How Much Art Can the Brain Take? Steven Pinker This article is adapted from How the Mind Works (Penguin paperback, 1999). Man does not live by bread alone, nor by know-how, safety, children, or sex. People everywhere spend as much time as they can afford on activities that, in the struggle to survive and reproduce, seem pointless. In all cultures, people tell stories and recite poetry. They joke, laugh, and tease. They sing and dance. They decorate surfaces. As if that weren't enough of a puzzle, the more biologically frivolous and vain the activity, the more people exalt it. Art, literature, and music are thought to be not just pleasurable but noble. They are the mind's best work, what makes life worth living. Why do we pursue the biologically trivial and futile and experience them as sublime? To many educated people the question seems horribly philistine, even immoral. But it is unavoidable for anyone interested in the makeup of [Homo sapiens]. Members of...
Posts
How do we come up with words?
How do we come up with words? Thinking about how words get made can challenge some of our fundamental assumptions. By Steven Pinker September 30, 2007 We live in an age in which you can Google, BlackBerry, blog, podcast and spam -- yet none of these words existed (at least in their current senses) just a few years ago. The addition of vocabulary to the English language is, of course, nothing new. Every word in the dictionary was originally the brainchild of some wordsmith, lost in the mists of history, whose coinage caught on and was passed down the generations. Words can be coined in several ways. Most new words are simply assembled out of old ones. We can figure out what a defragmenter is thanks to our familiarity with de -, fragment and - er . The last decade has also given us deshopping (buying something to use it once and return it), gripesite (where you post comments about deficient products) and green washing (in which companies cover up polluting practices wi...
THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS
Introduction When Nassim Taleb talks about the limits of statistics, he becomes outraged. "My outrage," he says, "is aimed at the scientist-charlatan putting society at risk using statistical methods. This is similar to iatrogenics, the study of the doctor putting the patient at risk." As a researcher in probability, he has some credibility. In 2006, using FNMA and bank risk managers as his prime perpetrators, he wrote the following: The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely." In the following Edge original essay, Taleb continues his examination of Black Swans, the highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. He claims that those who are putting society at risk are "no true statisticians...
The Roots of Conflict
By Umberto Eco An English modification of an essay for La Repubblica , 15 October 2001. Excerpted from Counterpunch ). Original Article: Le guerre sante passione e ragione All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black. If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind. Of course it did not always do this. Hitler, who burned books, condemned "degenerate" art and killed those belonging to "inferior" races; and the fascism which taught me at school to recite "May God Curse the English" because they were "the people who eat five meals a day" and were therefore greedy and inferior to thrifty Italians, are also pa...