Group items tagged

Today, people are constantly told that we must be flexible and adaptable in order to succeed. Is it surprising that these values are reshaping how many of us approach sex and love?

part-timers, contractors and other contingent workers — who constitute some 40 percent of the American work force — are more inclined to text one another “u still up?” than to make plans in advance

Smartphones have altered expectations about when we are “on” and “off,” and working from home or from cafes has blurred the lines between labor and leisure.

The 2013 and 2014 Work and Education Poll conducted by Gallup found that the average full-time American worker reported working 47 hours per week. Moreover, 21 percent of the people surveyed reported working 50 to 59 hours per week; and another 18 percent said they worked 60 or more hours a week.

marriage rates have declined significantly since 1960. The median age of first marriage has risen to a record high: 27 for women and 29 for men.

“Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” observed that young adults have gone from seeing marriage as a “cornerstone” of adult life to its “capstone,” something you enter only after you complete your education and attain professional stability

DATING itself is a recent invention. It developed when young people began moving to cities and women began working outside private homes. By 1900, 44 percent of single American women worked. Previously, courtship had taken place under adult supervision, in private places: a parlor, a factory dance or church social. But once women started going out and earning wages, they had more freedom over where and how they met prospective mates. Because men vastly out-earned women, they typically paid for entertainment.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex.

By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.

by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off

The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.

this kind of dating isn’t any more transactional than it was back when suitors paid women family-supervised visits or parents sought out a yenta to introduce their children at a synagogue mixer.

Courtship has always been dictated by changes in the market. The good news is that dating is not the same thing as love. And as anyone who has ever been in love can attest, the laws of supply and demand do not control our feelings.

Many philosophers and many departments simply ignore arguments for greater diversity; others respond with arguments for Eurocentrism that we and many others have refuted elsewhere. The profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric.

Instead, we ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness. We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”

We see no justification for resisting this minor rebranding (though we welcome opposing views in the comments section to this article), particularly for those who endorse, implicitly or explicitly, this Eurocentric orientation.

Some of our colleagues defend this orientation on the grounds that non-European philosophy belongs only in “area studies” departments, like Asian Studies, African Studies or Latin American Studies. We ask that those who hold this view be consistent, and locate their own departments in “area studies” as well, in this case, Anglo-European Philosophical Studies.

Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: We do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.

Of course, we believe that renaming departments would not be nearly as valuable as actually broadening the philosophical curriculum and retaining the name “philosophy.” Philosophy as a discipline has a serious diversity problem, with women and minorities underrepresented at all levels among students and faculty, even while the percentage of these groups increases among college students. Part of the problem is the perception that philosophy departments are nothing but temples to the achievement of males of European descent. Our recommendation is straightforward: Those who are comfortable with that perception should confirm it in good faith and defend it honestly; if they cannot do so, we urge them to diversify their faculty and their curriculum.

This is not to disparage the value of the works in the contemporary philosophical canon: Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with philosophy written by males of European descent; but philosophy has always become richer as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.

We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the “Bhagavad Gita” as they do the “Republic,” that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931- ), Lame Deer (1903-1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.

For demographic, political and historical reasons, the change to a more multicultural conception of philosophy in the United States seems inevitable. Heed the Stoic adage: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”

the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.”

So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts?

For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives)

Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions. They are given quizzes in which they must sort claims into one camp or the other but not both. But if a fact is something that is true and an opinion is something that is believed, then many claims will obviously be both

How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality

Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion.

Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions? — Copying homework assignments is wrong. — Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior. — All men are created equal. — It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism. — It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol. — Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat. — Drug dealers belong in prison.

Our children deserve a consistent intellectual foundation. Facts are things that are true. Opinions are things we believe. Some of our beliefs are true. Others are not. Some of our beliefs are backed by evidence. Others are not.

In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.

If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave.

The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.

