The public debate around COVID-19 has too often centred on the question of whether a certain set of measures, usually classified as lockdowns, are or are not effective.
Quillette’s Jonathan Kay talks to Brian Amerige—a former team leader at Facebook, and now the CEO of Thoughtful—about the content-moderation lessons he’s learned from established social-media giants, and how we can create something better.
Rationalists, in short, are a group of people who picked up the liberal, academic, philosophical traditions of Western civilization when institutions like the New York Times decided to abandon them.
The pandemic has done much to undermine the basis for urban supremacy.
If heaven needs to be segregated, what hope does Earth have?
The great conflict within the Left during the 19th century was between anarchist and statist visions for socialism (this was the bone of contention between Bakunin and Marx, and for many revolutionaries long after).
It is an attack on the free reporting of information if context no longer matters, and it is an attack on education if a respectful discussion about language itself risks dismissal.
We have to make ourselves equal. No one can do it for us.
The only way students can resist this commodification of their identities is by occupying an unsafe space—getting an education that will encourage them to escape what they think they already are.
In our hyper-connected times, personal resilience is a muscle worth exercising.
But since these same Times managers had already shown staff they can be bullied by office mobs, it was predictable that McNeil eventually would be thrown beneath the Times bus (an increasingly crowded place), which is why he now finds himself unemployed and begging for forgiveness.
The problem, he notes is that there is always going to be a required balance between our trusting inclination of accusations from an apparent victim, and everyone’s inviolable right of due process.
Published in 1841, Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is as amusing a survey of human folly as has ever been written.
Yes, your car might be stolen even if you lock it and take the keys, but does that mean that no one should remind us to lock our cars and take our keys?
Social science can be a valuable means of understanding the world and improving human well-being when it is rigorously and practically applied.