Group items tagged

In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.

The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.

the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.

The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. M.I.T.’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policy makers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.

“There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”

“My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”

Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

The website's lessons have been downloaded 800,000 times and spawned a lively online community of history educators grateful for the camaraderie

just 30 percent of the people who teach history-related courses in U.S. public high schools both majored in the field and are certified to teach it.

" By reading these challenging documents and discovering history for themselves, he says, "not only will they remember the content, they'll develop skills for life."

"Textbooks are useful as background narrative. It's difficult to talk about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution if students don't know where Vietnam is, or the Lincoln-Douglas debates if they don't know who Abe Lincoln was before he was Daniel Day-Lewis.

But when a ten-pound textbook becomes the script for a whole year's worth of instruction, a precious learning opportunity is lost. "Many students go through their entire middle and high school and never encounter the actual voice of a historical participant,"

Wineburg devoured history books as a kid and did well in Advanced Placement courses at his public high school. But when he entered Brown University, he was shocked at how ill-prepared he was in the subject. Employed after college as a high school history teacher, he saw similar weaknesses in his students. "The best ones could repeat what the text said," he recalls, "but when I asked them to critically examine whether they believed the text, I could have been speaking Martian."

Wineburg realized that the art of historical thinking is not something that comes naturally to most people; it has to be cultivated. Students have to be taught to look at the source of a document before reading it, figure out the context in which it was written, and cross-check it with other sources before coming to a conclusion.

In 2008, Reisman was ready to conduct a test of the curriculum at five schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. As expected, students in the test classes showed an increased ability to retain historical knowledge, as well as a greater appreciation for history, compared to the control group. What took everyone by surprise, though, was how much the test students advanced in basic reading.

Fremont 11th grader Ayanna Black agrees. "In other history courses I have taken, I wasn't able to fully understand what was going on. It seemed that it was just a bunch of words I had to memorize for a future test," she says. "Now that I contextualize the information I am given, it helps me understand not only what is being said but also the reason behind it." The approach, she says, "leads me to remembering the information out of curiosity, rather than trying to pass a test."

Scholars in the Stanford History Education Group hope to develop more online lesson plans in world history

The Common Core curriculum will bring radical changes in the standardized state tests that youngsters have been taking for decades. Instead of filling in multiple-choice bubbles, they will be expected to write out short answers that demonstrate their ability to analyze texts, and then cite those texts to support arguments—the exact skills that Reading Like a Historian fosters.

Wineburg and his PhD students have teamed up with the library on another project: a website called Beyond the Bubble,where teachers can learn how to evaluate their students using short written tests called History Assessments of Thinking. Each HAT asks students to consider a historical document—a letter drawn from the archives of the NAACP, for example—and justify their conclusions about it in three or four sentences. By scanning the responses, teachers can determine quickly whether their pupils are grasping basic concepts.

Wineburg hopes to make Reading Like a Historian lesson plans completely paperless, with exercise sheets that can be filled out on a laptop or tablet computer.

Though the work has been hard in history this year, she appreciates what it's taught her. "I've learned that you don't just read what is put in front of you and accept it, which is what I had been doing with my textbook all summer," she explains. "It can be frustrating to analyze documents that are contradictory, but I'm coming to appreciate that history is a collection of thousands of accounts and perspectives, and it's our job to interpret it."

What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.

Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.

psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.

Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.

Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.

While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.

“Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”

it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.

Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.

As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.

Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”

B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.

“No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”

the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.

As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.

UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.

the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.

“We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”

Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use

Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications

moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?

Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”

the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”

Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”

Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.

Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked

A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.

“The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”

Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.

Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.

one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”

The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”

These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.

The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.

Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”

After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system

“If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”

This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.

Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.

“Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”

Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention

Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.

But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.

younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.

Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones

U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.

Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.

Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school

teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping

kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.

many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful

persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments

A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.

And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.

The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.

as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids

Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.

While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school

it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.

Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.

The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.

Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives

Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”

Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”

“If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”

Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.

Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.

How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.

Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”

the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter

APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests

Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.

“Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”

Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds

Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids

similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.

in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”

I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”

The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness

Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.

Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.

It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated

The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.

John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president.

the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students.

Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion.

GWU is, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit organization. Best example: study abroad. Their top program, a partnering with Sciences Po, costs each student (30 of them, on a program with 'prestige' status?) a full semester's tuition. It costs GW, according to Sciences Po website, €1000. A neat $20,000 profit per student (who is in digging her/himself deeper and deeper in debt.) Moreover, the school takes a $500 admin fee for the study abroad application! With no guarantee that all credits transfer. Students often lose a partial semester, GW profits again. Nor does GW offer help with an antiquated, one-shot/no transfers, tricky registration process. It's tough luck in gay Paris.Just one of many examples. Dorms with extreme mold, off-campus housing impossible for freshmen and sophomores. Required meal plan: Chick-o-Filet etc. Classes with over 300 students (required).This is not Harvard, but costs same.Emotional problems? Counselors too few. Suicides continue and are not appropriately addressed. Caring environment? Extension so and so, please hold.It's an impressive campus, I'm an alum. If you apply, make sure the DC experience is worth the price: good are internships, a few colleges like Elliot School, post-grad.GWU uses undergrad $$ directly for building projects, like the medical center to which students have NO access. (Student health facility is underfunded, outsourced.)Outstanding professors still make a difference. But is that enough?

Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don’t buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer’s standpoint, isn’t just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It’s that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying.

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain.

The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from $200 million to almost $1 billion.

The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn’t quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world.

U.S. News & World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the “first tier.”

The watch and vodka analogies are correct. Personally, I used car analogies when discussing college choices with my kids. We were in the fortunate position of being able to comfortably send our kids to any college in the country and have them leave debt free. Notwithstanding, I told them that they would be going to a state school unless they were able to get into one of about 40 schools that I felt, in whatever arbitrary manner I decided, that was worth the extra cost. They both ended up going to state schools.College is by and large a commodity and you get out of it what you put into it. Both of my kids worked hard in college and were involved in school life. They both left the schools better people and the schools better schools for them being there. They are both now successful adults.I believe too many people look for the prestige of a named school and that is not what college should be primarily about.

In 2013, only 14 percent of the university’s 10,000 undergraduates received a grant — a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about $30,800 in debt.

