AirVarsity: Recent Episodes
Andre Smuts
The hormone system works like a democracy, every tissue in the body is an endocrine organ broadcasting its needs and demands, and so informing the tenor of our internal body politic
The business challenges of Ethical Decision Making..We are not as good at it as we think..because we are not as good as we think..The dangers of presumed Piety.. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
An exploration of the role of artificial food in the development of our species and how it acts as a liberator for the downtrodden.
It's tempting to think science gives a God's - eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril.
High Conflict People have a pattern of high conflict behavior that increases conflict rather than reducing or resolving it. The pattern usually happens over and over again in many different situations with many different people. Here is what to look out for.
Habits are are intimately connected with our Habitus and were once a matter of serious ethical consideration. A caution against 'Habit Mongers' who sell nothing more than self obsession.
Fantasies about the future have a troubling effect on achieving actual goals. If Positive thinking alone doesn’t work, what does? Listen in and learn about the power of WOOP
The chasm between producers and consumers leaves many of us estranged from beauty and a vital part of the ethical life
The Old adage "Do not judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes". Can be updated to say "Don't form your Opinions until you have stepped out of your Echo Chamber" - First you don’t hear other views, that is called an 'Epistemic bubble Then you can’t trust them, that is called the 'Echo Chamber" Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult
Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? Then maybe you’re the one with the jerkitude
The conditions of modernity are in many ways profoundly better than those under which the vast majority of humanity lived for more or less the whole of history. But, along with its manifest benefits, modernity has brought a special range of troubles into our lives which we would be wise to try to unpick and to understand. Without as yet pushing in detail for what the solutions might be, we identify eight central ills stemming from certain of modernity’s leading ideas:
The perception of an Age of Distraction is related to our uncertainty about the answer to the question of ‘attention to what or to whom’. The sublimation of anxieties about moral authority through the fetish of technologically driven distraction has acquired pathological proportions in relation to children and young people.
Contagion, poison and trigger. The idea that books are dangerous has a long history, and holds a kernel of truth
According to Frederick Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess’. A civilised cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social ‘rank’ of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field.
Pop culture today is obsessed with the battle between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed?
A ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. The results also show that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives.
Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the diodes down his left-hand side. Is that how my toaster feels?
The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires
A Psychoanalytic lens on how authoritarians energize hatred, self-pity and delusion while promising heaven on earth
In a global culture that appears increasingly obsessed with radical individualism, narcissistic presentations of self, and incendiary political rhetoric, it is hard to imagine that society once cared about the beauty of the soul.
The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires
Today's discussion: The 21st century requires a holistic approach to rewarding employees. It's possible to place too much emphasis on pay and other extrinsic rewards. The changing nature of the relationship between employees and employers requires a new kind of currency.
In this episode we discuss the power, the potential as well as the pitfalls of ERP systems and their implementation.