Haidt: Beauty and Awe Help Us Escape the Phone-Based Life
The question is: why are we drawn to beauty?I want the beauty of the forest to actually be beautiful, not just signal a primordial drive to forage and hunt.
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Are Beliefs in Space Aliens Really Spiraling Out of Control?
A British philosophy prof sees such views as a “widespread societal problem,” comparing them to the J6 riotOn the whole, Milligan’s worries are not so much unreasonable as they are perennial. People will NOT easily accept that we might be alone in the universe.
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Polling Season: Time To Be Manipulated!
The fact that polls can be analyzed numerically is one of their limitations for predictionIf we obsess about polling data, all we will hear is the distorted echo of our own voices. We need to focus on issues and policies instead.
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Why Are Robots Built To Look Like Humans?
It’s not because that’s the most efficient way to design them for high tech workThe main effect of humanoid robots is psychological; people tend to believe they are actually thinking when they are not.
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Google Decision Challenges Trillion-Dollar Internet Gatekeeper
How one company cornered the market for the human mindThe judge ruled that Google operates unlawfully: It effectively excludes competitors while its prices and services are unresponsive to consumer market demands.
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The Dark Art of Online “Nudging”: How to Protect Yourself
Organizations of all kinds use psychological tricks to move our minds as we browse — but a handy acronym helps detect themThe FORCES acronym helps us sense when a website, app, news report, or video source is nudging us to think and act in ways that perhaps we hadn’t expected.
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Social Media Cutting Into Your Sanity? Try the Great Unplug
Video producer Adam Nieri looks at the pros and cons of a post-AI world and recommends structured timeouts to regain perspectiveVideo producer Adam Nieri looks at the pros and cons of a post-AI world and recommends structured timeouts to regain perspective.
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Why AI Will Not and Cannot Think Our Thoughts
How can a robot ever have a spiritual vision of reality? How can it even be emotional?Could an android at a child’s funeral read the mourners’ thoughts and emotions? Or would it view the death as a mere rearrangement of atoms in a wooden box?
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The Cancel Culture Mob Comes for the Psychologists
The response “It’s complicated,” chosen by nearly half of psychology profs, is a roundabout confession of cowardice in the face of mobs threatened by findings they hope to stifleCancel Culture at universities aims to protect a set of core beliefs from challenge by new evidence. If a discipline is to thrive, it must defeat the Cancel mob
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Does Time Exist? That’s Not As Clear As We Might Think
We picture a clock when we think of time but, physicists note, that’s not how we experience it as living beingsThe COVID lockdowns often introduced people to a different approach to time from what they were used to, with mixed results.
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Is Psychology Heading for Another Big Replication Crisis?
The use of Amazon’s MTurk in survey research risks a second scandal in which findings are low quality and can’t be replicated, critics warnIn the first big replication crisis, the effort to root out a 2011 paper supporting ESP turned up the fact that only 36% of approved papers could be replicated.
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Is the New Natural-Sounding Chatbot GPT4.o Breaking a Barrier?
It depends on what barrier you mean, says philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor. It could harm vulnerable people by convincing them that it is a personIt’s interesting that science fiction gets so much right — but then, about our relationship with AI, it gets the key thing so wrong.
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Robocop 2014: A Good Movie Hampered by Bad Timing
The 2014 remake of RoboCop is considered a failure by most. I disagree. It has its problems but it is pretty solid in many respectsThe film implies the existence of the human soul, as that seems to be pretty much all that Alex Murphy has left as he begins a new life as a robocop.
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Is AI the Triumph of Left-Brained Thinking? What Follows?
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that it is and asks us to consider what its cultural lean toward the “left brain” is doing to usHe notes, “ AI … has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context—or even scale and extent—changes everything.”
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So Who Are Today’s Disinformation Police?
Social scientists are striving to develop ways to blunt the force of information that governments would rather the public did not know or heedThe disinformation experts claim to be defending democracy — and yet their principal weapon is indoctrination.
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Philosopher: Non-Materialism Is Fashionable Orthodoxy Now
Non-reductionism, which means that the mind is not simply reducible to the brain, is now well accepted, she arguesGiuseppina D’oro’s essay introduces two 20th-century idealist philosophers — Oakeshott and Collingwood — and their critique of psychology as a science.
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Scientists Attempt an Honest Look at Why We Trust Science Less
Contemplating the depressing results of a recent Pew survey, a molecular biologist and a statistician take aim at growing corruption in scienceThe article, unfortunately, doesn’t address the way the panic around COVID leaned heavily on claims about “the science” — which likely discredited science.
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Dembski: Does the Squawk Around AI Sound Like the Tower of Babel?
Well then, maybe that’s just what it is, he argues, in a new series of short essaysDembski sees the breathless and implausible claims for computers that think like people as the modern equivalent of ancient idols. Here are some highlights.
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New Studies Point to Ways We Might Reduce the Effects of Dementia
What’s becoming clear is that, while dementia itself may not be preventable, its severity may potentially be mitigated by timely health care interventions.
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Can There Really Be an Ultimate Happiness Machine?
Technology can do so much. Can it really provide an answer to the eternal human quest for happiness?What if we had a machine that could access and manipulate the internals of the human mind? It would fall victim to the halting problem.
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