Group items tagged

the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics);

As used originally by the ancient Greeks, the term "philosophy" meant the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and comprised ALL areas of speculative thought,

the methods used to study it may be analogous to those used in the study of the natural sciences.

In 2016, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b around the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from Earth. Now, researchers have traced a second signal they believe belongs to a super-Earth orbiting the same star, increasing the intrigue of this neighboring planetary system and its potential.

After the discovery of the first planet around Proxima Centauri, researchers speculated about the existence of another planet in the system. Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to trace light signals that appeared to be coming from that direction.

The radial velocity method is based on gravity and the Doppler effect, in which light increases or decreases in frequency as a source and observed objects move toward or away from each other.

What, then, are you supposed to do when the mathematics gets more abstract? What do you do when you get to General Relativity, or Quantum Field Theory, or even more far afield into the speculative realms of cosmic inflation, extra dimensions, grand unified theories, or string theory? The mathematical structures that you build to describe these possibilities simply are what they are; on their own, they won't offer you any physical insights. But if you can pull out either observable quantities, or connections to physically observable quantities, that's when you start crossing over into something that you can test and observe.

Now, string theory (or, more accurately, string theories) have their own constraints governing them, as do the forces in our Universe, so it isn't provably clear that there's a one-to-one correspondence between our four-dimensional Universe with gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces and any version of string theory. It's an interesting conjecture, and it has found some applications to the real world: in the study of quark-gluon plasmas. In that sense, it's more than mathematics: it's physics. But where it strays from physics into pure mathematics is not yet fully determined.

If you describe the Universe precisely, and you can make quantitative predictions about it, you're physics. If those predictions turn out to be accurate and reflective of reality, then you're physics that's correct and useful. If those predictions are demonstrably wrong, you're physics that doesn't describe our Universe: you're a failed attempt at a physical theory. But if your equations have no connection at all to the physical Universe, and cannot be related to anything you can ever hope to someday observe or measure, you're firmly in the realm of mathematics; the divorce from physics will then be final. Mathematics is the language we use to describe physics, but not everything mathematical is physically meaningful. The connection, and where it breaks down, can only be determined by looking at the Universe itself.

Every night since humans first evolved, we have made what might be considered a baffling, dangerous mistake. Despite the once-prevalent threat of being eaten by predators, and the loss of valuable time for gathering food, accumulating wealth, or having sex, we go to sleep. Scientists have long speculated and argued about why we devote roughly a third of our lives to sleep, but with little concrete data to support any particular theory. Now, new evidence has refreshed a long-held hypothesis: During sleep, the brain cleans itself.

Various studies point to the conclusion that subjecting the mind to formal discipline — as when studying geometry or Latin — does not, in general, engender a broad transfer of learning. There is no sweeping increase of a general capacity for tasks like writing a speech or balancing a checkbook.

Many reasons have been advanced for this poor showing, including the lack of relevance of such an abstract exercise to people’s daily lives.

Most people reflexively eliminate the cards not explicitly specified in the rule (the F and the 2) and then continue with slower, more analytic processing only for the E and the 5. In this, they rely on an initial snap judgment about superficial similarity, a tendency that some scholars speculate evolved in humans because in most real-world contexts, quickly detecting such similarities is a good strategy for survival.

Astronomers have traced the signal of an enigmatic repeating fast radio burst for only the second time -- and it's in a spiral galaxy similar to our own, not so far away.

Multiple individual fast radio bursts in past years have been traced back to their sources in other galaxies, although those have yet to shed light on what created them.But this newly discovered repeating FRB has a different source from the first one that was found in 2019, deepening the mystery of how these radio waves are created.

"The FRB is among the closest yet seen, and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said Mohit Bhardwaj, study co-author and McGill University doctoral student. "However, the observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

Personality traits are characteristics that relate to the factory settings of our motivational system.

Values are factors that drive what we find to be important. Research by Schwartz and his colleagues suggests that there is a universal set of values.

Researchers are interested in understanding how these two sources of stability in a person over time are inter-related and whether changes in one factor (like personality) create changes in another (like values). This question was addressed in a paper in the August 2019 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

It may well be the case that some amount of community protection kicks in below 60 percent exposure, and possibly quite a bit below that threshold, and that those who exhibit a cross-reactive T-cell immune response, while still susceptible to infection, may also have some meaningful amount of protection against severe disease.

early returns suggest that while the maximalist interpretation of each hypothesis is not very credible — herd immunity has probably not been reached in many places, and cross-reactive T-cell response almost certainly does not functionally immunize those who have it — more modest interpretations appear quite plausible.

Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”

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

“Reminiscence” is a great illustration of how strangely passive and defeatist an industry full of Prius early adopters has been about the biggest challenge of our time.

Hollywood’s reliance on big-budget action movies plays a role in its inability to address climate change effectively. In an industry reliant on chases, special effects and disasters, even ostensible “issue movies” get wedged into the same template.

these movies share at least one thing: pessimism. Climate change will be catastrophic — as will be many human responses to it.

Remember the good old days when kids just watched YouTube all day? Now that they binge on 15-second TikToks, those YouTube clips seem like PBS documentaries.

Many parents tell me their kids can’t sit through feature-length films anymore because to them the movies feel painfully slow. Others have observed their kids struggling to focus on homework. And reading a book? Forget about it.

What is happening to kids’ brains?

By 1935, the New Dealers had set up a new agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and cleaned out the FTC. Yet there was still immense concern that Roosevelt had not been able to tame Wall Street. The Supreme Court didn’t really ratify the SEC as a constitutional body until 1938, and nearly struck it down in 1935 when a conservative Supreme Court made it harder for the SEC to investigate cases.

It took a few years, but New Dealers finally implemented a workable set of securities rules, with the courts agreeing on basic definitions of what was a security. By the 1950s, SEC investigators could raise an eyebrow and change market behavior, and the amount of cheating in finance had dropped dramatically.

Institutional change, in other words, takes time.

Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up

“You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”

Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.

That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019

And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.

Some nativists believe that specific beliefs or preferences are "hard-wired". For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate. A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialized learning devices. This latter view differs from empiricism only to the extent that the algorithms that translate experience into information may be more complex and specialized in nativist theories than in empiricist theories. However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism.

Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforward empiricist views of John Locke and David Hume. Hume had given persuasive logical arguments that people cannot infer causality from perceptual input. The most one could hope to infer is that two events happen in succession or simultaneously. One response to this argument involves positing that concepts not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.

The percentage who say that having children is very important to them has dropped from 43 percent to 30 percent since 2019. This fits with data showing that, since 2007, the total fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 2.1 lifetime births per woman, the “replacement rate” necessary to sustain population levels, to just 1.64 in 2020.

The U.S. economy is losing an edge that robust population dynamics gave it relative to low-birth-rate peer nations in Japan and Western Europe; this country, too, faces chronic labor-supply constraints as well as an even less favorable “dependency ratio” between workers and retirees than it already expected.

the timing and the magnitude of such a demographic sea-change cry out for explanation. What happened in 2007?

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.