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I'm always suspicious of any thinker who leads with overly broad analogizing as opposed to specific issues

What issue are you actually trying to clarify when you make these comparisons? What aspect of history or social life are you really trying to illuminate? Are you really trying to talk to other people, or are you trying to shut them down?

There is always a way to make yourself right, and win the argument. There's also a difference between curiosity and one-upmanship. I've yet to see a legitimately curious person begin their conversation with an overly broad analogy. But I've seen a lot of dogmatic ideologues wield them like clubs. 

Human brains take shortcuts in making decisions. Finding where those shortcuts lead us to dumb places is what his life work has been all about. Artificial intelligences, say, Google, also have to take shortcuts, but they are *not* the same ones that our brains use. So, when an AI ends up in a weird place by taking a shortcut, that bias strikes us as uncannily weird. Get ready, too, because AI bias is going to start replacing human cognitive bias more and more regularly.

European leaders, meeting until the early hours of Friday, agreed to sign an intergovernmental treaty that would require them to enforce stricter fiscal and financial discipline in their future budgets. But efforts to get unanimity among the 27 members of the European Union, as desired by Germany, failed as Britain refused to go along.

all 17 members of the European Union that use the euro agreed to the new treaty, along with six other countries that wish to join the currency union eventually.

Twenty years after the Maastricht Treaty, which was designed not just to integrate Europe but to contain the might of a united Germany, Berlin had effectively united Europe under its control, with Britain all but shut out.

Mr. Derman is perhaps a bit too harsh when he describes EMM—the so-called Efficient Market Model. EMM does not, as he claims, imply that prices are always correct and that price always equals value. Prices are always wrong. What EMM says is that we can never be sure if prices are too high or too low.

The Efficient Market Model does not suggest that any particular model of valuation—such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model—fully accounts for risk and uncertainty or that we should rely on it to predict security returns. EMM does not, as Mr. Derman says, "stubbornly assume that all uncertainty about the future is quantifiable." The basic lesson of EMM is that it is very difficult—well nigh impossible—to beat the market consistently.

Mr. Derman gives an eloquent description of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in a chapter titled "The Sublime." He writes: "The electromagnetic field is not like Maxwell's equations; it is Maxwell's equations."

I think originality is a word of praise for things that have been expressed in a marvelous way and that make points of origin for any particular element beside the point.  When you read Saul Bellow or listen to Bob Dylan sing, you can have someone point to various cribbings and it won’t matter, because something has been arrived at which subsumes and incorporates and transcends these matters.  In that way, sourcing and originality are two sides of the same coin, they’re a nested partnership.  I don’t think originality has any value as a description of process.  In that regard it’s as meaningless a process word as beauty is.  No artist says, “Let me sit down and do some beauty now.”

It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to obscure the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed

In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.

This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.”

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value. It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to American ones

I've long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of "moral imagination"--the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

How, exactly, does college prepare students for the workplace? For most jobs, it provides basic intellectual skills: the ability to understand relatively complex instructions, to write and speak clearly and cogently, to evaluate options critically. Beyond these intellectual skills, earning a college degree shows that you have the “moral qualities” needed for most jobs: you have (to put it a bit cynically), for a period of four years and with relatively little supervision, deferred to authority, met deadlines and carried out difficult tasks even when you found them pointless and boring.

This sort of intellectual and moral training, however, does not require studying with experts doing cutting-edge work on, say, Homeric poetry, elementary particle theory or the philosophy of Kant. It does not, that is, require the immersion in the world of intellectual culture that a college faculty is designed to provide. It is, rather, the sort of training that ought to result from good elementary and high school education.

students graduating from high school should, to cite one plausible model, be able to read with understanding classic literature (from, say, Austen and Browning to Whitman and Hemingway) and write well-organized and grammatically sound essays; they should know the basic outlines of American and European history, have a good beginner’s grasp of at least two natural sciences as well as pre-calculus mathematics, along with a grounding in a foreign language.

74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.”

When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

This question of accounting for what we call the "big bang state" -- the search for a physical explanation of it -- is probably the most important question within the philosophy of cosmology, and there are a couple different lines of thought about it.

One that's becoming more and more prevalent in the physics community is the idea that the big bang state itself arose out of some previous condition, and that therefore there might be an explanation of it in terms of the previously existing dynamics by which it came about

The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that's very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. This is what Einstein was upset about; this is what Schrodinger was upset about. Quantum mechanics was merely a calculational technique that was not well understood as a physical theory. Bohr and Heisenberg tried to argue that asking for a clear physical theory was something you shouldn't do anymore. That it was something outmoded. And they were wrong, Bohr and Heisenberg were wrong about that. But the effect of it was to shut down perfectly legitimate physics questions within the physics community for about half a century. And now we're coming out of that

Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are — or than others consider us to be — can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others.

One intriguing theme running through “The Folly of Fools” is that self-­deception can affect our susceptibility to disease, for ill or good.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest. The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google. However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Coursekit is a new tool that lets teachers and educators create mini social networks around individual courses and lectures.

The goal of the service, said Joseph Cohen, its co-founder and chief executive, is to take some of the most successful elements of social networking — especially the fluid exchange of ideas that comes natural to online interactions — to revitalize the education experience. Students are already accustomed to interacting online and supplementing their daily lives with the Web and social media. Why should that stop when it comes to learning? “Our education experience is truly offline,” he said. “We want to build what Facebook has done for your personal life, but for your school.”

Using Coursekit’s software, teachers can upload homework assignments, answer questions, grade work and facilitate discussions with their students. In addition, students can use the software to chat with one another, collaborate on projects and share relevant materials with their classmates

the ease of self-publishing and search afforded by the Internet along with a growing skeptical stance towards scientific expertise—has given the anti-vaccination movement a significant boost

She regularly shares her "knowledge" about vaccination with her nearly half-million Twitter followers. This is the kind of online influence that Nobel Prize-winning scientists can only dream of; Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous working scientist, has only 300,000 Twitter followers.

An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.

Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users

The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.