In France, there are several words for “to complain”: there’s “se plaindre”, used for regular old complaining; there’s “porter plainte”, for complaining more officially. And then there’s “râler”: complaining just for the fun of it. – BBC
Category: ideas
So What Are Straw Man Arguments Really For?
One wonders how straw man arguments function. Our answer is that straw men arguments do their rhetorical work not on the speaker depicted as made of straw, but rather on an audience of argumentative onlookers, often selected specifically for the argument by the straw-manner. – 3 Quarks Daily
Thank Goodness For Caremongering
Over decades and centuries, mutual aid has helped people pay rent, buy groceries, and acquire medicine; it has given workers something where there is so much nothing to be had, and it has given luckier people a way to help out in desperate times. So why weren’t we doing mutual aid before—everybody, all the time? Well, Black people were. – The Walrus
Why Does Time Seem To Speed Up As We Age?
To a ten-year-old child a year is a tenth of her existence, and thus feels like something of a stretch. For someone who’s twice her age a year is only a twentieth of the time they’ve already had, and by the time you get to 60, well, I’d say it doesn’t bear thinking about were it not for the fact that thinking about it is all you do once you get to a certain age … – The Critic
Are Americans Losing Faith In Our Scientific Institutions?
We’ve reached a sort of meta-crisis of scientific authority, one in which our leading experts have lost their faith in the public’s faith in the leadership of experts. – Wired
A Different Way Of Thinking About The Purpose Of Education
Too often schools are tasked not simply with caring for their students but with repairing an entire social order. Schools can do so much we do not ask of them, like developing solidarity, fostering political responsibility, and ensuring a love of learning for its own sake. Yet the one thing we are most insistent they accomplish, the ensuring of “equal opportunity,” is something even the best school is simply not capable of achieving. – Hedgehog Review
Why Do Some Technologies Transform Our World And Others Don’t
Although the private sector brought electricity to the big cities—New York, Chicago, St. Louis—the federal government’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to much of America, helping to make radio, electric appliances, television and telecommunications part of everyone’s daily lives. A good deal of private investment created these technologies, but the transformations that they wrought were enabled by the “hidden hand” of government, and citizens often experienced their value in unanticipated ways. – Scientific American
The Prejudice Against Those With Less Education
Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash. – The New York Times
Students Figured Out AI Was Grading Their Work – And Gamed The Answers To Trick It
“I always tried to make the answer at least semi-coherent because it seemed a bit cheap to just toss a bunch of keywords into the input field,” Paradiso said. “But if I was a bit lazier, I easily could have just written a random string of words pertinent to the question prompt and gotten 100 percent.” – The Verge
Maybe We Need To Expand Notions Of What Creativity Is
Imagine instead that we worked with idea that creativity wasn’t about novelty. That doesn’t mean we’d have to give up the value of originality entirely, but rather see it as one of a range of possible outcomes. Casting a wider net in this way might hence make creativity (whatever it involves) easier to achieve. – Psyche