Happy weekend readers! If you’re looking for some interesting things to read, watch, and think about while you kick back and relax, look no further, here are my favorite things from around the web this week:
1. “Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.” — The Lives They Lived 2019 // The New York Times
2. “But even if I frame death in that way, I’m still afraid of my experiences being discontinued. I enjoy waking up in the morning and learning things and doing things, and I enjoy thinking, and even sometimes interacting with other people. Death marks the end of that, and it’s the end of that for a long time. Other people will continue having experiences while I do not, and that sucks.” — Talking Through A Fear of Death // LessWrong
3. “The first challenge is casting doubt on the tendency to see personality traits—patterns of behaviour that are stable across time—as parts of our identities that are inevitable and arising from within. While it’s true that people are the products of genes interacting with the environment (the answer to the question ‘Is it nature or nurture?’ is always ‘Yes’)…” — Personality is not only about who but also where you are // Aeon Magazine
4. “Morality begins as a competitive weapon between societies. Now the really interesting question is can we make the jump to universal morality and start to turn non-sentient things into the enemy” — Can universal morality exist? // The Minimalists
5. “What I failed to realise is that in the absence of that empathetic connection, scripts, boundaries and prompts become absolutely essential. If someone is vulnerable for health reasons—physical or mental—because of something going on in their lives or for some other reason, we shouldn’t wait for some grand ethical revolution to give them the time and space they need to preserve their own sense of wellbeing.” — Sometimes you need to put your friends on hold, and I now understand that’s OK // The Guardian
6. “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that has to do with knowledge how we know things how we come to know things what counts as fact vs opinion. Tribal epistemology was my attempt to capture this phenomenon where a group identity becomes so strong and… once tribalism takes over a group you have what’s called tribal epistemology which is instead of assessing new facts and knowledge based on their correspondence to factual reality or their credibility in the scientific community you accept as true what is good for your tribe.” — Republicans vs. the planet // The Ezra Klein Show
7. “Because the attention schema streamlines the complex noise of calculations and electrochemical signals of our brains into a caricature of mental activity, we falsely believe that our minds are amorphous and nonphysical. The body schema can delude a woman who has lost an arm into thinking that it’s still there, and Graziano argues that the ‘mind’ is like a phantom limb: ‘One is the ghost in the body and the other is the ghost in the head.’” — Do We Have Minds of Our Own? // The New Yorker
8. “As these people’s role in creating a physical and digital world built on surveillance, harassment, and child labor has become more clear, we’ve seen a wave of pseudo apologies for the tools and decisions that got us here. For the past few years, the men (and it’s almost entirely men) who built this digital hellscape have been on a veritable atonement tour.” — The Architects of Our Digital Hellscape are Very Sorry // WIRED
9. “A 16-month investigation by Searchlight New Mexico has found that when it comes to human trafficking, indigenous women and girls are the least recognized and least protected population in a state that has long struggled to address the issue. An almost total lack of protocols, mandated training, and coordination between law enforcement systems as well as medical institutions has ensnared victims in cycles of exploitation.” — Stolen and Erased // Searchlight New Mexico
10. “Paris Opera dancers perform in front of the Palais Garnier, protesting against the French government’s plan to overhaul the country’s retirement system, in Paris, on December 24, 2019.” — Photos of the Week // The Atlantic
Have you read, watched, or written an interesting or inspiring thing this week? Has something on the internet made you feel strongly, think deeply, or see the world in a new light? If so, drop a link in the comments, we’d love to check it out!
Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
Lisa Marie Blair 