Our social instincts can lead us to adopt models of desire that might not serve our interests.
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Pokémon has people wandering the world to enslave wild and magical creatures so they can fight in painful blood sports. What’s fun about that?
You can’t spot a liar just by looking — but psychologists are zeroing in on methods that might actually work.
Baruch Spinoza suggests how to lead a virtuous and blessed life.
Proponents of transhumanism make big promises, such as a future in which we upload our minds into a supercomputer. But there is a fatal flaw in this argument: reductionism.
When actual people correct misinformation online, it can be as effective, if not more so, as when a social media company labels something as questionable.
The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural map replaces geographic accuracy with closeness in terms of values.
Kids’ underdeveloped brains seem to help them acquire new languages with little effort.
In a new book, an MIT scholar examines how game-theory logic underpins many of our seemingly odd and irrational decisions.
In some Asian countries, what’s in your blood may influence your social status.
If the “self” is not real, then we are slaves to a billiard ball universe, trapped in a nihilistic nightmare in which we cannot change our fate.
AI tried to write music. It wasn’t exactly The Beatles.
What responsibility do social media companies like Twitter have to free speech? It depends on whether they are “landlords” or “publishers.”
If you had perfect foreknowledge of the blessings and tragedies that will come in your life, would you make the same choices anyway?
The Siege of Leningrad lasted over two years and claimed nearly a million lives. It also inspired writers to record the bleak conditions in which they lived.
When reading critiques that inflate the uncertainty of science, ask these 7 questions.
Pseudoscience is science’s shadow.
We seem to be wired to calculate not the shortest path but the “pointiest” one, facing us toward our destination as much as possible.
From boosting empathy to improving therapy, virtual reality is poised to change our ideas of the self.
Most people believe you can win an argument with facts – but when “facts” are so often subject to doubt, are personal experiences trusted more?
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.
Implicit bias may be outside your conscious control, but that doesn’t mean change is.
Time will tell what the reign of Charles III will look like, but one thing is for sure: the “new Elizabethan age” is long gone.
It’s better to pursue moral actions instead of the ephemeral state of happiness, according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Take a trip through these master-crafted fantasy societies and ask yourself: Could I actually live there?
It took a series of ingenious experiments in the 20th century to uncover some of our biggest cognitive biases.
Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.
Next year is the perfect time to have better conversations!