By Eric Le Roy
One of my students put this article under my nose yesterday during a class discussion. He is Swiss, and the original article was in German. So here is a translation of the gist of it:
Germany: In front of a nursing home for people with dementia in Duisburg, a fake bus stop has recently been installed. A fictitious timetable hangs on the typical bus … Read the rest
I have no interest in mocking anyone’s faith. Not because I am afraid of offending people, but because faith is often where people keep their most tender parts: grief, hope, guilt, gratitude, love. If you kick that door down with sarcasm, you do not prove you are intelligent. You prove you are careless.
And yet, if something is truly sacred, it should be able to breathe in daylight. Questions are … Read the rest
There are people who leave religion because they hate it, and people who leave because they loved something in it and could no longer pretend. I understand the second group better. Not because they are smarter, but because they are usually gentler. They are not trying to win arguments. They are trying to stop lying to themselves.
Most believers I have met are not hungry for control. They are tired, … Read the rest
Sometimes, late at night, when the city finally remembers that it is allowed to be quiet, I catch myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about the strange future we are building with our own hands. Not just faster phones, not just more clever recommendation engines that push us more cat videos and more outrage, but something else. Something like the Minds from Iain Banks’ Culture novels: artificial intelligences so … Read the rest
There are days when I feel our species is a kind of orchestra that forgot the score but still plays with great confidence. Violins screaming in different keys, trumpets improvising in panic, the conductor having a small existential crisis. And yet, we insist with straight faces that this is rational decision-making. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein gave a polite scientific name to this chaos: noise. Personally, I think they were … Read the rest
