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Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience

geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.

Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”

Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.

it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.

In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.

How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020

The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.

He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.

Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.

Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts

this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.

Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule

He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth

A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.

Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime

Mostly elites were content with demonisation

He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person

The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France

Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.

Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.

He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.

The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.

The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.

“Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.

The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.

Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary

So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”

The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.

Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.

This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.

But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.

Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy

many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.

In recent years the pessimists have grown in number

The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?

Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?

Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.

The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication

Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.

Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.

The point is not necessarily that wealth is intrinsically and everywhere evil, but that it is dangerous — that it should be eyed with caution and suspicion, and definitely not pursued as an end in itself; that great riches pose great risks to their owners; and that societies are right to stigmatize the storing up of untold wealt

Over the past few years, a pile of studies from the behavioral sciences has appeared, and they all say, more or less, “Being rich is really bad for you.” Wealth, it turns out, leads to behavioral and psychological maladies. The rich act and think in misdirected ways.

When it comes to a broad range of vices, the rich outperform everybody else. They are much more likely than the rest of humanity to shoplift and cheat , for example, and they are more apt to be adulterers and to drink a great deal. They are even more likely to take candy that is meant for children.

The rich are the worst tax evaders, and, as The Washington Post has detailed, they are hiding vast sums from public scrutiny in secret overseas bank accounts.

They also give proportionally less to charity — not surprising, since they exhibit significantly less compassion and empathy toward suffering people.

Studies also find that members of the upper class are worse than ordinary folks at “reading” people’ s emotions and are far more likely to be disengaged from the people with whom they are interacting — instead absorbed in doodling, checking their phones or what have you. Some studies go even further, suggesting that rich people, especially stockbrokers and their ilk (such as venture capitalists, whom we once called “robber barons”), are more competitive, impulsive and reckless than medically diagnosed psychopaths.

Some studies go so far as to suggest that simply being around great material wealth makes people less willing to share. That’s right: Vast sums of money poison not only those who possess them but even those who are merely around them. This helps explain why the nasty ethos of Wall Street has percolated down, including to our politics (though we really didn’t need much help there).

Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre

They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore.

Values Education was introduced as a way to help young people think about their values in a completely non-judgmental way. Scenarios involving value choices were discussed, but to avoid any hint of indoctrination or imposition of any one set of values onto children, the ultimate conclusion was always that ‘there are no right or wrong answers’. This institutionalized a relativistic stance, leading some students to consider racial prejudice or cheating on exams as the same kind of choice as one’s choice of career.

n the 1970s-80s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of the stages of moral development which was adopted as a blueprint for a new kind of moral education. Kohlberg’s theory suggested that a characteristic of those individuals who have reached the higher levels of moral development is their ability to deal well with dilemmas. Inspired by this, educators present dilemmas in which the leading character has to make a choice between two good (or two bad) values, and they encourage the young people to discuss reasons why the character should do X or Y. This would promote the moral thinking of participants, thereby encouraging their moral development and ultimately translating into moral behavior. However, this approach framed everything as a dilemma, a choice between two rights or two wrongs. It also tended to over-intellectualize the nature of moral decision-making

the most recent (but perhaps also the most classical) innovation in moral education is Character Education. Building on Aristotelian notions of virtue and the educational approach of the ancient Greeks, Thomas Lickona and others have crafted a popular model in which such virtues as honesty, courage, integrity, and generosity are taught to students from kindergarten through high school by modeling, didactic stories, and programs rewarding good behavior, such as ‘school citizen of the month’.