Professor McBrayer seems to miss the major point of the Common Core concern: can students distinguish between premises based on (reasonably construed) fact and premises based on emotion when evaluating conclusions? I would prefer that students learn to reason rather than be taught moral 'truth' that follows Professor McBrayer's logic.

The hard work lies not in recognizing that at least some moral claims are true but in carefully thinking through our evidence for which of the many competing moral claims is correct.

Moral truths are not the same as scientific truths or mathematical truths. Yet they may still be used a guiding principle for our individual lives as well as our laws.But there is equal danger of giving moral judgments the designation of truth as there is in not doing so. Many people believe that abortion is murder on the same level as shooting someone with a gun. But many others do not. So is it true that abortion is murder?Moral principles can become generally accepted and then form the basis for our laws. But many long accepted moral principles were later rejected as being faulty. "Separate but equal" is an example. Judging homosexual relationships as immoral is another example.

Whoa! That Einstein derived an equation is a fact. But the equation represents a theory that may have to be tweaked at some point in the future. It may be a fact that the equation foretold the violence of atomic explosions, but there are aspects of nature that elude the equation. Remember "the theory of everything?"

Here is a moral fact, this is a sermon masquerading as a philosophical debate on facts, opinions and truth. This professor of religion is asserting that the government via common core is teaching atheism via the opinion vs fact.He is arguing, in a dishonest form, that public schools should be teaching moral facts. Of course moral facts is code for the Ten Commandments.

As a fourth grade teacher, I try to teach students to read critically, including distinguishing between facts and opinions as they read (and have been doing this long before the Common Core arrived, by the way). It's not always easy for children to grasp the difference. I can only imagine the confusion that would ensue if I introduced a third category -- moral "facts" that can't be proven but are true nonetheless!

horrible acts occur not because of moral uncertainty, but because people are too sure that their views on morality are 100% true, and anyone who fails to recognize and submit themselves are heathens who deserve death.I can't think of any case where a society has suffered because people are too thoughtful and open-minded to different perspectives on moral truth.In any case, it's not an elementary school's job to teach "moral truths."

The characterization of moral anti-realism as some sort of fringe view in philosophy is misleading. Claims that can be true or false are, it seems, 'made true' by features of the world. It's not clear to many in philosophy (like me) just what features of the world could make our moral claims true. We are more likely to see people's value claims as making claims about, and enforcing conformity to, our own (contingent) social norms. This is not to hold, as Mr. McBrayer seems to think follows, that there are no reasons to endorse or criticize these social norms.

This is nonsense. Giving kids the tools to distinguish between fact and opinion is hard enough in an age when Republicans actively deny reality on Fox News every night. The last thing we need is to muddy their thinking with the concept of "moral facts."A fact is a belief that everyone _should_ agree upon because it is observable and testable. Morals are not agreed upon by all. Consider the hot button issue of abortion.

Truthfully, I'm not terribly concerned that third graders will end up taking these lessons in the definition of fact versus opinion to the extremes considered here, or take them as a license to cheat. That will come much later, when they figure out, as people always have, what they can get a way with. But Prof. McBrayer, with his blithe expectation that all the grownups know that there moral "facts"? He scares the heck out of me.

I've long chafed at the language of "fact" v. "opinion", which is grounded in a very particular, limited view of human cognition. In my own ethics courses, I work actively to undermine the distinction, focusing instead on considered judgment . . . or even more narrowly, on consideration itself. (See http://wp.me/p5Ag0i-6M )

The real waffle here is the very concept of "moral facts." Our statements of values, even very important ones are, obviously, not facts. Trying to dress them up as if they are facts, to me, argues for a pretty serious moral weakness on the part of those advancing the idea.

Our core values are not important because they are facts. They are important because we collectively hold them and cherish them. To lean on the false crutch of "moral facts" to admit the weakness of your own moral convictions.

I would like to believe that there is a core of moral facts/values upon which all humanity can agree, but it would be tough to identify exactly what those are.

For the the ancient philosophers, reality comprised the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (what we might now call ethics, science and art), seeing these as complementary and inseparable, though distinct, realms. With the ascendency of science in our culture as the only valid measure of reality to the detriment of ethics and art (that is, if it is not observable and provable, it is not real), we have turned the good and the beautiful into mere "social constructs" that have no validity on their own. While I am sympathetic in many ways with Dr. McBrayer's objections, I think he falls into the trap of discounting the Good and The Beautiful as valid in and of themselves, and tries, instead, to find ways to give them validity through the True. I think his argument would have been stronger had he used the language of validity rather than the language of truth. Goodness, Truth and Beauty each have their own validity, though interdependent and inseparable. When we artificially extract one of these and give it primacy, we distort reality and alienate ourselves from it.

Value claims are like any other claims: either true or false, evidenced or not.

Moral issues cannot scientifically be treated on the level that Prof. McBrayer is attempting to use in this column: true or false, fact or opinion or both. Instead, they should be treated as important characteristics of the systematic working of a society or of a group of people in general. One can compare the working of two groups of people: one in which e.g. cheating and lying is acceptable, and one in which they are not. One can use historical or model examples to show the consequences and the working of specific systems of morals. I think that this method - suitably adjusted - can be used even in second grade.

Relativism has nothing to do with liberalism. The second point is that I'm not sure it does all that much harm, because I have yet to encounter a student who thought that he or she had to withhold judgment on those who hold opposing political views!

searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.

Nor is it a coincidence that people are increasingly following the election on social media, using it both as the source of their information and as the way to get their view out. Consent is still being manufactured, but the manufacturing is being done willingly by us, usually intended for consumption by other people with whom we already agree, facts or no facts.

It really isn’t a surprise that Rubio would ask us to Google for certain facts; that’s how you and I know almost everything we know nowadays — it is a way of knowing that is so embedded into the very fabric of our lives that we don’t even notice it

The problem of course is that having more information available, even more accurate information, isn’t what is required by the ideal.

What is required is that people actually know and understand that information, and there are reasons to think we are no closer to an informed citizenry understood in that way than we ever have been. Indeed, we might be further away.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.

the flow of digital information is just as prone to manipulation as its content

No wonder Trump and his followers on Twitter immediately shrugged off Rubio’s inconvenient truths; there is nothing to fear from information when counterinformation is just as plentiful.

The real worry concerns our faith in the ideal of an informed citizenry itself. That worry, as I see it, has two faces.

First, as Jason Stanley and others have emphasized recently, appeals to ideals can be used to undermine those very ideals.

The very availability of information can make us think that the ideal of the informed citizen is more realized than it is — and that, in turn, can actually undermine the ideal, making us less informed, simply because we think we know all we need to know already.

Second, the danger is that increasing recognition of the fact that Googling can get you wherever you want to go can make us deeply cynical about the ideal of an informed citizenry — for the simple reason that what counts as an “informed” citizen is a matter of dispute. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.

And once disagreement reaches that far down, the daylight of reason seems very far away indeed.

invoked an old metaphor to explain why he isn’t convinced by the analysis: He compared it to establishing a theory of how weather works by pointing a video camera out the window for 7 hours.

Indeed, among neuroscientists, the new “comprehensive atlas” of the cerebral cortex is almost as controversial as a historical atlas of the Middle East. That’s because every word has a constellation of meanings and associations — and it’s hard for scientists to agree about how best to study them in the lab.

For this study, neuroscientist Jack Gallant and his team at the University of California, Berkeley played more than two hours’ worth of stories from the Moth Radio Hour for seven grad students and postdocs while measuring their cerebral blood flow using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Then, they linked the activity in some 50,000 pea-sized regions of the cortex to the “meaning” of the words being heard at that moment.

How, you might ask, did they establish the meaning of words? The neuroscientists pulled all the nouns and verbs from the podcasts. With a computer program, they then looked across millions of pages of text to see how often the words from the podcasts are used near 985 common words taken from Wikipedia’s List of 1,000 Basic Words. “Wolf,” for instance, would presumably be used more often in proximity to “dog” than to, say, “eggplant.” Using that data, the program assigned numbers that approximated the meaning of each individual word from the podcasts — and, with some fancy number crunching, they figured out what areas of the brain were activated when their research subjects heard words with certain meanings.

Everyone agrees that the research is innovative in its method. After all, linking up the meanings of thousands of words to the second-by-second brain activity in thousands of tiny brain regions is no mean feat. “That’s way more data than any human being can possibly think about,” said Gallant.

What they can’t agree on is what it means. “In this study, our goal was not to ask a specific question. Our goal was to map everything so that we can ask questions after that,” said Gallant. “One of the most frequent questions we get is, ‘What does it mean?’ If I gave you a globe, you wouldn’t ask what it means, you’d start using it for stuff. You can look for the smallest ocean or how long it will take to get to San Francisco.”

This “data-driven approach” still involves assumptions about how to break up language into different categories of meaning

“Of course it’s a very simplified version of how meaning is captured in our minds, but it seems to be a pretty good proxy,” she said.

hordes of unanswered questions: “We can map where your brain represents the meaning of a narrative text that is associated with family, but we don’t know why the brain is responding to family at that location. Is it the word ‘father’ itself? Is it your memories of your own father? Is it your own thinking about being a parent yourself?” He hopes that it’s just those types of questions that researchers will ask, using his brain map as a guide.

Even doctors—those whose business is to treat others humanely— can remain disengaged from the minds of their patients, particularly when those patients are easily seen as different from the doctors themselves. Until the early 1990s, for instance, it was routine practice for infants to undergo surgery without anesthesia. Why? Because at the time, doctors did not believe that infants were able to experience pain, a fundamental capacity of the human mind.

Your sixth sense functions only when you engage it. When you do not, you may fail to recognize a fully human mind that is right before your eyes.

Although it is indeed true that the ability to read the minds of others exists along a spectrum with stable individual differences, I believe that the more useful knowledge comes from understanding the moment-to-moment, situational influences that can lead even the most social person—yes, even you and me—to treat others as mindless animals or objects.

None of the cases described in this chapter so far involve people with chronic and stable personality disorders. Instead, they all come from predictable contexts in which people’s sixth sense remained disengaged for one fundamental reason: distance.

This three-part chain—sharing attention, imitating action, and imitation creating experience—shows one way in which your sixth sense works through your physical senses. More important, it also shows how your sixth sense could remain disengaged, leaving you disconnected from the minds of others. Close your eyes, look away, plug your ears, stand too far away to see or hear, or simply focus your attention elsewhere, and your sixth sense may not be triggered.

Distance keeps your sixth sense disengaged for at least two reasons. First, your ability to understand the minds of others can be triggered by your physical senses. When you’re too far away in physical space, those triggers do not get pulled. Second, your ability to understand the minds of others is also engaged by your cognitive inferences. Too far away in psychological space—too different, too foreign, too other—and those triggers, again, do not get pulled

For psychologists, distance is not just physical space. It is also psychological space, the degree to which you feel closely connected to someone else. You are describing psychological distance when you say that you feel “distant” from your spouse, “out of touch” with your kids’ lives, “worlds apart” from a neighbor’s politics, or “separated” from your employees. You don’t mean that you are physically distant from other people; you mean that you feel psychologically distant from them in some way

Interviews with U.S. soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent were able to discharge their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. Even when they did shoot, soldiers found it hard to hit their human targets. In the U.S. Civil War, muskets were capable of hitting a pie plate at 70 yards and soldiers could typically reload anywhere from 4 to 5 times per minute. Theoretically, a regiment of 200 soldiers firing at a wall of enemy soldiers 100 feet wide should be able to kill 120 on the first volley. And yet the kill rate during the Civil War was closer to 1 to 2 men per minute, with the average distance of engagement being only 30 yards.

Modern armies now know that they have to overcome these empathic urges, so soldiers undergo relentless training that desensitizes them to close combat, so that they can do their jobs. Modern technology also allows armies to kill more easily because it enables killing at such a great physical distance. Much of the killing by U.S. soldiers now comes through the hands of drone pilots watching a screen from a trailer in Nevada, with their sixth sense almost completely disengaged.

Other people obviously do not need to be standing right in front of you for you to imagine what they are thinking or feeling or planning. You can simply close your eyes and imagine it.

The MPFC and a handful of other brain regions undergird the inferential component of your sixth sense. When this network of brain regions is engaged, you are thinking about others’ minds. Failing to engage this region when thinking about other people is then a solid indication that you’re overlooking their minds.

Research confirms that the MPFC is engaged more when you’re thinking about yourself, your close friends and family, and others who have beliefs similar to your own. It is activated when you care enough about others to care what they are thinking, and not when you are indifferent to others

As people become more and more different from us, or more distant from our immediate social networks, they become less and less likely to engage our MPFC. When we don’t engage this region, others appear relatively mindless, something less than fully human.

The mistake that can arise when you fail to engage with the minds of others is that you may come to think of them as relatively mindless. That is, you may come to think that these others have less going on between their ears than, say, you do.

It’s not only free will that other minds might seem to lack. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own. Members of distant out-groups, ranging from terrorists to poor hurricane victims to political opponents, are also rated as less able to experience complicated emotions, such as shame, pride, embarassment, and guilt than close members of one’s own group.

the notion that minds and bodies exist in separate realms (i.e. Cartesian Dualism) is entirely untenable. 

Our bodies have an address in the first realm, whereas our minds and everything psychological about minds make their home in the second realm.  According to Descartes, these realms are forever separate such that the mind and body cannot influence one another.

We are amazed to learn that when the mind is stressed over time, this can lead the body to break down, producing a variety of physical ailments.  This is amazing to us because we believe stress is of the mind and it is difficult to imagine something of the mind affecting our bodies.  Its hard to believe because it violates our intuitive dualistic understanding of the world.

Are you smart?  Are you kind?  Are you funny?  Are you afraid of being alone?  These two different kinds of questions, focused on body and mind, respectively, rely on different networks within your brain.  When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere (these are called ‘lateral’ regions).  When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other (these are called ‘medial’ regions). 

Knowing that our sense of dualism is just an illusion is very important.  Thomas Mussweiler’s lab recently conducted a study showing that those who have a stronger belief in dualism tend to be less healthy.  Why?  Dualists believe their body is just a shell that is far less important than the mind. 

Dr. Tegmark, in his new book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” turns the idea on its head: The reason mathematics serves as such a forceful tool is that the universe is a mathematical structure. Going beyond Pythagoras and Plato, he sets out to show how matter, energy, space and time might emerge from n

“Above all,” he wrote, “I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.”

Neuroscientists assume that these mental powers somehow emerge from the electrical signaling of neurons — the circuitry of the brain. But no one has come close to explaining how that occurs. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story That, Dr. Nagel proposes, might require another revolution: showing that mind, along with matter and energy, is “a fundamental principle of nature” — and that we live in a universe primed “to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” Rather than being a blind series of random mutations and adaptations, evolution would have a direction, maybe even a purpose.

the mathematician Edward Frenkel noted that only a small part of the vast ocean of mathematics appears to describe the real world. The rest seems to b

there are two warring parts of the brain: a hot part demanding immediate gratification (the limbic system), and a cool, goal-oriented part (the prefrontal cortex). The secret of self-control, he says, is to train the prefrontal cortex to kick in first.

To do this, use specific if-then plans, like “If it’s before noon, I won’t check email” or “If I feel angry, I will count backward from 10.” Done repeatedly, this buys a few seconds to at least consider your options. The point isn’t to be robotic and never eat chocolate mousse again. It’s to summon self-control when you want it, and be able to carry out long-term plans.

“We don’t need to be victims of our emotions,” Mr. Mischel says. “We have a prefrontal cortex that allows us to evaluate whether or not we like the emotions that are running us.

Self-control alone doesn’t guarantee success. People also need a “burning goal” that gives them a reason to activate these skills, he says. His students all have the sitzfleisch to get into graduate school, but the best ones also have a burning question they want to answer in their work, sometimes stemming from their own lives

His secret seems to come straight from the marshmallow test: distraction. “It’s to keep living in a way one wants to live and work; to distract constructively; to distract in ways that are in themselves satisfying; to do things that are intrinsically gratifying,” he says

Here, daughters of working mothers earned 23 percent more than daughters of stay-at-home mothers, after controlling for demographic factors, and sons spent seven and a half more hours a week on child care and 25 more minutes on housework.

Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to much bigger problems than a misattributed quote.

Memory failures that resemble Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo.

, for false memories, higher confidence was associated with lower accuracy.

In general, if you have seen something before, your confidence that you have seen it and your accuracy in recalling it are linked: The more confident you are in your memory, the more likely you are to be right

. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.

When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time. We get a lot of details right, but when our memories change, we only “hear” the most recent version of the message, and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed.

Studies find that even our “flashbulb memories” of emotionally charged events can be distorted and inaccurate, but we cling to them with the greatest of confidence.

With each retrieval our memories can morph, and so can our confidence in them. This is why the National Academy of Sciences report strongly advised courts to rely on initial statements rather than courtroom proclamations:

In fact, the mere act of describing a person’s appearance can change how likely you are to pick him out of a lineup later. This finding, known as “verbal overshadowing,” had been controversial, but was recently verified in a collective effort by more than 30 separate research labs.

The science of memory distortion has become rigorous and reliable enough to help guide public policy. It should also guide our personal attitudes and actions.

It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it.

Subliminal is a good book on this subject, as is Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is not merely that our memory is a game of telephone in which we garble the memory as we retrieve and re-store it. It appears to be a very useful part of existence, which has stayed with us or gotten stronger with evolution. There seems to be utility in forgetting, misremembering, and having memories coalesce with those of others in our social groups.

Self-destructive behaviors — dropping out of school, joining a gang, taking drugs, bearing children when one isn’t ready — compound poverty.

Yet scholars are also learning to understand the roots of these behaviors, and they’re far more complicated than the conservative narrative of human weakness.

For starters, there is growing evidence that poverty and mental health problems are linked in complex, reinforcing ways

If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas like domestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely to have trouble in school, to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, to have trouble in relationships.

A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of cognitive bandwidth.

Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.

It turns out that when people have elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, they are less willing to delay gratification.

it’s circumstances that can land you in a situation where it’s really hard to make a good decision because you’re so stressed out. And the ones you get wrong matter much more, because there’s less slack to play with.”

That emphasis on personal responsibility is part of the 12-step program to confront alcoholism or drug addiction, and it may be useful for people like Jackson. But for society to place the blame entirely on the individual seems to me a cop-out.

Let’s also remember, though, that today we have randomized trials — the gold standard of evidence — showing that certain social programs make self-destructive behaviors less common.

as long as we’re talking about personal irresponsibility, let’s also examine our own. Don’t we have a collective responsibility to provide more of a fair start in life to all, so that children aren’t propelled toward bad choices?

the regulatory rebound is taking place for a reason. Maybe we had too much regulation in the 1970s, but we’ve now spent 35 years trusting business to do the right thing with minimal oversight — and it hasn’t worked.

So what has been happening lately is an attempt to redress that imbalance, to replace knee-jerk opposition to regulation with the judicious use of regulation where there is good reason to believe that businesses might act in destructive ways. Will we see this effort continue? Next year’s election will tell.

At M.I.T., however, Keynes never went away. To be sure, stagflation showed that there were limits to what policy can do. But students continued to learn about the imperfections of markets and the role that monetary and fiscal policy can play in boosting a depressed economy.

And the M.I.T. students of the 1970s enlarged on those insights in their later work. Mr. Blanchard, for example, showed how small deviations from perfect rationality can have large economic consequences; Mr. Obstfeld showed that currency markets can sometimes experience self-fulfilling panic.

This open-minded, pragmatic approach was overwhelmingly vindicated after crisis struck in 2008. Chicago-school types warned incessantly that responding to the crisis by printing money and running deficits would lead to 70s-type stagflation, with soaring inflation and interest rates. But M.I.T. types predicted, correctly, that inflation and interest rates would stay low in a depressed economy, and that attempts to slash deficits too soon would deepen the slump.

The truth, although nobody will believe it, is that the economic analysis some of us learned at M.I.T. way back when has worked very, very well for the past seven years.

But has the intellectual success of M.I.T. economics led to comparable policy success? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

True, there have been some important monetary successes. The Fed, led by Mr. Bernanke, ignored right-wing pressure and threats — Rick Perry, as governor of Texas, went so far as to accuse him of treason — and pursued an aggressively expansionary policy that helped limit the damage from the financial crisis. In Europe, Mr. Draghi’s activism has been crucial to calming financial markets, probably saving the euro from collapse. Continue reading the main story 215 Comments

On other fronts, however, the M.I.T. gang’s good advice has been ignored. The I.M.F.’s research department, under Mr. Blanchard’s leadership, has done authoritative work on the effects of fiscal policy, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that slashing spending in a depressed economy is a terrible mistake, and that attempts to reduce high levels of debt via austerity are self-defeating. But European politicians have slashed spending and demanded crippling austerity from debtors anyway.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Republicans have responded to the utter failure of free-market orthodoxy and the remarkably successful predictions of much-hated Keynesians by digging in even deeper, determined to learn nothing from experience.

being right isn’t necessarily enough to change the world. But it’s still better to be right than to be wrong, and M.I.T.-style economics, with its pragmatic openness to evidence, has been very right indeed

The true work of the mathematician is not experienced until the later parts of graduate school, when the student is challenged to create knowledge in the form of a novel proof. It is common to fill page after page with an attempt, the seasons turning, only to arrive precisely where you began, empty-handed — or to realize that a subtle flaw of logic doomed the whole enterprise from its outset. The steady state of mathematical research is to be completely stuck. It is a process that Charles Fefferman of Princeton, himself a onetime math prodigy turned Fields medalist, likens to ‘‘playing chess with the devil.’’ The rules of the devil’s game are special, though: The devil is vastly superior at chess, but, Fefferman explained, you may take back as many moves as you like, and the devil may not. You play a first game, and, of course, ‘‘he crushes you.’’ So you take back moves and try something different, and he crushes you again, ‘‘in much the same way.’’ If you are sufficiently wily, you will eventually discover a move that forces the devil to shift strategy; you still lose, but — aha! — you have your first clue.

Tao has emerged as one of the field’s great bridge-­builders. At the time of his Fields Medal, he had already made discoveries with more than 30 different collaborators. Since then, he has also become a prolific math blogger with a decidedly non-­Gaussian ebullience: He celebrates the work of others, shares favorite tricks, documents his progress and delights at any corrections that follow in the comments. He has organized cooperative online efforts to work on problems. ‘‘Terry is what a great 21st-­century mathematician looks like,’’ Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has collaborated with Tao, told me. He is ‘‘part of a network, always communicating, always connecting what he is doing with what other people are doing.’’

As a group, the people drawn to mathematics tend to value certainty and logic and a neatness of outcome, so this game becomes a special kind of torture. And yet this is what any ­would-be mathematician must summon the courage to face down: weeks, months, years on a problem that may or may not even be possible to unlock. You find yourself sitting in a room without doors or windows, and you can shout and carry on all you want, but no one is listening.

For their work, Tao and Green salvaged a crucial bit from an earlier proof done by others, which had been discarded as incorrect, and aimed at a different goal. Other maneuvers came from masterful proofs by Timothy Gowers of England and Endre Szemeredi of Hungary. Their work, in turn, relied on contributions from Erdos, Klaus Roth and Frank Ramsey, an Englishman who died at age 26 in 1930, and on and on, into history. Ask mathematicians about their experience of the craft, and most will talk about an intense feeling of intellectual camaraderie. ‘‘A very central part of any mathematician’s life is this sense of connection to other minds, alive today and going back to Pythagoras,’’ said Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. ‘‘We are having this conversation with each other going over the millennia.’’

Most mathematicians tend to specialize, but Tao ranges widely, learning from others and then working with them to make discoveries. Markus Keel, a longtime collaborator and close friend, reaches to science fiction to explain Tao’s ability to rapidly digest and employ mathematical ideas: Seeing Tao in action, Keel told me, reminds him of the scene in ‘‘The Matrix’’ when Neo has martial arts downloaded into his brain and then, opening his eyes, declares, ‘‘I know kung fu.’’ The citation for Tao’s Fields Medal, awarded in 2006, is a litany of boundary hopping and notes particularly ‘‘beautiful work’’ on Horn’s conjecture, which Tao completed with a friend he had played foosball with in graduate school. It was a new area of mathematics for Tao, at a great remove from his known stamping grounds. ‘‘This is akin,’’ the citation read, ‘‘to a leading English-­language novelist suddenly producing the definitive Russian novel.’’

An effort to prove that 1 equals 0 is not likely to yield much fruit, it’s true, but the hacker’s mind-set can be extremely useful when doing math. Long ago, mathematicians invented a number that when multiplied by itself equals negative 1, an idea that seemed to break the basic rules of multiplication. It was so far outside what mathematicians were doing at the time that they called it ‘‘imaginary.’’ Yet imaginary numbers proved a powerful invention, and modern physics and engineering could not function without them.

Early encounters with math can be misleading. The subject seems to be about learning rules — how and when to apply ancient tricks to arrive at an answer. Four cookies remain in the cookie jar; the ball moves at 12.5 feet per second. Really, though, to be a mathematician is to experiment. Mathematical research is a fundamentally creative act. Lore has it that when David Hilbert, arguably the most influential mathematician of fin de siècle Europe, heard that a colleague had left to pursue fiction, he quipped: ‘‘He did not have enough imagination for mathematics.’’

Many people think that substantial progress on Navier-­Stokes may be impossible, and years ago, Tao told me, he wrote a blog post concurring with this view. Now he has some small bit of hope. The twin-prime conjecture had the same feel, a sense of breaking through the wall of intimidation that has scared off many aspirants. Outside the world of mathematics, both Navier-­Stokes and the twin-prime conjecture are described as problems. But for Tao and others in the field, they are more like opponents. Tao’s opponent has been known to taunt him, convincing him that he is overlooking the obvious, or to fight back, making quick escapes when none should be possible. Now the opponent appears to have revealed a weakness. But Tao said he has been here before, thinking he has found a way through the defenses, when in fact he was being led into an ambush. ‘‘You learn to get suspicious,’’ Tao said. ‘‘You learn to be on the lookout.’’

The recent calorie reductions appear to be good news, but they, alone, will not be enough to reverse the obesity epidemic. A paper by Kevin Hall, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, estimated that for Americans to return to the body weights of 1978 by 2020, an average adult would need to reduce calorie consumption by 220 calories a day. The recent reductions represent just a fraction of that change.