When I talk to the best high school students in my state I always stress the benefits of the honors college experience at an affordable public university. For students who won't qualify for a public honors college. the regular pubic university experience is far preferable to the huge debt of places like GW.

Carey would do well to look beyond high ticket private universities (which after all are still private enterprises) and what he describes as the Olympian heights of higher education (which for some reason seems also to embitter him) and look at the system overall . The withdrawal of public support was never a policy choice; it was a political choice, "packaged and branded" as some tax cutting palaver all wrapped up in the argument that a free-market should decide how much college should cost and how many seats we need. In such an environment, trustees at private universities are no more solely responsible for turning their degrees into commodities than the administrations of state universities are for raising the number of out-of-state students in order to offset the loss of support from their legislatures. No doubt, we will hear more about market based solutions and technology from Mr. Carey

I went to GW back in the 60s. It was affordable and it got me away from home in New York. While I was there, Newsweek famously published a article about the DC Universities - GW, Georgetown, American and Catholic - dubbing them the Pony league, the schools for the children of wealthy middle class New Yorkers who couldn't get into the Ivy League. Nobody really complained. But that wasn't me. I went because I wanted to be where the action was in the 60s, and as we used to say - "GW was literally a stone's throw from the White House. And we could prove it." Back then, the two biggest alumni names were Jackie Kennedy, who's taken some classes there, and J. Edgar Hoover. Now, according to the glossy magazine they send me each month, it's the actress Kerry Washington. There's some sort of progress there, but I'm a GW alum and not properly trained to understand it.

More and more, I notice what my debt-financed contributions to the revenue streams of my vendors earn them, not me. My banks earned enough to pay ridiculous bonuses to employees for reckless risk-taking. My satellite tv operator earned enough to overpay ESPN for sports programming that I never watch--and that, in turn, overpays these idiotic pro athletes and college sports administrators. My health insurer earned enough to defeat one-payor insurance; to enable the opaque, inefficient billing practices of hospitals and other providers; and to feed the behemoth pharmaceutical industry. My church earned enough to buy the silence of sex abuse victims and oppose progressive political candidates. And my govt earned enough to continue ag subsidies, inefficient defense spending, and obsolete transportation and energy policies.

I attended nearby Georgetown University and graduated in 1985. Relative to state schools and elite schools, it was expensive then. I took out loans. I had Pell grants. I had work-study and GSL. I paid my debt of $15,000 off in ten years. Would I have done it differently? Yes: I would have continued on to graduate school and not worried about paying off those big loans right after college. My career work out and I am grateful for the education I received and paid for. But I would not recommend to my nieces and nephews debts north of $100,000 for a BA in liberal arts. Go community. Then go state. Then punch your ticket to Harvard, Yale or Stanford — if you are good enough.

American universities appear to have more and more drifted away from educating individuals and citizens to becoming high priced trade schools and purveyors of occupational licenses. Lost in the process is the concept of expanding a student's ability to appreciate broadly and deeply, as well as the belief that a republican democracy needs an educated citizenry, not a trained citizenry, to function well.Both the Heisman Trophy winner and the producer of a successful tech I.P.O. likely have much in common, a college education whose rewards are limited to the financial. I don't know if I find this more sad on the individual level or more worrisome for the future of America.

This is now a consumer world for everything, including institutions once thought to float above the Shakespearean briars of the work-a-day world such as higher education, law and medicine. Students get this. Parents get this. Everything is negotiable: financial aid, a spot in the nicest dorm, tix to the big game. But through all this, there are faculty - lots of 'em - who work away from the fluff to link the ambitions of the students with the reality and rigor of the 21st century. The job of the student is to get beyond the visible hype of the surroundings and find those faculty members. They will make sure your investment is worth it

My experience in managing or working with GW alumni in their 20's or 30's has not been good. Virtually all have been mentally lazy and/or had a stunning sense of entitlement. Basically they've been all talk and no results. That's been quite a contrast to the graduates from VA/MD state universities.

This explains a lot of the modern, emerging mentality. It encompasses the culture of enforced grade inflation, cheating and anti-intellectualism in much of higher education. It is consistent with our culture of misleading statistics and information, cronyism and fake quality, the "best and the brightest" being only schemers and glad handers. The wisdom and creativity engendered by an honest, rigorous academic education are replaced by the disingenuous quick fix, the winner-take-all mentality that neglects the common good.

as the parent of GWU freshman I am grateful for every opportunity afforded her. She has a generous merit scholarship, is in the honors program with some small classes, and has access to internships that can be done while at school. GWU also gave her AP credits to advance her to sophomore status. Had she attended the state flagship school (where she was accepted into that exclusive honors program) she would have a great education but little else. It's not possible to do foreign affairs related internship far from D.C. or Manhattan. She went to a very competitive high school where for the one or two ivy league schools in which she was interested, she didn't have the same level of connections or wealth as many of her peers. Whether because of the Common Application or other factors, getting into a good school with financial help is difficult for a middle class student like my daughter who had a 4.0 GPA and 2300 on the SAT. She also worked after school.The bottom line - GWU offered more money than perceived "higher tier" universities, and brought tuition to almost that of our state school system. And by the way, I think she is also getting a very good education.

This article reinforces something I have learned during my daughter's college application process. Most students choose a school based on emotion (reputation) and not value. This luxury good analogy holds up.

The entire education problem can be solved by MOOCs lots and lots of them plus a few closely monitored tests and personal interviews with people. Of course many many people make MONEY off of our entirely inefficient way of "educating" -- are we even really doing that -- getting a degree does NOT mean one is actually educated

As a first-generation college graduate I entered GW ambitious but left saddled with debt, and crestfallen at the hard-hitting realization that my four undergraduate years were an aberration from what life is actually like post-college: not as simple as getting an [unpaid] internship with a fancy titled institution, as most Colonials do. I knew how to get in to college, but what do you do after the recess of life ends?I learned more about networking, resume plumping (designated responses to constituents...errr....replied to emails), and elevator pitches than actual theory, economic principles, strong writing skills, critical thinking, analysis, and philosophy. While relatively easy to get a job after graduating (for many with a GW degree this is sadly not the case) sustaining one and excelling in it is much harder. It's never enough just to be able to open a new door, you also need to be prepared to navigate your way through that next opportunity.

this is a very telling article. Aimless and directionless high school graduates are matched only by aimless and directionless institutes of higher learning. Each child and each parent should start with a goal - before handing over their hard earned tuition dollars, and/or leaving a trail of broken debt in the aftermath of a substandard, unfocused education.

it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th.Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on “Sex and the City.” Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top-25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same.

