5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Essay 5 Due 6-6-18
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Justin Peters' essay "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain," published in liberal-slanting Slate magazine, presents an argument that Joe Rogan and his podcast guest philosopher Sam Harris are wrong to believe in giving a platform to hateful voices. In the words of Peters, Rogan and Harris are morally wrong in their following premise: "[Liberals and progressives holding] people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance."
Joe Rogan defends giving a platform to Alt-Right "crackpots" while talking to comedian Neil Brennan in this podcast segment published on You Tube under title "Why Joe Rogan Has Right Wing Guests on His Show." Rogan argues that deplatforming is dangerous to American democracy and freedom of speech. This notion of deplatforming is under further controversy by democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren refusing to go on Fox News because she argues that Fox News is a "hate-for-profit racket." But others, like Megan Day in her essay "Elizabeth Warren Should Have Gone on Fox News," argue that Warren's virtue signaling is actually misguided and shows she is too interested in showcasing her moral purity than she is in engaging people with contrary ideas to her own. Even liberal MSNBC's "Morning Joe" criticizes Warren for not going into enemy territory to argue her message.
In the context of the deplatforming controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Elizabeth Warren, develop an argumentative thesis about deplatforming: Is engaging in conversations with opposing voices a way of giving harmful platform to hate and moral bankruptcy or is this cross-cultural conversation a way of shedding light on evil and finding opportunity to persuade one's opponents?
There can be a middle-ground in this debate. For example, one could justify having Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson on their show while eschewing a complete troll like Alex Jones.
Also consider that if you have strong opinions, they should be worth fighting for. Joe Rogan, who does MMA training and fighting, is a fighter. He doesn't mind going into the belly of beast and fighting the battles of the day. Elizabeth Warren, some might argue, is a pacifist who is eager to showboat her virtue to her crowd of the already converted but too cowardly to engage in battle with the enemy. If she can't fight, is she a worthy candidate? Some say no. Others say her moral purity is precisely her appeal. Frame the debate under your own terms.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Excerpts from "Alexa, Should We Trust You?"
(Subheadings my own)
Conquering Private Space in Increments (You make a chicken bald by plucking one feather at a time)
Privacy concerns have not stopped the march of these devices into our homes, however. Amazon doesn’t disclose exact figures, but when I asked how many Echo devices have been sold, a spokeswoman said “tens of millions.” By the end of last year, more than 40 million smart speakers had been installed worldwide, according to Canalys, a technology-research firm. Based on current sales, Canalys estimates that this figure will reach 100 million by the end of this year. According to a 2018 report by National Public Radio and Edison Research, 8 million Americans own three or more smart speakers, suggesting that they feel the need to always have one within earshot. By 2021, according to another research firm, Ovum, there will be almost as many voice-activated assistants on the planet as people. It took about 30 years for mobile phones to outnumber humans. Alexa and her ilk may get there in less than half that time.
One reason is that Amazon and Google are pushing these devices hard, discounting them so heavily during last year’s holiday season that industry observers suspect that the companies lost money on each unit sold. These and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize space. Not interplanetary space. Everyday space: home, office, car. In the near future, everything from your lighting to your air-conditioning to your refrigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice.
Technology Changes Bring New Social Orders
The ramifications of this shift are likely to be wide and profound. Human history is a by-product of human inventions. New tools—wheels, plows, PCs—usher in new economic and social orders. They create and destroy civilizations. Voice technologies such as telephones, recording devices, and the radio have had a particularly momentous impact on the course of political history—speech and rhetoric being, of course, the classical means of persuasion. Radio broadcasts of Adolf Hitler’s rallies helped create a dictator; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats edged America toward the war that toppled that dictator.
Perhaps you think that talking to Alexa is just a new way to do the things you already do on a screen: shopping, catching up on the news, trying to figure out whether your dog is sick or just depressed. It’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of switching out the body parts used to accomplish those tasks—replacing fingers and eyes with mouths and ears. We’re talking about a change in status for the technology itself—an upgrade, as it were. When we converse with our personal assistants, we bring them closer to our own level.
Getting rid of "friction": We become dependent on a frictionless world.
The beauty of Alexa, Reid continued, is that she makes such interactions “frictionless”—a term I’d hear again and again in my conversations with the designers and engineers behind these products. No need to walk over to the desktop and type a search term into a browser; no need to track down your iPhone and punch in your passcode. Like the ideal servant in a Victorian manor, Alexa hovers in the background, ready to do her master’s bidding swiftly yet meticulously.
Frictionlessness is the goal, anyway. For the moment, considerable friction remains. It really is remarkable how often smart speakers—even Google Home, which often outperforms the Echo in tests conducted by tech websites—flub their lines. They’ll misconstrue a question, stress the wrong syllable, offer a bizarre answer, apologize for not yet knowing some highly knowable fact. Alexa’s bloopers float around the internet like clips from an absurdist comedy show. In one howler that went viral on YouTube, a toddler lisps, “Lexa, play ‘Ticker Ticker’ ”—presumably he wants to hear “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
Technology that uses voice will go deeper inside our heads to hijack our brains:
Lacking a face isn’t necessarily a hindrance to a smart speaker. In fact, it may be a boon. Voices can express certain emotional truths better than faces can. We are generally less adept at controlling the muscles that modulate our voices than our facial muscles (unless, of course, we’re trained singers or actors). Even if we try to suppress our real feelings, anger, boredom, or anxiety will often reveal themselves when we speak.
The power of the voice is at its uncanniest when we can’t locate its owner—when it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There’s a reason God speaks to Adam and Moses. In the beginning was the Word, not the Scroll. In her chilling allegory of charismatic totalitarianism, A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle conjures a demonic version of an all-pervasive voice. IT, the supernatural leader of a North Korea–like state, can insert its voice inside people’s heads and force them to say whatever it tells them to say. Disembodied voices accrue yet more influence from the primal yearning they awaken. A fetus recognizes his mother’s voice while still in the womb. Before we’re even born, we have already associated an unseen voice with nourishment and comfort.
A 2017 study published in American Psychologist makes the case that when people talk without seeing each other, they’re better at recognizing each other’s feelings. They’re more empathetic. Freud understood this long before empirical research demonstrated it. That’s why he had his patients lie on a couch, facing away from him. He could listen all the harder for the nuggets of truth in their ramblings, while they, undistracted by scowls or smiles, slipped into that twilight state in which they could unburden themselves of stifled feelings.
Human shallowness is the final destination:
If I have learned anything in my years of therapy, it is that the human psyche defaults to shallowness. We cling to our denials. It’s easier to pretend that deeper feelings don’t exist, because, of course, a lot of them are painful. What better way to avoid all that unpleasantness than to keep company with emotive entities unencumbered by actual emotions? But feelings don’t just go away like that. They have a way of making themselves known. I wonder how sweet my grandchildren’s dreams will be.
Topic and Sample Thesis
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Sample Thesis
Technology seduces us with "persuasion architecture," convenience, "frictionless" tasks, more efficient decision making, more productivity, and more pleasure; however, the end result is a dystopia based on economic decline for the masses, loss of privacy, shallowness, dehumanization, and a general hijacking of the brain resulting in a loss of free will.
5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Essay 5 Due 6-6-18
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Justin Peters' essay "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain," published in liberal-slanting Slate magazine, presents an argument that Joe Rogan and his podcast guest philosopher Sam Harris are wrong to believe in giving a platform to hateful voices. In the words of Peters, Rogan and Harris are morally wrong in their following premise: "[Liberals and progressives holding] people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance."
Joe Rogan defends giving a platform to Alt-Right "crackpots" while talking to comedian Neil Brennan in this podcast segment published on You Tube under title "Why Joe Rogan Has Right Wing Guests on His Show." Rogan argues that deplatforming is dangerous to American democracy and freedom of speech. This notion of deplatforming is under further controversy by democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren refusing to go on Fox News because she argues that Fox News is a "hate-for-profit racket." But others, like Megan Day in her essay "Elizabeth Warren Should Have Gone on Fox News," argue that Warren's virtue signaling is actually misguided and shows she is too interested in showcasing her moral purity than she is in engaging people with contrary ideas to her own. Even liberal MSNBC's "Morning Joe" criticizes Warren for not going into enemy territory to argue her message.
In the context of the deplatforming controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Elizabeth Warren, develop an argumentative thesis about deplatforming: Is engaging in conversations with opposing voices a way of giving harmful platform to hate and moral bankruptcy or is this cross-cultural conversation a way of shedding light on evil and finding opportunity to persuade one's opponents?
There can be a middle-ground in this debate. For example, one could justify having Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson on their show while eschewing a complete troll like Alex Jones.
Also consider that if you have strong opinions, they should be worth fighting for. Joe Rogan, who does MMA training and fighting, is a fighter. He doesn't mind going into the belly of beast and fighting the battles of the day. Elizabeth Warren, some might argue, is a pacifist who is eager to showboat her virtue to her crowd of the already converted but too cowardly to engage in battle with the enemy. If she can't fight, is she a worthy candidate? Some say no. Others say her moral purity is precisely her appeal. Frame the debate under your own terms.
Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
One. Is BE committing a Straw Man in the first paragraph? ("You don't have to get sick and die." Who promised that?)
In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse. It was barely even a decision, more like an accumulation of micro-decisions: to stay at my desk and meet a deadline or show up at the primary care office and submit to the latest test to gauge my biological sustainability; to spend the afternoon in faux-cozy corporate environment of a medical facility or to go for a walk. At first I criticized myself as a slacker and procrastinator, falling behind on the simple, obvious stuff that could prolong my life. After all, this is the great promise of modern scientific medicine: You do not have to get sick and die (at least not for a while), because problems can be detected “early” when they are readily treatable. Better to catch a tumor when it’s the size of an olive than that of a cantaloupe.
No one promises you won't get sick and die. Rather, the probabilities are in your favor if you get early detection and pursue preventative care.
Two. Is BE committing an either-or fallacy and non sequitur in second paragraph? (Does responsible preventative care exclude testing for lead? Are the two problems even related or is BE posing a non sequitur?)
I knew I was going against my own long-standing bias in favor of preventive medical care as opposed to expensive and invasive high-tech curative interventions. What could be more ridiculous than an inner-city hospital that offers a hyperbaric chamber but cannot bestir itself to get out in the neighborhood and test for lead poisoning? From a public health perspective, as well as a personal one, it makes far more sense to screen for preventable problems than to invest huge resources in the treatment of the very ill.
That BE's clinic offers dubious services such as a hyperbaric chamber and is not addressing lead poisoning in the community is a good point for an essay, but not this essay. She seems to be using a non sequitur that does not support her thesis, which is that preventive care is overrated and based on false promises.
Her thesis suffers in several ways. Here are two:
One, not all preventative care is the same.
Two, some people need more preventative care than others based on their family history.
Three. Does BE commit fallacies of ad hominem and Straw Man in third paragraph, and if so, what happens to her ethos? (Are people responsible for their preventative care "boasting" and delusional about living forever?)
I also understood that I was going against the grain for my particular demographic. Most of my educated, middle-class friends had begun to double down on their health-related efforts at the onset of middle age, if not earlier. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with upcoming medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure. Mostly they understood they the task of aging to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy, or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mind-set that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious,” while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free.” Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures like fasts, purges, or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.
BE uses some logical fallacies here: Not all health seekers behave the same. Some behave stupidly; others behave smartly. BE shouldn't lump them altogether with a few caricatures. For example, I exercise and watch what I eat, but I don't boast about my amazing healthy lifestyle. Nor do I think I will defy death.
Four. Does she commit another non sequitur in paragraphs four and five with her fatalism about death? (Since we are going to die and since there is so much we can do about the aging process, are we just supposed to say "the hell with it?" Does it follow that the inevitability of death compels us to give up on preventative medical care at some point?)
I had a different reaction to aging: I gradually came to realize that I was old enough to die, by which I am not suggesting that each of us bears an expiration date. There is of course no fixed age at which a person ceases to be worthy of further medical investment, whether aimed at prevention or cure. The military judges that a person is old enough to die—to put him or herself in the line of fire—at age 18. At the other end of life, many remain world leaders in their seventies or even older, without anyone questioning their need for lavish continuing testing and care. Zimbabwe’s former president, Robert Mugabe, recently turned 90, and has undergone multiple treatments for prostate cancer.
If we go by newspaper obituaries, however, we notice that there is an age at which death no longer requires much explanation. Although there is no general editorial rule on these matters, it is usually sufficient when the deceased is in their seventies or older for the obituary writer to invoke “natural causes.” It is sad when anyone dies, but no one can consider the death of a septuagenarian “tragic,” and there will be no demand for an investigation.
Just because BE feels "old enough to die," doesn't mean her position is embraced by everyone else. Her personal decision, in other words, is not some universal wisdom to be imposed on the rest of us. If you're done, BE, that's your business.
Five. While I see flaws in the beginning of the essay, there is a point where BE begins to win me over.
BE seems to be advocating a balance of quality of life and common sense vs. hyper vigilance or fanatical attention to one's health, which becomes oppressive.
BE makes the correct observation that there is a point where invasive medical procedures compromise our quality of life and offer little in the bargain; in fact, some procedures may present even more harm than good and cause us to question the medical establishment'sfinancial incentives.
Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and that will stave off hunger for as long as possible, like protein, fiber, and fats. I exercise—not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care: I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me. Ideally, the determination of when one is old enough to die should be a personal decision, based on a judgment of the likely benefits, if any, of medical care and—just as important at a certain age—how we choose to spend the time that remains to us.
