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A batch of the best highlights from what Fabien's read, .
Fox’s influence is larger because of the sheer size of its audience, but all of the networks now feature partisan “infotainment” in their schedules. The bigger problem, on all of the major networks, is that the transition from news to entertainment is almost seamless and largely invisible: daytime fluff moves to afternoon updates and talk, which then gives way to the evening’s hard news, which in turn then flows into celebrity programming, all within the space of hours.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters—we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial—and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Whenever we see people who completely sacrifice everything for some cause, they are reliving a shift in values initiated by the early Christians of the first century, who revolutionized our way of thinking by devoting all aspects of life to some ideal. Whenever we fall in love and idealize the beloved, we are reliving the emotions that the troubadours of the twelfth century introduced into the Western world, a sentiment that had never existed before. Whenever we extol emotions and spontaneity over the intellect and effort, we are reexperiencing what the Romantic movements of the eighteenth century first introduced into our psychology. We are not aware of all this, but we in the present are motley products of all the accumulated changes in human thinking and psychology. By making the past into something dead, we are merely denying who we are. We become rootless and barbaric, disconnected from our nature.
The Laws of Human Nature
Robert Greene
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