Debbie Foster

… the historian Maya Jasanoff observes that "Erasing history' is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn't erasing history; it's revising cultural priorities … Burning documents: now that's erasing history."

Among the recent discoveries of neuroscience is that radical self-delusion can have an organic source.

why should we believe that there is any way we ought to feel, that reality dictates our total reaction to life

the wonderful precognition movie Arrival

In the end, a word will stick if it serves a new role in the English language. If, as with "cancel," it defines a necessary concept, then we say that it's filled a semantic gap : a concept that we didn't previously have a word for. Had there already been an entrenched word for the same idea, we would have had no need to cancel people. Sometimes,

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

Superattractors are "super" for two reasons. First, they are complex packages of functionally interrelated cultural attractors. Like a machine built from an array of interacting components, shamanism involves non-ordinary states, narratives of otherworldly contact, and goal-oriented services. Hero stories include not just triumphant endings but

Words aren't just diffusing from human to human anymore: They're now moving from human to algorithm and back to human. Sussy baka spread both because it had cultural value and because it was a trending piece of metadata on social media, making the rounds faster than it ever could've before.