Six. BE raise important question: Are health providers basing procedures on profit motive?
At the same time I had always questioned whatever procedures the health care providers recommended; in fact I am part of a generation of women who insisted on their right to raise questions without having the word “uncooperative,” or worse, written into their medical records. So when a few years ago my primary care physician told me that I needed a bone density scan, I of course asked him why: What could be done if the result was positive and my bones were found to be hollowed out by age? Fortunately, he replied, there was now a drug for that. I told him I was aware of the drug, both from its full-page magazine ads as well as from articles in the media questioning its safety and efficacy. Think of the alternative, he said, which might well be, say, a hip fracture, followed by a rapid descent to the nursing home.
Seven. Is health care industry wrongly calling natural conditions of old age "disease"?
So I grudgingly conceded that undergoing the test, which is noninvasive and covered by my insurance, might be preferable to immobility and institutionalization. The result was a diagnosis of “osteopenia,” or thinning of the bones, a condition that might have been alarming if I hadn’t found out that it is shared by nearly all women over the age of 35. Osteopenia is, in other words, not a disease but a normal feature of aging. A little further research, all into readily available sources, revealed that routine bone scanning had been heavily promoted and even subsidized by the drug’s manufacturer. Worse, the favored medication at the time of my diagnosis has turned out to cause some of the very problems it was supposed to prevent—bone degeneration and fractures. A cynic might conclude that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.
My first major defection from the required screening regimen was precipitated by a mammogram. No one likes mammography, which amounts to a brute-force effort to render the breasts transparent. First, a breast is flattened between two plates, then it is bombarded with ionizing radiation, which is, incidentally, the only environmental factor known for sure to cause breast cancer. I’d been fairly dutiful about mammograms since having been treated for breast cancer at the turn of the millennium, and now, about 10 years later, the gynecologist’s office reported that I’d had a “bad mammogram.” I spent the next few anxious weeks undergoing further tests, in the midst of which I managed to earn a ticket for “distracted driving.” Naturally I was distracted—by the looming decision of whether I would undergo debilitating cancer treatments again, or just let the disease take its course this time.
It turned out, after I’d been through a sonogram and fought panic in a coffin-like MRI tube, that the “bad mammogram” was a false positive resulting from the highly sensitive new digital forms of imaging. That was my last mammogram. Lest this seem like a reckless decision, I was supported in it by a high-end big-city oncologist, who viewed all my medical images and said that there would be no need to see me again, which I interpreted as ever again.
After this, every medical or dental encounter seemed to end in a tussle. Dentists—and I have met a number of them in my moves around the country—always wanted a fresh set of X-rays, even if the only problem was a chip in the tip of a tooth. All I could think of was the X-ray machines every shoe store had offered in my youth, through which children were encouraged to peer at the bones of their feet while wiggling their toes. The fun ended in the 1970s, when these “fluoroscopes” were eventually banned as dangerous sources of radiation. So why should I routinely expose my mouth, which is much more cancer-prone than the feet, to high annual doses of roentgens? If there was some reason to suspect underlying structural problems, okay, but just to satisfy the dentist’s curiosity or meet some abstract “standard of care”—no.
In all these encounters, I was struck by the professionals’ dismissal of my subjective reports—usually along the lines of “I feel fine”—in favor of the occult findings of their equipment. One physician, unprompted by any obvious signs or symptoms, decided to measure my lung capacity with the new handheld instrument he’d acquired for this purpose. I breathed into it, as instructed, as hard as I could, but my breath did not register on his screen. He fiddled with the instrument, looking deeply perturbed, and told me I seemed to be suffering from a pulmonary obstruction. In my defense, I argued that I do at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day, not counting ordinary walking, but I was too polite to demonstrate that I was still capable of vigorous oral argument.
Eight. BE makes convincing argument that in many cases medical industry subjects us to dangerous equipment and procedures that pose more risk than the very thing they're supposedly trying to find. This problem is explored in graphic detail in the Netflix documentary The Bleeding Edge.
It was my dentist, oddly enough, who suggested, during an ordinary filling, that I be tested for sleep apnea. How a dentist got involved in what is normally the domain of ear, nose, and throat specialists, I do not know, but she recommended that the screening be done at a “sleep center,” where I would attempt to sleep while heavily wired to monitoring devices, after which I could buy the treatment from her: a terrifying skull-shaped mask that would supposedly prevent sleep apnea and definitely extinguish any last possibility of sexual activity. But when I protested that there is no evidence I suffer from this disorder—no symptoms or detectable signs—the dentist said that I just might not be aware of it, adding that it could kill me in my sleep. This, I told her, is a prospect I can live with.
As soon as I reached the age of 50 physicians had begun to recommend—and in one case even plead—that I have a colonoscopy. As in the case of mammograms, the pressure to submit to a colonoscopy is hard to avoid. Celebrities promote them, comics snicker about them. During March, which is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, an eight-foot-high inflatable replica of a colon tours the country, allowing the anally curious to stroll through and inspect potentially cancerous polyps “from the inside.” But if mammography seems like a refined sort of sadism, colonoscopies mimic an actual sexual assault. First the patient is sedated—often with what is popularly known as the “date rape drug,” Versed—then a long flexible tube, bearing a camera on one end, is inserted into the rectum and all the way up through the colon. What repelled me even more than this kinky procedure was the day of fasting and laxatives that was supposed to precede it, in order to ensure that the little camera encounters something other than feces. I put this off from year to year, until I finally felt safe in the knowledge that since colon cancer is usually slow-growing, any cancerous polyps I contain are unlikely to flourish until I am already close to death from other causes.
Then my internist, the chief physician in a midsized group practice, sent out a letter announcing that he was suspending his ordinary practice in order to offer a new level of “concierge care” for those willing to cough up an extra $1,500 a year beyond what they already pay for insurance. The elite care would include 24-hour access to the doctor, leisurely visits, and, the letter promised, all kinds of tests and screenings in addition to the routine ones. This is when my decision crystallized: I made an appointment and told him face-to-face that, one, I was dismayed by his willingness to drop his less-than-affluent patients, who appeared to make up much of the waiting room population. And, two, I didn’t want more tests; I wanted a doctor who could protect me from unnecessary procedures. I would remain with the masses of ordinary, haphazardly screened patients.
Of course all this unnecessary screening and testing happens because doctors order it, but there is a growing rebellion within the medical profession. Over-diagnosis is beginning to be recognized as a public health problem, and is sometimes referred to as an “epidemic.” It is an appropriate subject for international medical conferences and evidence-laden books like Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in thePursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch and his Dartmouth colleagues Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin. Even health columnist Jane Brody, long a cheerleader for standard preventive care, now recommends that we think twice before undergoing what were once routine screening procedures. Physician and blogger John M. Mandrola advises straightforwardly:
Rather than being fearful of not detecting disease, both patients and doctors should fear healthcare. The best way to avoid medical errors is to avoid medical care. The default should be: I am well. The way to stay that way is to keep making good choices—not to have my doctor look for problems.
With age, the cost/benefit analysis shifts. On the one hand, health care becomes more affordable—for Americans, anyway—at age 65, when a person is eligible for Medicare. Exhortations to undergo screenings and tests continue, with loved ones joining the chorus. But in my case, the appetite for medical interactions of any kind wanes with each passing week. Suppose that preventive care uncovered some condition that would require agonizing treatments or sacrifices on my part—disfiguring surgery, radiation, drastic lifestyle limitations. Maybe these measures would add years to my life, but it would be a painful and depleted life that they prolonged.
As it is now, preventive medicine often extends to the end of life: 75-year-olds are encouraged to undergo mammography; people already in the grip of one terminal disease may be subjected to screenings for others. At a medical meeting, someone reported that a 100-year-old woman had just had her first mammogram, causing the audience to break into a “loud cheer.”
One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients? By subjecting them to tests and examinations that, in sufficient quantity, are bound to detect something wrong or at least worthy of follow-up. Gilbert and his coauthors offer a vivid analogy, borrowed from an expert in fractal geometry: “How many islands surround Britain’s coasts?” The answer of course depends on the resolution of the map you are using, as well as how you are defining an “island.” With high-resolution technologies like CT scans, the detection of tiny abnormalities is almost inevitable, leading to ever more tests, prescriptions, and doctor visits. And the tendency to over-test is amplified when the doctor who recommends the tests has a financial interest in the screening or imaging facility that he or she refers people to.
It’s not only a profit-hungry medical system that drives over-testing and over-diagnosis. Individual consumers, that is, former and potential patients, may demand the testing and even threaten a malpractice suit if they feel it is being withheld. In the last couple of decades, “patient advocacy” groups have sprung up to “brand” dozens of diseases and publicize the need for screening. Many have their own celebrity spokespersons—Katie Couric for colonoectal cancer, Rudy Giuliani for prostate cancer—and each sports its own distinctive colored ribbon—pink for breast cancer, purple for testicular cancer, black for melanoma, a “puzzle pattern” for autism, and so on—as well as special days or months for concentrated publicity and lobbying efforts. The goal of all this is generally “awareness,” meaning a willingness to undergo the appropriate screening, such as mammograms and PSA tests.
There are even sizable constituencies for discredited tests. When the US Preventive Services Task Force decided to withdraw its recommendation of routine mammograms for women under 50, even some feminist women’s health organizations, which I had expected to be more critical of conventional medical practices, spoke out in protest. A small band of women, identifying themselves as survivors of breast cancer, demonstrated on a highway outside the task force’s office, as if demanding that their breasts be squeezed. In 2008, the same task force gave PSA testing a grade of “D,” but advocates like Giuliani, who insisted that the test had saved his life, continued to press for it, as do most physicians.
Many physicians justify tests of dubious value by the “peace of mind” they supposedly confer— except of course on those who receive false positive results. Thyroid cancer is particularly vulnerable to over-diagnosis. With the introduction of more high-powered imaging techniques, doctors were able to detect many more tiny lumps in people’s necks and surgically remove them, whether surgery was warranted or not. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of thyroid cancer surgeries performed on US, French, and Italian women in the first decade of the 21st century are now judged to have been unnecessary. In South Korea, where doctors were especially conscientious about thyroid screening, the number rose to 90 percent (Men were also over-diagnosed, but in far lower numbers.) Patients pay a price for these surgeries, including a lifelong dependence on thyroid hormones, and since these are not always fully effective, the patient may be left chronically “depressed and sluggish.”
So far I can detect no stirrings of popular revolt against the regime of unnecessary and often harmful medical screening. Hardly anyone admits to personally rejecting tests, and one who did—science writer John Horgan in a Scientific American blog on why he will not undergo a colonoscopy—somewhat undercut his well-reasoned argument by describing himself as an “anti-testing nut.” Most people joke about the distastefulness of the recommended procedures, while gamely submitting to whatever is expected of them.
But there’s a significant rebellion brewing on another front. Increasingly, we read laments about the “medicalization of dying,” usually focused on a formerly frisky parent or grandparent who had made clear her request for a natural, nonmedical death, only to end up tethered by cables and tubes to an ICU bed. Physicians see this all the time—witty people silenced by ventilators, the fastidious rendered incontinent—and some are determined not to let the same thing happen to themselves. They may refuse care, knowing that it is more likely to lead to disability than health, like the orthopedist who upon receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer immediately closed down his practice and went home to die in relative comfort and peace. A few physicians are more decisively proactive, and have themselves tattooed “NO CODE” or “DNR,” meaning “do not resuscitate.” They reject the same drastic end-of-life measures that they routinely inflict on their patients.
In giving up on preventive care, I’m just taking this line of thinking a step further: Not only do I reject the torment of a medicalized death, but I refuse to accept a medicalized life, and my determination only deepens with age. As the time that remains to me shrinks, each month and day becomes too precious to spend in windowless waiting rooms and under the cold scrutiny of machines. Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating.
Sample Thesis Statements
Supporting BE
While BE's essay has a rocky beginning with some logical fallacies, her essay eventually makes the convincing case that the medical industry profits from promising unrealistic expectations about aging, subjecting us to invasive procedures that compromise the quality of our life, and packaging their "preventative care" to veil their true motive: profit.
Another Support of BE
While some medical care is invasive and unsafe, we can, like BE, do our due diligence to find the sweet spot of preventative care that works for us and repel those procedures that BE correctly observes are unsafe and profit-driven.
Refuting BE
While BE has resigned herself to dying and old age, it is irresponsible for her to play doctor and determine what procedures work and do not work for her and to then argue that we should follow her reckless behavior.
Harvard Betrays a Law Professor — and Itself by Randall Kennedy
I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. At the center of the controversy is Ronald Sullivan, a law professor who ran afoul of student activists enraged that he was willing to represent Harvey Weinstein.
Mr. Sullivan is my friend and colleague. He is the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School and the architect of a conviction-review program in Brooklyn that has freed a score of improperly convicted individuals. He is also a sought-after lawyer who has represented plaintiffs (including the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer fueled the Black Lives Matter movement) as well as defendants (including Rose McGowan, the actress who faced drug charges and is, ironically, one of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers).
In addition to his work as a professor and a lawyer, Mr. Sullivan, with his wife, Stephanie Robinson, has served for a decade as the faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate dormitory where some 400 students live.
As a faculty dean, Mr. Sullivan is responsible for creating a safe, fun, supportive environment in which students can pursue their collegiate ambitions. Winthrop House is meant to be a home away from home; faculty deans are in loco parentis. Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Robinson are expected to attend to the students as counselors, cheerleaders, impresarios and guardians.
