While mainstream opinions and some scholarship suggests that we need God for a sense of meaning and purpose, this article proposes an alternative thesis. By digging into the data, it demonstrates how religious contexts provide the kind of atmosphere conducive to the development of meaning and purpose. Then, it shows that neither belief in God nor church attendance are needed for a strong sense of meaning and purpose. The article highlights how non-religious societies helped their members lead meaningful lives full (...) of purpose. It ends with specific research-based strategies for reason-oriented people to develop a personal sense of meaning and purpose. (shrink)

Grounded in evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), The Blindspots Between Us reveals the most common "hidden" biases that blind us to the truth, and which lead to misunderstandings and damaged relationships. Using this guide, readers will learn to identify their own blindspots, and move beyond them for better relationships-and a better world.

The effects that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will have on society in the short- and long-term are inherently uncertain. For this reason, many governments are avoiding strict command and control regulations for this technology and instead rely on softer ethics-based approaches. The Russian approach to regulating AI is characterized by the prevalence of unenforceable ethical principles implemented via industry self-regulation. We analyze the emergence of the regulatory regime for AI in Russia to illustrate the limitations of this approach. The article (...) is based on 50 interviews with policymakers, representatives of AI companies, and academics in the country. The findings show that this regulatory regime was formed under the strong influence of Russian big tech companies, which saw an opportunity to avoid regulatory oversight by washing out concrete regulatory measures from the policy. This approach is part of a broader protectionist sanction-proofing strategy for the local IT sector designed by the government, which can be characterized by lifting regulatory barriers for local companies. Unenforceable ethics-based self-regulation is a _regulatory gift_ from the Russian government to the industry. This _gift_ was intentionally designed because the government thought that prioritizing local innovation over consumer protection would benefit the public. However, the _gift_ can also unintentionally undermine the public interest by providing an opportunity for _ethics washing_. (shrink)

Social network services such as Twitter are important venues that can be used as rich data sources to mine public opinions about various topics. In this study, we used Twitter to collect data on one of the most growing theories in education, namely Self-Regulated Learning and carry out further analysis to investigate What Twitter says about SRL? This work uses three main analysis methods, descriptive, topic modeling, and geocoding analysis. The searched and collected dataset consists of a large volume of (...) relevant SRL tweets equal to 54,070 tweets between 2011 and 2021. The descriptive analysis uncovers a growing discussion on SRL on Twitter from 2011 till 2018 and then markedly decreased till the collection day. For topic modeling, the text mining technique of Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied and revealed insights on computationally processed topics. Finally, the geocoding analysis uncovers a diverse community from all over the world, yet a higher density representation of users from the Global North was identified. Further implications are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. (...) The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy). (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet productivist economy. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers following the rise of Stalin. This article challenges the neat, purported divide between a ‘metabolic’ and ‘productivist’ Marxism by analysing the energy-economic thinking of Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, a Bolshevik (...) engineer and old friend of Lenin. As chairman of both the electrification commission (GOELRO) and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), Krzhizhanovskii conceptualised the energy economy as something embedded in the metabolism of nature and society and as the technical-economic basis of the socialist economy. This argument drew its strength from his idea that production is part of the general, ongoing life-process, and the hope that large-scale electrification and electro-chemistry could help govern the metabolism between nature and society more rationally – both arguments commonly found among contemporary natural scientists. Any ecomarxist attempt to recover the concept of metabolism today has to come to terms with its productivist and technocratic history. (shrink)

The early history of the attempts to unify quantum theory with the general theory of relativity is depicted through the work of the under--appreciated Italo-Brazilian physicist Gleb Wataghin, who is responsible for many of the ideas that the quantum gravity community is entertaining today.

The glorious Sophia image of Nikolai Mokrogo, now completely forgotten, was the oldest national shrine and one of the first miraculous icons of Kievan Rus known to us. The name of the icon is associated with the "Miracle of the Infant in Kiev", which dates from the researchers no later than 1090. The legend tells about the marriage, which went to the pilgrimage to the relics of Boris and Gleb in Vyshgorod. They returned to Kyiv by the Dnipro in (...) a boat. In the road, a tired woman was asleep and dropped into the water a baby, which immediately drowned. Parents of the child turned to despair in despair. Mykola "having a great faith in him", asking for help. Indeed, the next morning the child of a bud was found undisturbed on the outside of the chambers of Sophia of Kiev: "... the child is lying wet in front of the image of St. Nikolai "[Leonid, Archimandrite. Life and miracles of St. Nikolai Mirlykysky and praise him. Investigation of two monuments of ancient Russian writing of the XI century. - St. Petersburg, 1881. - P. 90.] The icon of the saint, under which was found miraculously saved sv. Nicholas is a child in wet diapers, nicknamed Nikolay Mokrogo. For centuries it was located on the choirs of the St. Sophia Cathedral in the iconostasis of the Mykolaiv altar, on the right of the royal gates, occupying the place of the temple image. (shrink)