The Archive of Free Thinking

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  • How to understand aliens

    Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. Milan Kundera In a recently published article in the FT, Adam Rutherford, evolutionary biologist and ‘alien consultant’, describes how he designed a realistic, biologically accurate alien for a film. Rutherford and his team went through a long and demanding process, creating a fully rendered genetic…

  • Productive or Paternalistic?

    “We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavour robs the act of virtue.” William MacAskill Charities are information-rich and income-poor. They have deep knowledge of the people they serve, highly developed networks with experts and extensive relationships with…

  • To: Humans and Machines. Subject: Creating Creativity

    “Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.” Edward Albee For all the hype surrounding ‘generative’ AI, it remains apparent that AI, in its current form, is profoundly uncreative. It functions like a very sophisticated blender; it is able to mix up only what we put inside it. This is why there is such intense…

  • A Board Question: Where Should the Money Go?

    “In the era of welfare capitalism, the enlightened corporation, not the labour union or the state, would spearhead the creation of a more benign industrial society.” Lizabeth Cohen In the early twentieth century, Industrial Paternalism, as a form of Welfare Capitalism, emerged as a new method of managing wealth distribution. This was a consequence of…

  • Can we ever go home?

    “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”  Maya Angelou The importance of the home is indisputable. It is both a physical place and an emotional experience; somewhere which simultaneously protects us from the outside world and helps us to…

  • Do you know your place?

    ​​There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s perspective that there is ‘nothing noble in being superior’ challenges our devotion to hierarchy. He does not argue that there are no differences between men, but rather that the enforcement of these…

  • The value of stories

    “Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” G.K. Chesterton Chesterton’s quote can be interpreted in four distinct ways. It is a criticism of intellectual elitism, a clarification of the distinctions between fiction and literature: between entertainment and insight, and between freedom of imagination and the prescribing…

  • The importance of understanding video games

    “They assimilate games into some other, more respectable category of human practice.”  C. Thi Nguyen Nguyen argues that comparing games to other art forms, rather than establishing and examining games within their own category, leads to an underestimation of their distinctiveness and importance. An importance which lies in a game’s unique quality as a medium;…

  • The secret to better parks – a visual essay

    “Parks are not automatically anything” Jane Jacobs

  • Are we drowning in data?

    “Data is like garbage. You’d better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.” Mark Twain The conventional view on data and garbage is “garbage in, garbage out.” But Mark Twain raises a more fundamental point, that data is only as useful as its potential applications, and these must be…