I currently attend GW, and I have to say, this article completely misrepresents the situation. I have yet to meet a single person who is paying the full $60k tuition - I myself am paying $30k, because the school gave me $30k in grants. As for the quality of education, Foreign Policy rated GW the #8 best school in the world for undergraduate education in international affairs, Princeton Review ranks it as one of the best schools for political science, and U.S. News ranks the law school #20. The author also ignores the role that an expanding research profile plays in growing a university's prestige and educational power.

it makes me very sad to see how expensive some public schools have become. Used to be you could work your way through a public school without loans, but not any more. Like you, I had the advantage of a largely-scholarship paid undergraduate education at a top private college. However, I was also offered a virtually free spot in my state university's (then new) honors college

this is the same playbook used by hospitals the past 30 years or so. It is how Hackensack Hospital became Hackensack Medical Center and McComb Hospital became Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center. No wonder the results have been the same in healthcare and higher education; both have priced themselves out of reach for average Americans.

a world where a college is rated not by the quality of its output, but instaed, by the quality of its inputs. A world where there is practically no work to be done by the administration because the college's reputation is made before the first class even begins! This is isanity! But this is the swill that the mammoth college marketing departments nationwide have shoved down America's throat. Colleges are ranked not by the quality of their graduates, but rather, by the test scores of their incoming students!

The Pew Foundation has been doing surveys on what students learn, how much homework they do, how much time they spend with professors etc. All good stuff to know before a student chooses a school. It is called the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE - called Nessy). It turns out that the higher ranked schools do NOT allow their information to be released to the public. It is SECRET.Why do you think that is?

The article blames "the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way." This is the view of someone who has never taught at a university, nor thought much about how education there actually happens. Once undergraduates get beyond the general requirements, their educations _have_ to depend on "autonomous departments" because it's only those departments know what the requirements for given degree can be, and can grant the necessary accreditation of a given student. The idea that some administrator could know what's necessary for degrees in everything from engineering to fiction writing is nonsense, except that's what the people who only know the theory of education (but not its practice) actually seem to think. In the classroom itself, you have tremendously talented people, who nevertheless have their own particular strengths and approaches. Don't you think it's a good idea to let them do what they do best rather than trying to make everyone teach the same way? Don't you think supervision of young teachers by older colleagues, who actually know their field and its pedagogy, rather than some administrator, who knows nothing of the subject, is a good idea?

And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, “That could be me.” Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit “better” students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction — up! — and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be.

My daughter attended a good community college for a couple of classes during her senior year of high school and I could immediately see how such places are laboratories for failure. They seem like high schools in atmosphere and appearance. Students rush in by car and rush out again when the class is over.The four year residency college creates a completely different feel. On arrival, you get the sense that you are engaging in something important, something apart and one that will require your full attention. I don't say this is for everyone or that the model is not flawed in some ways (students actually only spend 2 1/2 yrs. on campus to get the four yr. degree). College is supposed to be a 60 hour per week job. Anything less than that and the student is seeking himself or herself

This. Is. STUNNING. I have always wondered, especially as my kids have approached college age, why American colleges have felt justified in raising tuition at a rate that has well exceeded inflation, year after year after year. (Nobody needs a dorm with luxury suites and a lazy river pool at college!) And as it turns out, they did it to become luxury brands. Just that simple. Incredible.I don't even blame this guy at GWU for doing what he did. He wasn't made responsible for all of American higher ed. But I do think we all need to realize what happened, and why. This is front page stuff.

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, given the choice between low tuition, primitive dorms, and no athletic center VS expensive & luxurious, the customers (and their parents) are choosing the latter. As long as this is the case, there is little incentive to provide bare-bones and cheap education.

Wesleyan University in CT is one school that is moving down the rankings. Syracuse University is another. Reed College is a third. Why? Because these schools try hard to stay out of the marketing game. (With its new president, Syracuse has jumped back into the game.) Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia hasn't fared well over the past few decades in the rankings, which is true of practically every women's college. Wellesley is by far the highest ranked women's college, but even there the acceptance rate is significantly higher than one finds at comparable coed liberal arts colleges like Amherst & Williams. University of Chicago is another fascinating case for Mr. Carey to study (I'm sure he does in his forthcoming book, which I look forward to reading). Although it has always enjoyed an illustrious academic reputation, until recently Chicago's undergraduate reputation paled in comparison to peer institutions on the two coasts. A few years ago, Chicago changed its game plan to more closely resemble Harvard and Stanford in undergraduate amenities, and lo and behold, its rankings shot up. It was a very cynical move on the president's part to reassemble the football team, but it was a shrewd move because athletics draw more money than academics ever can (except at engineering schools like Cal Tech & MIT), and more money draws richer students from fancier secondary schools with higher test scores, which lead to higher rankings - and the beat goes on.

College INDUSTRY is out of control. Sorry, NYU, GW, BU are not worth the price. Are state schools any better? We have the University of Michigan, which is really not a state school, but a university that gives a discount to people who live in Michigan. Why? When you have an undergraduate body 40+% out-of-state that pays tuition of over $50K/year, you tell me?Perhaps the solution is two years of community college followed by two at places like U of M or Michigan State - get the same diploma at the end for much less and beat the system.

In one recent yr., the majority of undergrad professors at Harvard, according to Boston.com, where adjuncts. That means low pay, no benefits, no office, temp workers. Harvard.Easily available student loans fueled this arms race of amenities and frills that in which colleges now engage. They moved the cost of education onto the backs of people, kids, who don't understand what they are doing.Students in colleges these days are customers and the customers must be able to get through. If it requires dumbing things down, so be it. On top of tuition, G.W. U. is known by its students as the land of added fees on top of added fees. The joke around campus was that they would soon be installing pay toilets in the student union. No one was laughing.

You could written the same story about my alma mater, American University. The place reeked of ambition and upward mobility decades ago and still does. Whoever's running it now must look at its measly half-billion-dollar endowment and compare it to GWU's $1.5 billion and seethe with envy, while GWU's president sets his sights on an Ivy League-size endowment. And both get back to their real jobs: 24/7 fundraising,Which is what university presidents are all about these days. Money - including million-dollar salaries for themselves (GWU's president made more than Harvard's in 2011) - pride, cachet, power, a mansion, first-class all the way. They should just be honest about it and change their university's motto to Ostende mihi pecuniam! (please excuse my questionable Latin)Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess - if they do, it's thanks to the professors, adjuncts and the administrative staff, who do the actual work of educating and keep the school running.

