Noam Chomsky on Consciousness
Noam Chomsky, an intellectual giant, ‘who was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list’, shares his views on consciousness and the mind: Honorary contributors to DesPardes: Adil Khan, Ajaz Ahmed, Anwar Abbas,
Steven Pinker: How Language Influences Your Brain
Harvard educated professor Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive scientist, psychologist, psycholinguist, and a public intellectual. He’s an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker’s
Continue readingSteven Pinker: How Language Influences Your Brain
Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?
Jeff Schatten in The Chronicle of Higher Education: When I was a kid, my favorite poem was Shel Silverstein’s “The Homework Machine,” which summed up my childhood fantasy: a machine
Continue readingWill Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?
BOOK: The Song of the Cell
Explaining difficult ideas in terms that are both straightforward and interesting GOOGLE READS: From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, here
Humanity Was Stagnant For Millennia — Then Something Big Changed 150 Years Ago
“Do we indeed have to worry more about how to utilize our wealth, and less about how to produce much more wealth? I would say probably so.” Dylan Matthews in Vox:
Continue readingHumanity Was Stagnant For Millennia — Then Something Big Changed 150 Years Ago
How Mathematics Changed Me
If one is inclined toward mysteries, mathematics can lead one to the conclusion that behind the veil of life there is a structure and an order. Alec Wilkinson at The
How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous
Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace in Foreign Affairs: In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy.
Continue readingHow AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous
WATCH Some ‘Floating’ Ideas: A Hospital in Pakistan, A City in the Pacific, Iqbal Solar Park, Water From Ocean, Etc.
Curated by Irshad Salim (2020~) Honorary contributors to DesPardes: Ajaz Ahmed, Ammar Jafri, Anwar Abbas, Arif Mirza, Aziz Ahmed, Bawar Tawfik, Dr. Razzak Ladha, G. R. Baloch, Jamil Usman, Jawed
What We Owe the Future
Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten: If the point of publishing a book is to have a public relations campaign, Will MacAskill is the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He
Longtermism: The New Moral Mathematics
In his new book, philosopher William MacAskill implies that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. “His arguments are shaky.” Kieran Setiya in the Boston Review:
The Idiots, Tribes People, the Citizen Personalities (Video)
Watch and listen to Dr. Kethoser Kevichusa (of Nagaland, India) discuss how the Greeks looked at the society in general: the idiot, the tribes people, and the citizen personalities. “Unfortunately,
Continue readingThe Idiots, Tribes People, the Citizen Personalities (Video)
Genghis Khan and the Mongols
9 Things You May Not Know About Genghis Khan: He installed one of the first international postal systems.He was tolerant of different religions.Some of his most trusted generals were former