Alan Jacobs

And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party. It is not so much that their views are wrong—I am not going to fall into the trap of labeling those with whom I disagree immoral because of our disagreements—but because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion.

Perhaps it is just a turf war, but I don’t think philosophy is something to be ignored or done after a day’s work in the lab over a few beers in the faculty club. I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

This isn’t a particularly great insight, I suppose: that you can goose demand if you shift costs into the future. Discount rates exist; it’s why economists fret about declines in consumer borrowing. It’s why people still smoke cigarettes.

I have an aesthetic aversion to it — a general sense that things would be better if costs were presented up front. That it would be preferable for Twitter to be a protocol like email rather than a service like Facebook. Maybe even that it would be more moral for them to be. That the costs associated with transitioning between social networks every, what, five years are high enough to be worth complaining about.*

But this is probably is just a meaningless prejudice on part. Twitter wouldn’t have become Twitter if those costs had been apparent from the start. To wish it could be otherwise is just to say that you want foolish angel investors to buy you toys for free**. The service will probably remain fine for a long time, and then it’ll get worse, and we’ll all bitch about it and eventually something else will come along.

And now the learner, has he no lot or part in this story of suffering, even though his lot cannot be that of the Teacher? Aye, it cannot be otherwise. And the cause of all this suffering is love, precisely because the God is not jealous for himself, but desires in love to be the equal of the humblest. When the seed of the oak is planted in earthen vessels, they break asunder; when new wine is poured in old leathern bottles, they burst; what must happen when the God implants himself in human weakness, unless man becomes a new vessel and a new creature! But this becoming, what labors will attend the change, how convulsed with birth-pangs! And the understanding — how precarious, and how close each moment to misunderstanding, when the anguish of guilt seeks to disturb the peace of love! And how rapt in fear; for it is indeed less terrible to fall to the ground when the mountains tremble at the voice of the God, than to sit at table with him as an equal; and yet it is the God’s concern precisely to have it so.

As instructors naturally become aware of their students’ attachment styles—this is an anxious student who is in my office every day, or this is an avoidant student who never calls me—you think about how you can tailor your advising style to meet their needs.

In everyday thought and speech we have reasons, intentions, feelings. In brainspeak we have synapses, firing patterns, neurotransmitters. For the mechanical materialist, the latter causes the former – and in his routine use of causal language Damasio reveals himself as just that. This is why the weakest part of the book is the concluding chapters, where he extends his central principle of homeostasis to embrace human history, society and culture. But it is possible to be a non-reductionist materialist. The language of mind and consciousness relates to the language of brains and synapses as English does to Italian; one may translate into the other, though always with some loss of cultural resonance. But we do not have to assign primacy to either. Long may pluralism reign, and we conscious beings continue to employ our minds and brains to enhance our understanding of both.

As to a practical “freedom to connect” policy agenda, “we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression,” Clinton averred. The Obama administration will therefore experiment, adopting a “venture capital–style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training” in projects designed to sustain an “Internet that is open, secure, and reliable.”

One danger such a pathway presents is that it may lead to incremental, government-led rulemaking, as if what is required to secure freedom of speech and assembly on the global Internet is some international version of the Federal Communications Commission. That would be deeply questionable, judging by the FCC’s embarrassing history in the United States, and the history of similar regulatory bodies worldwide. It is a story marked mainly by collusion with monopolizing industry and government, as well as the suppression of innovation and speech. Before the United States devotes itself to the civilizing mission of Internet freedom abroad, then, it might be wise to think more deeply about what it will take to protect the “freedom to connect” at home.

Moby: The reason I started making music really young is that no other art form affected me as powerfully. I was a latchkey kid who didn’t have a ton of friends and was bad at sports, so that gave me a lot of time to sit in my living room, listen to records and play guitar. And I don’t know how to do anything else, which I think is a key component for success. It really helps if you only know how to do one thing, because then you have no fallback plan.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Collini is hearing people urging others to be civil, and mis interpreting it as a demand that they stop arguing. The two demands, however, are utterly different, and one can’t sustain a rational dialogue without the virtue of civility. A demand for delicacy and caution is not a demand for silence, it’s a necessary aspect of making speech flourish. Because Collini is right about the goal for which we should strive - a community of rigorous and open argument - it seems unfortunate that he is not attuned to the problems of civility often faced by unpopular minorities who are making new demands. Arguments are not abstract propositions in the air. They are human performances towards other humans, in which the choice of vocabulary, the tone of voice and the look in the eyes all matter for whether the performance is virtuous or vicious. So we should seek the goal to which Collini points us, but pursue it with all our ethical and emotional wits about us.

I did however glean some of Ariely’s bigger picture ideas:

• Most people cheat a little, but very few cheat a lot.

• If offered the incentive to cheat most people will not jump at the chance immediately. Keep offering them the opportunity, however, and eventually they will do so. Ariely and Szalavitz call this the ‘What the hell effect’.

• Across a range of areas - school, law, sex, game, tech, work - men are more likely to be dishonest than women. If, however, a woman is dishonest in one area, she is more likely to be dishonest in all areas than a man.

• Ariely and Szalavitz have no evidence to suggest that people are less likely to cheat an individual than they are to cheat an institution or company. The idea of “sticking it to the man”, says Ariely, is probably just a cover for our own selfishness.

I chose not to write about the nitty-gritty of the current technical situation for a simple reason: I don’t really have anything to add to what the honest-to-goodness experts have to say. I know more than enough about the technical ins and outs of nuclear power to speak intelligently about related policy issues, but the situation at the reactors is complex and opaque. Even bona-fide nuclear engineering experts have severe limits to their ability to predict where things are going. A disturbingly large fraction of the people currently opining on television and radio, though, aren’t even experts on nuclear technology. They are policy experts who apparently can’t say no when people ask them to go on TV and talk about the technical ins and outs of the unfolding situation.