Well ladies and gents, I’m back after my (unintentional) sabbatical from The Week in Viewpoints last week, but I rechanneled my efforts into finding the most interesting opinion writing on the web for this week.
Personally, I prefer longer-form essays, ones with a lot of meat, that tackle a subject both timely and of timeless importance. So for your weekly dose of big-brained boffin-speak, consider the following.
From Nautilus, a recent essay from Feb. 10 entitled “Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels” peaked my interest. Author Angus Fletcher deflates the widely-held belief that computers will one day compose artistic works as competent and moving as any human could. Nevertheless, he doesn’t think it has anything to do with the spirit, the will, or any other non-material asset humans might possess. Rather, it’s because of the way neurons convey information. Fletcher argues that only humans can write stories because our neurons flow in a definite direction, allowing for linear, causal progression logic, whereas computers can only reason in Aristotelian syllogisms. His primary thrust is:
The best that computers can do is spit out word soups. Those word soups are syllogistically equivalent to literature. But they’re narratively different. As our brains can instantly discern, the verbal emissions of computers have no literary style or poetic voice. They lack coherent plots or psychologically comprehensible characters. They leave our neurons unmoved…
Our thoughts in time aren’t necessarily right, good, or true—in fact, strictly speaking, since time lies outside the syllogism’s timeless purview, none of our this-leads-to-that musings qualify as candidates for rightness, goodness, or truth. They exist forever in the realm of the speculative, the counterfactual, and the fictional. But even so, their temporality allows our mortal brain to do things that the superpowered NOR/NAND gates of computers never will. Things like plan, experiment, and dream.
Things like write the world’s worst novels—and the greatest ones, too.
Read the whole thing here.
Manvir Singh in a Feb. 8 essay over at Aeon deconstructs the myth of the universally egalitarian, communally-oriented hunter gatherer. The essay entitled “Beyond the !Kung” focuses on how the !Kung people of Africa (the “!” denotes a click, as is common in many languages in the Kalahari region) became the standard-bearers for sociological research into what humans were like before civilization, but that a preponderance of the evidence shows that the egalitarian, sharing culture of the !Kung is a global outlier.
This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Yes, we live in mega-societies with property and slavery and inequality but, at heart, we are mobile, egalitarian hunter-gatherers, wired for small groups and sharing. According to the evolutionary social scientist Peter Turchin, this view is ‘so standard that it is rarely formulated in explicit terms’. The archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber described it as ‘the foundation of all contemporary debate on inequality’. This view serves as a narrative of human nature, a symbol of our capacity to establish good societies, and a reminder of just how far we have strayed in the past 10,000 years.
It’s also probably wrong.
Singh’s survey of ancient anthropology, like records of the Calusa people of Florida or the various princely burials of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, leads him to conclude that:
If, however, we evolved in both mobile bands and large hierarchical communities, then, by nature, we are much more psychologically flexible. We’re egalitarian, yes, but also predatory and hierarchical. We’re prepared to interact with familiar people, yes, but also ready to cooperate with strangers. The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies.
Read the whole thing here.
Finally, from Smithsonian Magazine, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie explains exactly why stepping on a lego block is approximately 1 million times 10 to the 44th times more painful than walking over fire, ice, or broken glass. Not strictly a viewpoint, but I find it good to know these things. The article “Why Walking on Legos Hurts More Than Walking on Fire or Ice” explains in detail that it’s really all about pressure and rigidity of structure. By interviewing professional lego-walkers (God help them, but why?!?) she learned why stepping on a lego is the most painful thing in the universe, and how to avoid it.
Legos are—for now at least—built from ABS plastic, an extremely hard and durable terpolymer plastic. They’re built to survive intense levels of abuse without shattering: A single two-by-two brick can withstand up to 4,240 Newtons, an unbelievable amount of pressure. That’s equivalent to a mass of around 950 pounds, and it would take 375,000 other bricks stacked 2.75 miles high on top to exert the same kind of pressure.
So when stepping on a single Lego brick, with its sharp corners and pointy bits and no give at all, there’s nowhere for the force to go except back into your very sensitive foot. (And humans’ feet are very sensitive: Despite the fact that we’re standing on them all the time, feet are, along with hands, lips, and genitals, among the most sensitive areas on our bodies, instantly reactive to painful stimuli and touch. The bottom of each foot is packed with up to 200,000 individual sensory receptors, constantly sending information back to our brains and allowing us to unconsciously adjust our gaits and steps as needed.)
Read the whole thing, and learn to avoid severely harming yourself in your child’s bedroom (or your own bedroom, I don’t judge) here.