When I was in HS (70s), many of my richer friends went to GW and I was then of the impression that GW was a 'good' school. As I age, I have come to realize that this place is just another façade to the emptiness that has become America. All too often are we faced with a dilemma: damned if we do, damned if we don't. Yep, 'education' has become a trap for all too many of our citizen.

I transferred to GWU from a state school. I am forever grateful that I did. I wanted to get a good rigorous education and go to one of the best International Affairs schools in the world. Even though the state school I went to was dirt-cheap, the education and the faculty was awful. I transferred to GW and was amazed at the professors at that university. An ambassador or a prominent IA scholar taught every class. GW is an expensive school, but that is the free market. If you want a good education you need to be willing to pay for it or join the military. I did the latter and my school was completely free with no debt and I received an amazing education. If young people aren't willing to make some sort of sacrifice to get ahead or just expect everything to be given to then our country is in a sad state.We need to stop blaming universities like GWU that strive to attract better students, better professors, and better infrastructure. They are doing what is expected in America, to better oneself.

"Whether the students are actually learning anything is up to them, I guess." How could it possibly be otherwise??? I am glad that you are willing to give credit to teachers and administrators, but it is not they who "do the actual work of educating." From this fallacy comes its corollary, that we should blame teachers first for "under-performing schools". This long-running show of scapegoating may suit the wallets and vanity of American parents, but it is utterly senseless. When, if ever, American culture stops reeking of arrogance, greed and anti-intellectualism, things may improve, and we may resume the habit of bothering to learn. Until then, nothing doing.

Universities sell knowledge and grade students on how much they have learned. Fundamentally, there is conflict of interest in thsi setup. Moreover, students who are poorly educated, even if they know this, will not criticize their school, because doing so would make it harder for them to have a career. As such, many problems with higher education remain unexposed to the public.

I've lectured and taught in at least five different countries in three continents and the shortest perusal of what goes on abroad would totally undermine most of these speculations. For one thing American universities are unique in their dedication to a broad based liberal arts type education. In France, Italy or Germany, for example, you select a major like mathematics or physics and then in your four years you will not take even one course in another subject. The amount of work that you do that is critically evaluated by an instructor is a tiny fraction of what is done in an American University. While half educated critics based on profoundly incomplete research write criticism like this Universities in Germany Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Japan as well as France have appointed committees and made studies to explain why the American system of higher education so drastically outperforms their own system. Elsewhere students do get a rather nice dose of general education but it ends in secondary school and it has the narrowness and formulaic quality that we would just normally associate with that. The character who wrote this article probably never set foot on a "campus" of the University of Paris or Rome

This is the inevitable result of privatizing higher education. In the not-so-distant past, we paid for great state universities through our taxes, not tuition. Then, the states shifted funding to prisons and the Federal government radically cut research support and the GI bill. Instead, today we expect universities to support themselves through tuition, and to the extent that we offered students support, it is through non-dischargeable loans. To make matters worse, the interest rates on those loans are far above the government's cost of funds -- so in effect the loans are an excise tax on education (most of which is used to support a handful of for-profit institutions that account for the most student defaults). This "consumer sovereignty" privatized model of funding education works no better than privatizing California's electrical system did in the era of Enron, or our privatized funding of medical service, or our increasingly privatized prison system: it drives up costs at the same time that it replace quality with marketing.

The university is part of a complex economic system and it is responding to the demands of that system. For example, students and parents choose universities that have beautiful campuses and buildings. So universities build beautiful campuses. State support of universities has greatly declined, and this decline in funding is the greatest cause of increased tuition. Therefore universities must compete for dollars and must build to attract students and parents. Also, universities are not ranked based on how they educate students -- that's difficult to measure so it is not measured. Instead universities are ranked on research publications. So while universities certainly put much effort into teaching, research has to have a priority in order for the university to survive. Also universities do not force students and parents to attend high price institutions. Reasonably priced state institutions and community colleges are available to every student. Community colleges have an advantage because they are funded by property taxes. Finally learning requires good teaching, but it also requires students that come to the university funded, prepared, and engaged. This often does not happen. Conclusion- universities have to participate in profile raising actions in order to survive. The day that funding is provided for college, ranking is based on education, and students choose campuses with simple buildings, then things will change at the university.

There are data in some instances on student learning, but the deeper problem, as I suspect the author already knows, is that there is nothing like a consensus on how to measure that learning, or even on when is the proper end point to emphasize (a lot of what I teach -- I know this from what students have told me -- tends to come into sharp focus years after graduation).

Michael (Baltimore) has hit the nail on the head. Universities are increasingly corporatized institutions in the credentialing business. Knowledge, for those few who care about it (often not those paying for the credentials) is available freely because there's no profit in it. Like many corporate entities, it is increasingly run by increasingly highly paid administrators, not faculty.

GWU has not defined itself in any unique way, it has merely embraced the bland, but very expensive, accoutrements of American private education: luxury dorms, food courts, spa-like gyms, endless extracurricular activities, etc. But the real culprit for this bloat that students have to bear financially is the college ranking system by US News, Princeton Review, etc. An ultimately meaningless exercise in competition that has nevertheless pushed colleges and universities to be more like one another. A sad state of affairs, and an extremely expensive one for students

It is long past time to realize the failure of the Reagonomics-neoliberal private profits over public good program. In education, we need to return to public institutions publicly funded. Just as we need to recognize that Medicare, Social Security, the post office, public utilities, fire departments, interstate highway system, Veterans Administration hospitals and the GI bill are models to be improved and expanded, not destroyed.

