Category: ideas

In practice, this ensures the less read become even less read. It creates what one might call popularity polarization: a few pieces rise to the top, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. With print, this didn’t happen as much. Flipping pages, you would see every article somewhere. But, on your phone, you scroll through what’s been selected for you. And that selection likely reflects a ruthless narrowing of editorial values and priorities. – The Walrus

There are few issues that lead to such widespread feelings of anger and frustration as the idea of nepotism, especially in an artistic or literary context. For many would-be writers or actors, in particular, the suspicion remains that both industries operate as essentially a closed shop, and entry can only be obtained to the glamorous and well-remunerated professions through having a famous name or similarly high-profile connections. – The Critic

With universities and colleges in desperate need of funds far in excess of the $14 billion in federal stimulus money allotted by the CARES Act, Covid-19 may well be what some have called an “extinction-level event” for higher education. Schools often run deficits in normal times; in 2019, nearly 1,000 private colleges were already borderline insolvent. Covid will cause many to shutter for good. It is accounting, not epidemiology, that drives university administrators to push for a rapid return to business as usual, effectively demanding that faculty and staff sacrifice their lives for the financial health of their employer. – The New Republic

Just as authors and composers must be free to write about any world they can imagine, so must interpreters be allowed to play and sing any roles for which they are held to be more qualified than their competitors—provided they agree to the creators’ terms and conditions. – Conrad Osborne

When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. – The Guardian

GPT-3 is a marvel of engineering due to its breathtaking scale. It contains 175 billion parameters (the weights in the connections between the “neurons” or units of the network) distributed over 96 layers. It produces embeddings in a vector space with 12,288 dimensions. And it was trained on hundreds of billions of words representing a significant subset of the Internet—including the entirety of English Wikipedia, countless books, and a dizzying number of web pages. Training the final model alone is estimated to have cost around $5 million. – Nautilus

“One could say that capitalism produces greater artistic variation, thereby speeding up aesthetic evolution. But if the species is rapidly evolving toward decadence and possible extinction, then its proliferation of increasingly varied forms of art and music is destined to be short-lived, however ingenious and enjoyable those forms may be.” – Resilience

“When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse than to present myself in the accustomed New Yorker manner. Reticence, self-deprecation, and wit are the last things a jury wants to see in a witness.” – New York Review of Books

In the midst of present dangers—environmental, humanitarian, and political crises, and now (since the book’s publication) pandemic and economic disaster, and the onset of a sweeping antiracist movement—critique can seem to be a luxury.¹ Problems like these can appear so obvious as to require little further reflection. They give contemporary life to Marx’s exhortation not to interpret the world but to change it. What, then, is the purpose of critique in a moment like this? – Public Books

“This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers.” – The Guardian