Enraged by Mr. Sullivan’s work on behalf of Mr. Weinstein, a cadre of students at Winthrop, and in other parts of the university as well, demanded the lawyer’s ouster, asserting that his choice of client undermined their confidence in his ability to be properly attuned to their thoughts and feelings. Some said that Mr. Sullivan’s choice was nothing less than “trauma-inducing.”
From the outset of the dispute, which began in January when Mr. Sullivan joined Mr. Weinstein’s team of lawyers (he has recently withdrawn from active participation), Harvard authorities have evinced sympathy with the position voiced by the student dissidents. “I take seriously the concerns that have been raised from members of the College community regarding the impact of Professor Sullivan’s choice to serve as counsel for Harvey Weinstein on the House community that he is responsible for leading as a faculty dean,” the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, remarked in an email to students in February.
A few weeks later, after protests that included vandalism (spray-painted graffiti on university buildings included the slogans “Our rage is self-defense” and “Whose side are you on?”), Dean Khurana initiated a review of “the climate” at Winthrop House, including asking students in a questionnaire whether they found the dormitory “sexist” or “non-sexist.” Some onlookers saw the move as a predetermined predicate for wrangling Mr. Sullivan’s resignation or dismissal.
They were right. On Saturday, Dean Khurana announced that Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Robinson would no longer be deans of the college, citing their “ineffective” efforts to improve “the climate” at Winthrop.
Although Dean Khurana declared that his decision was “informed by a number of considerations,” he said nothing in his announcement about the issue that lay at the heart of the controversy: the claim that Mr. Sullivan’s representation of Mr. Weinstein was in and of itself inconsistent with his role as a faculty dean. No wonder the students who campaigned for his dismissal on that basis celebrated the administration’s action.
The upshot is that Harvard College appears to have ratified the proposition that it is inappropriate for a faculty dean to defend a person reviled by a substantial number of students — a position that would disqualify a long list of stalwart defenders of civil liberties and civil rights, including Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.
Student opposition to Mr. Sullivan has hinged on the idea of safety — that they would not feel safe confiding in Mr. Sullivan about matters having to do with sexual harassment or assault given his willingness to serve as a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein. Let’s assume the good faith of such declarations (though some are likely mere parroting). Even still, they should not be accepted simply because they represent sincere beliefs or feelings.
Suppose atheist students claimed that they did not feel “safe” confiding in a faculty dean who was an outspoken Christian or if conservative students claimed that they did not feel “safe” confiding in a faculty dean who was a prominent leftist. One would hope that university officials would say more than that they “take seriously” the concerns raised and fears expressed. One would hope that they would say that Harvard University defends — broadly — the right of people to express themselves aesthetically, ideologically, intellectually and professionally. One would hope that they would say that the acceptability of a faculty dean must rest upon the way in which he meets his duties, not on his personal beliefs or professional associations. One would hope, in short, that Harvard would seek to educate its students and not simply defer to vague apprehensions or pander to the imperatives of misguided rage.
Now, of course, Harvard authorities are dredging up various supposed delinquencies on Mr. Sullivan’s part. An exposé in The Harvard Crimson refers to allegations that he and his wife were highhanded in their dealings with the staff at Winthrop House. No one is perfect; perhaps there is something to these claims.
But these dissatisfactions, if relevant at all, were not what provoked the student protests that led to Mr. Sullivan’s ouster. The central force animating the drama has been student anger at anyone daring to breach the wall of ostracism surrounding Mr. Weinstein, even for the limited purpose of extending him legal representation. They want to make him, a person still clothed with the presumption of innocence, more of an untouchable before trial than those who have been convicted of a crime. There was no publicized protest at Winthrop House when Mr. Sullivan successfully represented a convicted murderer, Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots star, who was acquitted of a separate double murder before killing himself in prison.
Harvard officials are certainly capable of withstanding student pressure. This time, though, they don’t want to. Some high-ranking administrators have clearly been guided by an affinity for the belief that Mr. Sullivan’s representation of Mr. Weinstein constituted a betrayal of enlightened judgment. Others have simply been willing to be mau-maued.
In March, when it seemed that the administration was getting ready to do what it’s now done, 52 members of the Harvard Law School faculty, myself included, signed a letter supporting Mr. Sullivan’s “dedication to the professional tradition of providing representation to people accused to crimes and other misconduct, including those who are most reviled.” We called upon Harvard “to recognize that such legal advocacy in service of constitutional principles is not only fully consistent with Sullivan’s roles of law professor and dean of an undergraduate house, but also one of the many possible models that resident deans can provide in teaching, mentoring and advising students.”
The rejection of that advice has now led to an alarming impasse. Friends of academia should insist that Harvard answer the question: Why is serving as defense counsel for Harvey Weinstein inconsistent with serving as a faculty dean?
5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Essay 5 Due 6-6-18
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Justin Peters' essay "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain," published in liberal-slanting Slate magazine, presents an argument that Joe Rogan and his podcast guest philosopher Sam Harris are wrong to believe in giving a platform to hateful voices. In the words of Peters, Rogan and Harris are morally wrong in their following premise: "[Liberals and progressives holding] people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance."
Joe Rogan defends giving a platform to Alt-Right "crackpots" while talking to comedian Neil Brennan in this podcast segment published on You Tube under title "Why Joe Rogan Has Right Wing Guests on His Show." Rogan argues that deplatforming is dangerous to American democracy and freedom of speech. This notion of deplatforming is under further controversy by democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren refusing to go on Fox News because she argues that Fox News is a "hate-for-profit racket." But others, like Megan Day in her essay "Elizabeth Warren Should Have Gone on Fox News," argue that Warren's virtue signaling is actually misguided and shows she is too interested in showcasing her moral purity than she is in engaging people with contrary ideas to her own. Even liberal MSNBC's "Morning Joe" criticizes Warren for not going into enemy territory to argue her message.
In the context of the deplatforming controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Elizabeth Warren, develop an argumentative thesis about deplatforming: Is engaging in conversations with opposing voices a way of giving harmful platform to hate and moral bankruptcy or is this cross-cultural conversation a way of shedding light on evil and finding opportunity to persuade one's opponents?
There can be a middle-ground in this debate. For example, one could justify having Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson on their show while eschewing a complete troll like Alex Jones.
Also consider that if you have strong opinions, they should be worth fighting for. Joe Rogan, who does MMA training and fighting, is a fighter. He doesn't mind going into the belly of beast and fighting the battles of the day. Elizabeth Warren, some might argue, is a pacifist who is eager to showboat her virtue to her crowd of the already converted but too cowardly to engage in battle with the enemy. If she can't fight, is she a worthy candidate? Some say no. Others say her moral purity is precisely her appeal. Frame the debate under your own terms.
Coddling of the American Mind Lesson
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
One. What are microaggressions and how do they provide a controversy?
Buzzfeed has an example of 21 so-called “microaggressions.”
The Microaggression Fallacy
The suggestion in the prefix “micro” is that the aggression is small, subtle, not a flagrant act of racial hatred but unconscious, subtle hostility and ignorance.
One can argue that the bullheaded ignorance that informs the acts described above is not a microaggression at all, but rather conspicuous racial animosity.
To use the term microaggression, as the authors do, may be a Straw Man Fallacy, a misrepresentation of overt racism to help the authors’ claim that students are over sensitive. Using the term microaggression may be a misnomer.
The Lump All Together Fallacy
Some aggressions that students point at are legit; others are not, but let us not lump all of these complaints together to paint the students as overly sensitive snowflakes.
Two. What is the difference between political correctness in the 1990s and today?
Back in the 90s, political correctness was about curbing hate speech by saying it wasn’t saved under the umbrella of free speech.
Secondly, in the 90s there was an attack on the White Holy Canon of books, music, and art, which tended to exclude people of color.
Today political correctness is focused more on emotional well-being.
Have we created a safe space for our students in which we shield them from words and triggers that will make them anxious, distraught, and threatened?
A student who is easily triggered is called a snowflake. Some of the triggers are more substantial than others, and we can debate what should and what should not traumatized students; however, we should be aware of the Snowflake Fallacy:
Beware of Snowflake Fallacy (variation of Ad Hominem):
In a campus debate, you upset an opponent and rather than address the substance of the opponent’s content, you attack the person by calling him or her a snowflake.
Three. Why might some challenge the authors’ claim that campuses are turning into overly sensitive Snowflake Factories?
One might attack the authors of lacking proportion. And here we arrive at another fallacy:
The Distraction Fallacy:
You pound a fringe topic while ignoring far worse, far more pervasive issues.
Yes, some campuses might exhibit fringe behavior that encourages snowflakes, but this problem pales in comparison to more heavy-hitting, pervasive crises on campuses:
Cost of education
Student debt
Student cheating
Arbitrary, corrupt methods of accepting students into campus
Rich parents bribing officials to get their students into college.
One in five California community college students suffer from food and shelter insecurity; do we really need to fret over microaggressions and snowflakes?
Four. What is the authors’ thesis:
The new protectiveness is teaching students to think pathologically. In other words, by encouraging them to become snowflakes, they become weak whiners, complainers, groaners. All they do is fuss.
Such people are insufferable in the workplace. No one wants to hire them.
Some of the surrounding information may be somewhat distorted, as I’ve tried to show above, but their thesis seems defensible: If you paint a picture of a snowflake as a hyper-sensitive, sniveling whiner, then indeed such a person is pathological and is insufferable as a friend, family member, student, or potential employee.
I seriously doubt my students, who do not act the way described in this essay, want to hang out with snowflakes.
So while I agree with the authors’ thesis, I disagree with the scope of the problem, at least at a community college.
Five. What are the causes of Helicopter Parents who create Snowflakes?
In the 1980s, parents were terrified of milk cartons with photos of kidnapped children on them. They started walking their children to school.
When we over protect our children, we make them weak, and we suffocate and hurt them.
Political tribalism:
We read:
These same children grew up in a culture that was (and still is) becoming more politically polarized. Republicans and Democrats have never particularly liked each other, but survey data going back to the 1970s show that on average, their mutual dislike used to be surprisingly mild. Negative feelings have grown steadily stronger, however, particularly since the early 2000s. Political scientists call this process “affective partisan polarization,” and it is a very serious problem for any democracy. As each side increasingly demonizes the other, compromise becomes more difficult. A recent study shows that implicit or unconscious biases are now at least as strong across political parties as they are across races.
So it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past. This hostility, and the self-righteousness fueled by strong partisan emotions, can be expected to add force to any moral crusade. A principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds.” Part of what we do when we make moral judgments is express allegiance to a team. But that can interfere with our ability to think critically. Acknowledging that the other side’s viewpoint has any merit is risky—your teammates may see you as a traitor.
Social Media:
We read:
Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors. Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join. This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.
These first true “social-media natives” may be different from members of previous generations in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts. We find much to like about these trends; young people today are engaged with one another, with news stories, and with prosocial endeavors to a greater degree than when the dominant technology was television. But social media has also fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.
Increased Diagnosis of Mental Illness Causes Over Protection
We read:
We do not mean to imply simple causation, but rates of mental illness in young adults have been rising, both on campus and off, in recent decades. Some portion of the increase is surely due to better diagnosis and greater willingness to seek help, but most experts seem to agree that some portion of the trend is real. Nearly all of the campus mental-health directors surveyed in 2013 by the American College Counseling Association reported that the number of students with severe psychological problems was rising at their schools. The rate of emotional distress reported by students themselves is also high, and rising. In a 2014 survey by the American College Health Association, 54 percent of college students surveyed said that they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the past 12 months, up from 49 percent in the same survey just five years earlier. Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.
We’ve replaced critical thinking on campuses with “emotional reasoning.”
We read:
Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.
Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.
Yet another cause: Being a bratty little snowflake gets you to the top.
I recently met a Texan couple whose son was still in diapers. They were angling to get him into a preschool that feeds into a private preparatory school with a great record for college admissions.
The couple were ambivalent about doing this. They were from immigrant and working-class backgrounds, and had thrived in public schools. In theory, they believed that all children should have an equal chance to succeed. But I suspected that if they got their son a spot in the preschool, they’d take it. These days, such chances are hard to pass up.
It’s a familiar story. Psychologists, sociologists and journalists have spent more than a decade diagnosing and critiquing the habits of “helicopter parents” and their school obsessions. They insist that hyper-parenting backfires — creating a generation of stressed-out kids who can’t function alone. Parents themselves alternate between feeling guilty, panicked and ridiculous.
But new research shows that in our unequal era, this kind of parenting brings life-changing benefits. That’s the message of the book “Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids,” by the economists Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University and Fabrizio Zilibotti of Yale. It’s true that high-octane, hardworking child-rearing has some pointless excesses, and it doesn’t spark joy for parents. But done right, it works for kids, not just in the United States but in rich countries around the world.
The authors explain that when inequality hit a low in the 1970s, there wasn’t that much of a gap between what someone earned with or without a college degree. Strict parenting gave way to an era of “permissive parenting” — giving children lots of freedom with little oversight. Why spend 18 years nagging kids to succeed if the rewards weren’t worth it?
In the 1980s, however, inequality increased sharply in Western countries, especially the United States, and the gap between white- and blue-collar pay widened. Permissive parenting was replaced by helicopter parenting. Middle- and upper-class parents who’d gone to public schools and spent evenings playing kickball in the neighborhood began elbowing their toddlers into fast-track preschools and spending evenings monitoring their homework and chauffeuring them to activities.
