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Humans have expended a great deal of intellectual energy over the past few thousand years trying to understand the morality (or amorality) of seeking pleasure. Most of philosophy begins with the question of what defines the (or a) good life. But what if the answer to what makes us happy comes down to how much of a particular chemical is circulating in our brain at any particular moment...
...answer to the latter question is, yes. Although dopamine may be crucial to making decisions about future pleasure, too much of it might distort those decisions. A surplus of dopamine is at the root of addiction, for instance: Cocaine, for one, works in part by preventing brain cells from reabsorbing dopamine that the brain has released in connection with pleasurable sensations. And once the brain has learned to like cocaine, it causes all kinds of self-destructive behavior to satisfy its cravings...
...whether religion will disappear from Harvard, Gomes’ answer is simple. “We are still here. We will always be here,” he says...
...money with Madoff and you own your house free and clear, you most likely still took a hit. To paraphrase the question Ronald Reagan posed years ago, Are you better off today than you were at the beginning of the decade? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. Let us count the ways. For one thing, the stock market is down 26% since 2000, making this the worst decade for stocks. (Inflation-adjusted, it's even worse.) I remember Warren Buffett telling me at the beginning of the decade that there...
...course, the decade's bad news hasn't been confined to the financial pages. Was there actually more bad news than usual? The answer is an objective yes. For example, there were more mass shootings and school shootings, such as the murder of 32 students at Virginia Tech in 2007 and the recent slaughter at Fort Hood, than in any other decade. There were more large-scale terrorist bombings and attacks in countries like England, Spain, Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia, Jordan, the Philippines, Turkey, India and of course the U.S. The absolute number killed was not great, but the idea that...