Move over IQ, there’s a new intelligence test on the scene. Psychologists have developed a free 10-minute test that they claim is an excellent assessment of “fluid intelligence.”
For the past six years, as a brutal civil war has reduced swathes of Syria to rubble, no visitors have set foot in the National Museum of Damascus. Today (Oct. 28), the museum finally re-opened its doors to tourists.
There’s no foolproof way to know if someone’s verbally telling lies, but scientists have developed a tool that seems remarkably accurate at judging written falsehoods. Using machine learning and text analysis, they’ve been able to identify false robbery reports with such accuracy that the tool is now being rolled out to police stations across Spain.
US president Donald Trump claims to be surprised that anti-Semitism still exists. “This was an anti-Semitic act,” he said after the shooting that killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “You wouldn’t think this would be possible in this day and age.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tends to go on and on about how his company can make the world a more connected place. His sister Donna Zuckerberg, who recently wrote a book on red pill misogynists, doesn’t seem so convinced.
The Trump administration wants to eradicate transgender rights, and is prepared to create an unscientific, government-sanctioned definition of sex to do so. That, at least, was implications of a leaked memo, published in part by the New York Times last Sunday (Oct. 21), which showed the Trump administration was considering defining both gender and sex as unchanging and determined by genitalia at birth.
The works of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Greek poet Hesiod, and the Roman poet Ovid are examples of great classic Western literature—and popular references within the red pill community. Men who believe society is oppressed by women frequently turn to the Western classics to validate their misogyny and, as Donna Zuckerberg explores in her newly published book Not All Dead White Men, they have plenty of texts to choose from.
Pompeii, the Roman city preserved for two millennia thanks to a volcanic eruption that engulfed the area in ash in 79 AD, has long been studied as a window to the past. Newly discovered scribbles of graffiti, unearthed by archeologists excavating the site, just changed the historical narrative on precisely when the natural disaster occurred.
Matthew Aucoin is a composer and conductor who, at 25, was heralded as “opera’s great hope” and, last week, was awarded a MacArthur genius grant at age 28. Aucoin was the year below me at college (though we didn’t meet at the time), and the day he was officially anointed a genius, I was congratulating myself on remembering to bring a packed lunch into work. Clearly, it was time to re-assess.
Why do men go to Hooters? This hardly seems like an academic question.
A philosopher is stuck in hell and can only survive if he breaks his moral code and pretends to be a demon. What does he do?
Jason Kander, an army veteran who went on to become a Missouri politician and was this year running as the Democratic candidate for mayor of Kansas City, announced this week that he was dropping out of the race. No one asked him to do so, there was no burgeoning secret scandal. Instead, he decided to step aside of his own volition, to focus on his mental health.
Is it immoral to swerve your car into a mother and baby in order to avoid the six schoolchildren who ran into your path? What about if the mother and baby are your mother and sibling? It’s a difficult question, and it should be—philosophers have been debating similar ethical dilemmas for thousands of years, and they still haven’t come up with a set of definitively right answers.
Of the myriad arguments used to defend Brett Kavanaugh, the most disturbing is that what he did—if he did it—simply isn’t that bad. This “boys will be boys” attitude, which underlies the more apathetic responses to the Kavanaugh hearings, was explicitly articulated by Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal:
Any decent workplace wants to handle the mental health of its employees kindly and effectively, whether out of compassion or pure self-interest. One in four people suffer a mental disorder at some point in their life and, left unchecked, mental illness can be a huge drain on a productive workforce.
Philosophy studies in South Africa revolves around pronouncements from white, European men. Tony Shabangu, a philosophy lecturer and doctoral student at University of Johannesburg, has read them all. He’s looking for something new.
“You are not on trial.”
Psychologists have a new way of categorizing personalities, and it’s something of a downer. Researchers from Northwestern University analyzed the questionnaires of 1.5 million respondents and came up with four distinct personality types: “average,” “reserved,” “self-centered,” and “role model.”
The Myers-Briggs test is unscientific, unreliable, and hugely popular. And so whether or not this personality test “works” is beside the point. Sure, it doesn’t actually tell us anything meaningful about our personalities, but 88% of Fortune 500 companies still ask their employees take the assessment.
To achieve a truly ambitious goal, you have to be relentless. Swoop on any opportunity that arises, take a few risks, and be dedicated in pursuit of your dreams. Follow, in other words, the madcap yet inspiring example of Charles Bendire, a 19th century US soldier and egg collector extraordinaire.
A patient goes into the emergency room for a broken toe, is given a series of standardized tests, has their data fed into an algorithm, and—though they haven’t mentioned feeling depressed or having any suicidal thoughts—the machine identifies them as at high risk of suicide in the next week. Medical professionals must now broach the subject of suicide with someone who hasn’t yet asked for help, and find some way of intervening.
Last week, I didn’t open my laptop once. I had an idyllic vacation where the only words I read were in novels, rather than Twitter or emails, and where my body and mind sunk into a state of deep relaxation, free from the inundating stresses of everyday life.
Calls for pope Francis to resign may well be motivated by political animosity. But that Francis could be capable of questionable behavior should only be a surprise to those who’ve been blinded by the pontiff’s own political spin.
In a world where Donald Trump declares an audio recording of his statements “fake news” and insists to supporters that “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” it’s easy to despair for the truth. “We have entered an age of post-truth politics,” lamented the New York Times.
