278 | Kieran Healy on the Technology of Ranking People

278 | Kieran Healy on the Technology of Ranking People

We claim to love all of our children, friends, and students equally. But perhaps deep down you assign a ranking to them, from favorite to not-so-favorite. Ranking and quantifying people is an irresistible human tendency, and modern technology has made it ubiquitous. In this episode I talk with sociologist Kieran Healy, who has co-authored (with Marion Fourcade) the new book The Ordinal Society, about how our lives are measured and processed by the technological ecosystem around us. We discuss how this has changed how relate to ourselves and the wider world.

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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/10/278-kieran-healy-on-the-technology-of-ranking-people/

Kieran Healy received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University. He is currently a professor of sociology at Duke University, and a member of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. As an undergraduate at University College Cork he won the Irish Times National Debating competition. He has a longstanding interest in data visualization.


Jaksot(415)

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28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe

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Holiday Message 2018

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17 Joulu 20181h 8min

26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

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Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emo...

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3 Joulu 20181h 22min

24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar

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I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to whe...

26 Marras 20181h 19min

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