March 2012
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No fire, no brimstone: An interview with Alain de... →
By: Caspar Melville for New Humanist “Even if religion isn’t true can’t we enjoy the best bits?” So asks the glossy advertising campaign for Alain de Botton’s new book Religion for Atheists. His answer, if you’ll excuse the spoiler, is yes. The book is packed full of proposals for how this secular asset-stripping of religion might be achieved. One of which, at least, you will no doubt already have...
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February 2012
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William Gibson, on inspiration →
itwonlast:
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. Have you ever seen Brian Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies? One of them is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” That’s my favorite. [At a] hotel in New York a couple of days ago, the young woman who...
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Paul Graham on How To Do What You Love →
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of...
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All machine and no ghost? →
The more we look at the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness. Perhaps philosophers will never be able to solve the mystery.
The philosophy of mind is concerned with fundamental questions about consciousness - about its existence and nature. The science of psychology is concerned with its empirical workings - how one mental thing leads to another, basically. The former...
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Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It →
A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don’t have a good enough sense of humor to tell.
This disconnect may be responsible for many of society’s problems.
With more than a decade’s worth of research, David...
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Black Characters And Mad Men →
Various Provocations: One discussion about Mad Men which has cropped up recently is race: people are wondering just where all the minority characters are. Or, rather, where the significant minority characters are: by and large, minority characters are set aside—they are waiters or elevator operators or (barely-seen) girlfriends. One side of the debate argues that the lack of minority characters is...
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David Bowie - Lady Stardust
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