American parents eventually increased their hands-on caregiving by about 12 hours a week, compared with the 1970s. Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Canadian and British parents ramped up their child care, too. (In Japan, hyper-involved mothers are known as “monster parents.”)
Not all the changes were rational. When some parents learned that talking to toddlers helps to develop their young brains, they began monologuing at them constantly.
But for the most part, the new parenting efforts seemed effective. Dr. Doepke and Dr. Zilibotti can’t prove causality (to do that, you’d have to randomly assign parenting styles to different families). But when they analyzed the 2012 PISA, an academic test of 15-year-olds around the world, along with reports from the teenagers and their parents about how they interact, they found that an “intensive parenting style” correlated with higher scores on the test. This was true even among teenagers whose parents had similar levels of education.
It’s not enough just to hover over your kids, however. If you do it as an “authoritarian” parent — defined as someone who issues directives, expects children to obey and sometimes hits those who don’t — you won’t get the full benefits.
The most effective parents, according to the authors, are “authoritative.” They use reasoning to persuade kids to do things that are good for them. Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.
And they seem most successful at helping their kids achieve the holy grails of modern parenting: college and postgraduate degrees, which now have a huge financial payoff. Using data from a national studythat followed thousands of American teenagers for years, the authors found that the offspring of “authoritative” parents were more likely to graduate from college and graduate school, especially compared with those with authoritarian parents. This was true even when they controlled for the parents’ education and income.
The benefits aren’t just academic. In a British study, kids raised by authoritative parents reported better health and higher self-esteem. In the American study, they were less likely to use drugs, smoke or abuse alcohol; they started having sex at older ages, and they were more likely to use condoms.
So why wouldn’t everyone just become an authoritative parent? Religious people, regardless of their income, are more likely to be authoritarian parents who expect obedience and believe in corporal punishment, the authors found.
Working-class and poor parents might not have the leisure time to hover or the budget to pay for activities and expensive schools. And they may rightly feel that they need to prepare their children for jobs in which rule-following matters more than debating skills.
Those who can afford to helicopter are probably making things even more unequal for the next generation. As with the Texan couple, this doesn’t always match their political beliefs. In the “Hidden Tribes” survey published last year by the nonprofit group More in Common, respondents who valued self-reliance and creativity in children — staples of both authoritative and permissive parents — were more likely to have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those with more authoritarian views on parenting were more likely to have voted for Donald Trump.
Since there’s apparently no limit to how much people will do for their kids, the prognosis for parenting doesn’t look good. Yet another reason to elect people who’ll make America more equal: We grown-ups can finally stop doing homework.
5-21 We will study Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and explore the pros and cons of his position. We will look at Bloom’s video “Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care.” Homework #16: Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why they believe a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Essay 5 Due 6-6-18
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Justin Peters' essay "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain," published in liberal-slanting Slate magazine, presents an argument that Joe Rogan and his podcast guest philosopher Sam Harris are wrong to believe in giving a platform to hateful voices. In the words of Peters, Rogan and Harris are morally wrong in their following premise: "[Liberals and progressives holding] people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance."
Joe Rogan defends giving a platform to Alt-Right "crackpots" while talking to comedian Neil Brennan in this podcast segment published on You Tube under title "Why Joe Rogan Has Right Wing Guests on His Show." Rogan argues that deplatforming is dangerous to American democracy and freedom of speech. This notion of deplatforming is under further controversy by democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren refusing to go on Fox News because she argues that Fox News is a "hate-for-profit racket." But others, like Megan Day in her essay "Elizabeth Warren Should Have Gone on Fox News," argue that Warren's virtue signaling is actually misguided and shows she is too interested in showcasing her moral purity than she is in engaging people with contrary ideas to her own. Even liberal MSNBC's "Morning Joe" criticizes Warren for not going into enemy territory to argue her message.
In the context of the deplatforming controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Elizabeth Warren, develop an argumentative thesis about deplatforming: Is engaging in conversations with opposing voices a way of giving harmful platform to hate and moral bankruptcy or is this cross-cultural conversation a way of shedding light on evil and finding opportunity to persuade one's opponents?
There can be a middle-ground in this debate. For example, one could justify having Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson on their show while eschewing a complete troll like Alex Jones.
Also consider that if you have strong opinions, they should be worth fighting for. Joe Rogan, who does MMA training and fighting, is a fighter. He doesn't mind going into the belly of beast and fighting the battles of the day. Elizabeth Warren, some might argue, is a pacifist who is eager to showboat her virtue to her crowd of the already converted but too cowardly to engage in battle with the enemy. If she can't fight, is she a worthy candidate? Some say no. Others say her moral purity is precisely her appeal. Frame the debate under your own terms.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
So-What Fallacy
To make an obvious statement, argument, or observation and expect people to make a big deal about it when there is no big deal because the person is simply stating the obvious. For example, extreme emotions are bad for us. So what?
Red Herring Fallacy
When people present a fake topic or non-issue that serves to distract us from the real and very important issues. Is too much empathy really a problem, as Paul Bloom argues? And what does this fake problem distract us from?
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Reduction Ad Absurdum Fallacy occurs when people try to disprove something by showing how this something inevitably leads to ridiculous, extreme, or absurd conclusion. In other words, this fallacy shows an extreme case and asks that this extreme be looked at as the natural state of affairs when it is not.
Reductio ad absurdum is neither intrinsically valid or fallacious. It depends on how it’s used.
Here are some McMahon examples of reduction ad absurdum:
Surely, diet books don’t work. If a diet book worked, we’d all read that diet book, and diet books wouldn’t have to be written anymore.
Clearly, psychotherapy is dangerous. We’ve had psychotherapy now for over 100 years, and human beings are crazier than ever.
Eating popcorn at night will make you thirsty.
Being thirsty will compel you to drink copious amounts of liquids before you go to bed.
As a result, you’ll be up all night going to the bathroom.
As a result, you will get a horrible night’s sleep.
As a result, you will be tired all day at work.
As a result, your work performance will be substandard and you will be fired.
As a result of losing your job, you won’t be able to pay your bills, and you will be homeless.
Therefore, we can conclude that eating popcorn will make you homeless.
A mother, concerned that her thirty-year-old son, who is still in college and spends much of his time in the mother’s basement wearing a robe while eating Hot Pockets at his computer and has never been on a date, has this exchange with her son.
“Honey, have you ever tried going out on a date?”
“I can’t date, Mother. I’m getting my Master’s. Dating will provide too much drama, which will compromise my academic performance.”
“But, honey, you’ve been going to college for over twelve years now.”
“Precisely. All the more reason I shouldn’t be dating. Now leave me alone. I’m doing research.”
Straw Man Fallacy
Straw Man Fallacy occurs when people distort a position and then argue against the distorted position. They don't argue against the real position because they have no argument against truth. They can only look convincing when they argue against something they know not to be true.
The Straw Man is intellectually dishonest.
The Straw Man is a fake way to get attention for oneself.
The Straw Man is a sneaky way to appear to be relevant one when is not.
Empathy Assignment
Defend, refute, or complicate Bloom's assertion in "Against Empathy" that empathy, contrary to popular opinion, is not a virtue in the face of evidence that empathy is a form of "irrational compassion" that can be destructive and inimical to human affairs.
Paul Bloom's Claim That Empathy Has Deficits
One. Empathy is a poor moral guide because it's biased and often looks-based.
Two. Empathy blinds us from utilitarian approaches to policy in favor of feelings approaches.
Three. Empathy is inferior to compassion. The latter desires to help others in the absence of feelings or empathy.
Four. Excessive empathy or "hyper empathy" can be bullying and controlling over others.
Five. Excessive empathy can lead to excessive self-denial and self-abnegation.
Six. Empathy can be selfish, indulgent, unpleasant, and inappropriate when the person is reacting to someone who is suffering (drowning example).
Seven. Empathy leads to emotional burnout.
Eight. Empathy is a liability for doctors who need calm, not empathy, to make their patients feel better.
Two. He accuses PB of wanting us to feel others' pain less: Straw Man Fallacy.
Three. He accuses PB of saying one thing and doing another: Semantic and Splitting Hairs Fallacy.
Four. He accuses PB of wanting to be "more significant than he is." False Motivation Fallacy.
Five. Complexity Fallacy. If the argument isn't simple enough, accuse the writer of being unclear and dishonest.
Six. "Fudging and circumlocution": Wordy Refutation Fallacy: Hide behind big words to sound convincing.
Seven. "He provokes audience and makes a bold statement" and then he is "hedging and qualifying": Stipulation Fallacy. Essayists use stipulations all the time. They are part of sophisticated analysis, not trickery.
Eight. "fundamental human belief": Tradition and Emotional Fallacy.
Nine. We need more, not less, empathy: More Is Better Fallacy.
Ten. "No one said a doctor needs to feel depressed": Red Herring Fallacy.
Eleven. "He sets himself up as a tough-minded truth teller." False Representation Fallacy.
When asked what I am working on, I often say I am writing a book about empathy. People tend to smile and nod, and then I add, “I’m against it.” This usually gets an uncomfortable laugh.
This reaction surprised me at first, but I’ve come to realize that taking a position against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens—a statement so outlandish it can only be a joke. And so I’ve learned to clarify, to explain that I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, doing the right thing, and making the world a better place. My claim is actually the opposite: if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.
The word “empathy” is used in many ways, but here I am adopting its most common meaning, which corresponds to what eighteenth-century philosophers such as Adam Smith called “sympathy.” It refers to the process of experiencing the world as others do, or at least as you think they do. To empathize with someone is to put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain. Some researchers also use the term to encompass the more coldblooded process of assessing what other people are thinking, their motivations, their plans, what they believe. This is sometimes called “cognitive,” as opposed to “emotional,” empathy. I will follow this convention here, but we should keep in mind that the two are distinct—they emerge from different brain processes; you can have a lot of one and a little of the other—and that most of the discussion of the moral implications of empathy focuses on its emotional side.
Some degree of emotional empathy is bred in the bone. The sight and sound of another’s suffering is unpleasant for babies and, as soon as they are mobile enough, they try to help, patting and soothing others in distress. This is not uniquely human: the primatologist Frans de Waal notes that chimps will often put their arms around the victim of an attack and pat her or groom her.
Empathy can occur automatically, even involuntarily. Smith describes how “persons of delicate fibres” who notice a beggar’s sores and ulcers “are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies.” John Updike writes, “My grandmother would have choking fits at the kitchen table, and my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy.”
And empathy can be extended through the imagination. In a speech before he became president, Barack Obama stressed how important it is
to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. . . . When you think like this—when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers—it becomes harder not to act, harder not to help.
Obama is right about this last part; there is considerable support for what the psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls “the empathy-altruism hypothesis”: when you empathize with others, you are more likely to help them. In general, empathy serves to dissolve the boundaries between one person and another; it is a force against selfishness and indifference.
It is easy to see, then, how empathy can be a moral good, and it has many champions. Obama talks frequently about empathy; witness his recent claim, after his first meeting with Pope Francis, that “it’s the lack of empathy that makes it very easy for us to plunge into wars. It’s the lack of empathy that allows us to ignore the homeless on the streets.” In The Empathetic Civilization (2009) Jeremy Rifkin argues that the only way our species will survive war, environmental degradation, and economic collapse is through the enhancement of “global empathy.” This past June, Bill and Melinda Gates concluded their Stanford commencement address by asking students to nurture and expand their empathetic powers, essential for a better world.
Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.
In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences.
But even if you accept this argument, there is a lot more to life than public policy. Consider our everyday interactions with our parents and children, with our partners and friends. Consider also certain special relationships, such as that between doctor and patient or therapist and client. Empathy might not scale up to the policy level, but it seems an unalloyed good when it comes to these intimate relationships—the more the better.
I used to believe this, but I am no longer sure.
• • •
One of empathy’s most thoughtful defenders is the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. In his 2011 book The Science of Evil, he draws upon psychology and neuroscience to argue that the notion of evil should be replaced with “empathy erosion” and that a high degree of empathy is what makes for good people and good societies.
Individuals differ in their disposition to feel empathy, and Baron-Cohen posits an empathy curve that runs from Level 0, where there is no empathy at all, to Level 6, where one is “continually focused on other people’s feelings . . . . in a constant state of hyperarousal, such that other people are never off their radar.” He sketches one such Level 6 individual:
Hannah is a psychotherapist who has a natural gift for tuning into how others are feeling. As soon as you walk into her living room, she is already reading your face, your gait, your posture. The first thing she asks you is ‘How are you?’ but this is no perfunctory platitude. Her intonation—even before you have taken off your coat—suggests an invitation to confide, to disclose, to share. Even if you just answer with a short phrase, your tone of voice reveals to her your inner emotional state, and she quickly follows up your answer with ‘You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?’
Before you know it, you are opening up to this wonderful listener, who interjects only to offer sounds of comfort and concern, to mirror how you feel, occasionally offering soothing words to boost you and make you feel valued. Hannah is not doing this because it is her job to do so. She is like this with her clients, her friends, and even people she has only just met. Hannah’s friends feel cared for by her, and her friendships are built around sharing confidences and offering mutual support. She has an unstoppable drive to empathize.
It is easy to see what Baron-Cohen finds so impressive here. Hannah sounds like a good therapist, and it seems as if she would also be a good mother to young children.