Character Education aims to give students enough knowledge of what virtues and vices entail to act virtuously and discourage vice in daily life. It offers a vast improvement over the absence of value talk in the classroom

it is still problematic. Even Aristotle admitted that acting virtuously is not a matter of simply knowing the virtues. The trick comes in the application – doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. This is not easily achieved, and defies simple instruction

For individuals who see morality as black and white, this can be unsettling. Some adults worry that if we present these sorts of complicated notions to children, especially young children, we will confuse them, or leave them apathetic to morality. But this has not proven to be the case. Children rarely abandon the values of their families, unless those values turn out to be unsatisfactory in serious ways

The approaches known as ‘philosophy for children’ (P4C) and ‘philosophy with children’ (PwC) offer a powerful alternative mode

Philosophy for/with children is not instruction in the ideas of the great philosophers; nor is it debates on the major ethical issues of our times. While it does not teach a particular set of values, it is not Values Clarification, which examines the beliefs of people but refuses to judge them

The methods and materials of philosophy ‘for’ and ‘with’ children differ dramatically, but its teachers and philosophers share a vision that philosophy is for everyone, including children. They believe that it can help anyone acquire critical reasoning skills, and build communities of inquiry in which we can practice the intellectual and moral virtues as we learn to negotiate across differences

A distinctive feature of the P4C/PwC approach is the ownership of the conversation by the young people themselves. By setting their own agenda, they actively engage in thinking and talking about the issues and ideas that matter to them, and not what matters to the teacher or the adults in their lives.

good thinking is nurtured. The facilitator’s role is that of a Socratic gadfly, challenging the participants to put forward their own ideas, but also enabling the testing of these ideas by communal scrutiny. Some ideas are better grounded than others, and the community’s goal is to discover what those ideas and grounds are, even as it remains open to revisiting and revising an idea that has been put aside. This means that ethical thinking is open-ended but not relativistic.

As Plato also pointed out in his dialogue The Meno, moral education is not the same kind of education as education in mathematics or history, where the ultimate goal is acquiring knowledge. We need to practice and apply virtues, and in doing so, we run up against the messiness of life. Is it always so clear what constitutes respect, courage, honesty, or how we demonstrate a virtue in action?

The PwC movement is founded on the assumption that there are better and worse ways of thinking and acting, even if there may not be one single best way. This assumption is necessary for the enterprise of seeking better ways of thinking and living to be meaningful and genuine

The conflict between the images is important because it shows up in alternative visions of the economy and the relationship between the economy and the state.

On the republican picture, owning is a relationship that presupposes law, if only the inchoate law of informal custom.

You own something only insofar as it is a matter of accepted convention that given the way you came to hold it — given public recognition of the title you have to the property — you enjoy public protection against those who would take it from you

This view of property, prominent in Rousseau and presupposed in the broader republican tradition, is scarcely questionable in view of the salient diversity in systems of property

These observations, scarcely richer than platitudes, are important for giving us a perspective on the market and the economy, undermining the libertarian image. That picture represents the market as a res privata, a private thing, suggesting that the role of the state is merely to lay low the hills in the way of the market and smooth the paths for its operation. And so it depicts any other interventions of government in the market as dubious on philosophical, not just empirical, grounds.

this image accounts for the continuing attachment to austerity among those on the right. They are philosophically opposed to Keynesianism, not just opposed on empirical grounds, and their ideological stance makes empirically based arguments for Keynesianism invisible to them.

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction

I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”

Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.

The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.

At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed

In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all

“Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”

The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”

The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone

“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.

The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques

The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government

Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.

But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.

If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.

If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.

The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.

Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”

Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.

Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.

Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.

Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.

My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.

“We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”

The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.

Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”

Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.

Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.

there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.

One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.

Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.

Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.

NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.

Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century

the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.

the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small.

We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.

Modernity, he thought, was exhausting itself. Humanity could not “carry on any longer merely on the surface, a purely external life”; we must either “go deep or peter out altogether.”

In our time of digitization and rapid information, our temptation is what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “excarnation” — the opposite of “incarnation,” it makes our life into an abstraction.

We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small.

Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.

The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families

Setiya’s treatise belongs to a particular genre: brainy books for the general public that present lessons for modern living from Aristotle, Montaigne or the Stoics.

in his view, given that there is much in life that makes us miserable, and that we can neither change nor ignore, we might as well find ways of dealing with the reality. Trying to live a perfect life in difficult circumstances, he states, “only brings dismay.”

Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize

We tell someone about an illness or a fight we had; they try to convince us not to worry so much, or to focus on the bright side. Worse still, they might tell us that “everything happens for a reason.”

such thinking can easily serve as an excuse to avoid compassion.

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit.

Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths

Plato, too, he reminds us, held that true happiness lies in recognizing the lies of ordinary life, famously imagined as a cave filled with shadows

If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way.

what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one

“Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.

Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense. True, a person who is blind or lacks full movement may not be able to enjoy certain pleasures — at least, in the typical way. And suffering injury can be traumati

But none of us can fit everything worth doing into one lifetime. Our possibilities and our choices are always limited, and we can live fully within those limits.

Setiya offers neither simple takeaways nor explicit instructions. Instead, he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle.

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention.

Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies

Ideally, it also helps us imagine what it is like to inhabit the bodies of others, imbuing us with “presumptive compassion for everyone else.”

Listening carefully, whether to good friends or to strangers on a bus, can help us feel less lonely.

By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them.

Mindfulness is also Setiya’s answer to the threat of personal failure. If we can teach ourselves to notice all the splendid, varied incidents of our lives, he claims, we are much less likely to brand ourselves with a single label, winner or loser.

He encourages readers to abandon simple narratives about success over the course of a lifetime

Although “Life Is Hard” claims to be a work of accessible philosophy, many of its insights are borrowed from other areas — literature, journalism, disability studies

Setiya is certainly right that we should work to reduce injustice, to “mend the future” no matter how long that future may last. Still, it is hard for many of us to quell the fear that it may be too late to prevent an ecological catastrophe, or to ignore our grief for what has already been lost.

Meanwhile, donors such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn and ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — as well as institutions like Open Philanthropy, a charitable organization started by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — have worked to push doomsayers from the tech industry’s margins into the mainstream.

More recently, wealthy tech philanthropists have begun recruiting an army of elite college students to prioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threats

Other skeptics, like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, are AI boosters who say that hyping such fears will impede the technology’s progress.

Critics call the AI safety movement unscientific. They say its claims about existential risk can sound closer to a religion than research

And while the sci-fi narrative resonates with public fears about runaway AI, critics say it obsesses over one kind of catastrophe to the exclusion of many others.

Open Philanthropy spokesperson Mike Levine said harms like algorithmic racism deserve a robust response. But he said those problems stem from the same root issue: AI systems not behaving as their programmers intended. The theoretical risks “were not garnering sufficient attention from others — in part because these issues were perceived as speculative,” Levine said in a statement. He compared the nonprofit’s AI focus to its work on pandemics, which also was regarded as theoretical until the coronavirus emerged.

Among the reputational hazards of the AI safety movement is its association with an array of controversial figures and ideas, like EA, which is also known for recruiting ambitious young people on elite college campuses.

The foundation began prioritizing existential risks around AI in 2016,

there was little status or money to be gained by focusing on risks. So the nonprofit set out to build a pipeline of young people who would filter into top companies and agitate for change from the insid

Colleges have been key to this growth strategy, serving as both a pathway to prestige and a recruiting ground for idealistic talent

The clubs train students in machine learning and help them find jobs in AI start-ups or one of the many nonprofit groups dedicated to AI safety.

Many of these newly minted student leaders view rogue AI as an urgent and neglected threat, potentially rivaling climate change in its ability to end human life. Many see advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of their generation

Despite the school’s ties to Silicon Valley, Mukobi said it lags behind nearby UC Berkeley, where younger faculty members research AI alignment, the term for embedding human ethics into AI systems.

Mukobi joined Stanford’s club for effective altruism, known as EA, a philosophical movement that advocates doing maximum good by calculating the expected value of charitable acts, like protecting the future from runaway AI. By 2022, AI capabilities were advancing all around him — wild developments that made those warnings seem prescient.

At Stanford, Open Philanthropy awarded Luby and Edwards more than $1.5 million in grants to launch the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which supports student research in the growing field known as “AI safety” or “AI alignment.

from the start EA was intertwined with tech subcultures interested in futurism and rationalist thought. Over time, global poverty slid down the cause list, while rogue AI climbed toward the top.

