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absent illness, famine, war
or other stresses, a lot of life is lived in the neutral zone, a familiar garden, but a grey one, unremarkable, immediately forgotten, hard to describe.
paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.
Only anthropologists, who studied other cultures in depth, who knew the beautiful extent of human variety, fully grasped the absurdity of human universals.
People who stayed behind at home in comfort understood nothing, not even of their own cultures.
evolutionary psychology was beginning to reassert the idea of an essential nature, derived from a common genetic inheritance, independent of time and place.
The response from the mainstream of social studies was dismissive, sometimes furious. To speak of genes in relation to people’s behaviour evoked memories of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Fashions change. But Adam’s makers were riding the new wave of ev...
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academic movement known generally as “theory”
prosopagnosia, a condition in which sufferers are unable to recognise familiar faces.
the Corn Laws and the historical viciousness of vested interests, their indifference to suffering.
The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.
intellectuals lived in the neighbourhood.
the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach.
we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?
the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine.
She tried to put her arms round Mark’s shoulders but he shrugged her off. It was possible he’d never been taught the luxury of being comforted.
There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older.
the purposeless beauty of art.
Flexibility at work had to be combined with security—for all. It wasn’t jobs
we had to protect, it was the well-being of workers.
Infrastructure investment, training, higher education and...
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Robots would soon be generating great wealth in the economy. They must be taxed. Workers must own an equity share in the machines that were...
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Thought provoking
General relativity was once at the outer edge of difficulty. Now it’s routine for first-year undergraduates. The same was true of the calculus. Now fourteen-year-olds can do it. One day quantum mechanics will pass into common sense.”
Thought provoking
Most cultured Americans weren’t rich.
Yep
I began to wonder whether this was the beginning of a history marker, of a general unravelling, or one of those isolated outrages that fade in time,
Looking back, I can remember such history markers in our great American unraveling: Newt Gingrich and January 1995, the advent of Fox News in 1996, Bush v Gore, etc
What horrified me was the ease with which the edifice of public, political life could be shaken apart.
this ambulant laptop into
I just liked this phrase of Charlie's irritated characterization of Adam
the A-and-Es were ill-equipped to understand human decision-making,
making, the way our principles are warped in the force field of our emotions, our peculiar biases, our self-delusion and all the other well-charted defects of our cognition.
Explains the difference quite well, I thought
how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer.
Great phrase !
