Sublime

He is calling us back from the disinhibition, and accompanying lack of charity, generated by a set of technologies that allow us to converse and debate with people who are not, in the historical sense of the term, our neighbors. Technologies of communication that allow us to overcome the distances of space also allow us to neglect the common humani

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter

incredible work in applied behavioral economics that was happening in the government, specifically using the power of defaults to encourage positive behavior. These defaults are known as nudges, made famous in the bestseller Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.

Some commentators point out that conservatives vote against their economic interests. What they miss is that those conservatives are voting their moral interests, and they will continue to do so. Therefore liberals need to understand the difference between policy and morality and that morality beats policy.

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard, has been described as “perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering,” a characterization that he bristles at. “I’m a proponent of reality,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2015. Keith founded the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program in 2017, and he