27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
How Social Media Annexes Your Cognitive Landscape
In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value.
The issue with this idea, as I discovered, is that many people could identify a small number of important benefits provided to them by particular social media platforms that couldn’t be easily r... 1 
notes
notes20 MAR 2018 by ideonexus
Small Minority Accounts for Bulk of Gun Ownership
Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.
S...
1 17 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
Diderot on Information Overload
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. When that time comes, a project, until then neglected because the need for it was not felt,...Folksonomies: information overload
Folksonomies: information overload
1 notes
notes08 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Universities Targeting Out-of-State Admissions for Tuitio...
Colorado Mesa University was typical of most public institutions in the fall of 2007, with out-of-state students making up a small number, about 5 percent, of the overall student body. But when the economic downturn hit in the fall of 2008, and state support for higher education began dwindling, Colorado Mesa President Tim Foster knew it was time to shake up the status quo. He decided to aggressively recruit out-of-state students, who pay 50 percent to 60 percent more than do Colorado residen...Folksonomies: academia admissions
Folksonomies: academia admissions
...at the expense of in-State students.
09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Insulation of Elites Compounds Societal Collapse
The scenarios most closely reflecting the reality of our world today are found in the third group of experiments (see the scenarios for an unequal society in section 5.3), where we introduced economic stratication. Under such conditions, we nd that collapse is dicult to avoid, which helps to explain why economic stratication is one of the elements consistently found in past collapsed societies. Importantly, in the rst of these unequal society scenarios, 5.3.1, the solution appears to be on a ... 1 notes
notes21 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Intelligence in Animals, Humans and Machines
To build software that is deemed intelligent, it’s helpful to begin with a definition of intelligence. Intelligence can be simply defined as a set of properties of the mind. These properties include the ability to plan, solve problems, and in general, reason. A simpler definition could be that intelligence is the ability to make the right decision given a set of inputs and a variety of possible actions.
Using this simple definition of intelligence (making the right decision),
we can apply ...All have shared intelligences, but some have more than one kind of intelligence. What makes humans special is that we have multiple kinds of intelligence: language communication, problem solving, kinesthetic, etc.
19 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Science as Power, Kept in Writing
In sedentary and peaceable societies, astronomy, medicine, the most simple notions of anatomy, the knowledge of plants and minerals, the first elements of the study of the phenomena of nature, acquired some improvement, or rather extended themselves by the mere influence of time, which, increasing the stock of observations, led, in a manner slow, but sure, to the easy and almost instant perception of some of the general consequences to which those observations were calculated to lead.
Meanwh... 1 notes
notesEarly scientists pursued science for power, and committed it in written form.
21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Scientific Knowledge is the Only Thing That Gets Better
No history of civilization can be tolerably complete which does not give considerable space to the explanation of scientific progress. If we had any doubts about this, it would suffice to ask ourselves what constitutes the essential difference between our and earlier civilizations. Throughout the course of history, in every period, and in almost every country, we find a small number of saints, of great artists, of men of science. The saints of to-day are not necessarily more saintly than thos...Art, religion, and scientists are all of the same caliber throughout history, the only difference is the wealth of knowledge they have access to grows larger all the time.
21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Importance of Peer Review
Nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all. What happens is that each recognizes as scien...Folksonomies: science peer review
Folksonomies: science peer review
1 notes
notesEach of us can only understand a small portion of science, thus we need a collaboration of mind to determine truth.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Measuring Cultural Information
But there may be more significant ways to characterize civilizations than by the
energy they use for communications purposes. An important criterion of a
civilization is the total amount of information that it stores. This information can
be described in terms of bits, the number of yes-no statements concerning itself
and the universe that such a civilization knows.
An example of this concept is the popular game of "Twenty Questions," as
played on Earth. One player imagines an object or conc... 1 notes
notesThe number of bits communicated in our radio broadcasts is quite enormous, conveying a great deal of information about our culture.
