Link Banana

I’ve refrained from commenting on the passing on David Foster Wallace because until that news spread, I might have assumed he was a Scottish revolutionary (or somesuch). But Gong Szeto captures how I feel about it all pretty well:

I can conclude with certainty that everyone I have ever encountered who admired his work are smart, passionate, and engaged people. And even though I have not myself engaged in his (intimidating) writing oeuvre, I see the far-reaching effect he had and continues to have on people around me.

Of the limited engagement I’ve had with his work in the last few days, I most liked this 2005 commencement speech. These two quotations are also good.

Luke O’Brien has an interesting piece about the philosophies advanced (or not) by the video games of Wil Wright. I admit I’d never much thought about it, but SimCity, The Sims, and Spore can all be read to have very serious real-world philosophical messages. Of The Sims, for example:

“The constraints of consumer capitalism are built into the game’s logic,” wrote Ann McGuire, an Australian academic, echoing earlier complaints about the hypercapitalist SimCity. “The Sims distils and intensifies, through its underlying code, key ideological aspects of late capitalism: self, other, and time are all quantified and commodified. What the player is doing is shopping effectively in order to manage a life in the world.”

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

I’ve had mixed opinions about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work in the past, but I really — really really — like this blog post.

Here is the thing — believing that you have fallen because of actions outside of your control, or the collective control of your tribe, rewards you with an unearned sense of the cosmic. It allows you to fashion yourself as heroic — a Hercules robbed by the smallness of Gods. It fills you with an anger which is, at its root, a sort of false power, a weak righteousness that turns your enemies into demons. It was thrilling to believe we’d been kidnapped by white interlopers, as opposed to knowing that, in the words of the great Robert Hayden, we’d been sold off for “tin crowns that shone with paste” for “red calico and German-silver trinkets.”

It’s Science Saturday on Bloggingheads and today’s discussion is especially interesting. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and UNC (experimental) philosopher Joshua Knobe discuss how morality comes about and persists. Fascinating stuff.