But consider what it must be like to be her. Hannah’s concern for other people doesn’t derive from particular appreciation or respect for them; her concern is indiscriminate and applies to strangers as well as friends. She also does not endorse a guiding principle based on compassion and kindness. Rather, Hannah is compelled by hyperarousal—her drive is unstoppable. Her experience is the opposite of selfishness but just as extreme. A selfish person might go through life indifferent to the pleasure and pain of others—ninety-nine for him and one for everyone else—while in Hannah’s case, the feelings of others are always in her head—ninety-nine for everyone else and one for her.
It is no accident that Baron-Cohen chose a woman as his example. In a series of empirical and theoretical articles, psychologists Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz have explored why women are twice as likely as men to experience depression. Their results suggest that this divergence is explained in part by a sex difference in the propensity for “unmitigated communion,” defined as “an excessive concern with others and placing others’ needs before one’s own.” Helgeson and Fritz developed a simple nine-item questionnaire, which asks respondents to indicate whether they agree with statements such as, “For me to be happy, I need others to be happy,” “I can’t say no when someone asks me for help,” and “I often worry about others’ problems.” Women typically score higher than men on this scale; Hannah would, I bet, score high indeed.
Strong inclination toward empathy comes with costs. Individuals scoring high in unmitigated communion report asymmetrical relationships, where they support others but don’t get support themselves. They also are more prone to suffer depression and anxiety. Working from a different literature on “pathological altruism,” Barbara Oakley notes in Cold-Blooded Kindness (2011), “It’s surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women’s generally stronger empathy for and focus on others.”
The problems that arise here have to do with emotional empathy—feeling another’s pain. This leads to what psychologists call empathetic distress. We can contrast this with non-empathetic compassion—a more distanced love and kindness and concern for others. Such compassion is a psychological plus. Putting aside the obvious point that some degree of caring for others is morally right, kindness and altruism are associated with all sorts of positive physical and psychological outcomes, including a boost in both short-term mood and long-term happiness. If you want to get happy, helping others is an excellent way to do so.
It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.
Or consider long-distance charity. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone who hears about the plight of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly.
Summing up, compassionate helping is good for you and for others. But empathetic distress is destructive of the individual in the long run.
It might also be of little help to other people because experiencing others’ pain is exhausting and leads to burnout. This issue is explored in the Buddhist literature on morality. Consider the life of a bodhisattva, an enlightened person who vows not to pass into Nirvana, choosing instead to stay in the normal cycle of life and death to help the masses. How is a bodhisattva to live? In Consequences of Compassion (2009) Charles Goodman notes the distinction in Buddhists texts between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to empathy, and “great compassion,” which involves love for others without empathetic attachment or distress. Sentimental compassion is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” Goodman defends great compassion, which is more distanced and reserved and can be sustained indefinitely.
This distinction has some support in the collaborative work of Tania Singer, a psychologist and neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, meditation expert, and former scientist. In a series of studies using fMRI brain scanning, Ricard was asked to engage in various types of compassion meditation directed toward people who are suffering. To the surprise of the investigators, these meditative states did not activate parts of the brain that are normally activated by non-meditators when they think about others’ pain. Ricard described his meditative experience as “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.”
He was then asked to put himself in an empathetic state and was scanned while doing so. Now the appropriate circuits associated with empathetic distress were activated. “The empathic sharing,” Ricard said, “very quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out.”
One sees a similar contrast in ongoing experiments led by Singer and her colleagues in which people are either given empathy training, which focuses on the capacity to experience the suffering of others, or compassion training, in which subjects are trained to respond to suffering with feelings of warmth and care. According to Singer’s results, among test subjects who underwent empathy training, “negative affect was increased in response to both people in distress and even to people in everyday life situations. . . . these findings underline the belief that engaging in empathic resonance is a highly aversive experience and, as such, can be a risk factor for burnout.” Compassion training—which doesn’t involve empathetic arousal to the perceived distress of others—was more effective, leading to both increased positive emotions and increased altruism.
This brings us to the targets of empathy. As I write this, an older relative of mine who has cancer is going back and forth to hospitals and rehabilitation centers. I’ve watched him interact with doctors and learned what he thinks of them. He values doctors who take the time to listen to him and develop an understanding of his situation; he benefits from this sort of cognitive empathy. But emotional empathy is more complicated. He gets the most from doctors who don’t feel as he does, who are calm when he is anxious, confident when he is uncertain. And he particularly appreciates certain virtues that have little directly to do with empathy, virtues such as competence, honesty, professionalism, and respect.
Leslie Jamison makes a similar point in her new essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison was at one time a medical actor—she would fake symptoms for medical students, who would diagnose her as part of their training. She also rated them on their skills. The most important entry on her checklist was number thirty-one: “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.” But when she discusses her real experiences with doctors, her assessment of empathy is mixed. She met with one doctor who was cold and unsympathetic to her concerns, which caused her pain. But she is grateful to another who kept a reassuring distance and objectivity: “I didn’t need him to be my mother—even for a day—I only needed him to know what he was doing,” she writes. “His calmness didn’t make me feel abandoned, it made me feel secure. . . . I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.”
Or consider friendship and love. Hannah’s “soothing words,” her “sounds of comfort and concern” and mirroring of others’ feelings describe how a certain type of therapist treats a client or how a certain type of parent treats an anxious toddler. But this isn’t how friendship usually works. Friendship is rooted in symmetry and equality, shared projects, teasing and jokes and gossip, all of which are absent from a therapeutic relationship. While I might benefit from a friend’s therapy if I were feeling deeply anxious or depressed, I don’t, on the whole, want my friends to treat me like a suffering patient, softly murmuring reassurances when they detect that I’m out of sorts. Hannah’s “You sound a bit sad. What’s happened to upset you?” exemplifies what Jamison means when she says, “Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”
Putting aside the extremes, do more empathetic people make better friends and partners? To my knowledge, this has never been studied. Certainly we want our friends to understand us and to care about us. It would be unnerving if someone I love never flinched in the face of my suffering or lit up at my joy. But this is not because I want them to mirror my feelings; rather, it is because if they love me, they should worry about my misfortunes and be pleased when I do well. From a purely selfish standpoint, I might not want their empathetic resonance, particularly when I am feeling down. I would prefer that they greet my panic with calm and my sadness with good cheer. As Cicero said about friendship—but he could just as well have been talking about close relationships in general—it “improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”
• • •
When we think about individuals on the other extreme, what Baron-Cohen would describe as empathy Level 0, we naturally think about psychopaths, sociopaths, or antisocial/psychopathic personality types (the terms typically are used synonymously). Psychopaths are identified in poplar culture as the embodiment of evil. The term describes everyone from predatory CEOs to callous politicians to cannibal-killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer and the fictional Hannibal Lecter.
There is a standard test for psychopathy developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. It is used to make legal decisions about criminal offenders, including whether they should be incarcerated for life, and used as well by experimental psychologists who give the test to undergraduates to explore how their scores relate to, for instance, attitudes toward sexual violence and their style of moral reasoning. If you like this sort of thing, you can take the test online, rating yourself on traits such as “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” and “promiscuous sexual behavior.”
The most important item for many people is “callous/lack of empathy.” Many popular treatments of psychopathy, such as Jon Ronson’s 2011 bestseller The Psychopath Test, see a lack of empathy as the core deficit in psychopathy. It is here that cognitive and emotional empathy come apart, because many people diagnosed with psychopathy are excellent at reading others’ minds. This is what enables them to be such masterful manipulators, con men, and seducers. But the emotional part is thought to be absent—they cannot feel other people’s pain—and this is why psychopaths are such terrible people.
This might be the popular picture, but the truth is more complicated. For one thing, as philosopher Jesse Prinz points out, psychopaths suffer from dulling of just about all emotional responses, not just empathy. This overall blunting of feeling—or “shallow affect”—is one of the criteria on the checklist. It was observed by Harvey Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity, his 1941 book that provided the first clinical description of psychopathy:
Vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitudes of vanity, and absurd and showy poses of indignation are all within his emotional scale and are freely sounded as the circumstances of life play upon him. But mature, wholehearted anger, true or consistent indignation, honest, solid grief, sustaining pride, deep joy, and genuine despair are reactions not likely to be found within this scale.
It is unclear, then, whether an empathy deficit is at the core of psychopathy, or whether it is just one facet of a more general problem. One can explore this by looking at how well scores on the callous/lack of empathy item and certain related items are correlated with future bad behavior. In an extensive review of the literature, psychologist Jennifer Skeem and her colleagues note that these items are weak predictors of violence and criminality. The reason why the psychopath test has any predictive power at all is that it assesses pastbad behavior—juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, parasitic lifestyle, and so on—as well as factors such as lack of inhibition and poor impulse control. To put it another way, you can remove the empathy question from the scale, and it would be about as good at picking out psychopaths.
What about aggressive behavior more generally? Are more aggressive people less empathetic? Even I, a skeptic, would imagine there is some substantive relationship between empathy and aggression, since presumably someone with a great deal of empathy would find it unpleasant to cause pain in others. But a recent review summarizing data from all available studies of the relationship between empathy and aggression reaches a different conclusion. The authors of “The (non)relation between empathy and aggression: Surprising results from a meta-analysis” report that only 1 percent of the variation in aggression is accounted for by empathy. This means that if you want to predict how aggressive a person is, and you have access to an enormous amount of information about that person, including psychiatric interviews, pen-and-paper tests, criminal records, and brain scans, the last thing you would bother to look at would be measures of the person’s empathy.
Finally, one decisive test of the low-empathy-makes-bad-people theory would be to study a group of people who lack empathy but also lack the other traits associated with psychopathy. Such individuals do exist. Baron-Cohen notes that people with Asperger syndrome and autism typically have low cognitive empathy—they struggle to understand the minds of others—and have low emotional empathy as well. (As with psychopaths, there is some controversy about whether they are incapable of empathy or choose not to deploy it.) Despite their empathy deficit, such people show no propensity for exploitation and violence. Indeed, they often have strong moral codes and are more likely to be victims of cruelty than perpetrators.
Am I saying that empathy is irrelevant or a corrosive influence on how we treat those around us? This would be too strong a conclusion. There are many studies that look at individual differences in empathy levels and correlate these levels with real-world behavior, such as willingness to help someone in need. Many of these studies are poorly done. They often measure empathy through self-report, so you don’t know whether you are assessing actual empathy as opposed to the degree to which people see themselves, or want to be seen, as empathetic. Furthermore, people who help others more may assume that they are empathetic, since people often make judgments about themselves by drawing conclusions from their own behavior.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that being more empathetic influences how likely one is to help in certain circumstances. The relationship is often weak, and not all studies find it. Still, given laboratory findings showing that inducing empathy increases the likelihood of altruistic behaviors, it would be wrong to dismiss empathy’s role in our moral lives.
But we know that a high level of empathy does not make one a good person and that a low level does not make one a bad person. Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one’s appetites.
So how much empathy do we really want in ourselves, our children, our friends, and our society? If you want to answer that question, it helps to think about a quite different emotional response—anger.
Empathy and anger share a lot. Both emerge in early childhood and exist in every human culture. Both are present in other primates such as chimpanzees. Both are social. Unlike emotions such as fear and disgust, which are often elicited by experiences and inanimate beings, empathy and anger are mainly geared toward other people. And they are both moral. The identification that comes with empathy can motivate kind behavior toward others; anger is often a response to perceived unfairness, cruelty, and other immoral acts.
Buddhist texts are even more skeptical about anger than they are about empathy. They see it as destructive of the individual and the world at large. This is a valid concern. But if I could determine the emotional life of my child, I wouldn’t leave out the capacity for anger. The emotional force of anger can protect us and those we are close to from exploitation and predation. Someone who could never get angry would be the perfect victim. Anger can also be a prod to moral behavior more generally; many great moral heroes—Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance—have been individuals who let themselves get angry at situations that others were indifferent to.
But I would worry about the irrational, arbitrary, and self-destructive aspects of anger, so I wouldn’t wish that my child possess too much of it. And I would make sure to add plenty of intelligence, concern for others, and self-control. I would want to ensure that anger is modified, shaped, and directed by rational deliberation. It would occasionally spur action, but it would be subservient to the capacities for rationality and compassion. If we were all constituted in this way, if we could all put anger in its place, ours would be a kinder and better world.
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Justin Peters' essay "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain," published in liberal-slanting Slate magazine, presents an argument that Joe Rogan and his podcast guest philosopher Sam Harris are wrong to believe in giving a platform to hateful voices. In the words of Peters, Rogan and Harris are morally wrong in their following premise: "[Liberals and progressives holding] people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance."
Joe Rogan defends giving a platform to Alt-Right "crackpots" while talking to comedian Neil Brennan in this podcast segment published on You Tube under title "Why Joe Rogan Has Right Wing Guests on His Show." Rogan argues that deplatforming is dangerous to American democracy and freedom of speech. This notion of deplatforming is under further controversy by democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren refusing to go on Fox News because she argues that Fox News is a "hate-for-profit racket." But others, like Megan Day in her essay "Elizabeth Warren Should Have Gone on Fox News," argue that Warren's virtue signaling is actually misguided and shows she is too interested in showcasing her moral purity than she is in engaging people with contrary ideas to her own. Even liberal MSNBC's "Morning Joe" criticizes Warren for not going into enemy territory to argue her message.
In the context of the deplatforming controversy surrounding Joe Rogan and Elizabeth Warren, develop an argumentative thesis about deplatforming: Is engaging in conversations with opposing voices a way of giving harmful platform to hate and moral bankruptcy or is this cross-cultural conversation a way of shedding light on evil and finding opportunity to persuade one's opponents?
