The excavation of Pompei,
By Filippo Palizzi

- Mindhunter

Everything is 'disposable' these days, even people. They are disposable because they are simply too similar to one another, you can replace one with the other without much difference really.

The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines.

- World Without Mind

We know, for example, that Facebook sought to discover whether emotions are contagious. To conduct this trial, Facebook attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, Facebook excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed the mood of the posts it had reworded. This study was roundly condemned as invasive, but it is not so unusual. As one member of Facebook’s data science team confessed: “Anyone on that team could run a test. They’re always trying to alter people’s behavior.”

- World Without Mind

The company believes that it has unlocked social psychology and acquired a deeper understanding of its users than they possess of themselves. Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status, and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone. It’s Zuckerberg’s fantasy that this data might be analyzed to uncover the mother of all revelations, “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.”

- World Without Mind

- The Knick, and Thomas Edison

‏"من يحبون الحياة لا يقرأون، ولا يذهبون إلى السينما. قل ما شئت، لكن الحقيقة أن الولوج إلى دنيا الفنون، بدرجة أو أخرى، حكر على أولئك الذين، إلى حد ما، قد سئموا العالم."

هوارد فيليبس لافكرافت

A lot of what genius really is, is simply the result of the skill of asking the right questions.

Every great advance in the history of thought was done because someone asked a profound question no one thought about it before. Not because someone gave "the correct answer," since apparently, there are no correct answers.

Just like when we test someone's eyesight with an eye-chart, you can test someone's acuity of mind by checking what kind of questions they ask.

Imagine a stupid man and a smart man both standing amid millions of books and scrolls housed in the ancient library of Alexandria: despite the fact that they both have access to the same knowledge, one of them will benefit more from this great opportunity than the other.
The smart man knows where to look and what to look for, In other words: he knows how to make the right "inquiry," that is, which books and scrolls to look for and to read.
The stupid man is stupid because he cannot ask the right questions. He doesn't know how to make the right inquiry to extract the right data. He probably would not even ask any question whatsoever.