Happy Sunday from Taipei (again).
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#1 Meme Culture Wars (39 mins): This is the best article I've read on the current culture wars. The argument this paper makes is that the right/left paradigm has fractured into 35 (yes, 35!) different "memes" that are fighting for a range of different ideas, causes and people. They first start with identifying "six crises" and then identify the different tribes and potential solutions for this current state of affairs. Here are the six crises they outline:
The meaning crisis weakened our collective understanding of what ought to be.
The reality crisis fractured our collective understanding of what is.
The belonging crisis took away a genuine feeling of community.
The proximity crisis removed distance from conflicting views.
The sobriety crisis reduced our agency and turned us into addicts.
The warfare crisis transformed our minds into weapons for hidden wars in plain sight.
#2 On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt's 20-page essay "on bullshit" has been mentioned by a surprising number of pieces I've read, so I decided to venture into the original essay. It's an interesting read that starts out, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” and then goes on to define bullshit as opposed to lying:
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it.
He closes with a call for us to be more honest and correct about things and to not fall into the trap of what one might call “authenticity”:
Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
#3 Live Discussion Ideas: A friend in the learning space passed along this article of "The Big List Of Classroom Discussion Strategies" that offers an alternative to the limited ways we tend to debate, share and learn new information in groups. I especially liked the ideas about "asynchronous voice" and "conver-sations" that I hope to experiment with in the future.
#4 Rest (21 mins): I've written about Alex Pang's book Rest before, but have been diving deeper into the topic for an article I'm writing. I found this shorter version of some famous people in history that didn't work that much a useful summary of some of the ideas in the book: "Darwin Was A Slacker And You Should Be Too"
#5 Memory: The former consensus was that we can remember about "five items plus or minus two," but this was shown to be the wrong framing of the problem. It turns out we can remember about four "chunks." An example here would be a telephone number which you can easily remember in three chunks XXX, XXX, and XXXX (you know back when people made phone calls...)
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