There can be a middle-ground in this debate. For example, one could justify having Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson on their show while eschewing a complete troll like Alex Jones.
Also consider that if you have strong opinions, they should be worth fighting for. Joe Rogan, who does MMA training and fighting, is a fighter. He doesn't mind going into the belly of beast and fighting the battles of the day. Elizabeth Warren, some might argue, is a pacifist who is eager to showboat her virtue to her crowd of the already converted but too cowardly to engage in battle with the enemy. If she can't fight, is she a worthy candidate? Some say no. Others say her moral purity is precisely her appeal. Frame the debate under your own terms.
5-14 Essay #4 Due.
If we have time, we will see a Hasan Minhaj essay topic such as his comedy special Homecoming King on Netflix. We will examine the case of Rachel Dolezal. We will read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison. We will watch the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” that skewers Dolezal for her masquerade. You can consult the documentary on Netflix The Rachel Divide. Is her masquerade cause for serious academic inquiry or a pathetic exhibition of white privilege from a narcissist? Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society. If time, we will read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim.
5-16 We will watch video “Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever” in the context of Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Gene Editing.” We will also look at Netflix Explained episode “Designer DNA.” If we have time, we will look at David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and explain why so many people attacked Brooks for writing a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay. Homework #15: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.
5-21 We will study Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and explore the pros and cons of his position. We will look at Bloom’s video “Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care.” Homework #16: Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why they believe a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society.
5-16 We will watch video “Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever” in the context of Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Gene Editing.” We will also look at Netflix Explained episode “Designer DNA.” If we have time, we will look at David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and explain why so many people attacked Brooks for writing a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay. Homework #15: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.
One. What will happen to unconditional love when we have expectations of a Super Baby?
Two. Will we be individuals or the products of our parents' catalog wish-list?
Three. Will economic and social divisions widen between Haves (can afford to be super) and Have-Nots (can't afford to be so super, just bargain babies)?
Four. Have we committed the sin of pride by playing God?
Richard Hayes points out the dilemma of genetically modified humans: On one hand, they will have superior health; on the other hand, a free market of super babies will "undermine the foundations of civil and human rights." There will be a small group of rich Desirables who can afford genetic enhancement and large group of serfs serving at the whims of these Desirables.
Hayes points out the slippery slope: Once we improve one aspect of the human body, where do we stop? A child is no longer a child but a consumer product, an "artifact," a toy.
Hayes observes in the future there could be a "high-tech eugenics arms race" with countries amassing armies of super fighters.
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample #1
Human ethics usually clash with rapid disruptions of technologies. Gene editing is no exception. Appalled at the notion of super babies, the commodification of human beings, eugenics, genome vandalism, and other moral atrocities, many make the case that we must either halt or significantly regulate genetic editing. But as well-intentioned as these people are, their warning cries are an exercise in futility for several reasons. One, technology cannot be stopped. Even if the United Nations signs an agreement to end genetic testing, rogue entities will advance genetic editing underground, and then they will have the upper hand when it comes to using genetic editing in various types of warfare. Second, to halt genetic editing is to deny medical breakthroughs that are surely a benefit to all of us. Third, genetic editing can be used to alter farm crops in order to stop world-wide famine. While I concede we may kill off the human species by creating some kind of monstrous transhuman race of evil-doers, we at least have a fighting chance of improving our lot through the continued research of genetic editing.
Sample #2
All new technologies present challenges to the human race in terms of job disruption, economic distribution, health, national security, and ethics. We can cry and moan about it like the genetic engineering naysayers, but I say to them, "Welcome to Planet Earth." The survival of our species is not about retreating back into the womb of ignorance. Rather, it is about marching forward with knowledge with open eyes about both the benefits and potential dangers of this new genetic technology.
Sample #3
Granted, we cannot retreat into the womb and embrace ignorance to save ourselves from the ravishes of technology. Nor can we pull the reigns on our technological advancements as rogue states unleash their technological malevolence unchecked. However, with the same ardor and financial commitment, we must create a technology ethics task force so that we don't allow our technological advances in gene editing destroy us through _________________, _______________________, __________________________, and ________________________________.
Sample #4
Just as Harari makes the persuasive case that we cannot stop A.I. from taking over the democratic ideal of free will and the individual, we cannot stop genetic editing from transforming us from humans into transhumananists.
Sample #5
We would be well served to stop drinking Yuval Noah Harari's speculative Kook-Aid regarding the role of technology compromising the freedom of the individual. While Harari is a brilliant historian and story teller, much of his forecastings are rooted in fantastical speculation and science-defying hype.
This is your Capstone Essay. It requires 3 sources for your Works Cited to get credit.
Option A
Read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the contention that it is morally objectionable for white woman Rachel Dolezal to fabricate an identity to pass as being black. Also consult the parody of Rachel Dolezal in the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” in which Paper Boi discusses “trans-racial” issues with Montague. You can also consult Netflix documentary The Rachel Divide.
Option B
Take yet another topic we haven’t yet covered from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative thesis.
Read David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and support, refute, or complicate the contention that Brooks has written a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay.
Option F
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option G
Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write an argumentative essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the authors’ claim that a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
Option H
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option I
Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
Option J
In the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society.
If we have time, we will see a Hasan Minhaj essay topic such as his comedy special Homecoming King on Netflix. We will examine the case of Rachel Dolezal. We will read Jelani Cobb’s “Black Like Her” and "I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison. We will watch the Atlanta episode “B.A.N.” that skewers Dolezal for her masquerade. You can consult the documentary on Netflix The Rachel Divide. Is her masquerade cause for serious academic inquiry or a pathetic exhibition of white privilege from a narcissist? Homework #14: Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society. If time, we will read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim.
5-16 We will watch video “Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever” in the context of Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Gene Editing.” We will also look at Netflix Explained episode “Designer DNA.” If we have time, we will look at David Brooks’ “How We Are Ruining America” and explain why so many people attacked Brooks for writing a misleading, stupid, deceptive, and grossly wrong-minded essay. Homework #15: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.
5-21 We will study Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and explore the pros and cons of his position. We will look at Bloom’s video “Why Empathy Is Not the Best Way to Care.” Homework #16: Read “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why they believe a certain type of coddling is destroying young people’s mental health.
5-28 Go over Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument in her essay “Why I’m Giving Up Preventative Care.” Homework #18: Based on the following content, develop an argumentative thesis about the role of technology and social media creating a surveillance state. Read Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook.” You can also consult the video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
5-30 If we have time, we will cover a Hasan Minhaj essay topic. We will cover Judith Shulevitz’s “Alexa, Should We Trust You?”; Zeynep Tukekci’s “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”; Siva Vaidhyanthan’s “The Three Major Forces of Surveillance on Facebook”; and video “Safe and Sorry--Terrorism & Mass Surveillance.”
6-4: Peer Edit
6-6 Essay #5 due on turnitin; Portfolio 2 Grade Check in class
Homework #14:
Read “The Case Against Gene Editing” by Brendan Foht and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how gene editing is a liability to society.
Is Rachel Dolezal, by assuming the identity as a black woman, celebrating black culture, or is she a culture vulture committing the sin of cultural appropriation for her own "attention-seeking narcissism"?
"I Refuse to Rubberneck Rachel Dolezal’s Train Wreck" by Kitanya Harrison
I don’t like Rachel Dolezal. I don’t believe she’s misunderstood or mentally unbalanced or confused. I think she’s a shameless attention-seeker, a vile narcissist, and a grifter. She’s a thief. And the thing she covets the most and is desperately trying to misappropriate is Blackness, specifically the Blackness unique to the descendants of American slaves.
To be the descendant of an American slave is to live in a particular kind of purgatory. It is to be the abused and neglected child who always eats last. It is to stand outside in the wet cold and be denied entry to the vast mansion your ancestors built. It is to be harassed and brutalized by police forces born out of slave patrols. There are daily humiliations, constant reminders that you are of the lower caste. It is to know that your existence is seen as a threat, a threat that may be met with deadly violence at any moment.
The freedom struggle of the descendants of American slaves has a proud tradition that has produced true American heroes. That platform of resistance is an honored space, one that Rachel Dolezal infiltrated with her appalling blackface routine. She was the president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP when she was outed by a local reporter who asked the simple question: “Are you African American?” Stunned that she had been found out, the only reply she could muster was, “I don’t understand the question.”
Soon after that embarrassing interview, it was revealed that Dolezal was White and had been pretending to be a light-complexioned Black woman for years. As evidence, she had shared a photo of her with an African American man she barely knew as one of her and her father. What sort of pathology drives a person to do a thing like that? The same thing that drove her to make claims of racial harassment and report hate crimes, none of which could be substantiated. There’s also the disgusting way she’s taken on the label of “transracial” — co-opting the struggle of perhaps the most marginalized group and turning it into a punchline. Write it down: the next outrage will be her faking a serious illness for sympathy. This is when everyone else will finally turn on her and begin to call out her lies. When she was disrespecting Black people to get attention, it was all good.
There have been plenty of White Americans who have worked towards the cause of racial equality. There was no need for them to fake being Black, and there was no need for Dolezal to do so either. But none of Dolezal’s deception was rooted in her trying to be a genuine ally to Black Americans. This whole production is all about Rachel Dolezal getting to play alternately the victim and the hero. She wants attention, and withholding it is the only thing that might finally get her to stop. And she needs to be stopped.
There is a kind of morbid curiosity that might have made me tune into The Rachel Divide (I mean, the whole thing is such a colossal train wreck). Ironically, it was the teaser Netflix released that cemented my decision to stay away. In the short excerpt, Dolezal’s half-Black son is trying and failing to get his mother to see that her actions have consequences for other people, him in particular. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the wearying frustration of trying to teach empathy to a narcissist — an impossibility. All of Dolezal’s replies are about her and her needs. She doesn’t see her son at all. He is merely a prop in her psychodrama.
What Dolezal is doing to her son is a form of child abuse.
And that’s why I’m not watching. I’m not enabling that and adding to his suffering. Each view humiliates that child, and he deserves so much better. (I was going to link out to the teaser, but watching it made me feel so gross. I think giving even that short snippet views isn’t a moral choice.)
While Dolezal needs to disappear, we can’t forget her. The descendants of American slaves need to understand that she is the first of many to come. As cries for slavery and Jim Crow reparations grow stronger, you’ll see more White Americans start doing genetic tests and looking into their genealogy to find a link, so they can shove themselves to the front of the line if the payout comes.
Erasure is one of the most powerful tools of racism. And it’s what White America is going to double down on next.
Rachel Dolezal is the canary in the coal mine. Trying to steal the lineage and very identity of the descendants of slaves will be the next mutation of American racism. We all must be prepared to confront it and beat it back.
Possible Dolezal Defenses to Consider in Your Argument Or Counterargument
One. Just as we accept men who feel they identify with women and go through gender-transition process, we should accept Dolezal for going through a similar racial transition. Is the comparison legit?
Two. Since race is not a real thing and is nothing more than a social construct, why should we care if Dolezal identifies and passes as "black"?
Three. Dolezal's need to identify and "be" black doesn't hurt anyone. Why are we treating her with so much disdain as if she were a criminal? Does that not say more about us than it does her?
Four. Dolezel is championing civil rights for African Americans. She is a bona fide "sister in the struggle." She has earned the right to "be black." How dare we question her noble motives.
Jelani Cobb's Thesis Paragraph: "We're all wearing the fictive garb of race."
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
"Lying about the lie": Race is not a simple category set in stone; rather, race is an arbitrary social construction historically designed to service a power hierarchy.
We read, for example, in Debra Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way," that white America initially tagged southern Europeans, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians, for example, as "black" and then around 1920 Anglo White America "allowed" these southern Europeans to earn their "whiteness" by assimilating into Anglo culture. However, they did not give such license to African-Americans and Latinos.
According to Jelani Cobb's logic, since race is a fiction and a lie, we should not be so offended by the lie that Rachel Dolezal assumes as she parades through life under the guise of a black identity.
Refuting Cobb's argument:
Try telling African Americans that their race is a lie when racial perception results in higher rates of police brutality, mass incarceration, and an income gap of 10:1 in favor of white Americans.
In spite of African Americans' struggle and oppression in America, African Americans wield huge influence over the world in terms of language and culture. The whole world is influenced by African American culture: language, style, music, art, fashion, entertainment, and business.
The whole world imitates and borrows from African-American culture, which has the biggest influence than any culture in the world.
Cultural influence is one thing. Piggy-backing on another culture is another thing.
But cultural appropriation, some argue, takes cultural borrowing too far to the point that one is stealing.
Pretending your black, putting on fake tan and using tanning booth, and telling the world you're black, many would argue, is taking cultural influence too far.
Rachel Dolezal wants positive attention as being a "sister in the struggle." Many people are annoyed by this.
Rachel Dolezal and her defenders say we should not be annoyed. It's cool to for Rachel, a white woman, to masquerade as a sister in the struggle.
At what point does a non African-American commit an act of cultural appropriation?
Should we be morally offended by white people passing as African American?
If you had a white college instructor championing black rights and disguising himself as black, would you be able to take that instructor seriously? Would you have any moral objections to such a professor? Would you question that professor's mental stability? Or would you "be cool with it"?
Sample Thesis Statements
Even if Rachel Dolezal is an attention-seeking narcissist using race to expand her status and social cachet, her claim to belong to the African-American is not a crime or an offense because there is no such thing as race except as a fiction that we all pretend to exist. By condemning Rachel Dolezal for masquerading as an African-American, we are guilty of perpetuating the mythology that race is an objective reality.
Refutation of the Above
While we can all agree that race is a mythology, the fact remains that America has used skin color as an arbitrary way to manage power and that people of color have been stolen from by America's kleptocracy. For Rachel Dolezal to appropriate blackness to elevate her social esteem while enjoying her white privilege is morally disgusting and morally bankrupt, evidence of a selfish narcissist, evidence of someone willing to mock and steal from the very people she claims to represent, and evidence of a kind of fraud that has no place in championing civil rights, especially someone who works for the NAACP.
Wild Card Thesis
Rachel Dolezal is a "special case" so embedded in pathological behavior that to use her charade as an argument about race misses the point. She is not so much appropriating race as much as she is evidencing a serious mental illness that requires medical attention.
On June 7th, Elinor Burkett published an Op-Ed in the Times expressing what she portrayed as a feminist’s reluctant skepticism about aspects of the transgender movement. She argued, in part, that the notion of men simply transitioning into women was equivalent to a white person darkening his or her skin and professing to be black. The example was meant as a reductio ad absurdum—but, less than a week later, Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a professor of Africana studies, was unveiled as a white woman who has for some years presented herself and identified as black. On Monday, Dolezal resigned, in a statement that didn’t answer questions about what she referred to as "my personal identity,” though it did refer obliquely to “challenging the construct of race.” That answer is clearly inadequate; many people have challenged the construct of race without lying about their lives. But there is something more worth discussing here.
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the “white Negro.” Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.
But this is precisely what makes the Dolezal deception complicated. Artists like Eminem and Teena Marie, white people who were by and large accepted by black people as a legitimate part of black cultural life, nonetheless had to finesse a kind of epidermal conflict of interest. Irrespective of their sincerity, a portion of their profitability lay in their status as atypically white. Dolezal’s transracialism was imbued with exactly the opposite undertaking. She passed as black and set about shouldering the inglorious, frustrating parts of that identity—the parts that allocate responsibility for what was once called “uplifting the race.” It’s an aspect of her story that at least ought to give her critics—black ones, particularly—a moment of pause.
Dolezal is, like me, a graduate of Howard University, a place where the constellation of black identities and appearances is so staggeringly vast as to ridicule the idea that blackness could be, or ever has been, any one thing. What I took from Howard, besides that broadened sense of a world I’d presumed to know, was an abiding debt to those who’d fought on its behalf and a responsibility to do so for those who came afterward. It’s easy to deride Dolezal’s dishonesty—to ridicule her hoax as a clever means of sidestepping the suspicion with which white liberals are commonly greeted—until we reflect on a photograph of Walter White, the aptly named man who served as the second black president of the N.A.A.C.P. Or one of Louis T. Wright, who served as the national chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. board during the Great Depression. In the nineteen-twenties, amid a feud with the organization, the black nationalist Marcus Garvey criticized the N.A.A.C.P. for being a organization whose black and white members were essentially indistinguishable.
The spectrum of shades and colorings that constitute “black” identity in the United States, and the equal claim to black identity that someone who looks like White or Wright (or, for that matter, Dolezal) can have, is a direct product of bloodlines that attest to institutionalized rape during and after slavery. Nearly all of us who identify as African-American in this country, apart from some more recent immigrants, have at least some white ancestry. My own white great-grandparent is as inconsequential as the color of my palms in terms of my status as a black person in the United States. My grandparents had four children: my father and his brother, both almond-brown, with black hair and dark eyes, and two girls with reddish hair, fair skin, freckles, and gray eyes. All of them were equally black because they were equal heirs to the quirks of chance determining whether their ancestry from Europe or Africa was most apparent. Dolezal’s primary offense lies not in the silly proffering of a false biography but in knowing this ugly history and taking advantage of the reasons that she would, at least among black people, be taken at her word regarding her identity.
Race, in this country and under certain circumstances, functions like a faith, in that the simple profession of membership is sufficient. The most—possibly the sole—democratic element of race in this country lies in this ecumenical approach to blackness. We are not in the business of checking membership cards. In this way, Dolezal’s claim on black identity is of a different order than the hollow declaration of a Hollywood scion or anyone else who opted to be Negro for a season. They can plead ignorance. But Dolezal spent four years at an institution steeped in the delicacies of race. If nothing else, she understands the exact nature of the trust she violated.
Despite the interchangeability of the terms “African-American” and “black,” this is a community in which ancestry is one, but clearly not the sole or necessarily even the primary, basis for inclusion. Walter White was only fractionally more African than Dolezal, but black enough to be accepted as not only a member of that community but one of its leaders. There is also a disquieting notion inherent in this approach to identity—that if anyone can indeed be “black,” then we all are, that Morrison and Coltrane and Chisholm and Malcolm are both unhyphenated Americans and indistinct. (And yet, in circumstances where someone named Eric Garner or Walter Scott is looking nervously over his shoulder, they are still vulnerably intelligible.) It putatively means that Chet Haze is as qualified to utter the word "nigga" as anyone for whom dark skin and skewed life chances have given the word connotations Haze would never countenance. It means, most damningly, that black people are not distinctly bound to each other. Yet both of these things—a community rooted in race and a deep-seated skepticism about the very existence of race—coexist.
Rachel Dolezal is not black—by lineage or lifelong experience—yet I find her deceptions less troubling than the vexed criteria being used to exclude her. If blackness is simply a matter of a preponderance of African ancestry, then we should set about the task of excising a great deal of the canon of black history, up to and including the current President. If it is simply a matter of shared experience, we might excommunicate people like Walter White, whose blue eyes were camouflage that could serve both to spare him the direct indignity of racism and enable him to personally investigate and expose lynchings. Dolezal was dishonest about an undertaking rooted in dishonesty, and no matter how absurd her fictional blackness may appear, it is worth recalling that the former lie is far more dangerous than the latter. Our means of defining ourselves are complex and contradictory—and could be nothing other than that. But if the rubric is faulty it remains vital. The great majority of Americans recognize slavery as a figment of history, interred in a receding past. But, for black people, that past remains at the surface—close at hand, indelible, a narrative as legible as skin.
Jelani Cobb's Thesis Paragraph: "We're all wearing the fictive garb of race."
The easy presumption about Dolezal, who has two white parents and light skin and eyes—and hair that has ranged from blond to brown, though she has worn it in ways that are culturally associated with black women—is that this is an instance in which someone finally pointed out the obvious: the emperor is naked. But, in truth, Dolezal has been dressed precisely as we all are, in a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging. This doesn’t mean that Dolezal wasn’t lying about who she is. It means that she was lying about a lie.
"Lying about the lie": Race is not a simple category set in stone; rather, race is an arbitrary social construction historically designed to service a power hierarchy.
We read, for example, in Debra Dickerson's essay "The Great White Way," that white America initially tagged southern Europeans, Slavs, Greeks, and Italians, for example, as "black" and then around 1920 Anglo White America "allowed" these southern Europeans to earn their "whiteness" by assimilating into Anglo culture. However, they did not give such license to African-Americans and Latinos.
According to Jelani Cobb's logic, since race is a fiction and a lie, we should not be so offended by the lie that Rachel Dolezal assumes as she parades through life under the guise of a black identity.
Refuting Cobb's argument:
Try telling African Americans that their race is a lie when racial perception results in higher rates of police brutality, mass incarceration, and an income gap of 10:1 in favor of white Americans.
In spite of African Americans' struggle and oppression in America, African Americans wield huge influence over the world in terms of language and culture. The whole world is influenced by African American culture: language, style, music, art, fashion, entertainment, and business.
The whole world imitates and borrows from African-American culture, which has the biggest influence than any culture in the world.
Cultural influence is one thing. Piggy-backing on another culture is another thing.
But cultural appropriation, some argue, takes cultural borrowing too far to the point that one is stealing.
Pretending your black, putting on fake tan and using tanning booth, and telling the world you're black, many would argue, is taking cultural influence too far.
Rachel Dolezal wants positive attention as being a "sister in the struggle." Many people are annoyed by this.
Rachel Dolezal and her defenders say we should not be annoyed. It's cool to for Rachel, a white woman, to masquerade as a sister in the struggle.
At what point does a non African-American commit an act of cultural appropriation?
Should we be morally offended by white people passing as African American?
If you had a white college instructor championing black rights and disguising himself as black, would you be able to take that instructor seriously? Would you have any moral objections to such a professor? Would you question that professor's mental stability? Or would you "be cool with it"?
Sample Thesis Statements
Even if Rachel Dolezal is an attention-seeking narcissist using race to expand her status and social cachet, her claim to belong to the African-American is not a crime or an offense because there is no such thing as race except as a fiction that we all pretend to exist. By condemning Rachel Dolezal for masquerading as an African-American, we are guilty of perpetuating the mythology that race is an objective reality.
Refutation of the Above
While we can all agree that race is a mythology, the fact remains that America has used skin color as an arbitrary way to manage power and that people of color have been stolen from by America's kleptocracy. For Rachel Dolezal to appropriate blackness to elevate her social esteem while enjoying her white privilege is morally disgusting and morally bankrupt, evidence of a selfish narcissist, evidence of someone willing to mock and steal from the very people she claims to represent, and evidence of a kind of fraud that has no place in championing civil rights, especially someone who works for the NAACP.
Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)
Ethos
Ethos is an ethical appeal based on writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and streets smarts. The latter is evidenced by author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.
Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject.
Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.
Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions.
Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed.
Logos
Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies.
Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up to date, current, and relevant.
To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments.
Pathos
Pathos is achieved by appealing to reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs.
Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal. If pathos does appeal to the brain, it focuses on the reptilian side.
Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence.
Recognizing Logical Fallacies
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy.
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Lexus GS350.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three Americans with false British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all Americans, such as Madonna, who contrive British accents are annoying.” Perhaps some Americans do so ironically and as a result are more funny than annoying.
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue is an over simplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, we’ll have to allow people to marry gorillas.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”
Study Questions for "Why Technology Favors Tyranny" by Yuval Noah Harari
One. What is a liberal democracy and what makes it so fragile?
A liberal democracy is based on treating each individual as someone of worth and someone entitled to have the freedom to pursue happiness based on one's individual personality traits.
The individual has human agency or free will. You can only possess free will if you have critical thinking skills, which prevent your brain being hijacked by logical fallacies.
Once logical fallacies hijack your brain, you have no human agency and, like an anti-vaxxer, you become manipulated by the tribe and become ripe for the mob.
The mob is not compatible with democracy; it is compatible with fascism.
Democracy Is Fragile
Harari observes we are fools to take such a liberal democracy for granted because there are technological circumstances that can wipe away individual worth and agency.
For example, if technology leads to mass unemployment and requires UBI to feed the masses, the masses will live in irrelevant despair with no sense of self-worth as they desperately try to distract themselves with gadgets and cheap entertainments while dependent on a government handout for subsistence.
Death of Expertise
Liberal democracy is also fragile because we're losing an educated populace. In education's place is "America's obsession with worshiping its own ignorance," to borrow the words of Tom Nichols in his book The Death of Expertise.
Democracy is being substituted by rule of the mob as evidenced in the mob of anti-vaxxers who are infecting the world and doubling down in their position.
Technological Anxieties
Harari continues to observe that anxieties over global disruptions, many led by technology, have disunited societies, propelling the people into various political tribes and that this tribalism is yet another blow against a democracy in which a people are united to make for a better world. Harari writes:
In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder; politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.
Lack of Privacy Kills Democracy
Mass unemployment, tribalism, and a loss of privacy will very likely kill democracy. As we read:
Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into our inner lives—our emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.
Two. Describe the shift from working person to technological dominance.
As working people, we were celebrated as being an important part of society. We could even fight for our rights and fight to end exploitation. But Harari observes that fighting against irrelevance is much more difficult. He writes:
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an “ordinary man,” rather than, say, a Jew or a woman). He looked at the propaganda posters—which typically depicted coal miners and steelworkers in heroic poses—and saw himself there: “I am in that poster! I am the hero of the future!”
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump may therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
The revolutions in information technology and biotechnology are still in their infancy, and the extent to which they are responsible for the current crisis of liberalism is debatable. Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, and Mumbai are only dimly aware, if they are aware at all, of the rise of AI and its potential impact on their lives. It is undoubtable, however, that the technological revolutions now gathering momentum will in the next few decades confront humankind with the hardest trials it has yet encountered.
Three. What makes the machines today more dangerous to human relevance to the machines of yesterday?
Machines of old competed with manual labor, but today's machines compete with cognitive ability. Today's machines are now part of the Cognitive Revolution, and they may very well leave humans in the dust. As Harari writes:
Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.
At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.
However, most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.
Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators—not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72—it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright genius.
Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.
Four. How does AI crush its competition, humans, in the realms of connectivity and updatability? We read:
What’s more, AI enjoys uniquely nonhuman abilities, which makes the difference between AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.
For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive, and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won’t really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide will therefore be far smaller.
Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.
Five. How will the need for self-reinvention become a colossally stressful and constant undertaking? We read:
All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.
Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility increases, will people be able to cope? By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.
Six. How can digital manipulation hurt democratic freedom?
Bots can infiltrate social media and brainwash users into believing false news resulting in swaying elections for authoritarian leaders. As we read:
And yet such hard-edged tactics may not prove necessary, at least much of the time. A facade of free choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the public exerts less and less actual control. To be sure, attempts to manipulate voters’ feelings are not new. But once somebody (whether in San Francisco or Beijing or Moscow) gains the technological ability to manipulate the human heart—reliably, cheaply, and at scale—democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.