In the past year, EA has been beset by scandal, including the fall of Bankman-Fried, one of its largest donors

Another key figure, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 bestseller “Superintelligence” is essential reading in EA circles, met public uproar when a decades-old diatribe about IQ surfaced in January.

Programming future AI systems to share human values could mean “an amazing world free from diseases, poverty, and suffering,” while failure could unleash “human extinction or our permanent disempowerment,” Mukobi wrote, offering free boba tea to anyone who attended the 30-minute intro.

Open Philanthropy’s new university fellowship offers a hefty direct deposit: undergraduate leaders receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insurance, and up to $100,000 a year to cover group expenses.

Student leaders have access to a glut of resources from donor-sponsored organizations, including an “AI Safety Fundamentals” curriculum developed by an OpenAI employee.

Interest in the topic is also growing among Stanford faculty members, Edwards said. He noted that a new postdoctoral fellow will lead a class on alignment next semester in Stanford’s storied computer science department.

Edwards discovered that shared online forums function like a form of peer review, with authors changing their original text in response to the comments

Mukobi feels energized about the growing consensus that these risks are worth exploring. He heard students talking about AI safety in the halls of Gates, the computer science building, in May after Geoffrey Hinton, another “godfather” of AI, quit Google to warn about AI. By the end of the year, Mukobi thinks the subject could be a dinner-table topic, just like climate change or the war in Ukraine.

Luby, Edwards’s teaching partner for the class on human extinction, also seems to find these arguments persuasive. He had already rearranged the order of his AI lesson plans to help students see the imminent risks from AI. No one needs to “drink the EA Kool-Aid” to have genuine concerns, he said.

Edwards, on the other hand, still sees things like climate change as a bigger threat than rogue AI. But ChatGPT and the rapid release of AI models has convinced him that there should be room to think about AI safety.

Interested students join reading groups where they get free copies of books like “The Precipice,” and may spend hours reading the latest alignment papers, posting career advice on the Effective Altruism forum, or adjusting their P(doom), a subjective estimate of the probability that advanced AI will end badly. The grants, travel, leadership roles for inexperienced graduates and sponsored co-working spaces build a close-knit community.

The course will not be taught by students or outside experts. Instead, he said, it “will be a regular Stanford class.”

Literacy rates rose alongside industrialization, although those who decided what the newspapers printed and what people were allowed to say on the radio, and then on television, were hugely powerful. But with the rise of scientific knowledge and the spread of telecommunications came a time of multiple sources of information and many rival ways to process facts and reason out implications.

With the emergence of A.I., we are about to regress even further. Some of this has to do with the nature of the technology. Instead of assessing multiple sources, people are increasingly relying on the nascent technology to provide a singular, supposedly definitive answer.

This technology is in the hands of two companies that are philosophically rooted in the notion of “machine intelligence,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to outperform humans in specific activities.

This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth.

Combined together, these ideas are cementing the notion that the most productive applications of A.I. replace humankind.

Congress needs to assert individual ownership rights over underlying data that is relied on to build A.I. systems

Fortunately, Marx was wrong about the 19th-century industrial age that he inhabited. Industries emerged much faster than he expected, and new firms disrupted the economic power structure. Countervailing social powers developed in the form of trade unions and genuine political representation for a broad swath of society.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that control over information is central to who has power and what they can do with it.

Generative A.I. requires even deeper pockets than textile factories and steel mills. As a result, most of its obvious opportunities have already fallen into the hands of Microsoft, with its market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, and Alphabet, worth $1.6 trillion.

At the same time, powers like trade unions have been weakened by 40 years of deregulation ideology (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, two Bushes and even Bill Clinton

For the same reason, the U.S. government’s ability to regulate anything larger than a kitten has withered. Extreme polarization and fear of killing the golden (donor) goose or undermining national security mean that most members of Congress would still rather look away.

To prevent data monopolies from ruining our lives, we need to mobilize effective countervailing power — and fast.

