Tag: Society
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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? – The New York Times
By midweek, students said they felt more immersed in the world around them. They met up to hand-write letters to family members and discuss “Self-Reliance,” the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship / Of minds that each can stand against the world / By its own meek and incorruptible…
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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Stories Beyond Demographics – seeing stories in ourselves
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How…
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package. Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship. Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without…
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How harmful is the decline in long-form reading? – Marginal REVOLUTION
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable…
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Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a…
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Global Child Mortality Declined from 50% in 1800 to 4.3% Today
For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway. This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.…
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American democracy is very much alive, though not in all regards well – Marginal REVOLUTION
The Senate also sided with the House on the Epstein files. Nate Silver and many others write about how Trump is now quite possibly a lame duck President. I do not doubt that there are many bad policies, and also much more corruption, and a more transparent form of corruption, which is corrosive in its…
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…