We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices. While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.
Seven. Why have democracies proven to flourish and be superior to languishing dictatorships and why might that change in the future?
The smartest people in the world want to live in democracies, so democratic countries attract the best and the brightest, enjoy the greatest innovations, and crush dictatorships, which usually have outdated, inferior technology. But that could all change. As we read:
The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.
Eight. How will machines cause us to gradually give up our freedom?
We read:
Even if some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority over our lives because we will learn from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information. As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google not just to find information but also to guide them around. Self-driving cars and AI physicians would represent further erosion: While these innovations would put truckers and human doctors out of work, their larger import lies in the continuing transfer of authority and responsibility to machines.
We already are being conditioned to trust in algorithms more than our own judgment. As we read:
What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we’ll like. But why should AI’s helpfulness stop there?
Every year millions of college students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult decision, made under pressure from parents, friends, and professors who have varying interests and opinions. It is also influenced by students’ own individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels, and advertising campaigns. Complicating matters, a given student does not really know what it takes to succeed in a given profession, and doesn’t necessarily have a realistic sense of his or her own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of lives would those be? Do we have models for making sense of such lives?
Nine. Does Harari have any hope we can resist against the loss of our freedom?
While he offers some suggestions, he admits they may prove futile. As he writes:
So what should we do?
For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated. If we invest too much in AI and too little in developing the human mind, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might serve only to empower the natural stupidity of humans, and to nurture our worst (but also, perhaps, most powerful) impulses, among them greed and hatred. To avoid such an outcome, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving AI, we would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in exploring and developing human consciousness.
More practically, and more immediately, if we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, we must regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times, land was the most important asset, so politics was a struggle to control land. In the modern era, machines and factories became more important than land, so political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production. In the 21st century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, so politics will be a struggle to control data’s flow.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task than regulating land or machines. Data are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of them as you want. Do the data collected about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, or to the government, or to a corporation, or to the human collective?
The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers. Yet their true business isn’t merely selling ads. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which are worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers—we are their product.
Ordinary people will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, many of us are happy to give away our most valuable asset—our personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. But if, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they are likely to have trouble doing so, especially as they may have come to rely on the network to help them make decisions, and even for their health and physical survival.
4-30 We will examine fallacies in Brennan’s epistocracy argument. To complement Brennan’s argument, we will study Jeffrey Rosen’s Atlantic essay “America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare.” Homework #13: Read Yuval Noah Harari’s essay “Why Technology Favors Tyranny” and explain in 3 paragraphs how A.I. could compromise human freedom and democracy.
In the context of Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence," develop a thesis that addresses the claim that going on a diet is too futile and harmful and that we should give up on the idea of dieting altogether.
Option B
In the context of the Netflix documentary The Magic Pill, write an argumentative thesis about the alleged benefits of the ketogenic diet.
Option C
Take an issue not yet covered by Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act and develop an argumentative essay.
Option D
In the context of David Freedman’s “The War on Stupid People,” support, refute, or complicate Freedman’s contention that we marginalize average people at our own peril, socially, pragmatically, morally, and otherwise.
Option E
Read the online essay "It's been hot before" and write an argumentative essay about the role logical fallacies in the dangerous denial of global warming and global drought. For another source, you can use Netflix Explained, "The World's Water Crisis." For another source, you may consult Ibram X. Keni's essay "What the Believers Are Denying."
Study Questions for "Why Technology Favors Tyranny" by Yuval Noah Harari
One. What is a liberal democracy and what makes it so fragile?
A liberal democracy is based on treating each individual as someone of worth and someone entitled to have the freedom to pursue happiness based on one's individual personality traits.
The individual has human agency or free will. You can only possess free will if you have critical thinking skills, which prevent your brain being hijacked by logical fallacies.
Once logical fallacies hijack your brain, you have no human agency and, like an anti-vaxxer, you become manipulated by the tribe and become ripe for the mob.
The mob is not compatible with democracy; it is compatible with fascism.
Democracy Is Fragile
Harari observes we are fools to take such a liberal democracy for granted because there are technological circumstances that can wipe away individual worth and agency.
For example, if technology leads to mass unemployment and requires UBI to feed the masses, the masses will live in irrelevant despair with no sense of self-worth as they desperately try to distract themselves with gadgets and cheap entertainments while dependent on a government handout for subsistence.
Death of Expertise
Liberal democracy is also fragile because we're losing an educated populace. In education's place is "America's obsession with worshiping its own ignorance," to borrow the words of Tom Nichols in his book The Death of Expertise.
Democracy is being substituted by rule of the mob as evidenced in the mob of anti-vaxxers who are infecting the world and doubling down in their position.
Technological Anxieties
Harari continues to observe that anxieties over global disruptions, many led by technology, have disunited societies, propelling the people into various political tribes and that this tribalism is yet another blow against a democracy in which a people are united to make for a better world. Harari writes:
In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder; politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments. The technology that favored democracy is changing, and as artificial intelligence develops, it might change further.
Lack of Privacy Kills Democracy
Mass unemployment, tribalism, and a loss of privacy will very likely kill democracy. As we read:
Information technology is continuing to leap forward; biotechnology is beginning to provide a window into our inner lives—our emotions, thoughts, and choices. Together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.
Two. Describe the shift from working person to technological dominance.
As working people, we were celebrated as being an important part of society. We could even fight for our rights and fight to end exploitation. But Harari observes that fighting against irrelevance is much more difficult. He writes:
Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology in any detail, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future (provided, of course, that he was an “ordinary man,” rather than, say, a Jew or a woman). He looked at the propaganda posters—which typically depicted coal miners and steelworkers in heroic poses—and saw himself there: “I am in that poster! I am the hero of the future!”
In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious terms are bandied about excitedly in ted Talks, at government think tanks, and at high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, AI, machine learning—and common people, both men and women, may well suspect that none of these terms is about them.
In the 20th century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump may therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore. This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.
The revolutions in information technology and biotechnology are still in their infancy, and the extent to which they are responsible for the current crisis of liberalism is debatable. Most people in Birmingham, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, and Mumbai are only dimly aware, if they are aware at all, of the rise of AI and its potential impact on their lives. It is undoubtable, however, that the technological revolutions now gathering momentum will in the next few decades confront humankind with the hardest trials it has yet encountered.
Three. What makes the machines today more dangerous to human relevance to the machines of yesterday?
Machines of old competed with manual labor, but today's machines compete with cognitive ability. Today's machines are now part of the Cognitive Revolution, and they may very well leave humans in the dust. As Harari writes:
Fears of machines pushing people out of the job market are, of course, nothing new, and in the past such fears proved to be unfounded. But artificial intelligence is different from the old machines. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in manual skills. Now they are beginning to compete with us in cognitive skills. And we don’t know of any third kind of skill—beyond the manual and the cognitive—in which humans will always have an edge.
At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.
However, most of the new jobs will presumably demand high levels of expertise and ingenuity, and therefore may not provide an answer to the problem of unemployed unskilled laborers, or workers employable only at extremely low wages. Moreover, as AI continues to improve, even jobs that demand high intelligence and creativity might gradually disappear. The world of chess serves as an example of where things might be heading. For several years after IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, human chess players still flourished; AI was used to train human prodigies, and teams composed of humans plus computers proved superior to computers playing alone.
Yet in recent years, computers have become so good at playing chess that their human collaborators have lost their value and might soon become entirely irrelevant. On December 6, 2017, another crucial milestone was reached when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 had won a world computer chess championship in 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators—not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72—it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They could be described as creative, if not downright genius.
Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.
Four. How does AI crush its competition, humans, in the realms of connectivity and updatability? We read:
What’s more, AI enjoys uniquely nonhuman abilities, which makes the difference between AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.
For example, many drivers are unfamiliar with all the changing traffic regulations on the roads they drive, and they often violate them. In addition, since every driver is a singular entity, when two vehicles approach the same intersection, the drivers sometimes miscommunicate their intentions and collide. Self-driving cars, by contrast, will know all the traffic regulations and never disobey them on purpose, and they could all be connected to one another. When two such vehicles approach the same junction, they won’t really be two separate entities, but part of a single algorithm. The chances that they might miscommunicate and collide will therefore be far smaller.
Similarly, if the World Health Organization identifies a new disease, or if a laboratory produces a new medicine, it can’t immediately update all the human doctors in the world. Yet even if you had billions of AI doctors in the world—each monitoring the health of a single human being—you could still update all of them within a split second, and they could all communicate to one another their assessments of the new disease or medicine. These potential advantages of connectivity and updatability are so huge that at least in some lines of work, it might make sense to replace all humans with computers, even if individually some humans still do a better job than the machines.
Five. How will the need for self-reinvention become a colossally stressful and constant undertaking? We read:
All of this leads to one very important conclusion: The automation revolution will not consist of a single watershed event, after which the job market will settle into some new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions. Old jobs will disappear and new jobs will emerge, but the new jobs will also rapidly change and vanish. People will need to retrain and reinvent themselves not just once, but many times.
Just as in the 20th century governments established massive education systems for young people, in the 21st century they will need to establish massive reeducation systems for adults. But will that be enough? Change is always stressful, and the hectic world of the early 21st century has produced a global epidemic of stress. As job volatility increases, will people be able to cope? By 2050, a useless class might emerge, the result not only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.
Six. How can digital manipulation hurt democratic freedom?
Bots can infiltrate social media and brainwash users into believing false news resulting in swaying elections for authoritarian leaders. As we read:
And yet such hard-edged tactics may not prove necessary, at least much of the time. A facade of free choice and free voting may remain in place in some countries, even as the public exerts less and less actual control. To be sure, attempts to manipulate voters’ feelings are not new. But once somebody (whether in San Francisco or Beijing or Moscow) gains the technological ability to manipulate the human heart—reliably, cheaply, and at scale—democratic politics will mutate into an emotional puppet show.
We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices. While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.
Seven. Why have democracies proven to flourish and be superior to languishing dictatorships and why might that change in the future?
The smartest people in the world want to live in democracies, so democratic countries attract the best and the brightest, enjoy the greatest innovations, and crush dictatorships, which usually have outdated, inferior technology. But that could all change. As we read:
The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.
However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you’ll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.
Eight. How will machines cause us to gradually give up our freedom?
We read:
Even if some societies remain ostensibly democratic, the increasing efficiency of algorithms will still shift more and more authority from individual humans to networked machines. We might willingly give up more and more authority over our lives because we will learn from experience to trust the algorithms more than our own feelings, eventually losing our ability to make many decisions for ourselves. Just think of the way that, within a mere two decades, billions of people have come to entrust Google’s search algorithm with one of the most important tasks of all: finding relevant and trustworthy information. As we rely more on Google for answers, our ability to locate information independently diminishes. Already today, “truth” is defined by the top results of a Google search. This process has likewise affected our physical abilities, such as navigating space. People ask Google not just to find information but also to guide them around. Self-driving cars and AI physicians would represent further erosion: While these innovations would put truckers and human doctors out of work, their larger import lies in the continuing transfer of authority and responsibility to machines.
We already are being conditioned to trust in algorithms more than our own judgment. As we read:
What will happen to this view of life as we rely on AI to make ever more decisions for us? Even now we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Spotify to pick music we’ll like. But why should AI’s helpfulness stop there?
Every year millions of college students need to decide what to study. This is a very important and difficult decision, made under pressure from parents, friends, and professors who have varying interests and opinions. It is also influenced by students’ own individual fears and fantasies, which are themselves shaped by movies, novels, and advertising campaigns. Complicating matters, a given student does not really know what it takes to succeed in a given profession, and doesn’t necessarily have a realistic sense of his or her own strengths and weaknesses.
It’s not so hard to see how AI could one day make better decisions than we do about careers, and perhaps even about relationships. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and whom to date or even marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision making, and our conception of life will need to change. Democratic elections and free markets might cease to make sense. So might most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking Siri whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favorite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions made by a Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth would have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of lives would those be? Do we have models for making sense of such lives?
Nine. Does Harari have any hope we can resist against the loss of our freedom?
While he offers some suggestions, he admits they may prove futile. As he writes:
So what should we do?
For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated. If we invest too much in AI and too little in developing the human mind, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might serve only to empower the natural stupidity of humans, and to nurture our worst (but also, perhaps, most powerful) impulses, among them greed and hatred. To avoid such an outcome, for every dollar and every minute we invest in improving AI, we would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in exploring and developing human consciousness.
More practically, and more immediately, if we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, we must regulate the ownership of data. In ancient times, land was the most important asset, so politics was a struggle to control land. In the modern era, machines and factories became more important than land, so political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production. In the 21st century, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, so politics will be a struggle to control data’s flow.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much experience in regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task than regulating land or machines. Data are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, they can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of them as you want. Do the data collected about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, or to the government, or to a corporation, or to the human collective?
The race to accumulate data is already on, and is currently headed by giants such as Google and Facebook and, in China, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these companies have acted as “attention merchants”—they capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and then they resell our attention to advertisers. Yet their true business isn’t merely selling ads. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which are worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers—we are their product.
Ordinary people will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, many of us are happy to give away our most valuable asset—our personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. But if, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they are likely to have trouble doing so, especially as they may have come to rely on the network to help them make decisions, and even for their health and physical survival.
