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I've just googled "How to survive attending your Ex's wedding"

Joi Ito:

“What I realized was that a lot of the engineers who work in AI felt that you could reduce the whole world to a function.

That life, human life, was just optimizing. And that the world could be simulated in a computer.

This is almost religious because I think that there are people who have the kind of thinking where they look at their life as a game.

Where they say: “Okay. I’m optimizing for money, and how many minutes do I have to do this.”

I tweeted out the other day: “Those people who think that we live in a computer simulation are the kinds of people who are most likely to be simulations.”

A lot of people approach life like an engineering problem. For them, I could imagine that they could see their whole life being in a computer.

But if you go into the humanities or the East Coast, there are a lot of people who don’t think like a computer.

They live life through experience and only things that happen actually matter. (…)

A lot of the papers that you see by the engineers say: “We’ll just define fairness as accuracy,” or something like that.

And this is what I call reductionist, because fairness is really complex, and it’s always contextual.

My concern is the stuff that we have, which is efficiency, productivity — that’s the stuff that makes us obese, creates climate change, income inequality.

The problems that we have today are caused by the tools that we created.

But I think there’s a lot of people who believe that more efficiency and productivity will fix everything.

I think right now there’s a lot of power in the hands of the reductionists.

And I would put economists and neoclassic economics in this, which is just reducing everything to just measuring GDP. (…)

If you go to places like MIT, the engineers have all the power, all the money, and everything looks like an engineering problem. 

And we’ve made liberal arts sort of this sideshow. 

I think that we need the historians, social scientists, anthropologists, qualitative people involved in asking the questions: why are we here, what are we doing?”

Source: Recode Decode — MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito on the problem with tech people who want to solve problems

This is a video of an Oksapmin woman demonstrating the Oksapmin base-27 counting system. The Oksapmin people of New Guinea use body part counting as a base for their numeral system (which may sound wild and exotic, but is really just a more detailed version of what we do, most anthropologists think base-10 number systems come from humans’ having 10 fingers) starting with the thumb, going up the arm and head to the nose (the 14th number) and going down the other side of the body to the pinky finger of the other hand (the 27th number). It does not matter which side you start counting on, so counting from right-to-left or left-to-right makes no difference. 

And if that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what to tell ya

Well my week has been exciting so far.

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Michelle Obama: "I have been at every powerful table you can think of...They are not that smart"

Truth 

“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that.”

— Biance Sparacino (How To Ruin Your Life Without Even Noticing That You Are)

Water calms me down for some reason