distinction has been brought into contemporary philosophical discourse most notably by Thomas Nagel, in a number of his essays, most famously in “What is It Like to Be a Bat?”The spectacular success of science in the past 300 years has raised hopes that it also holds the key to guiding human beings towards a good life. Psychology and neuroscience has become a main source of life advice in the popular media. But philosophers have long held reservations about this scientific orientation to how to live life. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, famously pointed out, no amount of fact can legislate value, moral or otherwise. You cannot derive ought from is. But there is another, in some way more radical concern, expressed in Western philosophy most forcefully by Kierkegaard, and in literature by Dostoyevsky — two religiously inspired thinkers — namely that our experience of life matters in ineffable ways that no objective understanding of the world can capture.

Nuremberg is not alone in dealing anew with its Nazi heritage. The entire country has been swept into a debate this year about the release of a new edition of “Mein Kampf,” the first time Hitler’s book has been published in Germany in 70 years. Both clashes come as Germany faces the reemergence of xenophobia that has flared as the country sits at the center of Europe’s refugee crisis. Some worry that both the book and the buildings, if renovated, will become rallying points for today’s neo-Nazis. 

The debates in Germany highlight a fundamental question that many countries in the world struggle with: What do you do with symbols of a past that many people today find abhorrent?In the United States, fights over the display of the Confederate flag in public places surface almost weekly. Ukraine is systematically removing statues of Vladimir Lenin and other totems of the country’s Soviet past. In Spain, where authorities in Madrid are renaming streets that commemorate Francisco Franco, divisions simmer over demands to remove the late dictator’s body from the vast monument named  Valley of the Fallen that glorifies his reign.The Rising Sun flag – a controversial symbol of Japan’s imperial history – is still used by the country’s Maritime Self-Defense Force, much to the anger of Japan’s neighbors. Britain has been embroiled in a controversy over whether to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes – for whom the prestigious Rhodes scholarship is named – from a college at Oxford University because of critics’ concerns about his ties to Southern Africa’s colonial and racist past. The university says it will stay right where it is.

Yet in few places do historical symbols evoke more sensitivity than in Germany. 

Peter Godfrey-Smith, the author of “Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science,” has been thinking about how people can avoid the misunderstanding embedded in the phrase, “It’s only a theory.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”

After a law went into effect last summer banning obscenities in public performances, the playwright and director Ivan Vyrypaev excised the curse words from one of his plays, “The Drunks,” for its Russian debut at the prestigious Moscow Art Theater. Some actors played the new version straight, he said, while others winked to make clear what was cut.

Mainly, I think, the restoration story gets people hooked because it raises ancient and endlessly fascinating philosophy-of-art questions. In this respect, the restored murals are really a new work, a work of conceptual art. To look at them is to have thoughts about the nature of art. When I was a student, I went to a class taught by the art historian Meyer Schapiro. There were lots of people in the room; I think it was supposed to be his last class. (This was at Columbia, where Schapiro had been, as a student and a professor, since 1920.) He devoted the entire opening lecture to forgeries. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to hear him talk about paintings, not fakes. I didn’t go back.

We suggest that reason is very much like any other cognitive mechanism—it is itself a form of intuition. Like other intuitions, it is a specialised mechanism. The specificity of reason is to bear... on reasons. Reason delivers intuitions about relationships between reasons and conclusions: some reasons are intuitively better than others. When you want to convince someone, you use reason to construct arguments. When someone wants to convince you of something, you use reason to evaluate their arguments. We are swayed by reasons that are intuitively compelling and indifferent to reasons that are intuitively too weak. Reason, then, does not contrast with intuition as would two quite different systems. Reason, rather, is just a higher order mechanism of intuitive inference.

What has more consciousness: a puppy or a baby? An iPhone 5 or an octopus? For a long time, the question seemed impossible to address. But recently, Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, argued that consciousness can be measured—captured in a single value that he calls Φ, the Greek letter phi. The intuition behind Tononi’s idea, known as the Integrated Information Theory, is that we experience consciousness when we integrate different sensory inputs. According to Tononi, when you eat ice cream, you cannot separate the taste of the sugar on your tongue from the sensation of the melting liquid coating the inside your mouth. Phi is a measure of the extent to which a given system—for example, a brain circuit—is capable of fusing these distinctive bits of information. The more distinctive the information, and the more specialized and integrated a system is, the higher its phi. To Tononi, phi directly measures consciousness; the higher your phi, the more conscious you are.

in the very worst manifestation it was actually kind of a weaponized mathematical algorithm. I was working in online advertising. Most of the people working online advertising represented it as a way of giving people opportunities. That’s true for most technologists, most educated people, most white people. On the other side of the spectrum you have poor people, who are being preyed upon, by the same kinds algorithms.

people need to stop trusting mathematics and they need to stop trusting black box algorithms. They need to start thinking to themselves. You know: Who owns this algorithm? What is their goal and is it aligned with mine? If they’re trying to profit off of me, probably the answer is no.

focused on policy, rather than discovery of fundamentals

We judge economics by what it can produce

The question is more complicated than it seems.

Self-operating machines are permeating every dimension of society, so that humans find themselves interacting more frequently with robots than ever before—often without even realizing it. The human-machine relationship is rapidly evolving as a result. Humanity, and what it means to be a human, will be defined in part by the machines people design.