Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...true for our students, as I learned this year. So if the decks were reshuffled, wholly new departments might emerge: a department of evolutionary studies, say, or perhaps a department of cognition and neurobiology which would unite professors from the sciences with those involved in the arts and humanities. The possibilities are endless. The idea of reshuffling the decks has considerable appeal. But here’s the conundrum: the act of forming new institutions does not, ipso facto, solve the problem of institutional exhaustion. So rather than form new departments that would just calcify in their turn, we want...
...This does not mean a nationalist China is committed to what its own government has dubbed a “peaceful rise.” China’s dual-pronged espionage campaign remains menacing. First, Chinese hackers conduct extensive cyber-warfare. Second, China gathers human intelligence in a manner markedly different from the former Soviet Union. Whereas the KGB extracted sensitive information from a few carefully chosen assets, China’s Ministry of State Security uses a web of informers in businesses, educational institutions, and governments, many of whom probably don’t even consider their actions...
...Genetics and biology matter in human leadership, but they do not determine it in the way that the traditional heroic approach to leadership suggests. The “Big Man” type of leadership works well in societies based on networks of tribal cultures which rely on personal and family honor and loyalty, but are not well adapted for coping with today’s complex information based world. Institutional constraints such as constitutions and impartial legal systems circumscribe such heroic figures. Societies that rest on heroic leaders are not able to develop the civil society and broad social...
...internal “choice rules” that we hold. In some way, many of us have learned the most not from texts and lectures, but by observing our reactions to them and by becoming aware of our habits of thought and the limits of the human gift for “zooming out” to reflect on a subject from the perspective of someone else. The key to my learning, at least, was the attempt to eliminate an automatic creation of opinions...
...numbers are exploding – a topic that has been attracting attention since Malthus. Nor do I mean that life expectancy is rising – a fact that is widely appreciated. I mean a very modern and massive set of changes in the composition of the human population...