In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000.

Reading a great book (specifically nonfiction) is to acquire, within a matter of hours, the insights and knowledge that the author spent months, years, and sometimes decades developing. Books are therefore knowledge multipliers, shortcuts to years of research and thinking, and the more books you read, the more hard-won knowledge you accumulate in a fraction of the time.

Our collective overuse and misuse of antibiotics is accelerating resistance to these universal drugs, leaving people increasingly vulnerable to infections that can no longer be treated. This applies not only to the use of antibiotics in human medicine, but also in animal industries. Antibiotic resistance is an example of a collective action problem. These are problems where what is individually rational leads to a collectively undesirable outcome.

Three very famous philosophers are teaming up to create an academic journal dedicated to ideas too controversial to put a name on. As you might expect, the concept itself has already gathered controversy.

How my suburban-hewn world-view was flipped on its head. By Jesse Bering.

‘I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection.

In the current political climate of populism and xenophobia, it is tempting to simply close the door and withdraw from public affairs. Indeed, there is a pervading sense that there is no alternative to our polarised politics, neoliberal capitalism and corruption. Pleas for solidarity among nation-states seem to be easily overshadowed by resentment towards foreigners and nostalgia for lost national glory. And yet, it is precisely such retreat into the private realm that Hannah Arendt warned against during the 20th century.

We think creativity is a uniquely mysterious force. But with Google's Magenta producing musical symphonies, some fear AI threatens to make the imagination redundant. Is human creativity no more than mechanics? Will AI transform and enrich the human experience? Can robots be creative? Or is there something strange about creative thought that separates humans and machines?

Three academics are launching a new journal in which arguments can be made anonymously. But is separating ideas from their authors the best way forward? Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina, and he works in a large, dark oak-panelled, and not very warm study in Corpus Christi college. It’s a room with an illustrious past.

Are insects ‘philosophical zombies’ with no inner life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise. By Lars Chittka, Catherine Wilson.

What is boredom? What does it mean to have nothing to do? For many of us, the feeling of boredom is associated with being young, newspapers and magazines carry stories about the importance of boredom to stimulate creativity – the rise of the smart phone is, apparently, a threat to us all (although I am sure they said that about television as well…). But what happens when boredom turns into stagnation? When life stretches out behind, and ahead, with few opportunities to progress, gain experiences or make choices? What happens when you have served decades in prison?

by Thomas R. Wells Suppose a company wants to fill a job. They would advertise it together with the requirements for any successful candidate. HR would screen out all the applicants not good enough to do the job and everyone e Perhaps you…

Long before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a Japanese video game developer predicted society's issues of truth and reality. Over a decade before my posts on post-truth aphorisms and our struggles in constructing narratives, Hideo Kojima would create a game in which the archenemy was none other than the American government itself in 2001.

Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

All perception is created by the brain, which is therefore illusory and limited by its own function. Because of a certain way the neurons within our brain get fired on specific inputs, they give a distinct output or reaction expressed in our physical reality. A visual of a pizza advertisement gives you a pleasurable craving which can then be converted into an output action, for example.

Bullshit. By David Egan.

"I’ve had experience, I know the world. Amuse yourself, ask every passenger to tell you his story, and if you find one, just one, who hasn’t often cursed his life, who hasn’t often told himself he’s the unluckiest of men, throw me headfirst into the sea.’’ – Voltaire.

The fallacy fallacy is a logical fallacy which occurs when someone assumes that if an argument contains a logical fallacy, then its conclusion must necessarily be wrong. For example, consider a situation where someone claims that a certain medical treatment is preferable to an alternative simply because it’s perceived as more “natural”, and someone else points out that this reasoning is fallacious, since what matters is whether the new treatment is better in practice, and not whether it’s more natural.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to the University of Berlin in 1933.

There is no self, no 'I', only a flickering illusion. So claim many neuroscientists and philosophers. Yet for the rest of us, the denial of the self feels like a bitter pill to swallow. Is the self a fantasy? Or is it essential to our being and consciousness?