Four short links: 5 July 2019
Online Not All Bad, Emotional Space, Ted Chiang, Thread Summaries
- How a Video Game Community Filled My Nephew’s Final Days with Joy (Guardian) — you had a rough week. Treat yourself to this heart-warming story of people going the extra mile for someone.
- Self-Report Captures 27 Distinct Categories of Emotion Bridged by Continuous Gradients — Although reported emotional experiences are represented within a semantic space best captured by categorical labels, the boundaries between categories of emotion are fuzzy rather than discrete. By analyzing the distribution of reported emotional states we uncover gradients of emotion—from anxiety to fear to horror to disgust, calmness to aesthetic appreciation to awe, and others—that correspond to smooth variation in affective dimensions such as valence and dominance. Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space. In addition, our library of videos and an interactive map of the emotional states they elicit are made available to advance the science of emotion. (via Dan Hon)
- Sci-Fi Author Ted Chiang on Our Relationship to Technology, Capitalism, and the Threat of Extinction (GQ) — Right now I think we’re beginning to see a correction to the wild techno-boosterism that Silicon Valley has been selling us for the last couple decades, and that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I wish we didn’t swing back and forth from the extremes of Pollyannaish optimism to dystopian pessimism; I’d prefer it if we had a more measured response throughout, but that doesn’t appear to be in our nature. +1 to this. I don’t like the way we have spent 20 years imagining dystopias and then building them.
- Wikum — Summarize large discussion threads.
