Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In other words, the invisible hand did not solve the problem of politics by making politics altogether unnecessary. “We don’t think government can solve all our problems,” President Obama said in his convention address, “But we don’t think that government is the source of all our problems.” Smith would have appreciated this formulation. For him, whether government should get out of the way in any given matter, economic or otherwise, was a question for considered judgment abetted by scientific inquiry.

politics is a practical venture, and Smith distrusted those statesmen who confused their work with an exercise in speculative philosophy. Their proposals should be judged not by the delusive lights of the imagination, but by the metrics of science and experience, what President Obama described in the first presidential debate as “math, common sense and our history.”

John Paul Rollert teaches business ethics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and leadership at the Harvard Extension School.  He is the author of a recent paper on President Obama’s “Empathy Standard” for the Yale Law Journal Online.

Adam Smith, analytic philosophy, economics, Elections 2012

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons:

And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors

The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity

We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes.

How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right

marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

WE need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.

But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person

We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

how open is Facebook willing to be in return?

not very.

that should concern anyone of any political persuasion as Facebook continues to gain influence over the national — and international — conversation

Increasingly, those users are spending time on Facebook not only to share personal nuggets with friends, but, for more than 40 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, to stay on top of news

It now has an inordinate power to control a good part of the national discussion should it choose to do so, a role it shares with Sili

There was the initial statement that Facebook could find “no evidence” supporting the allegations; Facebook said it did not “insert stories artificially” into the Trending list, and that it had “rigorous guidelines” to ensure neutrality. But when journalists like my colleague Farhad Manjoo asked for more details about editorial guidelines, the company declined to discuss them.

Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them. (They showed that humans work with algorithms to shape the lists and introduce headlines on their own under some circumstances, contradicting Facebook’s initial statement, Recode noted.) It was openness by way of a bullet to the foot.

a more important issue emerged during the meeting that had been lying beneath the surface, and has been for a while now: the power of the algorithms that determine what goes into individual Facebook pages.

“What they have is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story,” Mr. Carlson told me. “It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media.”

What most people don’t realize is that not everything they like or share necessarily gets a prominent place in their friends’ newsfeeds: The Facebook algorithm sends it to those it determines will find it most engaging.

For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism.

This gives Facebook enormous influence over how newsrooms, almost universally eager for Facebook exposure, make decisions and money. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, called this a “profound and alarming” development in a column in The New Statesman last week.

, Facebook declines to talk in great detail about its algorithms, noting that it does not want to make it easy to game its system. That system, don’t forget, is devised to keep people on Facebook by giving them what they want

The answer is not “because Britain is better and unique” but “because I am British and these are the stories I have been brought up on” at school, university, on TV and elsewhere. Go to another country and you will see that they have their own, equally admirable, pantheon of greats.

The area that I have been working on, the eighteenth-century search for longitude, likewise reveals the need to challenge nationalistic assumptions.

Historians and readers of history both need to be aware of the biases of our education and literature. Accounts of British exceptionalism, especially those that lump the rest of Europe or the world into an amorphous group of also-rans, are more the result of national tradition and wishful thinking than a careful reading of the sources.

, researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others

acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one’s brain into processing positive emotions. In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes called the orbicularis oculi (which create “crow’s feet”). They found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions.

gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus (a key part of the brain that regulates stress) and the ventral tegmental area (part of our “reward circuitry” that produces the sensation of pleasure).

In the slightly more elegant language of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has.”

In addition to building our own happiness, choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us

when their competence was questioned, the subjects tended to lash out with aggression and personal denigration. When shown gratitude, however, they reduced the bad behavior. That is, the best way to disarm an angry interlocutor is with a warm “thank you.”

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology finds evidence that people begin to crave sweets when they are asked to express gratitude.

There are concrete strategies that each of us can adopt. First, start with “interior gratitude,” the practice of giving thanks privately

he recommends that readers systematically express gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. A disciplined way to put this into practice is to make it as routine as morning coffee. Write two short emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what they do.

Finally, be grateful for useless things

think of the small, useless things you experience — the smell of fall in the air, the fragment of a song that reminds you of when you were a kid. Give thanks.

Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition.

It coordinates something called overt attention – aiming the satellite dishes of the eyes, ears, and nose toward anything important.

Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life

The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum

At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.

All vertebrates—fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. Even lampreys have one, and they appeared so early in evolution that they don’t even have a lower jaw. But as far as anyone knows, the tectum is absent from all invertebrates

According to fossil and genetic evidence, vertebrates evolved around 520 million years ago. The tectum and the central control of attention probably evolved around then, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion when vertebrates were tiny wriggling creatures competing with a vast range of invertebrates in the sea.

The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.

The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement

In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.