George Washington is actually not a Rolex watch, it is a counterfeit Rolex. The real Rolexes of higher education -- places like Hopkins, Georgetown, Duke, the Ivies etc. -- have real endowments and real financial aid. No middle class kid is required to borrow $100,000 to get a degree from those schools, because they offer generous need-based financial aid in the form of grants, not loans. The tuition at the real Rolexes is really a sticker price that only the wealthy pay -- everybody else on a sliding scale. For middle class kids who are fortunate enough to get in, Penn actually ends up costing considerably less than a state university.The fake Rolexes -- BU, NYU, Drexel in Philadelphia -- don't have the sliding scale. They bury middle class students in debt.And really, though it is foolish to borrow $100,000 or $120,000 for an undergraduate degree, I don't find the transaction morally wrong. What is morally wrong is our federal government making that loan non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, so many if these kids will be having their wages garnished for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.There is a very simple solution to this, by the way. Cap the amount of non-dischargeable student loan debt at, say, $50,000

The slant of this article is critical of the growth of research universities. Couldn't disagree more. Modern research universities create are incredibly engines of economic opportunity not only for the students (who pay the bills) but also for the community via the creation of blue and white collar jobs. Large research university employ tens of thousands of locals from custodial and food service workers right up to high level administrators and specialist in finance, computer services, buildings and facilities management, etc. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland system employ more people than any other industry in Maryland -- including the government. Research universities typically have hospitals providing cutting-edge medical care to the community. Local business (from cafes to property rental companies) benefit from a built-in, long-term client base as well as an educated workforce. And of course they are the foundry of new knowledge which is critical for the future growth of our country.Check out the work of famed economist Dr. Julia Lane on modeling the economic value of the research university. In a nutshell, there are few better investments America can make in herself than research universities. We are the envy of the world in that regard -- and with good reason. How many *industries* (let alone jobs) have Stanford University alone catalyzed?

What universities have the monopoly on is the credential. Anyone can learn, from books, from free lectures on the internet, from this newspaper, etc. But only universities can endow you with the cherished degree. For some reason, people are will to pay more for one of these pieces of paper with a certain name on it -- Ivy League, Stanford, even GW -- than another -- Generic State U -- though there is no evidence one is actually worth more in the marketplace of reality than the other. But, by the laws of economics, these places are actually underpriced: after all, something like 20 times more people are trying to buy a Harvard education than are allowed to purchase one. Usually that means you raise your price.

Overalll a good article, except for - "This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s “Academically Adrift,” a study that found “limited or no learning” among many college students." The measure of learning you report was a general thinking skills exam. That's not a good measure of college gains. Most psychologists and cognitive scientists worth their salt would tell you that improvement in critical thinking skills is going to be limited to specific areas. In other words, learning critical thinking skills in math will make little change in critical thinking about political science or biology. Thus we should not expect huge improvements in general critical thinking skills, but rather improvements in a student's major and other areas of focus, such as a minor. Although who has time for a minor when it is universally acknowledged that the purpose of a university is to please and profit an employer or, if one is lucky, an investor. Finally, improved critical thinking skills are not the end all and be all of a college education even given this profit centered perspective. Learning and mastering the cumulative knowledge of past generations is arguably the most important thing to be gained, and most universities still tend to excel at that even with the increasing mandate to run education like a business and cultivate and cull the college "consumer".

As for community colleges, there was an article in the Times several years ago that said it much better than I could have said it myself: community colleges are places where dreams are put on hold. Without making the full commitment to study, without leaving the home environment, many, if not most, community college students are caught betwixt and between, trying to balance work responsibilities, caring for a young child or baby and attending classes. For males, the classic "end of the road" in community college is to get a car, a job and a girlfriend, one who is not in college, and that is the end of the dream. Some can make it, but most cannot.

as a scientist I disagree with the claim that undergrad tuition subsidizes basic research. Nearly all lab equipment and research personnel (grad students, technicians, anyone with the title "research scientist" or similar) on campus is paid for through federal grants. Professors often spend all their time outside teaching and administration writing grant proposals, as the limited federal grant funds mean ~%85 of proposals must be rejected. What is more, out of each successful grant the university levies a "tax", called "overhead", of 30-40%, nominally to pay for basic operations (utilities, office space, administrators). So in fact one might say research helps fund the university rather than the other way around. Flag

It's certainly overrated as a research and graduate level university. Whether it is good for getting an undergraduate education is unclear, but a big part of the appeal is getting to live in D.C..while attending college instead of living in some small college town in the corn fields.

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.”

Americans want to avoid negative states of mind more than Germans do.

Cultural differences in how much people want to avoid negative emotions play a key role in how Americans and Germans feel about focusing on the negative rather than the positive when expressing sympathy.

When people desire to avoid negative emotions, they focus less on the negative and more on the positive when responding to another person's suffering.

suffering, according to the researchers. However, until now, Tsai said, no studies have specifically examined how culture shapes "different ways in which sympathy, compassion or other feelings of concern for another's suffering might be expressed."

Unlike when Americans talk about illness, Germans primarily focus on the negative, Tsai and Koopmann-Holm wrote. For example, the "Sturm und Drang" ("Storm and Drive") literary and musical movement in 18th-century Germany went beyond merely accepting negative emotions to actually glorifying them.

Long lives are not the problem. The problem is living in cultures designed for lives half as long as the ones we have.

Retirements that span four decades are unattainable for most individuals and governments; education that ends in the early 20s is ill-suited for longer working lives; and social norms that dictate intergenerational responsibilities between parents and young children fail to address families that include four or five living generations.

Last year, the Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called “The New Map of Life.”

it would be a mistake to replace the old rigid model of life — education first, then family and work, and finally retirement — with a new model just as rigid

there should be many different routes, interweaving leisure, work, education and family throughout life, taking people from birth to death with places to stop, rest, change courses and repeat steps along the way.

To thrive in an age of rapid knowledge transfer, children not only need reading, math and computer literacy, but they also need to learn to think creatively and not hold on to “facts” too tightly. They’ll need to find joy in unlearning and relearning.

Teens could take breaks from high school and take internships in workplaces that intrigue them. Education wouldn’t end in youth but rather be ever-present and take many forms outside of classrooms, from micro-degrees to traveling the world.

There is good reason to think we will work longer, but we can improve work quality with shorter workweeks, flexible scheduling and frequent “retirements.”

Rather than saving ever-larger pots of money for the end of life, we could pool risks in new ways

Generations may share wealth earlier than traditional bequests; we can start savings accounts at birth and allow young adults to work earlier so that compound interest can work in their favor.

Maintaining physical fitness from the beginning to end of life will be paramount. Getting children outside, encouraging sports, reducing the time we sit, and spending more time walking and moving will greatly improve individual lives.

