Two unrelated but interesting articles, both from slate.
First is the history of media scares. Good overview of historical scares that are similar to "is google making us dumber?" - my favorite is when literacy was increasing there was a concern that education would be bad for the mental health of children.
Next is about diagnostic scanning and the cost of health care. The main point is somewhat interesting (although I feel like the point has already been made). But far more interesting is the start of the article which describes how the success of the Beatles funded the invention of the CT scanner (it's a bit of a stretch, but still kinda funny).
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'An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools "exhaust the children's brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment."'
ReplyDelete- I don't completely disagree with the latter part of this statement about protracted imprisonment. I think development of intellect often comes at the price of maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle.
Also, reading the blurb from Socrates reminded me of something I read recently about how individual memory/knowledge is giving away to collective memory/knowledge. Something about how in the future, it will be less important to be able to draw information from one's own memory than to be able to draw it from the internet, which is like a shared collective memory- like an extension of one's brain. It makes me wonder what sort of advantages people in the time of Socrates had before writing became popular.