When it comes to designing things in our physical world, we all understand how flawed we are and design the physical world around us accordingly.

What I find amazing is that when it comes to designing the mental and cognitive realm, we somehow assume that human beings are without bounds. We cling to the idea that we are fully rational beings, and that, like mental Supermen, we can figure out anything. Why are we so readily willing to admit to our physical limitations but are unwilling to take our cognitive limitations into account?

To start with, our physical limitations stare us in the face all the time; but our cognitive limitations are not as obvious. A second reason is that we have a desire to see ourselves as perfectly capable — an impossibility in the physical domain. And perhaps a final reason why we don’t see our cognitive limitations is that maybe we have all bought into standard economics a little too much.

Miller has now had the superb idea of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, while simultaneously using this model to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value. He covers 12 philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Laertius), Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. In each case, he explores the life selectively, looking for “crux” points and investigating how ideas of the philosophical life have changed.

Miller concludes that his 12 philosophical lives offer a moral that is “neither simple nor uniformly edifying.” It amounts mainly to the idea that philosophy can offer little or no consolation, and that the examined life is, if anything, “harder and less potentially rewarding” for us than it was for Socrates.

a database of words from millions of books digitized by Google—4 percent of all books ever printed—could be one of the big ones. It's a fabulous source of ideas and evidence for theories about society, and it's fabulously democratic. Google offers a handy analyzer, the Ngram Viewer, which anyone can use to test an idea. A case in point: Yesterday, the social psychologist Rob Kurzban argued that the tool can distinguish between genuine scientific theories and intellectual fads.

Wilson's student Dan O'Brien was researching cooperative behavior in a local primate species called the Binghamton, N.Y. high-school student. The higher a neighborhood's median income, O'Brien found, the less cooperative were its teen-agers.

The fact that cooperativeness varies from culture to culture, Wilson writes, suggests an explanation: Human nature doesn't have a single default setting for helpfulness and respect. Instead, we have the capacity to learn how trusting, how open, and how generous to be with others. If you hunt whales in a tightly cooperating team, you learn to cooperate readily. If you farm a hardscrabble patch of dirt with only your near relatives to help, you're much more likely to want to screw over your fellow man.

Wilson suggests that the comforts of affluence are atrophying people's propensity to band with others to work for the common good. If you don't practice this social skill, he argues, it will go away. "Those of us who can pay with our credit cards don’t need to cooperate," he writes, "and so we forget how."

Neurologically, how does our brain adapt itself to new technologies? Nicholas Carr: A couple of types of adaptations take place in your brain. One is a strengthening of the synaptical connections between the neurons involved in using that instrument, in using that tool. And basically these are chemical – neural chemical changes. So you know, cells in our brain communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them and those electrical signals are actually activated by the exchange of chemicals, neurotransmitters in our synapses. And so when you begin to use a tool, for instance, you have much stronger electrochemical signals being processed in those – through those synaptical connections. And then the second, and even more interesting adaptation is in actual physical changes,anatomical changes. Your neurons, you may grow new neurons that are then recruited into these circuits or your existing neurons may grow new synaptical terminals. And again, that also serves to strengthen the activity in those, in those particular pathways that are being used – new pathways. On the other hand, you know, the brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you’re exercising, it’s pulling – it’s weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you’re not exercising so much.

And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around 1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading.

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thinggoing on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

As Ezra Klein of The Washington Post noted recently, this turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions Obama and Reid made. If Lieberman had not been welcomed back by the Democrats, there might not have been a 60th vote for health care reform, and it would have failed. There certainly would have been no victory for “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal without Lieberman’s tireless work and hawkish credentials. The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill came closer to passage than any other energy bill. Lieberman also provided crucial support or a swing vote for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the stimulus bill, the banking bill, the unemployment extension and several other measures.

These policy makers are judging Lieberman by the criteria Max Weber called the “ethic of responsibility” — who will produce the best consequences. Some of the activists are judging him by what Weber called an “ethic of intention” — who has the purest and most uncompromising heart.

He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

A blogger will feel anger from time to time - and should express it

The difficult task is summoning the right amount of anger with the right amount of generosity of spirit.

their experiments “provide clear evidence that Chaser acquired referential understanding of nouns, an ability normally attributed to children.”

Dr. Kaminski said she would not go as far as saying that Chaser’s accomplishments are a step toward language. They show that the dog can combine words for different actions with words for objects. A step toward syntax, she said, would be to show that changing the order of words alters the meaning that Chaser ascribes to them.

His goal is to develop methods that will help increase communication between people and dogs. “We are interested in teaching Chaser a receptive, rudimentary language,” he said.

The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces.

If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.

Using Christ's page as a guide to the online encyclopedia's ten-year history.

a model is a metaphor. Not every economist understands that. Poetry can fill the gap between reason and emotion, adding feelings to economics.

“Generally speaking, a people’s metaphors and figures of speech will come out of their basic economy,” Knight continues: If somebody lives near the ocean and they fish, their language will be full of those metaphors. If people are farmers, they will use that kind of figure of speech. Metaphors are alive. When they come into being, they are informed by the politics and the sociology and the economy of now. That’s how language is.

Philosophy, among other things, is that living activity of critical reflection in a specific context, by which human beings strive to analyze the world in which they find themselves, and to question what passes for common sense or public opinion — what Socrates called doxa — in the particular society in which they live.

Philosophy, as the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell puts it, is the education of grownups.

As it functions in society, philosophy can also provide a method for debunking the many myths and ideologies that we live by and propose alternative conceptual or normative frameworks for thinking about concepts — justice, truth, freedom, the mind, science, religion — all of which have been debated over the past months in The Stone. Hegel says that philosophy can allow us to comprehend our time in thought. But it can also — perhaps more importantly — allow us to resist our time, to ask untimely questions, difficult, intractable and unfashionable questions. Nietzsche writes in a very late text, where he is still trying to wrestle himself free from the spell of his fascination with the composer Richard Wagner: What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.” With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as a child of his time. Well, then I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a decadent. But I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.

As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

In Dr. De Dreu’s experiments, the five people who might be saved were nameless, but the sacrificial victim had either a Dutch or a Muslim name. Subjects who had taken oxytocin were far more likely to sacrifice the Muhammads than the Maartens.

Dr. De Dreu plans to investigate whether oxytocin mediates other social behaviors that evolutionary psychologists think evolved in early human groups. Besides loyalty to one’s own group, there would also have been survival advantages in rewarding cooperation and punishing deviants. Oxytocin, if it underlies these behaviors too, would perhaps have helped ancient populations set norms of behavior.

“As with so many of life’s experiences, humans are simply not very good at predicting how they’ll behave when hit by a real adversity,”

no one can reliably predict who will move on quickly and who will lapse into longer-term despair.

the number of life blows a person has taken may affect his or her mental toughness more than any other factor.

Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.” Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games? Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,”

This strange, unique, beautiful movie opened my eyes to the world around me, forced me to consider my place in that world, and has had the most profound effect on the way I’ve lived my life since.

Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face.

Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

television forces those who appear on it to argue "directly, and pointedly, in a short amount of time." This shapes how debates unfold because "concision actually favors the spouting of conventional thinking."

What if a television network tried to run a debate show like the back-and-forths that sometimes occur in print?

if executed correctly, the quality of argument and entertainment would be far better than any of the talking head exchanges currently broadcast on cable.

writing is fundamentally about the final draft. It's not like writing code, say, where recording one's every change is standard practice

Readers could use it to find places where you massaged the facts; they'd be able to see you struggle with simple structural problems; they'd watch, horrified, as you replaced an audacious idea, or character, or construction, with a commonplace.