Mr. Obama starts where most lawmakers are stuck: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms immunity from legal liability for most third-party posts. He suggested a “higher standard of care” for ads than for so-called organic content that everyday users post. This would strike a sensible balance between eviscerating Section 230, making sites accountable for everything they host, and doing nothing.

On top of that, “an instant, 24/7 global information stream,” from which audiences can pick and choose material that confirms their biases, has deepened the social divides that bad actors seek to exploit.

Mr. Obama identified another problem with the Section 230 talk: homing in on what material platforms do and don’t take down risks missing how the “very design” of these sites privileges polarizing, inflammatory posts.

With this, Mr. Obama adds something vital to the mainstream debate over social media regulation, shifting attention away from a debate about whack-a-mole content removal and toward the sites’ underlying structures. His specific suggestions, while fuzzy, also have promise — from slowing down viral material to imposing transparency obligations that would subject social media companies’ algorithms to scrutiny from researchers and regulators.

Mr. Obama calls this “democratic oversight.” But the material companies reveal could be highly technical. Ideally, it would get translated into layman’s terms so that everyday people, too, can understand how decisions so significant in their daily lives and the life of the country are made.

The great problem of our shared social existence is not wanting things, it’s wanting things because they are someone else’s.

Desire for what the other person has brings about a situation in which individuals in a community grow more similar to one another over time in a process of competition-cum-emulation. Such dual-natured social encounters, more precisely, are typical of people who are socially more or less equal

In relation to a movie star who does not even know some average schlub exists, that schlub can experience only emulation (this is what Girard calls “external mediation”), but in relation to a fellow schlub down the street (a “neighbor” in the Girardian-Biblical sense), emulation is a much more intimate affair (“internal mediation”, Girard calls it)

This is the moment of what Girard calls “mimetic crisis”, which is resolved by the selection of a scapegoat, whose casting-out from the community has the salvific effect of unifying the opposed but undifferentiated doubles

In a community in which the mimetic mechanism has led to widespread non-differentiation, or in other words to a high degree of conformity, it can however happen that scapegoating approaches something like the horror scenario in Shirley Jackson’s 1948 tale, “The Lottery”

As a modest theory of the anthropology of punishment, these observations have some promise.

he is a practically-minded person’s idea of what a theorist is like. Girard himself appears to share in this idea: a theorist for him is someone who comes up with a simple, elegant account of how everything works, and spends a whole career driving that account home.

Girard is not your typical French intellectual. He is a would-be French civil-servant archivist gone rogue, via Bloomington, Baltimore, Buffalo, and finally at Stanford, where his individual brand of New World self-reinvention would be well-received by some in the Silicon Valley subculture of, let us say, hyper-Whitmanian intellectual invention and reinvention.

Most ritual, in fact, strikes me as characterized by imitation without internal mediation or scapegoating.

I do not see anything more powerfully explanatory of this phenomenon in the work of Girard than in, say, Roland Barthes’s analysis of haute-couture in his ingenious 1967 System of Fashion, or for that matter Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption, or indeed any number of other authors who have noticed that indubitable truth of human existence: that we copy each other

whatever has money behind it will inevitably have intelligent-looking people at least pretending to take it seriously, and with the foundation of the Imitatio Project by the Thiel Foundation (executive director Jimmy Kaltreider, a principal at Thiel Capital), the study and promotion of Girardian mimetic theory is by now a solid edifice in the intellectual landscape of California.

with Girard what frustrates me even more is that he does not seem to detect the non-mimetic varieties of desire

Perhaps even more worrisome for Girard’s mimetic theory is that it appears to leave out all those instances in which imitation serves as a force for social cohesion and cannot plausibly be said to involve any process of “internal mediation” leading to a culmination in scapegoating

the idea that anything Girard has to say might be particularly well-suited to adaptation as a “business philosophy” is entirely without merit.

dancing may be given ritual meaning — a social significance encoded by human bodies doing the same thing simultaneously, and therefore in some sense becoming identical, but without any underlying desire at all to annihilate one another. It is this significance that the Australian poet Les Murray sees as constituting the essence of both poetry and religion: both are performed, as he puts it, “in loving repetition”.

There are different kinds of theorist, of course, and there is plenty of room for all of us. It is however somewhat a shame that the everything-explainers, the hammerers for whom all is nail, should be the ones so consistently to capture the popular imagination

Part of Girard’s appeal in the Silicon Valley setting lies not only in his totalizing urge, but also in his embrace of a certain interpretation of Catholicism that stresses the naturalness of hierarchy, all the way up to the archangels, rather than the radical egalitarianism of other tendencies within this faith

Girard explains that the positive reception in France of his On Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World had to do with the widespread misreading of it as a work of anti-Christian theory. “If they had known that there is no hostility in me towards the Church, they would have dismissed me. I appeared as the heretic, the revolted person that one has to be in order to reassure the media

Peter Thiel, for his part, certainly does not seem to feel oppressed by western phallocracy either — in fact he appears intent on coming out somewhere at the top of the phallocratic order, and in any case has explicitly stated that the aspirations of liberal democracy towards freedom and equality for all should rightly be seen as a thing of the past. In his demotic glosses on Girard, the venture capitalist also seems happy to promote the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order.

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina

states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).

“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned

The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.

The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”

Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,

cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”

The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive

My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.

Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.

Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.

If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?

Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?

As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals

She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals

Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.

Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.

Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values

conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”

Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.

For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).

Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.

We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)

Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.

A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.

What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them

Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).

Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world

Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.

I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?

There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio

I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:

t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier

They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.

Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.

Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?

It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”

While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.

there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:

While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments

For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.

Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.

We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”

In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”

Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.

“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective

In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:

society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.

The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”

The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.

or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio

Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio

Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.

Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.

The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges

— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.

in general what he argues is that if you take a look at animal cognition, human too, it's computational systems. Therefore, you want to look the units of computation. Think about a Turing machine, say, which is the simplest form of computation, you have to find units that have properties like "read", "write" and "address." That's the minimal computational unit, so you got to look in the brain for those. You're never going to find them if you look for strengthening of synaptic connections or field properties, and so on. You've got to start by looking for what's there and what's working and you see that from Marr's highest level.

it's basically in the spirit of Marr's analysis. So when you're studying vision, he argues, you first ask what kind of computational tasks is the visual system carrying out. And then you look for an algorithm that might carry out those computations and finally you search for mechanisms of the kind that would make the algorithm work. Otherwise, you may never find anything.

