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No Love: Tennis, Politics, and Queens, NYC
The U.S. Tennis Association just wanted to fix a few cracks in its Luis Armstrong Stadium. So what are New York City community boards, the last vestige of a millenia-old democratic process, getting worked up about?
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The Weekender: Feb. 2
Hello and welcome to first edition of the Weekender of the New Year.
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Start the Press: Reading about the Publishing Industry
When researching for a project or a new article, we often come across many great reads that are worth sharing. These often turn into heavily annotated notes or even whole segments, left on the cutting floor. So we’re introducing the Reading List, a new segment of annotated research and interesting reads that we’ve done on ...
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When Hurricane Sandy Tried to Visit the Economy
Bumper sticker spotted today: “I live in a society, not an economy” — Karl Schroeder (@KarlSchroeder) October 9, 2012 Two recent events have led the debate about America’s economic future: the first has been general election for our next President; the second has been Hurricane Sandy, its devastating effects, and how to deal with such events ...
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Think Outside of the Box
“This is a box. Your turn.” That’s how we’re starting it. For two years, What Are These Ideas has been publishing original and thought-provoking pieces, asking readers to think again about everything from genetics to social technology to today’s news. Today, we’re putting out our first contest, on the theme of “Think Outside of the ...
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The Uncomfortable Paradoxes of Raising Anders Breivik
What does it mean to accept the infamous Oslo terrorist as “sane?” How do we cope, and what should we ask ourselves when normal men commit heinous crimes? By Roman Kudryashov Also in Society & Politics: Philosophers in Khaki, by Peter Moore On August 24th, 2012, a Norwegian court found Anders Behring Breivik sane and ...
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Kickstarter Politics
Everyone agrees: politics are disappointing. Corruption, lobbyists, unresponsive representatives, deadlocks, endless debt, partisanship, social and financial issues, ridiculous laws and rulings, and an endless barrage of misleading statements make for a pretty… well, shitty time. So, I asked, “Can we reinvent political participation?” Can we make politics relevant and meaningful again? How?
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A Bilingual Monkey with a Typewriter
Can monkeys with typewriters teach us about computers, cryptology, and artificial intelligence? Yes, yes they can. By Roman Kudryashov 1. Fixing the Problem of Monkeys It was all very simple. Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, set them to work for an infinite amount of time, and they’re bound to ...
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Can a Robot Pass the SAT?
Can you fall in love with a robot? Would you adopt a robot if it could pass the SAT? Imagine the HAL 9000, the distantly-related brothers Deep Blue & Deep Thought, the Matrix, Neuromancer, and—ahem—Siri in all in one room. Imagine another room, probably next door, where a rambly crew of manufactured units from SkyNet, ...
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Machine Poetry & Artificial God-Games
Thalience; the successor to Science? What if you could separate the activity of science from the human researchers who conduct it? Automate it, in fact? Imagine creating a bot that does physics experiments and builds an internal model of the world based on those experiments. It could start out as something simple that stacked blocks and ...
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So, Robin Hood and John Galt walk into a bar…
John Agresto of the Wall Street Journal wrote a really provoking piece recently: “Robin Hoods Don’t Smash Shop Windows,” arguing that the left’s concern for the poor, as well as all that fairness and decency rhetoric, unravels rather quickly in practice, and that the ideological left seems to regularly produce a nihilistic fringe and mass ...
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Can we reinvent political participation?
I recently read a good interpretation of “Web 2.0″: Web2.0 is a business model – harnessing and commodifying participatory culture. #digitaltrans — narayan (@narayan_) May 15, 2012 Politics is the ultimate culmination of ‘meaningful participatory culture’. But, as we all know, politics today is a broken system. Is there any possibility to fix it, to ...