Opinion | How Behavioral Economics Took Over America - The New York Times - 0 views
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Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)
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it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.
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Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing
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An Existential Problem in the Search for Alien Life - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.
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since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.
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If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
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'Oppenheimer,' 'The Maniac' and Our Terrifying Prometheus Moment - The New York Times - 0 views
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Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.
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More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.
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Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”
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(1) Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny - Freddie deBoer - 0 views
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this recent piece from The New York Times Magazine, which argues that the artistic obsession with novelty and experimentation, the primary obsession of modernism and so something like the default goal of artists for more than a century, has recently run aground. This turn from the primacy of the new does not stem from a choice to reject it, but because culture is truly spent, and can produce nothing original
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the condition that Farago describes is ultimately the same condition that leads Rolling Stone to publish an anti-Infinite Jest piece in twenty goddamn twenty-three - discursive exhaustion, the inevitable dark side of meme culture, the sputtering firehose of human expression that is the internet running dry. CT Jones wrote that piece because it’s a thing people write, Rolling Stone published it because it’s a thing publications publish, and people read it because it’s a thing people are known to think. These are not ideas so much as they are the impressions of where ideas once were, like the lines you find on your face the morning after you sleep on the wrong pillow.
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The litbro, in other words, is a simulacra, a symbol that has eaten what it was meant to symbolize, a representation of something that has never existed. The idea is Jean Baudrillard’s, expressed in several texts but most famously in Simulacra & Sign, published in 1981
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George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness
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the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.
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What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers
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I Was Trying to Build My Son's Resilience, Not Scar Him for Life - The New York Times - 0 views
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Resilience is a popular term in modern psychology that, put simply, refers to the ability to recover and move on from adverse events, failure or change.
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“We don’t call it ‘character’ anymore,” said Jelena Kecmanovic, director of Arlington/DC Behavior Therapy Institute. “We call it the ability to tolerate distress, the ability to tolerate uncertainty.”
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Studies suggest that resilience in kids is associated with things like empathy, coping skills and problem-solving, though this research is often done on children in extreme circumstances and may not apply to everybody
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(1) This Is Why You Don't Trust the Polls - by Jonathan V. Last - 0 views
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The reason people have come to believe that polls are wrong is because the polls describe a reality that is utterly counter to what should be happening according to history, norms, and standard
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There is no universe in which this election should be close. When we see polls showing that it’s actually very close, we recoil from them.
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Here is the truth: We’ve lost sight of just how damned unreal this moment in American history is.
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A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views
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It’s tough out there for a mouse
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Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
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Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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The James Webb Telescope Finishes Deployment in Space - The New York Times - 0 views
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Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who chaired a report that led to what would become the Webb telescope, said “what resonates at this moment is the extraordinary ability of our species to collaborate, to organize thousands of people to work carefully, relentlessly, unselfishly, and seemingly endlessly toward some greater human good.”
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Chanda Prescod Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, echoed his remarks: “This is such a reminder of how successful people can be when they work together.”
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While the telescope is considered fully deployed, much remains to be completed. There are still 49 of those “single point failures,” according to Mr. Menzel. Problems with any of them could affect the mission’s individual instruments or the entire spacecraft.
Digital kompromat is changing our behaviour | Comment | The Times - 0 views
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Eyes and ears everywhere, the sort of stuff that makes civil libertarians recite prophetic lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “You had to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinised.”
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Many studies have proved the rather obvious idea that we act differently when we know we are being watched. This instinct to alter our behaviour under watchful eyes is so strong that the mere presence of a picture of eyes can encourage pro-social behaviour and discourage the antisocial sort.
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Researchers found that putting a picture of human eyes on a charity donation bucket increased donations by 48 per cent. In another experiment, pictures of a stern male gaze were placed in spots around a university campus where bike theft was rife. The robberies then plummeted by 65 per cent.
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Opinion | Beijing Olympics: Why Mikaela Shiffrin Stumbled, and Why We All Stumble - The... - 0 views
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Humans are biologically hard-wired to crave a sense of control and certainty over what will happen in the future.
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But with that comes a tendency to overfixate on the details of our performance, which can get in the way of achieving our best.
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Instead of focusing on what we hope to achieve — at tomorrow’s board meeting, at that cocktail party we’re braving solo, at a major exam — our brain is preoccupied by running through scenarios to avoid. Unfortunately, this does nothing to help prepare us, and only invites an overattention to details best left outside conscious awareness — noise.
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Apple News Plus Review: Good Value, But Apple Needs to Fine Tune This | Tom's Guide - 0 views
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For $9.99 a month, News+ gives you access to more than 300 magazines, along with news articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.
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if you want to find a specific magazine within the News+ tab, be prepared to give that scrolling finger a workout. There's no search field in the News+ tab for typing in a magazine title, so you've got to tap on Apple's catalog and scroll until you find what you're looking for
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You can browse by category from the home screen, which reduces the number of covers you have to sort through a little bit.
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Opinion | Guns, Germs, Bitcoin and the Antisocial Right - The New York Times - 0 views
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What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutish and short,” if they participate in a “commonwealth” — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure.
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Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.
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Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health, when they can; but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action
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How the Internet Is Like a Dying Star - 0 views
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