"Good Old Fashioned AI," as it's labeled now, made strong use of formalisms in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, mathematical logic for example, or derivatives of it, like nonmonotonic reasoning and so on. It's interesting from a history of science perspective that even very recently, these approaches have been almost wiped out from the mainstream and have been largely replaced -- in the field that calls itself AI now -- by probabilistic and statistical models. My question is, what do you think explains that shift and is it a step in the right direction?

AI and robotics got to the point where you could actually do things that were useful, so it turned to the practical applications and somewhat, maybe not abandoned, but put to the side, the more fundamental scientific questions, just caught up in the success of the technology and achieving specific goals.

The approximating unanalyzed data kind is sort of a new approach, not totally, there's things like it in the past. It's basically a new approach that has been accelerated by the existence of massive memories, very rapid processing, which enables you to do things like this that you couldn't have done by hand. But I think, myself, that it is leading subjects like computational cognitive science into a direction of maybe some practical applicability... ..in engineering? Chomsky: ...But away from understanding.

I was very skeptical about the original work. I thought it was first of all way too optimistic, it was assuming you could achieve things that required real understanding of systems that were barely understood, and you just can't get to that understanding by throwing a complicated machine at it.

if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won't get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at -- what you'll get at is an approximation to what's happening.

Suppose you want to predict tomorrow's weather. One way to do it is okay I'll get my statistical priors, if you like, there's a high probability that tomorrow's weather here will be the same as it was yesterday in Cleveland, so I'll stick that in, and where the sun is will have some effect, so I'll stick that in, and you get a bunch of assumptions like that, you run the experiment, you look at it over and over again, you correct it by Bayesian methods, you get better priors. You get a pretty good approximation of what tomorrow's weather is going to be. That's not what meteorologists do -- they want to understand how it's working. And these are just two different concepts of what success means, of what achievement is.

if you get more and more data, and better and better statistics, you can get a better and better approximation to some immense corpus of text, like everything in The Wall Street Journal archives -- but you learn nothing about the language.

the right approach, is to try to see if you can understand what the fundamental principles are that deal with the core properties, and recognize that in the actual usage, there's going to be a thousand other variables intervening -- kind of like what's happening outside the window, and you'll sort of tack those on later on if you want better approximations, that's a different approach.

take a concrete example of a new field in neuroscience, called Connectomics, where the goal is to find the wiring diagram of very complex organisms, find the connectivity of all the neurons in say human cerebral cortex, or mouse cortex. This approach was criticized by Sidney Brenner, who in many ways is [historically] one of the originators of the approach. Advocates of this field don't stop to ask if the wiring diagram is the right level of abstraction -- maybe it's no

if you went to MIT in the 1960s, or now, it's completely different. No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it. But that's a very different approach. And it resulted maybe from the fact that really for the first time in history, the basic sciences, like physics, had something really to tell engineers. And besides, technologies began to change very fast, so not very much point in learning the technologies of today if it's going to be different 10 years from now. So you have to learn the fundamental science that's going to be applicable to whatever comes along next. And the same thing pretty much happened in medicine.

that's the kind of transition from something like an art, that you learn how to practice -- an analog would be trying to match some data that you don't understand, in some fashion, maybe building something that will work -- to science, what happened in the modern period, roughly Galilean science.

it turns out that there actually are neural circuits which are reacting to particular kinds of rhythm, which happen to show up in language, like syllable length and so on. And there's some evidence that that's one of the first things that the infant brain is seeking -- rhythmic structures. And going back to Gallistel and Marr, its got some computational system inside which is saying "okay, here's what I do with these things" and say, by nine months, the typical infant has rejected -- eliminated from its repertoire -- the phonetic distinctions that aren't used in its own language.

people like Shimon Ullman discovered some pretty remarkable things like the rigidity principle. You're not going to find that by statistical analysis of data. But he did find it by carefully designed experiments. Then you look for the neurophysiology, and see if you can find something there that carries out these computations. I think it's the same in language, the same in studying our arithmetical capacity, planning, almost anything you look at. Just trying to deal with the unanalyzed chaotic data is unlikely to get you anywhere, just like as it wouldn't have gotten Galileo anywhere.

with regard to cognitive science, we're kind of pre-Galilean, just beginning to open up the subject

You can invent a world -- I don't think it's our world -- but you can invent a world in which nothing happens except random changes in objects and selection on the basis of external forces. I don't think that's the way our world works, I don't think it's the way any biologist thinks it is. There are all kind of ways in which natural law imposes channels within which selection can take place, and some things can happen and other things don't happen. Plenty of things that go on in the biology in organisms aren't like this. So take the first step, meiosis. Why do cells split into spheres and not cubes? It's not random mutation and natural selection; it's a law of physics. There's no reason to think that laws of physics stop there, they work all the way through. Well, they constrain the biology, sure. Chomsky: Okay, well then it's not just random mutation and selection. It's random mutation, selection, and everything that matters, like laws of physics.

What I think is valuable is the history of science. I think we learn a lot of things from the history of science that can be very valuable to the emerging sciences. Particularly when we realize that in say, the emerging cognitive sciences, we really are in a kind of pre-Galilean stage. We don't know wh

at we're looking for anymore than Galileo did, and there's a lot to learn from that.

Haidt’s experimentalist critique of Plato misses its mark because he ignores what Plato actually thought in favor of an oversimplification of his “rationalism.” He does something similar in suggesting that Kant’s ethics reflects a personality within the autism spectrum. Likewise, he implausibly suggests that John Rawls can be refuted by surveys showing that people do not share the judgments Rawls thinks we would make in the fictional situation of his “original position.”

Haidt’s own discussion requires him to move beyond empirical studies and in the direction of traditional philosophy.

But the great philosophers — Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche — describe moral experiences far more carefully and subtly than most of us can, and moreover, they provide historical perspectives that can help offset the limitations of our own limited viewpoint.

Haidt acknowledges that his concern as a psychologist is overwhelmingly descriptive.  But he says almost nothing about how to connect his work with the compelling normative questions of human life.  Engaging with the extensive philosophical discussions of Hume’s distinction between “is” and “ought” could help fill this major gap in Haidt’s account of ethics

I begin by reflecting on Haidt’s effort to refute Plato’s central argument in “The Republic.”  This is where Plato tries to show why a just (morally good) life is superior to an unjust (immoral) life.