With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst. Birds inherited a wulst from their reptile ancestors. Mammals did too, but our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously

The cortex also takes in sensory signals and coordinates movement, but it has a more flexible repertoire. Depending on context, you might look toward, look away, make a sound, do a dance, or simply store the sensory event in memory in case the information is useful for the future.

The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control. The tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important. The cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention. You don’t need to look directly at something to covertly attend to it. Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it

The cortex needs to control that virtual movement, and therefore like any efficient controller it needs an internal model. Unlike the tectum, which models concrete objects like the eyes and the head, the cortex must model something much more abstract. According to the AST, it does so by constructing an attention schema—a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are

Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence

this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.

I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Evolution is the master of that kind of opportunism. Fins become feet. Gill arches become jaws. And self-models become models of others. In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.

In the AST’s evolutionary story, social cognition begins to ramp up shortly after the reptilian wulst evolved. Crocodiles may not be the most socially complex creatures on earth, but they live in large communities, care for their young, and can make loyal if somewhat dangerous pets.

If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us.

t the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.

Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes

Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD

the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.

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

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

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

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

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

How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you — and at that very moment — “you can imagine how things could be different,” Professor Ariely said. It’s like a near miss in real life. “When would you be more upset?” he asked. “After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?

“Social software is both the creator and the cure of FOMO,”

feedback, Mr. Systrom said, can be slightly addictive. People using Instagram “are rewarded when someone likes it and you keep coming back,”

“We aren’t used to seeing the world as it happens,” he said. “We as humans can only process so much data.”

as technology becomes ever more pervasive, our relationship to it becomes more intimate, granting it the power to influence decisions, moods and emotions.

Younger members are less valuable in terms of potential to carry out terror operations, he says, but they are used to spread ideology and influence others.And they are easier to access. "Adolescents and teenagers are indeed easier to impress and lure into relationships with recruiters."

IS produces an average of 30 to 40 high-quality videos per day in almost every language," says Mr Koehler."They have an estimated Twitter network of 30,000 to 40,000 accounts, and guides for carrying out jihad or how to join IS are easily available online."

"Real or perceived grievances in the hands of a recruiter can reach fever pitch."

"While the internet does play an important role, what is different with IS is that it is much more outward facing,"

He says one of the greatest draws for young followers is the promise of belonging to a collective."IS is really trying to push this idea of a counter culture. They have crafted this idea of state building, of democratic jihad."

This aspirational nature can appeal to some adolescents who have high ideals and ambitions but are frustrated by their families or societies.The feeling of marginalisation also drives membership

They have also been shown to heavily rely on other social media platforms such as Ask.FM, which are visited by a large proportion of younger users.

While the internet is certainly an important tool for recruiters, both direct, real-life contact with radical groups in their home countries is equally vital."What we have seen a lot of times is people being enlisted by friendship groups,"

Members who have fought in Syria are encouraged to share information as a way of bringing other people in.Experiences are whitewashed to hide the iniquities and hypocrisies of the group's mission.

young people are more accustomed to seeing violence in the media than adults, and this plays a role in their growing involvement in violent Islamism.

about personal backgrounds and trajectories combined with opportunities and situations

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does … If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that’s empathy in the sense that I’m interested in here.

For example, donating to foreign charities ups our dopamine intake—we feel better because we’re making a difference (which, of course, can make it more about how we feel than who we’re helping).

Yet it’s not in our biological inheritance to offer unchecked empathy. Bloom points to our tribal nature as evidence. We’re going to care more for those closest to us, such as family and friends, then Cambodian orphans.

Anyone who thinks that it’s important for a therapist to feel depressed or anxious while dealing with depressed or anxious people is missing the point of therapy.

Bloom then discusses the difference between what Binghamton professor and Asian Studies scholar Charles Goodman describes as “sentimental compassion” and “great compassion.” The first is similar to empathy, which leads to imbalances in relationships and one’s own psychological state. Simply put, it’s exhausting.

Empathy is going to be a buzzword for some time to come. It feeds into our social nature, which Bloom sees nothing wrong with.

If you use p=0.05 to suggest that you have made a discovery, you will be wrong at least 30 percent of the time.

The problem is being tackled head on in the field of psychology which was shaken by the Stapel affair in which one Dutch researcher fabricated data in over 50 fraudulent papers before being detected.

a problem know as publication bias or the file drawer problem.

The smaller the effect size, the less likely the findings are to be true.

The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships, the less likely the findings are to be true.

For scientists, the discussion over how to resolve the problem is rapidly heating up with calls for big changes to how researchers register, conduct, and publish research and a growing chorus from hundreds of global scientific organizations demanding that all clinical trials are published.

For example, my dopamine receptors tingled when Thompson mentioned Joseph Campbell and Jeff Buckley, given that they’re both huge inspirations to me.

