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I don't think in terms of one year, but I can tell people what I genuinely believe, which is that if we take responsibility in being involved in our own fate if we participate, if we engage, if we speak out, if we work in our communities, if we volunteer, if we see the joy that comes from service to others, then all…
Sounds like a "fuzzy set." Which comes into play when you try to categorize things that vary continuously into discrete groups. Can't be done without ambiguruity and bias. As a geneficist by the name of Pearl demonstrated when he had 15 scienfists sort the same 532 com kernels into yellow-starchy, yellow-sweet…
In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are…
Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of…
gonzoflip 1 hour ago | unvote [-] I have family that farms in Iowa and I also worked in the agriculture industry there for a while after leaving the military. One thing that increases the stress on the farmers is the way they avoid income taxes at all costs so they rarely save any of the profits from good years to…
If a procedure named INSIGHT has been defined and then called seventeen times in the program, and the eighteenth time it is misspelled as INSIHGT, woe to the programmer. The compiler will balk and print a rigidly unsympathetic error message, saying that it has never heard of INSIHGT. Often, when such an error is…
Animism—the belief in n an intiterior spiritual reality to all things—sounds, to late twentieth-century eaars, quite a bi bit like solipsism, which holds that t only the self exists, manifesting itself in the architecture of reality. The "reality" of cyberspace falls somewhere in betwween these two; everything has an…
One consequence of the board-gaming boom has been to help designers come up with a set of principles and rules-of-thumb that add up, more or less, to a theory of fun. One way to get a sense of it is to look at a well-known game that violates many of this theory’s tenets. Monopoly is, by most calculations, the…
We’ve already seen that money is an astounding thing because it can represent myriad di
Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied and internalised techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very di
Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else. Brawn gets converted to brain when a discharged soldier
Having turned my back on propositions, I thought, what am I going to do about this? The area where it really comes up is when you start looking at the contents of consciousness, which is my number one topic. I like to quote Maynard Keynes on this. He was once asked, “Do you think in words or pictures?” to which he…
More than just a hipster fashion statement where big glasses, tight suits, and high-water pants are the norm, the black geek phenomenon normalizes all things formally couched as geeky. Science lovers, space dreamers, comic book fans, techies, or anyone who relishes super-high-level analysis just for the fun of it…
irst, the “spotlight” of attention is how cognitive scientists tend to talk about perceptual attention. The things that are task-salient in my environment. How I select and interact with those, basically. Second, the “starlight.” If the spotlight is about doing things, the starlight is who I want to be, not just what…
"These are (my son) the riches of Salomon's House. "For the several employments and offices of our fellows; we have twelve that sail into foreign countries, under the names of other nations, (for our own we conceal); who bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call…
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why. [...] ...reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the…
The Great Man theory is the notion that behind every great innovation is a single individual -- usually a man. It attempts to write a simple story about every innovation. But Ford didn't invent the automobile, Edison didn't invent the light bulb, and the Wright brothers didn't invent the airplane. The simple story…
This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work. As late as the mid-1800s, a stagecoach journey from Paris to Bordeaux cost the equivalent of a clerk’s monthly wages; today the journey costs a day or so and is fifty times as fast. A half-gallon of…
If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate. The ‘cross-fertilisation of ideas’ is a cliché, but one with unintentional fecundity. ‘To create is to recombine’ said the molecular biologist François Jacob. Imagine if…
Working societies — if they are to endure, grow, and cohere, if they are to prosper, hang together, and really mature — need moral universals. Moral universals are simply things that people believe everyone should have. In the UK, those things — those moral universals — are healthcare and media and welfare. In…