Haidt pithily summarizes Socrates’ argument: “Reason must rule the happy person. And if reason rules, then it cares about what is truly good, not just about the appearance of virtue.” He maintains that Socrates goes wrong because he assumes a false view of the role of reason in human life. ”Reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth,” where justification means pursuing “socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us.”

Haidt supports his claim about the actual role of reason with an array of fascinating psychological experiments cumulatively showing that “Glaucon was right: people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality,” and use reason accordingly.

Haidt’s psychological studies count against Plato only if we take them as denying any chance of rational control and allowing no alternative to a life dominated by our immediate inclinations — our “gut reactions,” as Haidt puts it. But Haidt makes no such claim, saying only, “we should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play.”

Nevertheless, he adds, “if you put individuals together in the right way … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent product of the social system.”

This mentality is understandable when we consider what innocent victims truly symbolize in our society. It’s hard for parents, or for anyone, to acknowledge that their children could end up as victims of assault.

The overwhelming message is clear: Our best and brightest young men will at times become overzealous in their attempts to conquer the world — and if they sometimes conquer young women, it is best for everyone if we pretend it didn’t happen.

Melvin Lerner showed through his famous electric shock experiments that, even when we are first-hand witnesses to an assault on an innocent victim, we will try to discredit and derogate the victim. The more severe the assault, the greater our derogation. We simply cannot allow the reality that often, good people will find themselves the victims of senseless abuse.

That’s borne out in the way colleges handle sexual assault. While multiple studies have shown that 1 in 5 college women have been sexually assaulted on campus, students determined to be guilty of sexual assault receive only minor sanctions 75 to 90 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of convicted rapists ever see jail

, “The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable.

We do not want to acknowledge that we are raising half of our children to conquer the world while leaving the other half of our children to be conquered. We would rather focus on the victors and pretend that the victims do not exist. We as a society have created this culture, and only we can change it.

Just as the loss of a species decreases the richness of an ecosystem, the addition of new animals could achieve the opposite effect.

National Geographic Society hosted a larger conference to debate the scientific and ethical questions raised by the prospect of “de-extinction.

“De-extinction went from concept to potential reality right before our eyes,

less scientific, if more persuasive, argument was advanced by the ethicist Hank Greely and the law professor Jacob Sherkow, both of Stanford. De-extinction should be pursued, they argued in a paper published in Science, because it would be really

“This may be the biggest attraction and possibly the biggest benefit of de-extinction. It would surely be very cool to see a living woolly mammoth.”

They will replace chunks of band-tailed-pigeon DNA with synthesized chunks of passenger-pigeon DNA, until the cell’s genome matches their working passenger-pigeon genome.

Scientists predict that changes made by human beings to the composition of the atmosphere could kill off a quarter of the planet’s mammal species, a fifth of its reptiles and a sixth of its birds by 2050

This cloning method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, can be used only on species for which we have cellular material.

There is a shortcut. The genome of a closely related species will have a high proportion of identical DNA, so it can serve as a blueprint, or “scaffold.”

By comparing the fragments of passenger-pigeon DNA with the genomes of similar species, researchers can assemble an approximation of an actual passenger-pigeon genome.

As with any translation, there may be errors of grammar, clumsy phrases and perhaps a few missing passages, but the book will be legible. It should, at least, tell a good story.

the genome will have to be inscribed into a living cell.

“We’ve framed it in terms of conservation,”

MAGE (Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering). MAGE is nicknamed the “evolution machine” because it can introduce the equivalent of millions of years of genetic mutations within minutes

Developmental and behavioral biologists would take over, just in time to answer some difficult questions. Chicks imitate their parents’ behavior. How do you raise a passenger pigeon without parents of its own species? And how do you train band-tailed pigeons to nurture the strange spawn that emerge from their eggs; chicks that, to them, might seem monstrous: an avian Rosemary’s Baby?

For endangered species with tiny populations, scientists would introduce genetic diversity to offset inbreeding.

They will try to alter the birds’ diets, migration habits and environment. The behavior of each subsequent generation will more closely resemble that of their genetic cousins.

The scientific term for this type of genetic intervention is “facilitated adaptation.”

“There’s always this fear that somehow, if we do it, we’re going to accidentally make something horrible, because only nature can really do it right. But nature is totally random. Nature makes monsters. Nature makes threats. Many of the things that are most threatening to us are a product of nature. Revive & Restore is not going to tip the balance in any way.”

This optimistic, soft-focus fantasy of de-extinction, while thrilling to Ben Novak, is disturbing to many conservation biologists, who consider it a threat to their entire discipline and even to the environmental movement.

The first question posed by conservationists addresses the logic of bringing back an animal whose native habitat has disappeared. Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?

There is also anxiety about disease

“If you recreate a species genetically and release it, and that genotype is based on a bird from a 100-year-old environment, you probably will increase risk.”

For species threatened by contagion, an effort would be made to fortify their DNA with genes that make them disease-resistant

De-extinction also poses a rhetorical threat to conservation biologists. The specter of extinction has been the conservation movement’s most powerful argument. What if extinction begins to be seen as a temporary inconvenience?

De-extinction suggests that we can technofix our way out of environmental issues generally, and that’s very, very bad.

How will we decide which species to resurrect?

Philip Seddon recently published a 10-point checklist to determine the suitability of any species for revival, taking into account causes of its extinction, possible threats it might face upon resurrection and man’s ability to destroy the species “in the event of unacceptable ecological or socioeconomic impacts.”

But the most visceral argument against de-extinction is animal cruelty.

“Is it fair to do this to these animals?” Shapiro asked. “Is ‘because we feel guilty’ a good-enough reason?” Stewart Brand made a utilitarian counterargument: “We’re going to go through some suffering, because you try a lot of times, and you get ones that don’t take. On the other hand, if you can bring bucardos back, then how many would get to live that would not have gotten to live?”

In “How to Permit Your Mammoth,” published in The Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Norman F. Carlin asks whether revived species should be protected by the Endangered Species Act or regulated as a genetically modified organism.

He concludes that revived species, “as products of human ingenuity,” should be eligible for patenting.

The term “de-extinction” is misleading. Passenger pigeons will not rise from the grave

Our understanding of the passenger pigeon’s behavior derives entirely from historical accounts.

There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions.