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A bi-weekly bulletin of the 5 most recommended articles, challenging ideas and interesting new things in Psychology from NIKOS MARINOS CONSULTANCY delivered straight to your inbox, every other Monday.- |
5things |
12 Nov 2018
Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships — yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. We don’t think that might love be a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. Read more on the 5things of this week. READ MORE ➔ |
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- When technology knows you better than you know yourself
WHEN YOU ARE 2 years old, your mother knows more about you than you know yourself. As you get older, you begin to understand things about your mind that even she doesn’t know. But then, says Yuval Noah Harari, another competitor joins the race: "You have this corporation or government running after you, and they are way past your mother, and they are at your back." Amazon will soon know when you need lightbulbs right before they burn out. YouTube knows how to keep you staring at the screen long past when it’s in your interest to stop. An advertiser in the future might know your sexual preferences before they are clear to you. (And they’ll certainly know them before you’ve told your mother.)
Recently, I spoke with Harari, the author of three best-selling books, and Tristan Harris, who runs the Center for Humane Technology and who has played a substantial role in making “time well spent” perhaps the most-debated phrase in Silicon Valley in 2018. They are two of the smartest people in the world of tech, and each spoke eloquently about self-knowledge and how humans can make themselves harder to hack. As Harari said, “We are now facing not just a technological crisis but a philosophical crisis.”
Recently, I spoke with Harari, the author of three best-selling books, and Tristan Harris, who runs the Center for Humane Technology and who has played a substantial role in making “time well spent” perhaps the most-debated phrase in Silicon Valley in 2018. They are two of the smartest people in the world of tech, and each spoke eloquently about self-knowledge and how humans can make themselves harder to hack. As Harari said, “We are now facing not just a technological crisis but a philosophical crisis.”
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Margaret Mead 
When we use ‘modern’ to describe something, it’s usually a positive. We are very appreciative and even a little smug about the miracles of modern science, the benefits of modern technology, and even the superiority of modern viewpoints. But what if, in speeding towards a new and ever-better future, we’ve left some important truths about ourselves behind? One of the people who best helped us explore this problem was Margaret Mead, perhaps the most famous anthropologist of the 20th century. Margaret Mead was born in 1901, the oldest of five children. Her father was a professor of finance, and her mother was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. When Margaret was little, her family moved frequently, and she alternated between attending traditional schools and homeschooling. She also shopped different religions (because her family members had different faiths) and eventually chose Episcopalian Christianity. Her experience sampling different beliefs and navigating new schools may have influenced her decision to study the wildly different ways people think and interact. After studying psychology as an undergraduate at DePauw University and then Barnard College (at a time where higher education was very unusual for a woman), Mead began a PhD at Columbia University in the relatively new field of anthropology. Her supervisor, Franz Boas, was essentially the founder of the discipline in the United States. Unlike earlier anthropologists, who had imagined that civilisation was progressing in a linear fashion from ‘barbarism’ to ‘savagery’ to ‘civilisation’, Boas argued that the world was teeming with separate cultures, each with their own unique perspectives, insights, and deficiencies. The modern western world was not the pinnacle of human achievement, but simply one specific example of what humans could achieve. READ MORE HERE |
