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A Life Spent Focused on What Computers Are Doing to Us

We are, she fears, in danger of producing an emotionally sterile society more akin to that of the robots coming down the road.

Turkle was born in 1948 into a lower-middle-class family that raised her to assume she would ace every test she ever took and marry a nice Jewish boy with whom she would raise a brood of children to ensure the survival of the Jewish people.

Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?

Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with — the catcalling and lewd gestures — connects directly with more serious abuses.

“Men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women.”

The Decline of Republican Demonization

Why has opposition to Biden’s plans been so low energy?

The American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief effort, is law.

There are, however, others who declare that these claims are not of the Natural Sciences. A knowledge claim in the natural sciences needs to be falsifiable in order to be tested, and claims regarding a multiverse are not falsifiable. This view of science is most closely associated with the philosopher of science Karl Popper and more recently by Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson claims that the multiverse theory, and others like it, do not fall under “science”, but “philosophy”. He claims that in physics, for example, a concept constitutes knowledge if it accurately predicts the future and can be tested empirically. Questions about why certain models work can be discussed and debated over dinner, but those ‘why’ questions are not scientific. We can predict where the moon will be at any given time on the strength of our equations, but questions about why those equations work are for philosophers if they cannot be answered with a falsifiable claim.

The natural sciences rely heavily on reason, in particular inductive reasoning. The statement, “all bodies observed so far obey Newton’s law of gravity” has been used to justify a believe in Newton’s law of gravity. Belief structures like this are the backbone of Natural Science, but there are notable philosophers of science who are quick to point out the fallacy of induction. David Hume, for example, questioned the assumption he referred to as the “uniformity of nature”. In short, simply because all observed bodies follow a pattern tell us nothing of unobserved bodies, and the “uniformity of nature” (the belief that nature behaves uniformly) cannot be proven. This brings us to....

Once understood and appropriated by students the capability/fallibility dualism is a powerful notion that can be used in various TOK contexts. Appreciating the positive aspects of knowing is a great example. A skeptical mindset, with regard to limitations and bias, is a central part of the TOK critical thinking toolkit. But focusing almost entirely on the weaknesses and fallibility of knowledge claims loses sight of our capability. There are many positive aspects of knowledge and there is tremendous pleasure in finding things out. The accumulated edifice of shared human ideas—loosely, the Areas of Knowledge—merits nothing less than awe and astonishment.

In some contexts, Faith is simply belief without evidence. But this is only a starting point. Faith has two primary meanings. It can be used as a synonym for trust in the secular world, and notably, in a more dogmatic sense, for all-or-nothing belief in, and personal commitment to God or Allah, that is central to most denominations of Christianity and Islam respectively. This is a good example of the polysemy of language.

A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update.

The revised response still emphasizes transmission in close contact but now says it may be via aerosols — smaller respiratory particles that can float — as well as droplets. It also adds a reason the virus can also be transmitted “in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings,” saying this is because “aerosols remain suspended in the air or travel farther than 1 meter.”

on Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also updated its guidance on Covid-19, clearly saying that inhalation of these smaller particles is a key way the virus is transmitted, even at close range, and put it on top of its list of how the disease spreads.

Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.

accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.

There -are two ways by which the spirit of a culture. may be shriveled. In the first-the Orwellian_;,.;_culture becomes a prison~ In the second-the Huxleyan-culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when· cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-tal,tc, when, in

In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?

These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.

Science comes hard to most of us because it can’t really take that form. Instead it’s equations, models, theories and the data that support them. But ironically, science offers an explanation of why we love stories.

It starts with a challenge posed in human evolution — but the more we come to understand about that subject, the more we see that our storytelling instinct can lead us astray, especially when it comes to how most of us understand history.

Many animals have highly developed mind-reading instinct, a sort of tracking-device technique shared with creatures that have no language, not even a language of thought.

Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were?

While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum.

Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history.

In the early 1980s, Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich began sifting through years of statistics from the Philadelphia 76ers. The psychologists looked at every single shot taken by every single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a string of hits or misses. All told, they analyzed thousands upon thousands of field goal attempts.

The larger question, of course, is why confirmation bias exists.

After analyzing all the shots of the 76ers, the psychologists discovered that there was absolutely no evidence of "the hot hand."

During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church

A type of war between science and religion was in play but there would be more casualties on the side of science.

Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were two scientists who printed books that later became banned

It’s true that banning links to a story published by a 200-year-old American newspaper — albeit one that is now a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid — is a more dramatic step than cutting off WikiLeaks or some lesser-known misinformation purveyor. Still, it’s clear that what Facebook and Twitter were actually trying to prevent was not free expression, but a bad actor using their services as a conduit for a damaging cyberattack or misinformation.

These decisions get made quickly, in the heat of the moment, and it’s possible that more contemplation and debate would produce more satisfying choices. But time is a luxury these platforms don’t always have. In the past, they have been slow to label or remove dangerous misinformation about Covid-19, mail-in voting and more, and have only taken action after the bad posts have gone viral, defeating the purpose.

That left the companies with three options, none of them great. Option A: They could treat the Post’s article as part of a hack-and-leak operation, and risk a backlash if it turned out to be more innocent. Option B: They could limit the article’s reach, allowing it to stay up but choosing not to amplify it until more facts emerged. Or, Option C: They could do nothing, and risk getting played again by a foreign actor seeking to disrupt an American election.

This idea of a gullible, pliable populace is, of course, nothing new. Voltaire said, “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. But no, says Mercier, Voltaire had it backwards: “It is wanting to commit atrocities that makes you believe absurdities”…

If someone says Obama is a Muslim, their primary reason may be to indicate that they are a member of the group of people who co-ordinate around that statement. When a social belief and a true belief are in conflict, Klintman says, people will opt for the belief that best signals their social identity – even if it means lying to themselves…

Such a “belief” – being largely performative – rarely translates into action. It remains what Mercier calls a reflective belief, with no consequences on one’s behaviour, as opposed to an intuitive belief, which guides decisions and actions.

Megan Rapinoe has denounced last week's riots in the US Capitol as "a huge stain on the country."

In the wake of the deadly riots, criminal defendants have been rounded up across the country, with some accused of bringing weapons and bombs to Capitol Hill.

"This is America, make no mistake about it,"

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma

Now, researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have found potential brain biomarkers of PTSD in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.

Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.

the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.

WASHINGTON — America’s greenhouse gas emissions from energy and industry plummeted more than 10 percent in 2020, reaching their lowest levels in at least three decades as the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on the nation’s economy, according to an estimate published Tuesday by the Rhodium Group.

Before the pandemic hit, America’s emissions had been slowly but steadily declining since 2005, in large part because utilities that generate electricity have been shifting away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in favor of cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power. Over the past decade, utilities have retired hundreds of coal-burning power plants despite President Trump’s efforts to revive the industry.

“Nothing short of a total transformation of our energy infrastructure will be required,” said Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director. “That calls for decisive action this year, next year and indeed every year to 2050.”