Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Please Don’t Cancel Aristotle

We have been arguing about Aristotle since the first century. Classical scholar Edith Hall tells us that because “modern people with radically different stances have tried to claim him for their own,” understanding the true meaning of the Greek philosopher has become even more important:

The extent to which Aristotle’s ideas have been willfully distorted – even falsified – reveals the magnitude of his authority. Part of the explanation lies in the complexity of his thought, which means that human qualities valued in his ethics implicitly undermine some of his political views; his interrogatory, dialectical manner of his argumentation, which gives due weight to counterarguments, also encourages challenges to received opinion and revels in unpicking nuances and contradictions…He is a crucial dialogic participant in the dynamic creation of new ideas. We would indeed cancel Aristotle at our peril.

2. Chill Out About AI

Noah Smith is a skeptic about most hysteria surrounding AI. “There’s just no sign of mass technological unemployment yet, and no compelling theoretical reason to think this will happen in the foreseeable future,” he writes. Then he goes further: 

 But there’s also the possibility that most people are simply wrong about how AI and humans will interact in the economy. It’s possible that AI will be better than humans at some tasks, but worse at other tasks — for example, telling truth from fiction. If this is the case, then AI will end up just like most past technologies — as a tool to make human workers more productive, rather than as a push-button solution that replaces them completely.

3. A Bagel Shop’s War Against Climate Activism 

The Los Angeles Times explains how Emily Winston’s Boichik Bagels in Berkeley became ground zero for defeating a ballot measure that would have forced bakers in most commercial spaces to use electric ovens instead of gas-powered ones:

As far as Winston knows, electric ovens capable of making a true New York-style bagel don’t exist. Before starting Boichik, she poked around the kitchens of Manhattan’s best bagel shops to see how they did it. She followed their lead exactly, spending $60,000 apiece on two revolving rack ovens. The way she explains it, each one contains five trays that rotate like a Ferris wheel, bringing the bagels close to a gas-fueled fire that heats them up just right. “I don’t know of anyone who makes a great bagel in an electric oven,” she said.

The ballot measure was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin.

4. Bell Labs Invented the Future

Brian Potter’s detailed post in Construction Physics about the heyday of Bell Labs demonstrates how important the organization would prove to be to future tech companies. In many ways, it paved the way for the modern business to invest in “innovation”:

Bell Labs thus created a new world that required some degree of scientific capability, showed what could result from creating such capabilities, and provided a playbook for how to do it. In the 1950s and beyond, many companies started their own research operations on the Bell Labs model: creating an academic-esque environment and giving researchers freedom to follow their interests, without necessarily needing to worry about marketable products or immediate profitability.

5. The World that “Warcraft” Created

Twenty years into the phenomena of The World of Warcraft, The New York Times offers 20 anecdotes about how the blockbuster game shifted perceptions, led a flourishing industry, and shaped public culture. Some deserve eye rolls (academic WoW “scholarship”); others are deeply moving:

The parents of Mats Steen assumed he had few friends because he mostly stayed inside while fighting a degenerative muscle disease. When they posted on his blog that he had died at age 25, they were shocked by the outpouring of support from his World of Warcraft guild. Several of the people he had spent his life with online traveled to his funeral in Norway.

6. The Persistence of Dull Speeches

“There are many ways to give a terrible speech,” writes Tim Harford in an indispensable post on good speeches. Alas, the bad speech and presentation is the norm:

Many executive speeches are excruciating because the CEO is determined to avoid saying anything of interest, while management consultancy is cursed by the need to give presentations regardless of whether there are any ideas to present…People who talk when they’ve nothing to say are an annoyance, but then there are those who do have something important to say, yet duck their opportunity to say it. That is less of an annoyance than a tragedy.

Websites Worth Reading

The Pursuit of Happiness: Economist Scott Sumner’s blog

The Pudding: Visual Essays

Grey Matter: How Bayer is Using AI 

Feeds We Follow

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