Thompson notes that as we age our explicit memory system wanes. We become more susceptible to confuse a statement that “feels right” with one that is correct.

Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.

Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.

a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research

tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values. Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

disruption breeds disruption

children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.

Some embrace networked, data-driven lives and are comfortable volunteering embarrassing, real time information about what we're doing, whom we're doing it with, and how we feel about our monitored activities.

Put it all together and we can see that our conception of what it means to be human has become "design space." We're now Humanity 2.0, primed for optimization through commercial upgrades. And today's apps are more harbinger than endpoint.

philosophers have had much to say about the enticing and seemingly inevitable dispersion of technological mental prosthetic that promise to substitute or enhance some of our motivational powers.

beyond the practical issues lie a constellation of central ethical concerns.

they should cause us to pause as we think about a possible future that significantly increases the scale and effectiveness of willpower-enhancing apps. Let's call this hypothetical future Digital Willpower World and characterize the ethical traps we're about to discuss as potential general pitfalls

it is antithetical to the ideal of " resolute choice." Some may find the norm overly perfectionist, Spartan, or puritanical. However, it is not uncommon for folks to defend the idea that mature adults should strive to develop internal willpower strong enough to avoid external temptations, whatever they are, and wherever they are encountered.

In part, resolute choosing is prized out of concern for consistency, as some worry that lapse of willpower in any context indicates a generally weak character.

Fragmented selves behave one way while under the influence of digital willpower, but another when making decisions without such assistance. In these instances, inconsistent preferences are exhibited and we risk underestimating the extent of our technological dependency.

It simply means that when it comes to digital willpower, we should be on our guard to avoid confusing situational with integrated behaviors.

the problem of inauthenticity, a staple of the neuroethics debates, might arise. People might start asking themselves: Has the problem of fragmentation gone away only because devices are choreographing our behavior so powerfully that we are no longer in touch with our so-called real selves -- the selves who used to exist before Digital Willpower World was formed?

Infantalized subjects are morally lazy, quick to have others take responsibility for their welfare. They do not view the capacity to assume personal responsibility for selecting means and ends as a fundamental life goal that validates the effort required to remain committed to the ongoing project of maintaining willpower and self-control.

Michael Sandel's Atlantic essay, "The Case Against Perfection." He notes that technological enhancement can diminish people's sense of achievement when their accomplishments become attributable to human-technology systems and not an individual's use of human agency.

Borgmann worries that this environment, which habituates us to be on auto-pilot and delegate deliberation, threatens to harm the powers of reason, the most central component of willpower (according to the rationalist tradition).

In several books, including Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, he expresses concern about technologies that seem to enhance willpower but only do so through distraction. Borgmann's paradigmatic example of the non-distracted, focally centered person is a serious runner. This person finds the practice of running maximally fulfilling, replete with the rewarding "flow" that can only comes when mind/body and means/ends are unified, while skill gets pushed to the limit.

Perhaps the very conception of a resolute self was flawed. What if, as psychologist Roy Baumeister suggests, willpower is more "staple of folk psychology" than real way of thinking about our brain processes?

novel approaches suggest the will is a flexible mesh of different capacities and cognitive mechanisms that can expand and contract, depending on the agent's particular setting and needs. Contrary to the traditional view that identifies the unified and cognitively transparent self as the source of willed actions, the new picture embraces a rather diffused, extended, and opaque self who is often guided by irrational trains of thought. What actually keeps the self and its will together are the given boundaries offered by biology, a coherent self narrative created by shared memories and experiences, and society. If this view of the will as an expa

nding and contracting system with porous and dynamic boundaries is correct, then it might seem that the new motivating technologies and devices can only increase our reach and further empower our willing selves.

"It's a mistake to think of the will as some interior faculty that belongs to an individual--the thing that pushes the motor control processes that cause my action," Gallagher says. "Rather, the will is both embodied and embedded: social and physical environment enhance or impoverish our ability to decide and carry out our intentions; often our intentions themselves are shaped by social and physical aspects of the environment."

It makes perfect sense to think of the will as something that can be supported or assisted by technology. Technologies, like environments and institutions can facilitate action or block it. Imagine I have the inclination to go to a concert. If I can get my ticket by pressing some buttons on my iPhone, I find myself going to the concert. If I have to fill out an application form and carry it to a location several miles away and wait in line to pick up my ticket, then forget it.

Perhaps the best way forward is to put a digital spin on the Socratic dictum of knowing myself and submit to the new freedom: the freedom of consuming digital willpower to guide me past the sirens.

Noether’s theorem shows that a symmetry of time — like the fact that whether you throw a ball in the air tomorrow or make the same toss next week will have no effect on the ball’s trajectory — is directly related to the conservation of energy, our old homily that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form.