“Choose things that are good enough, and do not worry about whether they’re the best.”
Psychologist Barry Schwartz is best known for his immensely popular TED Talk and his book The Paradox of Choice. He recently joined Ryan Hawk, host of The Learning Leader Show, to discuss what having too much of a good thing means for us, and how to stay engaged in an ever-changing, digitized world.
Continue reading… “How to want what you’ve got in a world of infinite choice”
New research has shown that if a man wants to live a long healthy life, marrying a smart woman will go a long way in fulfilling this desire. Besides increasing longevity, having an intelligent wife can negate the chances of a man catching dementia. The right partner will definitely help enrich a person’s life.
However, intelligence is not the only criteria for a happy relationship. Compatibility is another key factor. Just like the old adage says ‘do not judge a book by its cover,’ so too a person’s outward appearance should not be the yardstick for the selection of a partner. Younger people are generally attracted to the physical aspects of a person and sometimes fail to look beyond that. This often results in bad relationships or marriages in the later years. Choosing mind over matter can, therefore, have great benefits for both.
Continue reading… “New research says men who marry intelligent women live longer”
The Guardian view on the future of AI: great power, great irresponsibility.
Looking over the year that has passed, it is a nice question whether human stupidity or artificial intelligence has done more to shape events. Perhaps it is the convergence of the two that we really need to fear.
Artificial intelligence is a term whose meaning constantly recedes. Computers, it turns out, can do things that only the cleverest humans once could. But at the same time they fail at tasks that even the stupidest humans accomplish without conscious difficulty.
At the moment the term is mostly used to refer to machine learning: the techniques that enable computer networks to discover patterns hidden in gigantic quantities of messy, real-world data. It’s something close to what parts of biological brains can do. Artificial intelligence in this sense is what enables self-driving cars, which have to be able to recognise and act appropriately towards their environment. It is what lies behind the eerie skills of face-recognition programs and what makes it possible for personal assistants such as smart speakers in the home to pick out spoken requests and act on them. And, of course, it is what powers the giant advertising and marketing industries in their relentless attempts to map and exploit our cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities.
Continue reading… “Artificial intelligence can’t save us from human stupidity”
We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire. On the Dec. 19 podcast “Conversations with Tyler,” hosted by economist Tyler Cowen, Kahneman explains that working toward one goal may undermine our ability to experience the other.
The rural exodus has been triggered in Europe since the early decades of the second half of the twentieth century. Many people, especially the younger members of society, continue to migrate to the cities looking for job opportunities, better felicities, and higher wages than in the countryside. Over the years, the exodus to the vibrant urban centers together with the negative natural growth has led to an unstoppable dynamic of population decline in many EU territories, which in addition generate substantial gaps between regions of the same country. As a result, Europe must face today the scenario of demographic deserts threatening throughout the ‘old continent’.
The European Commission report on poverty in rural areas identified the exodus and aging problem, the remoteness, the lack of education facilities and the labor market issues (such a lower employment rates and seasonal work) as the four main factors to determine the risk of poverty and social exclusion. It is not a coincidence that these deficiencies are features of sparsely populated and underpopulated regions. According to a Joint Research Centre report, if the current economic and demographic trends continue, one would expect a growing number of regions to be classified as ‘less developed’.
When Tinder became available to all smartphone users in 2013, it ushered in a new era in the history of romance.
On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times’ popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor wrote that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and, in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times. “Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they’d met through their friends or family, or in college,” wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in 2012. “For a period that ran into the late 1990s, a number said, often sheepishly, that they had met through personal advertisements.”
But in 2018, seven of the 53 couples profiled in the Vows column met on dating apps. And in the Times’ more populous Wedding Announcements section, 93 out of some 1,000 couples profiled this year met on dating apps—Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, and other specialized dating apps designed for smaller communities, like JSwipe for Jewish singles and MuzMatch for Muslims. The year before, 71 couples whose weddings were announced by the Times met on dating apps.
Continue reading… “The 5 years that changed dating”
A pair of Lovot robots at their unveiling this week. Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images
It’s not been a great year for home robots, with two high-profile projects — Jibo and Kuri — shuttering operations. But a new competitor from Japan is entering the market with a different approach. Lovot, created by Kaname Hayashi, a former developer of the humanoid robot Pepper, is a furry, foot-and-a-half-high creation that’s designed only to be loved.
“This robot won’t do any of your work. In fact, it might just get in the way,” Hayashi told Bloomberg. “Everything about this robot is designed to create attachment.”
Lovot looks a lot like an upgraded Furby. It has minimal motor function (it can’t fetch you a beer or hoover your kitchen) but interacts with users with a pair of lively eyes and wordless chirping noises. It has a trio of wheels for scooting around your home, and a pair of flippers that it can use to show surprise, affection, or even beg to be picked up.
Continue reading… “Japan’s latest home robot isn’t useful — it’s designed to be loved”
As of last year, more people have been forced by violence and conflict to flee their homes than live in the U.K. or France.
That’s upwards of 60 million people — a global nation of refugees. If all of these asylum-seekers, internally displaced people and refugees were a country, they’d be the 21st most populous nation in the world, according to UNHCR estimates. More than half of refugees are under the age of 18.
Continue reading… “Special report: A widening world without a home”
The most depressed generation won’t get help despite having more access than ever before
About eight years ago, Eugene was in the midst of transferring colleges when he noticed how his mood sagged, seemingly at random times, triggered by the smallest things. He had spent the previous two years at a California State University “smoking, drinking and playing computer games” before realizing that he was treading water and wasting time. He felt envy toward friends who had a career path, but also contempt for other students who were either coasting or were just plain dumb.
Eventually, Eugene dropped out of school, aiming to transfer to a more prestigious private university. But over the next few months, daily routines like pulling himself out of bed and getting dressed loomed over him with daunting effect. “I just didn’t feel great,” he says. “Everything looked bad, and I couldn’t shake it. Then you wake up one day and think things like, Why don’t I just fucking kill myself? That made me step back, and wonder what was really wrong.”
Continue reading… “Why Millennial men don’t go to therapy”
The Psychopharmacology of everyday life.
Everyone is on drugs. I don’t mean the old-fashioned, illegal kind, but the kind made by pharmaceutical companies that come in the form of pills. As a psychoanalyst, I’ve listened to people through the screen of their daily doses; and I’ve listened to them without it. Their natural rhythms certainly change, sometimes very dramatically—I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? I have a great many questions about what happens when a mind—a mind that uniquely structures emotion, interest, excitement, defense, association, memory, and rest—is undercut by medication. In this Faustian bargain, what are we gaining? And what are we sacrificing?
There is new resistance to the easy solution of medicating away psychological problems, because of revelations about addiction and abuse, a better understanding of placebo effects, or, for example, the startling realization that antidepressants, far from saving some teenagers from committing suicide, can sometimes push them to do it, which means that these pills should not be a first line of defense. Perhaps the time is right to return to the conundrum of mind and medicine.
The story of psychopharmacology stretches from the advent of barbiturates at the turn of the century to the discovery in the early 1950s of the first antipsychotic, based on a powerful sedative used for surgical purposes that was described as a “non-permanent pharmacological lobotomy.” This drug, Chlorpromazine, led to the development of most of the drugs used today for psychiatric management. The proliferation of psychiatric medications, ones with supposedly less overt dangers, began in the late 1980s—at the same time, a watershed lawsuit was filed in the UK against the makers of benzodiazepines, a class of drugs used for treating anxiety and other disorders, for knowingly downplaying knowledge of their potential for causing harm. Today, psychopharmacology is a multibillion-dollar industry and an estimated one in six adults in America is on some form of psychiatric medication (a statistic that doesn’t even include the use of sleeping pills, or pain pills, or the off-label use of other medications for psychological purposes).
Continue reading… “Everyone is on drugs”
Smart, hard-working but forward-thinking Millennials are changing the culture of law.
Headlines are filled with the impact Millennials are having on the status quo. Said to be changing the way of the workplace, they are typically characterized as less “pushy” than previous generations while holding stronger convictions.
Millennials are now set to define a new generation of business leadership, moving through their 30s and assuming senior positions. The legal industry – known for its aversion to change and tendency to cling to tradition (after all, lawyers were among the first to move from Word Perfect to Word) — is not exempt from this leadership transformation. This should be unsurprising where Millennials practicing aw now outnumber Baby Boomers and Gen Xers – accounting for 43 percent of attorneys. A recent survey by Cushman & Wakefield found that, by 2025, more than 50 percent of practicing attorneys in the U.S. will be Millennials. Boomers and Gen Xers are retiring and with them is going the traditional, strictly hierarchical law firm structure.
Continue reading… “How Millennials are reshaping the practice of law”
The number of Americans who meditate has tripled. Yoga is up 55 percent.
In 2017, about 14.3 percent of US adults surveyed said they had done yoga in the past 12 months. That’s up from 9 percent in 2012. Timothy Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Yoga and meditation, two ancient practices, are now officially the most popular alternative health approaches in the United States, each used by around 35 million adults.
That’s the word from two reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out Thursday, which looked at the changes in the use of yoga, meditation, and chiropractors between 2012 and 2017.
Continue reading… “The growth of yoga and meditation in the US since 2012 is remarkable”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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