Today, those countervailing forces either don’t exist or are greatly weakened

Rather than machine intelligence, what we need is “machine usefulness,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities. This would be a much more fruitful direction for increasing productivity. By empowering workers and reinforcing human decision making in the production process, it also would strengthen social forces that can stand up to big tech companies

We also need regulation that protects privacy and pushes back against surveillance capitalism, or the pervasive use of technology to monitor what we do

Finally, we need a graduated system for corporate taxes, so that tax rates are higher for companies when they make more profit in dollar terms

Our future should not be left in the hands of two powerful companies that build ever larger global empires based on using our collective data without scruple and without compensation.

Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension.

Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.

These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.

This harbor mind holds lessons for us now. We may want fixed answers and rigid definitions. but vitality — and perhaps even health — lies in the ability to stay afloat, stay loose, stay connected, stay with the questions and entertain doubt as the unlikely bedrock of understanding. The only understanding is in the fluidity of mind

Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”

Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:

Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.

ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.

Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.

Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.

Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.

At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.

Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it

That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”

Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on

his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.

Analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples over the years has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the philosophers weep. The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.

“Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting.”

The microwaves detected by the Planck date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang, which is as far back as optical or radio telescopes will ever be able to see, cosmologists say. But the patterns within them date from less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe is said to have undergone a violent burst of expansion known as inflation that set cosmic history on the course it has followed ever since. Those patterns are Planck’s prize.

Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.

The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate, is 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec — in the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists rerun their computer simulations of cosmic history.

a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made of the beginning of time and those made more recently, and that it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility “pretty radical,” adding, “That would be pretty exciting.”

The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorizing for 30 years. Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, so the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of M.I.T. goes.

Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck’s measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a T. Dr. Tegmark of M.I.T. said, “We’re homing in on the simplest model.”

Cosmologists still do not know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behavior really exist.

another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data — the lopsided bumpiness, for example — that tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos; that is to say, when inflation was just starting.

. In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

Newly translated postmodernist texts give philosophical weight to the Surkovian power model. François Lyotard, the French theoretician of postmodernism, began to be translated in Russia only towards the end of the 1990s, at exactly the time Surkov joined the government. The author of Almost Zero loves to invoke such Lyotardian concepts as the breakdown of grand cultural narratives and the fragmentation of truth: ideas that still sound quite fresh in Russia. One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’ In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression.

In Soviet times a functionary would at least nominally pretend to believe in Communism; now the head of one of Russia’s main TV channels, Vladimir Kulistikov, who used to be employed by Radio Free Europe, proudly announces that he ‘can work with any power I’m told to work with’. As long as you have shown loyalty when it counts, you are free to do anything you like after hours. Thus Moscow’s top gallery-owner advises the Kremlin on propaganda at the same time as exhibiting anti-Kremlin work in his gallery; the most fashionable film director makes a blockbuster satirising the Putin regime while joining Putin’s party; Surkov writes a novel about the corruption of the system and rock lyrics denouncing Putin’s regime – lyrics that would have had him arrested in previous times.

In Soviet Russia you would have been forced to give up any notion of artistic freedom if you wanted a slice of the pie. In today’s Russia, if you’re talented and clever, you can have both. This makes for a unique fusion of primitive feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony

This is the world Surkov has created, a world of masks and poses, colourful but empty, with little at its core but power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.

In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.

Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:

First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:

If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.

If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency

Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt

Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”

it is a game changer.

Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.

The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.

For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.

I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.

The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.

Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.

the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”

“Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.

Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.

Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.

During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.

Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:

A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.

the Detroit rescue reveals another difference between the two—one that is more about character than ideology

Romney’s inconsistent rhetoric may leave us wondering precisely what he really thought and would have done. But they tell us a lot about how he operates in the face of political pressure. When Romney was trying to appease conservatives and win the

it’s possible to draw from the auto industry rescue a pretty good lesson about the real differences between Obama and Romney. Obama understands that the market doesn’t always work on its own—that sometimes government must intervene in order to protect Americans from economic harm. Romney doesn’t. Obama is also willing to act in the face of political peril. Romney isn’t.