We are wired to find meaning in the world, and often this means including superstition and other explanations into our world view Emotional stress and events of personal significance will push us strongly toward magical meaning-making. Susan Gelman explains it this way: God puts you in the path of an HIV-positive lover, but biology causes you to contract the virus from his semen.
Magical Thinking
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The Wisdom of the Chaperones
Is Web 2.0 democracy a myth? Is it more a case of wisdom of the chaperones than wisdom of the crowds? Chris Wilson concludes, Digg and Wikipedia would do well to stop pretending they’re operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few.
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Blog Writing
Sarah Boxer on blog writing as id writing:
…I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, ‘Dude, the ball.’
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The Life Cycle of a Blog Post
Where does a blog post go? Wired magazines’ flash animation follows a blog post as it makes its way from mere post to reader via the Interweb: The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, from servers to spiders to suits to you [flash animation].
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The Future of Ideas
We can now download Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas [pdf] for free. Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and vocal critic of the extension of the copyright term in United States, persuaded Random House to release the book under a Creative Commons license.
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Foreign Policy Goes Glam
Increasingly, celebrities are taking an active interest in political causes. Are they actually making a difference? No doubt that celebrities can raise the profile of issues near and dear to their hearts. But highlighting a problem is not the same thing as solving it—on that score, the celebrity track record at affecting policy outcomes is the same as the rest of us: mixed.
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Let’s Talk About Love
Is disdain for Céline Dion innate or learned? Is our love or hatred of My Heart Will Go On the result of a universal, disinterested instinct for beauty-assessment? Or is it something less exalted? Carl Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It’s a form of social currency, or “cultural capital,†that we use to stockpile prestige. Hating Céline is therefore not just an aesthetic choice, but an ethical one, a way to elevate yourself above her fans—who, according to market research, tend to be disproportionately poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores.
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How a UNICEF Photo Makes the West’s Heart Ache
This photo of 11-year old child bride sitting next to her 40-year old fiance captures a small, everyday moment that wouldn’t surprise anyone in the Taliban. But to Western eyes it is quite a different matter. Dutch writer Leon de Winter: Our eyes behold an abomination. Our eyes have learned to see the world from the perspective of a slowly acquired sense for humanity. And although more and more voices tell us that we — the former colonialists and imperialists — have lost the right to judge other cultures, we know just as well as this girl that this marriage is wrong.
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The quest for Netflix’s prize to whomever creates a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own reveals some interesting ideas about what constitutes a better algorithm. Rogue contestant Gavin Potter: Hence, demand is characterized by finely tuned algorithms and human behaviourial economics theories.