Suggested readings, #90

Here it is, a rundown of interesting articles I’ve come across recently, to consider for your weekend readings:

Why haven’t we lost our taste for clickbait? (Medium)

Rudy Giuliani was never really ‘America’s Mayor.’ (Gotham Gazette)

Stoicism versus Jordan Peterson. On the Stoic philosophy of anger. (Medium)

If everyone has a right to be heard, why are some told to keep quiet? (Medium)

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language. Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers. (MIT News)

Published by

Massimo

Massimo is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. He blogs at platofootnote.org and howtobeastoic.org. He is the author of How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life.

6 thoughts on “Suggested readings, #90”

  1. I was happy to see the Julian Baggini essay (If everyone has a right to be heard…). I suspect his youtube channel, facebook page, and twitter account will be under scrutiny by the algorithms in short order. What he wrote is all logical, reasonable, and frankly obvious, but as Douglas Murray recently noted “we are pretending to not know things that we’ve known until yesterday.”

    People who have lived under the protections of and in cultures with respect for free speech their whole lives seem not to understand it’s value. Somebody should have made them read 1984 or Brave New World in high school (the Gulag Archipelago would be too much to hope for). I suspect this will all get much worse before it gets better.

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  2. [“There have been claims from both camps — it has to be together with math, it has to be together with language,” Ivanova says. “But it looks like computer science educators will have to develop their own approaches for teaching code most effectively.”]

    Why would they suspect that programming uses the same cognitive skills as language or math anymore than organic chemistry uses a same set of cognitive skills than physics? It clearly doesn’t, although the empirical confirmation helps of course.

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  4. I agree fully with the piece on Stoicism versus Jordan Peterson. I was surprised to learn how really vacuous some of his arguments are and how strongly he uses what amounts to superstition to justify some of his ideas.

    Glad I got a chance to read it. It also gave me some insight into my own psychology.

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