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Each individual has his or her own perception of reality. The implication is that because each of us perceives the world through our own eyes, reality itself changes from person to person.

When it comes to your company’s costs, perception is reality. About 72% of people say that the reputation of a company or product can impact their decision to buy or not to buy.

Reality is fact. Reality is truth. Reality, however, is not always a known

Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.

Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”

Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange

a recent working paper by Nico Voigtländer and Sebastian Ottinger of the University of California at Los Angeles argues that leaders’ impact can indeed be isolated—thanks to the genomes of kings like Charles.

In theory, each round of inbreeding should have made monarchs slightly stupider—and thus worse at their jobs. This yields a natural experiment. Assuming that countries’ propensity for incest did not vary based on their political fortunes, the periods in which they had highly inbred (and probably dim-witted) leaders occurred at random intervals.

The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries’ success during their reigns using two measures: historians’ subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country’s historical averages.

there also seems to be little doubt that is corroding the web.

, two new studies offered some cause for alarm. (I discovered both in the latest edition of Import AI, the indispensable weekly newsletter from Anthropic co-founder and former journalist Jack Clark.)

The first study, which had an admittedly small sample size, found that crowd-sourced workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turks platforms increasingly admit to using LLMs to perform text-based tasks.

Online life is no longer optional for most people. The pandemic only accelerated a shift already underway, turning the internet into our school, office and social lifeline.

the internet’s tightening grip on every aspect of life isn’t without costs

These six shows tap into some of those dangers, exploring cybercrime, cryptocurrency and the many flavors of horror that lurk on the dark web.

We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”

Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship.

In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned.

Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.

hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.

eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.

why has University Challenge lasted, virtually unchanged, for so long?

The answer may lie in a famous theory about our brains put forward by the psychologist Raymond Cattell in 1963

Cattell divided intelligence into two categories: fluid and crystallised. Fluid intelligence refers to basic reasoning and other mental activities that require minimal learning — just an alert and flexible brain.

In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face

there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs.

they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention

An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals.

It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own

When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas

To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.

read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade.

The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story.

advocates for each side in the masking debate are once again claiming the mantle of science to justify political positions

pleas to “follow the science” have consistently yielded to use of the phrase as a rhetorical land mine.

“so much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics. The phrase can come off as sanctimonious,” she said, “and the danger is that it says, ‘These are the facts,’ when it should say, ‘This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.’

‘We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves,’ wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887

This seeking after ourselves, however, is not something that is lacking in Buddhist and Confucian traditions – especially not in the case of Korean philosophy. Self-cultivation, central to the tradition, underscores that the onus is on the individual to develop oneself, without recourse to the divine or the supernatural

Korean philosophy is practical, while remaining agnostic to a large degree: recognising the spirit realm but highlighting that we ourselves take charge of our lives by taking charge of our minds

n 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times

Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instance

Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness

Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived

when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit.