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In his hedged forecasts this time, Silver appears to be acknowledging that polling and historical patterns don’t always capture what John Maynard Keynes, in his classic 1936 economic General Theory, described as “animal spirits.”

There is, Keynes wrote, “the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.”

Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft and to exploit cooperation and exchange

Humans use discrete pulses of sound -- their language -- to alter the internal settings inside someone else's brain to suit an individual's interests. Because language is not a solitary pursuit, language is a form of social learning.

thousands of languages evolved

Can humans afford to have all these different languages, asks Professor Pagel. In a world where we want to promote cooperation, in a world that is more dependent than ever on cooperation to maintain and enhance humanity's levels of prosperity, multiple languages may not be practical.

languages reflect the myriad ways that the human mind perceives and responds to the world, and to lose any of them is to (slightly) diminish and limit the variety and expressive depth of human intellectual, creative and experiential capacity.

“I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”

Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.

“A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps

“Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”

“Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”

“There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”

The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”

llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.

At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”

If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different

Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.

“What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”

Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.

Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”

Don’t ignore what people vote fo

f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,

“I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.

Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.

The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response

“The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,

“Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”

“Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”

Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”

Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism

The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.

Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.

Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind.

The idea that life experiences could cause inheritable genetic changes has been identified among children of Holocaust survivors, who have been shown to have an increased likelihood of stress-related illnesses.

The possibility of epigenetic inheritance has been raised by Chinese academics regarding the Cultural Revolution, but to research the topic would most certainly invite state punishment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

According to the model suggested by this supposed dichotomy, exercises of theoretical knowledge involve active reflection, engagement with the propositions or rules of the theory in question that guides the subsequent exercise of the knowledge. Think of the chess player following an instruction she has learned for an opening move in chess. In contrast, practical knowledge is exercised automatically and without reflection.

Additionally, the fact that exercises of theoretical knowledge are guided by propositions or rules seems to entail that they involve instructions that are universally applicable

when one reflects upon any exercise of knowledge, whether practical or theoretical, it appears to have the characteristics that would naïvely be ascribed to the exercise of both practical and intellectual capacities

Perhaps one way to distinguish practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge is by talking. When we acquire knowledge of how to do something, we may not be able to express our knowledge in words. But when we acquire knowledge of a truth, we are able to express this knowledge in words.

once one bears down on the supposed distinction between practical knowledge and knowledge of truths, it breaks down. The plumber’s or electrician’s activities are a manifestation of the same kind of intelligence as the scientist’s or historian’s latest articles — knowledge of truths.

these are distinctions along a continuum, rather than distinctions in kind, as the folk distinction between practical and theoretical pursuits is intended to be.

He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.

“Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”

Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”

Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.

Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.

To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.

“Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.

changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.

materialism is not the greedy desire for material goods, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is material;

idealism is not the aspiration toward lofty and laudable goals, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is mental or idea-like. English-speaking philosophers today tend to speak of “physicalism” or “naturalism” rather than materialism (perhaps to avoid confusion with the Wall Street sense of the term). At the same time, Anglo-American historians of philosophy continue to find the distinction between materialism and idealism a useful one in our attempts at categorizing past schools of thought. Democritus and La Mettrie were materialists; Hobbes was pretty close. Berkeley and Kant were idealists; Leibniz may have been.

And it was these paradoxes that led the Irish philosopher to conclude that talk of matter was but a case of multiplying entities beyond necessity. For Berkeley, all we can know are ideas, and for this reason it made sense to suppose that the world itself consists in ideas.

Soviet and Western Marxists alike, by stark contrast, and before them the French “vulgar” (i.e., non-dialectical) materialists of the 18th century, saw and see the material world as the base and cause of all mental activity, as both bringing ideas into existence, and also determining the form and character of a society’s ideas in accordance with the state of its technology, its methods of resource extraction and its organization of labor. So here to focus on the material is not to become distracted from the true source of being, but rather to zero right in on it.

one great problem with the concept of materialism is that it says very little in itself. What is required in addition is an elaboration of what a given thinker takes matter, or ideas, to be. It may not be just the Marxist aftertaste, but also the fact that the old common-sense idea about matter as brute, given stuff has turned out to have so little to do with the way the physical world actually is, that has led Anglo-American philosophers to prefer to associate themselves with the “physical” or the “natural” rather than with the material.  Reality, they want to say, is just what is natural, while everything else is in turn “supernatural” (this distinction has its clarity going for it, but it also seems uncomfortably close to tautology). Not every philosopher has a solid grasp of subatomic physics, but most know enough to grasp that, even if reality is eventually exhaustively accounted for through an enumeration of the kinds of particles and a few basic forces, this reality will still look nothing like what your average person-in-the-street takes reality to be.

The 18th-century idealist philosopher George Berkeley strongly believed that matter was only a fiction contrived by philosophers in the first place, for which the real people had no need. For Berkeley, there was never anything common-sensical about matter. We did not need to arrive at the era of atom-splitting and wave-particle duality, then, in order for the paradoxes inherent in matter to make themselves known (is it infinitely divisible or isn’t it?

Central to this performance was the concept of  “materialism.” The entire history of philosophy, in fact, was portrayed in Soviet historiography as a series of matches between the materialist home-team and its “idealist” opponents, beginning roughly with Democritus (good) and Plato (bad), and culminating in the opposition between official party philosophy and logical positivism, the latter of which was portrayed as a shrouded variety of idealism. Thus from the “Short Philosophical Dictionary,” published in Moscow in 1951, we learn that the school of logical empiricism represented by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and others, “is a form of subjective idealism, characteristic of degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism.”Now the Soviet usage of this pair of terms appears to fly in the face of our ordinary, non-philosophical understanding of them (that, for example,  Wall Street values are “materialist,” while the Occupy movement is “idealist”). One might have thought that the communists should be flinging the “materialist” label at their capitalist enemies, rather than claiming it for themselves. One might also have thought that the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent failed project of building a workers’ utopia was nothing if not idealistic.

Consider money. Though it might sometimes be represented by bank notes or coins, money is an immaterial thing par excellence, and to seek to acquire it is to move on the plane of ideas. Of course, money can also be converted into material things, yet it seems simplistic to suppose that we want money only in order to convert it into the material things we really want, since even these material things aren’t just material either: they are symbolically dense artifacts, and they convey to others certain ideas about their owners. This, principally, is why their owners want them, which is to say that materialists (in the everyday sense) are trading in ideas just as much as anyone else.

In the end no one really cares about stuff itself. Material acquisitions — even, or perhaps especially, material acquisitions of things like Rolls Royces and Rolexes — are maneuvers within a universe of materially instantiated ideas. This is human reality, and it is within this reality that mystics, scientists, and philosophers alike are constrained to pursue their various ends, no matter what they might take the ultimate nature of the external world to be.

We have become what the privacy theorist Daniel Solove calls “digital persons.” As such we are subject to infopolitics (or what the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou calls “datapower,” the political theorist Davide Panagia “datapolitik” and the pioneering thinker Donna Haraway “informatics of domination”).

Once fingerprints, biometrics, birth certificates and standardized names were operational, it became possible to implement an international passport system, a social security number and all other manner of paperwork that tells us who someone is. When all that paper ultimately went digital, the reams of data about us became radically more assessable and subject to manipulation,

We like to think of ourselves as somehow apart from all this information. We are real — the information is merely about us.

But what is it that is real? What would be left of you if someone took away all your numbers, cards, accounts, dossiers and other informational prostheses? Information is not just about you — it also constitutes who you are.

We understandably do not want to see ourselves as bits and bytes. But unless we begin conceptualizing ourselves in this way, we leave it to others to do it for us

agencies and corporations will continue producing new visions of you and me, and they will do so without our input if we remain stubbornly attached to antiquated conceptions of selfhood that keep us from admitting how informational we already are.

What should we do about our Internet and phone patterns’ being fastidiously harvested and stored away in remote databanks where they await inspection by future algorithms developed at the National Security Agency, Facebook, credit reporting firms like Experian and other new institutions of information and control that will come into existence in future decades?

What bits of the informational you will fall under scrutiny? The political you? The sexual you? What next-generation McCarthyisms await your informational self? And will those excesses of oversight be found in some Senate subcommittee against which we democratic citizens might hope to rise up in revolt — or will they lurk among algorithmic automatons that silently seal our fates in digital filing systems?

Despite their decidedly different political sensibilities, what links together the likes of Senator Wyden and the international hacker network known as Anonymous is that they respect the severity of what is at stake in our information.

information is a site for the call of justice today, alongside more quintessential battlefields like liberty of thought and equality of opportunity.

we lack the intellectual framework to grasp the new kinds of political injustices characteristic of today’s information society.

though nearly all of us have a vague sense that something is wrong with the new regimes of data surveillance, it is difficult for us to specify exactly what is happening and why it raises serious concern

Creativity moves beyond mere synthesis and evaluation and is, he says, “the higher order skill.” This has not been a sudden development. Nearly 20 years ago “creating” replaced “evaluation” at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. In 2010 “creativity” was the factor most crucial for success found in an I.B.M. survey of 1,500 chief executives in 33 industries. These days “creative” is the most used buzzword in LinkedIn profiles two years running.

The method, which is used in Buffalo State classrooms, has four steps: clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing. People tend to gravitate to particular steps, suggesting their primary thinking style.

What’s igniting campuses, though, is the conviction that everyone is creative, and can learn to be more so.

Just about every pedagogical toolbox taps similar strategies, employing divergent thinking (generating multiple ideas) and convergent thinking (finding what works).The real genius, of course, is in the how.

as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity.

Ideating is brainstorming and calls for getting rid of your inner naysayer to let your imagination fly.

Clarifying — asking the right question — is critical because people often misstate or misperceive a problem. “If you don’t have the right frame for the situation, it’s difficult to come up with a breakthrough,

Developing is building out a solution, and maybe finding that it doesn’t work and having to start over

Implementing calls for convincing others that your idea has value.

“the frequency and intensity of failures is an implicit principle of the course. Getting into a creative mind-set involves a lot of trial and error.”

His favorite assignments? Construct a résumé based on things that didn’t work out and find the meaning and influence these have had on your choices.

“Examine what in the culture is preventing you from creating something new or different. And what is it like to look like a fool because a lot of things won’t work out and you will look foolish? So how do you handle that?”

Because academics run from failure, Mr. Keywell says, universities are “way too often shapers of formulaic minds,” and encourage students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.

“The new people who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” she says. When ideas from different fields collide, Dr. Cramond says, fresh ones are generated.

Basic creativity tools used at the Torrance Center include thinking by analogy, looking for and making patterns, playing, literally, to encourage ideas, and learning to abstract problems to their essence.

students explore definitions of creativity, characteristics of creative people and strategies to enhance their own creativity.These include rephrasing problems as questions, learning not to instinctively shoot down a new idea (first find three positives), and categorizing problems as needing a solution that requires either action, planning or invention.

I describe 6 emotional styles that are rooted in basic neuroscientific research.  The 6 styles are: 1. Resilience: How rapidly or slowly do you recover from adversity? 2. Outlook: How long does positive emotion persist following a joyful event? 3. Social Intuition: How accurate are you in detecting the non-verbal social cues of others? 4. Context: Do you regulate your emotion in a context-sensitive fashion? 5. Self-Awareness: How aware are you of your own bodily signals that constitute emotion? 6. Attention: How focused or scattered in your attention?

each of these styles has arisen inductively from the large corpus of research my colleagues and I have conducted using rigorous neuroscientific methods over the past 30 years.

they can explain the constituents of commonly found personality types. 

Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies.

“It’s so powerful when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail,” Loftus said. “Especially when they express emotion. To just say, ‘Oh my god it must be true.’ But all those characteristics are also true of false memories, particularly the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional. So you need independent corroboration.”

When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory.

been able to successfully convince ordinary people that they were lost in a mall in their childhood, pointed out that false memory recollections also occur among high profile people.

All memory, as McGaugh explained, is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, “they are reconstructing,” he said. “It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true.”

“puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”

For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.

“Why did evolution do that?” McGaugh said. “Because it was essential for our survival.

We now know animals are likely susceptible to memory distortions too, as MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice.

“We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”

“but you as the writer have the obligation to get as close to the truth as you possibly can,” Meyer said

The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”

“At one point, my supervisor was so concerned that he suggested that I wear my belt backward so that a rapist would have more difficulty pulling down my pants.

With a fortune estimated at $12.5 billion, Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. His favorite topics include gene puzzles, the origins of life, the roots of autism, math and computer frontiers, basic physics and the structure of the early cosmos.

In time, his novel approach helped change how the investment world looks at financial markets. The man who “couldn’t write programs” hired a lot of programmers, as well as physicists, cryptographers, computational linguists, and, oh yes, mathematicians. Wall Street experience was frowned on. A flair for science was prized. The techies gathered financial data and used complex formulas to make predictions and trade in global markets.

Working closely with his wife, Marilyn, the president of the Simons Foundation and an economist credited with philanthropic savvy, Dr. Simons has pumped more than $1 billion into esoteric projects as well as retail offerings like the World Science Festival and a scientific lecture series at his Fifth Avenue building. Characteristically, it is open to the public.

On a wall in Dr. Simons’s office is one of his prides: a framed picture of equations known as Chern-Simons, after a paper he wrote with Shiing-Shen Chern, a prominent geometer. Four decades later, the equations define many esoteric aspects of modern physics, including advanced theories of how invisible fields like those of gravity interact with matter to produce everything from superstrings to black holes.

“He’s an individual of enormous talent and accomplishment, yet he’s completely unpretentious,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who is the president of Rockefeller University. “He manages to blend all these admirable qualities.”

Forbes magazine ranks him as the world’s 93rd richest person — ahead of Eric Schmidt of Google and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, among others — and in 2010, he and his wife were among the first billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, promising to devote “the great majority” of their wealth to philanthropy.

For all his self-deprecations, Dr. Simons does credit himself with a contemplative quality that seems to lie behind many of his accomplishments.“I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world,” Dr. Simons said of his youthful math enthusiasms. “I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”

But the students also described a sense of loss.

A 15-year-old boy told me that someday he wanted to raise a family, not the way his parents are raising him (with phones out during meals and in the park and during his school sports events) but the way his parents think they are raising him — with no phones at meals and plentiful family conversation. One college junior tried to capture what is wrong about life in his generation. “Our texts are fine,” he said. “It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together that’s the problem.”

One teacher observed that the students “sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.” Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. The old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

the trend line is clear. It’s not only that we turn away from talking face to face to chat online. It’s that we don’t allow these conversations to happen in the first place because we keep our phones in the landscape.

It’s a powerful insight. Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group. What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.

At a nightly cabin chat, a group of 14-year-old boys spoke about a recent three-day wilderness hike. Not that many years ago, the most exciting aspect of that hike might have been the idea of roughing it or the beauty of unspoiled nature. These days, what made the biggest impression was being phoneless. One boy called it “time where you have nothing to do but think quietly and talk to your friends.” The campers also spoke about their new taste for life away from the online feed. Their embrace of the virtue of disconnection suggests a crucial connection: The capacity for empathic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude.

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can’t gather ourselves, we can’t recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don’t know how to be alone, we’ll only know how to be lonely.

we have put this virtuous circle in peril. We turn time alone into a problem that needs to be solved with technology.

People sometimes say to me that they can see how one might be disturbed when people turn to their phones when they are together. But surely there is no harm when people turn to their phones when they are by themselves? If anything, it’s our new form of being together.

But this way of dividing things up misses the essential connection between solitude and conversation. In solitude we learn to concentrate and imagine, to listen to ourselves. We need these skills to be fully present in conversation.

One start toward reclaiming conversation is to reclaim solitude. Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself. Slow down sufficiently to make this possible. And make a practice of doing one thing at a time. Think of unitasking as the next big thing. In every domain of life, it will increase performance and decrease stress.

Multitasking comes with its own high, but when we chase after this feeling, we pursue an illusion. Conversation is a human way to practice unitasking.

Our phones are not accessories, but psychologically potent devices that change not just what we do but who we are. A second path toward conversation involves recognizing the degree to which we are vulnerable to all that connection offers. We have to commit ourselves to designing our products and our lives to take that vulnerability into account.

We can choose not to carry our phones all the time. We can park our phones in a room and go to them every hour or two while we work on other things or talk to other people. We can carve out spaces at home or work that are device-free, sacred spaces for the paired virtues of conversation and solitude.

Families can find these spaces in the day to day — no devices at dinner, in the kitchen and in the car.

Engineers are ready with more ideas: What if our phones were not designed to keep us attached, but to do a task and then release us? What if the communications industry began to measure the success of devices not by how much time consumers spend on them but by whether it is time well spent?

The young woman who is so clear about the seven minutes that it takes to see where a conversation is going admits that she often doesn’t have the patience to wait for anything near that kind of time before going to her phone. In this she is characteristic of what the psychologists Howard Gardner and Katie Davis called the “app generation,” which grew up with phones in hand and apps at the ready. It tends toward impatience, expecting the world to respond like an app, quickly and efficiently. The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable results.

This attitude can show up in friendship as a lack of empathy. Friendships become things to manage; you have a lot of them, and you come to them with tools

here is a first step: To reclaim conversation for yourself, your friendships and society, push back against viewing the world as one giant app. It works the other way, too: Conversation is the antidote to the algorithmic way of looking at life because it teaches you about fluidity, contingency and personality.

We have time to make corrections and remember who we are — creatures of history, of deep psychology, of complex relationships, of conversations, artless, risky and face to face.

Take ownership of the space around you, whether it’s a boardroom or a cubicle. ‘‘Say to yourself: ‘This is my room. This is my table. This is my audience,’

Don’t bother overexplaining yourself. Speak succinctly

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”